As you read this issue of Intersections and explore the reviews of influential books about national trends in higher education, I invite you also to consider the implications of the widely used phrase, “the model is broken,” to describe the current reality of higher education. The phrase has its merits and utility. It gets the attention of trustees, administrators, and faculty and causes them to face up to the problems of our enterprise. And the phrase is difficult to ignore when the powerful and influential Association of Governing Boards touts it loudly, but “the model is broken” has its problems.
First, it tends to generate an atmosphere that blames the victim. Hence the rush to blame colleges and universities and their supposedly profligate ways for “breaking” contemporary higher education. Even worse, it generates recommendations for whole-sale change in higher education. ELCA colleges and universities are not infrequently challenged to abandon our long tradition of educating the whole person so that we can shift to the delivery of technical knowledge in preparation for specific jobs. Such a change would mean losing our integrity as we joined with forces that no longer consider higher education a public good but a private benefit and a commodity.
The mantra of “the model is broken” also distracts our attention from the actual difficulties ELCA higher education faces. First, the phrase tends to hide the truth that the gradual decline since the early 1980s in federal and state governmental support for higher education is a significant factor in the financial complications we face. The declining trajectory of public financial support for higher education reflects the growing acceptance of the perspective that higher education is a private benefit, to be purchased by individuals, and not a public good worthy of public investment. Second, “the model is broken” assertion masks that demographic changes are primary drivers of the enrollment, and therefore revenue, challenges troubling our schools. Nothing in our model created these demographic changes or the decline in financial support from government, but the wide use of the phrase implies otherwise.
To say it differently, the constant refrain of “the model is broken” mitigates against the development of wise responses to the challenges facing ELCA higher education. Yes, a wise response will inevitably require changes in what we do. But in the spirit of “there is nothing so practical as a good theory,” ELCA higher education will find its best response to demands for demonstrating the practical relevance of our education by modifying our existing model (our “theory”), not by discarding what we do in favor of an entirely new model.
Our style, form, or model of educating the whole person—body, mind, and spirit—in the liberal arts attuned to pre-professional education has educated leaders for church and society since the cathedral schools of medieval Europe grew into the first iteration of universities in Spain and France a millennium ago. Nothing is broken. To assert otherwise is fear-mongering masquerading as analysis. The “model” has successfully adjusted through the centuries to new situations, and we will do so again in early twenty-first century America.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
Mahn reports on the working group “People of Wondrous Ability: Introducing Faculty and Staff to Lutheran Higher Education,” shares creative ways campuses are introducing colleagues to the charisms of the Lutheran tradition, and frames the issue as a set of reflective reviews that move from national trends to homegrown conversations about the state of college.
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Book Review
The Religious Genealogy of College: Interrogating the Ambivalence of Delbanco's College
George Connell
Connell reads Andrew Delbanco’s College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be alongside Concordia’s Vision Statement for the Humanities and Martha Nussbaum’s Not for Profit, tracing Delbanco’s ambivalent engagement with the religious origins of American college. He asks whether Delbanco’s “college idea” can survive cut off from the religious rootstock that nourished it, and proposes that church-related colleges may serve best not as a “usable past” but as a “usable present.”
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Book Review
A College Degree or a College Experience? Reflecting on Selingo's College (Un)Bound
Laurie Brill
Brill reads Jeff Selingo’s College (Un)Bound from inside the Lutheran Educational Conference of North America, drawing on LECNA’s alumni research with Hardwick-Day and on Brandon Busteed’s Gallup data to argue that, in an age of competency-based degrees and college-as-commodity, Lutheran colleges must speak more clearly about the transformational, vocational impact of a college experience that develops the whole person.
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Book Review
Types, Methods, and Sagas in Lutheran Higher Education: Learning from Childers
Lake Lambert
Lambert situates Eric Childers’ College Identity Sagas within the older tradition of the 1977 Association of Lutheran College Faculties volume The Church-Related College in an Age of Pluralism, working through Burton Clark’s “saga” and Robert Benne’s typology of church-related colleges. He commends Childers’ socio-scientific approach while questioning whether a typology can do justice to institutions that resist easy classification.
