Issue: Summer 2015 | Posted: June 8, 2015
Journey from Alaska
How seven students from Alaska chose Union
By Tim Ellsworth
When they’re feeling mischievous, they form a united front capable of convincing West Tennesseans almost anything about Alaska.
BethAnne Davis and Jesse Dahms convinced a couple of people that Alaska is devoid of grass. Ivan Isaacs told his roommate there’s no wind in the winter because it freezes.
Christian Winter has a funny-shaped coffee mug. He told people it was shaped that way to help keep the snow out.
You can forgive them for such shenanigans when you hear some of the questions they get about life in Alaska.
“I’ve been asked if I need a passport when I go back home to Alaska,” Dahms says.
“I’ve been asked what language I speak,” Morgan Morfe says.
“I’ve had people ask me if there’s electricity where I live,” Miracle Burton says.
“I was talking about sports that I played in high school, and skiing was one of the main ones,” Dahms says. “Somebody asked me, ‘So, if one day you were really good at skiing and decided to compete in the Olympics, would you compete for the United States, or would you compete for Alaska?’”
Morgan Morfe overlooks Matanuska Glacier on top of Lions Head in Sutton, Alaska.
For the seven Union University students—Burton, Isaacs, Dahms, Davis, Morfe, Winter and Kelsie Leaf—who have made the nearly 4,000-mile trek from Alaska to study in West Tennessee, the cultural and geographic differences are sometimes jarring. Yes, they’re still part of the same country, but their home is closer to Tokyo than it is to Jackson.
At Union, however, they have formed a strong bond amongst themselves and have grown to love their new home.
“So many people have welcomed us with open arms that we’ve formed our own little family, and we’ve been able to be away from home together, which has been really nice,” Morfe says.
“Freshman year when we came down, there was definitely an instant bond, all of us being from Alaska,” Dahms says. “We knew each other a little bit, so it was easy to be friends. None of us really had vehicles, so we were around campus a lot.”
Morfe was named Alaska National Miss in 2015.
So how did seven people from Alaska make their way to Union?
Let’s start with Morfe, from Palmer, Alaska, who as a sophomore in high school began to pray about where the Lord wanted her to go to school.
“My prayer was, ‘Lord, I’ll go anywhere you want me to, but please, don’t send me to the South, don’t send me to a small school and don’t send me to a school with any of my friends from high school,” she says.
As a junior, Morfe attended a college fair at Grace Christian School in Anchorage, where Davis was a student. Morfe met Rich Grimm, Union’s former senior vice president for enrollment services, who was representing Union at the fair. When she heard that Union was in Jackson, Tennessee, she quickly ducked out of the conversation.
Too hot. No thanks.
A few months passed, and Morfe one day got an email from Grimm. He was back in Alaska and wanted to take her and her mother out to dinner to talk to them more about Union.
“OK, fine,” Morfe thought. “For a free dinner, what’s it going to hurt?”
By the end of the meal, Grimm had convinced her to come to Union for a visit.
“I got here, and I loved it,” Morfe says.
“I felt immediately welcomed into the
Union family.”
After making the decision to attend Union, Morfe started working on her high school classmates and fellow youth group members Dahms and Winter. They would call it pestering.
“Morgan told Jesse and me to apply, because it was a free application,” Winter says. “We’ll make Morgan happy and apply.”
Dahms says he and Winter had talked about wanting to be college roommates since they were in seventh grade. Union was on their radar, but they initially decided that Tennessee was too far south.
“Having Morgan apply and encouraging us to apply, we decided to submit an application,” Dahms says.
Jesse Dahms poses with his 18-point moose.
After visiting, they too decided to make Union their university home. And a year later, another friend of theirs from school, Burton, joined them at Union as well.
While he was recruiting Morfe, Grimm was also at work on Davis. Davis and Morfe competed against each other in sports, but they weren’t close friends.
Like Morfe, Davis met Grimm at the college fair. She was looking for nursing programs at Christian schools, because there aren’t any such programs in Alaska.
Unlike Morfe, Davis was looking for something drastically different from Alaska for college. She loves Alaska and plans to go back after college, but she wanted to experience something else for four years.
