By Alex Bertsch

On July 5 this past summer, long time communications professor Stephen Rendahl passed away at the age of 71. Rendahl had been a professor at UND since 1974, and had taught at other schools in Norway, China, and Romania and lectured in South Africa, Malaysia, China, Kyrgyzstan, and the Philippines.

Rendahl would win multiple awards for his teaching, and lived an exciting and varied life that he would often bring up in his lectures.

What I remember about Rendahl however, was his dedication to teaching. I had him for Comm 102 my first semester on campus, and when I was discussing my classes with my parents, my mother noticed his name, and was surprised to see that he was still teaching. While my mom was attending UND she had also had Rendahl as a professor, and even then he was nearing retirement age.

When I first read that he had been teaching since 1974, it didn’t dawn on me just how long that meant that he had been teaching. Had my grandmother attended UND she could have had him as a professor. The amount of dedication and love for your profession that it must have taken to continue teaching and working into your seventies is absolutely astonishing in consideration.

I remember one story that Rendahl told in his lecture about a time he was teaching abroad. He talked about a man he had met, who was a genius in the field of communication and how he loved to listen to him lecture while he was there. However, after he left he couldn’t find anything that the man had written, or any mention of him in anyone else’s writing. It was with stories like this, or one’s about his family reunion picnics that he would use to help ingrain the lessons that he was trying to teach. And I still haven’t forgotten anything that I learned in that class.

In the obituary that was emailed to everyone at UND, Rendahl’s sister Laurel recalls a time when she came to Concordia College, and he was already running for vice president of the student body. She described him as the “big man on campus” and he only continued that as a professor at UND. He was a veteran teacher who could teach a class of 15 to a class of 50 and still leave an impression on every student, and for that amazing contribution to the university, he will be missed.