Linking up with emeriti:

Bill Gardner

After an illustrious career in the U.S. educational system, former college dean Bill Gardner has an interesting perspective on the educational systems in Buenos Aires. “Teacher salaries don’t come up to the poverty level there,” Gardner observes. “For the middle class, private education is the thing.”

What brings an emeritus Minnesota educator to Argentina? Gardner, whose career with the college included teaching in the college for 42 years and serving as dean from 1976 to 1991, is married to Crystal Meriwether, former superintendent of St. Anthony Public Schools and an alumna of the college, who left education to join the foreign service. Buenos Aires is their most recent port of call. Before that, they lived for two years in Helsinki, Finland.

In Buenos Aires, Gardner and Meriwether offer presentations about the American education system, meet local residents through Meriwether’s work, and are part of a U.S./Argentine friendship society.

Although he retired in 1996, Gardner remained active, writing and consulting, and says he “really” retired in 1999. “People say, ‘What are you doing in retirement?’ I tell them: I’m reading books, and I’m reading them all the way through.”

Gardner and Meriwether recently took a trip to Antarctica. “Freedom is kind of a misused word these days, but I’m free to do the things I want to do,” he says.

To Gardner, life outside of the U.S. has offered new perspectives and has kept him constantly engaged. “The most important thing to me is that you get to see a society from the inside,” Gardner explains. “In the U.S., you read the papers from a U.S. point of view. In Buenos Aires and Finland, you get a greater quantity of international news, and you get things from their perspective, which is really grabbing and different.”