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Book Review
Post-Secular Religion on Campus: Conversing with Jacobsen and Jacobsen
L. DeAne Lagerquist
Lagerquist guides readers through Douglas and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen’s No Longer Invisible: Religion in University Education and its companion volumes, unpacking the authors’ three-act story of campus religion (Protestant, Privatized, Pluriform), their three-by-two framework of historic/public/personal religion in belief and behavior, and the six questions they pose for campus conversations. She lifts up interfaith etiquette and vocation as especially fruitful zones for Lutheran campuses.
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Book Review
The Prophetic Vocation and the Nature(s) of College: Reimagining College with Jim Farrell
Peder Jothen
Jothen reads the late Jim Farrell’s The Nature of College as a prophetic critique of the dual nature(s) of college—its socio-cultural “normal” and its ecological habitat—and argues that Farrell’s call to model an “Anthropocene Responsibility” resonates with the prophetic dimension of Lutheran higher education. He proposes a re-imagined “About St. Olaf” that names vocation, ecological dependence, and personal involvement as the operative goods of college.
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Book Review
The Courage to Change: Creating New Hearts with Palmer and Zajonc
Martha E. Stortz
Stortz reads Parker Palmer and Arthur Zajonc’s The Heart of Higher Education from the landscape of Lent and notes that the book’s strategies all target students, not their professors. Drawing on her own Faculty Formation Group at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary and the Ignatian Colleagues Program at Jesuit institutions, she asks what a Lutheran analogue might look like that would form the educators who teach for transformation.
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Book Review
Learning Across Campus: Hearing Bok's Call to Conversation
David Ratke
Ratke reads Derek Bok’s Our Underachieving Colleges from Lenoir-Rhyne and argues that Bok’s call to think holistically about undergraduate education and to dialogue across disciplinary boundaries names the work already underway at ELCA colleges. He weighs faculty attitudes, the role of skills in the core curriculum and the major, and the importance of the extracurriculum for student formation.
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Book Review
The Information Deluge: Navigating the Digital Age with Recent Scholars
Virginia Connell
From the reference desk at Concordia’s Carl B. Ylvisaker Library, Connell navigates Ann Blair’s Too Much to Know, Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger’s Delete, and Howard Gardner and Katie Davis’ The App Generation, then describes information-literacy work at Concordia—primary-source assignments, Omeka and TimelineJS exhibits—that helps students move from app-dependent to app-enabled in the Lutheran tradition of reform.
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Article
Why All This Talk About Understanding the Mission of NECU Member Institutions as a Vocation?
Mark Wilhelm
No. 56 · Fall 2022
In his valedictory keynote, retiring NECU Executive Director Mark Wilhelm argues that Lutheran higher education is, properly understood, vocation-based education — outlining four core practices recovered over the past fifty years and naming the constructive and corrective work still to be done, including a fuller embrace of DEIJ and of the diverse vocations of NECU’s 27 institutions.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 55 · Spring 2022
Wilhelm announces his planned retirement on January 31, 2023, after serving as the founding executive director of the Network of ELCA Colleges and Universities, and gives thanks for the privilege of helping NECU articulate a shared vision for Lutheran higher education in twenty-first-century North America.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 53 · Spring 2021
Wilhelm reflects on an NPR report of teenagers’ pandemic diaries and the fraught Christian history of struggling to live out Jesus’s ethic of love, framing the issue as a record of NECU institutions working out how to act for the common good through the pandemic of 2020–2021.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 52 · Fall 2020
Wilhelm argues that the “hackneyed” expressions of higher education — “you are not just a number,” “the college experience,” “risen to the challenge” — tell the simple truth about NECU institutions even as the Covid-19 pandemic has pushed budgets, employees, and campus life to the breaking point.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 51 · Spring 2020
Wilhelm frames the issue by tracing how Lutheran educational ideals — once a primary source of contemporary higher education — were masked in the United States, and introduces a NECU initiative that uses the case of business ethics to explore Lutheran social teaching as an academic resource.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 50 · Fall 2019
Wilhelm frames the issue by noting that a federal court’s vindication of Harvard’s race-conscious admissions process is a win for higher education’s commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion — and argues that for Lutheran higher education, the commitment to diversity is an old and foundational claim, rooted in Christianity’s openness to all and reflected in the four diverse gospels of the New Testament.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
No. 17 · Summer 2003
Selbyg explains that the four essays in this issue grew out of the first Lutheran Academy of Scholars in Higher Education—a two-week seminar funded by the Lutheran Brotherhood Foundation and the Lilly Endowment, led for its first three years by Dr. Ronald Thiemann of Harvard Divinity School—whose official theme “Finding Our Voice—Christian Faith and Critical Vision” became informally “What’s Faith Got To Do With It?”
