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Issue: Spring 2016 | Posted: April 25, 2016

Lynne Murchison

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Distinguished Achievement in Humanities

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The real test of a teacher is what their students can do after graduation, and retired educator M. Lynne Murchison is now discovering how much her years as a teacher have helped students become successful adults.

Murchison attended 51���� after hearing her older brother “talk about Union with such affection.” Her sister received a degree from Union, too.

“It’s kind of been a family school,” she says. “My grandniece will graduate this year. She’s the third generation of us, and I hope there’ll be more.”

The 1968 alumna earned a degree in English, never questioning the future she believed God had in store for her.

“I knew from the time I was a first grader that I wanted to teach,” she says. “I thought I would go to a full-time college teaching career, but I took a job at the high school thinking it was just a stop gap.”

The stepping stone to her expected career turned into 25 years of teaching juniors and seniors at the college preparatory level.

“I realized a lot of students came to university unprepared,” Murchison says. “I wanted to teach my kids first to think, and then I tried to teach them to write. I felt like if I could give them those two skills, then they would succeed.”

After retiring from the University of Mississippi, where she worked with adult learners in regional campuses, a scholarship was established in her name.

“The greatest honor is those students who do come back and tell me I’ve changed their lives in some way,” she says. “It’s really what God did through me.”