Grimm took Davis and her dad (who was the administrator at her school) out to lunch and discussed Union with them. He put Davis, a cross country runner, in touch with Union’s cross country coach, Gary Johnson, and Davis came to campus for a visit and competition in Union’s Scholars of Excellence weekend.
“One of my big draws in coming here was probably cross country,” Davis says. “Coach Johnson is very personable, and he made a point to try to get to know me as a person and not just as a runner.”
Winter, Morfe, and Dahms with friends at the Butte in Palmer, Alaska.
Davis’ enrollment at Union led to Isaacs coming a couple of years later. The two attended the same high school, and Isaacs also runs cross country. When he was looking at colleges, Davis’ dad suggested Union to him.
Leaf, meanwhile, knew about Union through her uncle, Brad Green, associate professor of Christian thought and tradition. Green, a native of Alaska, was also involved with Grimm in recruiting some of the students to Union, and he and his family have become what he calls a “familial proxy” for the Alaskan students while they are away from home.
When the first five students (Morfe, Dahms, Winter, Davis, Leaf) came in as freshmen, Green regularly invited them to his home. The group quickly gained the name “The Alaskans” and grew from those five to their immediate friends. When Burton came a year later and Isaacs followed in the fall of 2014, they also became part of the group.
“If you’re in the Alaskan crew, you’re invited automatically to ‘The Alaskans,’” Green says. “You can easily get an invite through an Alaskan, so it’s not a particularly exclusive society.”
The students go for meals, dessert or to go walking and praying with Green’s wife, Dianne. Green says his family wanted to minister to the group, because while many students can go home throughout the semester, the Alaskans are on campus for the semester’s duration.
“It is a culture shock, I think, for the typical Alaskan 18-year-old to come,” Green says.
Miracle Burton stands on the beach of Resurrection Bay outside Seward, Alaska.
Despite that, he says Union has appealed to the students because they love the size of Jackson and the “lingering Christian cultural ethos of the South.” Alaska is a fairly secular place, Green says, so Union has provided them with a distinctly Christian university that has been challenging and nourishing for them at the same time.
“There isn’t really anything like a Union in Alaska,” he says. Though they love Union, life in West Tennessee has taken some adjustment on their part.
“It’s really flat here,” Burton says.
“We get out of school for like half an inch of snow,” Isaacs says.
That’s a common cause of amusement for the hardy Alaskans.
Dahms: “Our freshman year, I called home and was talking to my mom and said, ‘Yeah, we’re out of school today. No, there isn’t actually snow on the ground, but there was a threat of snow last night.’”
“We had an indoor cross country practice canceled because it was too cold,” Winter says with a laugh.
For Leaf, a music lover, it was “a
dream come true” if an artist she knew
about traveled to Alaska for a concert.
“Now I live two hours away from some
of my favorite artists,” she says. “They
live in Nashville.”
Morfe is fascinated by the opportunity to travel to different states. Growing up, it was routine for the Alaskans to drive 10 hours to a ski meet.
“Here, we drive for 10 hours, and we find ourselves in Michigan,” Morfe says. “That was just foreign to us, because it takes three days to get to the continental U.S. Here, we can drive two hours and be in Alabama.”
As for Union, the Alaskan students are united in how much they love it, both academically and spiritually.
“The school itself has been a huge encouragement,” Davis says. “There are people all around who have been challenging me spiritually. Sometimes it’s professors, and sometimes it’s my friends or different organizations I’m involved with.”
“I think it’s probably exceeded my expectations, in that I didn’t expect to be challenged from my classes as much as I have been,” Winter says.
Davis concurs.
“Especially in the nursing program— it’s the most that I’ve ever had to study in my life,” she says. “It’s definitely pushed me to critically think and not just to know the answer and fill in the bubble.”
Some of them plan to return to Alaska when they graduate. Some don’t (“Don’t tell my mom,” one of them said). But they are all grateful for what they have found at Union.
“I didn’t expect to want to stay down here,” Dahms says. “But Union has become a second home. I definitely miss Union when I’m gone. Even when I’m back at home in Alaska—and I still consider Alaska my home—I wouldn’t say it’s too far of a statement to say that Union is also my home.”
BethAnne Davis hiking a frozen Lake Williwaw near Anchorage.