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Article
Students in the Cloud: Creating Digital Citizens
Jose Marichal
No. 29 · Spring 2009
Marichal weighs the utopian and dystopian views of the “networked information economy,” drawing on Yochai Benkler, Manuel Castells, Henry Jenkins, Cass Sunstein, Robert Putnam, Nicholas Carr, and Andrew Keen to chart the promise and peril of life “in the cloud,” and proposes Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of phronesis—developed through Hubert Dreyfus’s five stages of skill acquisition—as the goal of digital citizenship for college faculty and their students.
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Article
Sexuality over the Lifespan—Social Trends Pose Moral Dilemmas for Communities of Faith
Adina Nack
No. 22 · Spring 2006
Nack, a sociologist who presented to the ELCA Task Force for Studies on Sexuality, surveys empirical research on three life-stages flagged by the Task Force as particularly contested—premarital sexuality among adolescents and young adults, sexuality after divorce and within single parenting, and sexuality in late adulthood. Drawing on the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the Office of the Surgeon General, AARP, National Council on the Aging, and the World Health Organization’s 2002 definition of sexual health, she closes each section with questions about the church’s role in education, blessing of committed nonmarital relationships, and dismantling stereotypes about aging and sexuality.
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Institutional Focus
Facing Tornados and Climate Change: An Interview with Jim Dontje about Environmental Innovation at Gustavus
Jim Dontje
No. 36 · Fall 2012
Dontje, director of the Johnson Center for Environmental Innovation at Gustavus Adolphus College, describes the Center’s work with solar thermal and photovoltaic systems, LEED certification of Beck Hall, recycling and conservation initiatives, the Linnaeus Arboretum, and the difficult work of building consensus around climate response—reflecting on how Gustavus’s 1998 tornado recovery shaped a community capable of collective action, and on how the “Lutheran identity” both restrains and energizes the college’s environmental ethos.
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Editorial
From the Outgoing Editor
Jason A. Mahn
No. 55 · Spring 2022
Mahn closes out a decade of editing Intersections, passes the duties to Colleen Windham-Hughes, gives thanks to Mark Wilhelm and Augustana College, and introduces an issue largely drawn from comments by Lutheran faculty, staff, and administrators at the 2022 NetVUE national gathering.
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Article
Service Beyond the Comfort Zone
Kathryn Wolford
No. 18 · Fall 2003
Wolford names economic globalization and the growth of civil society as the two issues shaping Lutheran World Relief’s mission, illustrating with the Guatemalan storekeeper undercut by subsidized “gringo” chickens, fair-trade coffee and chocolate campaigns, and Charles Onyango-Obbo’s warning about anti-terrorism laws in fragile African democracies. Drawing on Darrell Jodock, Art Simon, and the Good Samaritan, she frames the global vocation of Lutheran colleges as inviting students past comfort zones of race, class, ethnicity, and ideas through service-learning that links mercy and justice, and closes with a concrete LWR partnership invitation including site visits, internships, fair-trade campus campaigns, and the “A Place for Peace in Colombia” advocacy program.