Celebrating Mr. Andre Anselme and Ms. Karin Miller-Lewis Upon Their Retirements

Two members of the Regis faculty are retiring this year after years of dedicated service to our school. These profiles appear in the Spring 2025 issue of Regis Magazine.

As he retires from Regis, Mr. Andre Anselme looks back on 41 years serving our community inside and outside of the classroom.

In 1984, Mr. Andre Anselme was teaching history, math, and chemistry at Power Memorial, a Catholic high school for boys near Lincoln Center, when the decision was made to close the school. Mr. Anselme had been at Power Memorial for 13 years, beginning there when he was a year out of St. Francis College and still finishing his master’s at Fordham. For the first time in his career, Mr. Anselme was looking for a new position, and like the top free agents in his beloved Major League Baseball, he had plenty of suitors.

Administrators from several schools reached out to gauge his interest in joining their faculty, including Regis Assistant Principal Mr. Frank Walsh, who at the time was also serving as Regis’s baseball coach. Mr. Anselme had coached baseball and basketball at Power Memorial, and the two had struck up a friendship through their respective coaching roles. Mr. Anselme sent along his résumé, got the job, and when he retires this spring, he will have served Regis for an incredible 41 years.

Mr. Anselme comes from a family of educators. His sister was a teacher in Haiti, while his brother taught chemistry at the University of Massachusetts–Boston. Growing up in Woodside, he’d always loved history, and by the time he arrived at St. Francis College, where his appreciation of New York history was bolstered by summers working in the archives and poring over old newspapers and documents, he knew his calling.

While at Power Memorial, Mr. Anselme had been asked to teach multiple subjects, so when he was offered the opportunity to join the Regis faculty and focus on history, he jumped at the opportunity.

“Everybody knew what Regis stood for,” said Mr. Anselme. “A lot of people wanted to be in that academic environment.”

Mr. Anselme has been an integral part of the Regis community inside and outside the classroom. He directed eight shows for the Regis Repertory, managed the bookstore for 18 years, and served as Athletic Director from his arrival in 1984 until 1999.

Indeed, Mr. Anselme brought with him a wealth of knowledge about sports, in addition to his experience coaching teams at both Power Memorial and St. Raymond’s in the Bronx. It was in that latter role that he coached a sophomore on the St. Raymond’s JV basketball team named Kevin Cullen, who would go on to be his colleague and friend at Regis for the past 35 years.

“Andre has a passion for anything to do with history,” said Mr. Cullen, “but there are also intangible qualities that make him such a fantastic teacher and person: his sense of humor, his wit, and his ability to know about everything from sports to old TV shows. He’s a trusted friend and confidant who’s been an influential person in my life since my sophomore year of high school.”

In addition to his duties with his schools’ teams, Mr. Anselme served as an officer in the CHSAA from 1981 until 1989. For his dedication to Catholic high school athletics, Mr. Anselme was elected to the CHSAA Hall of Fame in 2022. Mr. Cullen, his former player, would be elected himself two years later.

As he looks back on more than four decades on 84th Street, Mr. Anselme says he’ll miss the curiosity of students and the way he could go off on tangents because their interests might be piqued by something that wasn’t necessarily in the curriculum. And most of all, he says, he’ll miss the give-andtake with students in his history classes.

“They try and out-wise-guy me,” he said. “That can’t be done, but they see it as a challenge.”

Looking back on his time as an educator more broadly, he recalls the words of an infamous historical figure.

“No career is perfect, but I’ve had more ups than downs,” said Mr. Anselme. “Like Richard Nixon said, I want to have one more victory than defeat in my life.”

Ms. Karin Miller-Lewis on retirement, her first memories of Regis, and what she’ll miss about the classroom.

In the winter of 1991-92, Ms. Karin Miller-Lewis was a graduate student at Columbia and running programs to train high school teachers in the education department at the Museum of Modern Art. One day, she received a call from English teacher Dr. John Tricamo, asking if she’d consider offering a pair of lectures about 20th century American art as part of Regis’s interdisciplinary American Studies Program. She agreed, enjoyed the experience, and was thrilled to be asked back the next year. And the next. And the next.

Ms. Miller-Lewis continued to return to Regis each year to offer these lectures, and when a teaching position opened up in 2011, she was eager to apply.

“I had developed a great admiration for Regis,” said Ms. Miller-Lewis. “What immediately made me feel like I was at home was the degree to which the school encouraged connections between intellectual life and emotional and spiritual life.”

As she retires after 14 years on the Regis faculty, Ms. MillerLewis says she’s proud of the way the Arts Department helps students realize that analysis and creation are not diametrically opposed and that “making and doing and thinking and feeling are human activities that feed each other.”

She says it’s been especially fulfilling to work at a school that embraces the Jesuit value of cura personalis and encourages teachers to engage with students both in and away from an academic setting.

“I’ll miss just how happy I feel in the classroom,” she said. “There's an energy that the students take to their life at Regis. They want to get a lot out of it, and they give a lot of themselves.”