When a character on the old television drama, The West Wing, asked whether President Bartlett was angry about her politically damaging lapse in judgment, she was told, “He is actually more upset that you could not come up with a retort better than, ‘If the shoe fits, wear it.’”
The tiresome use of a hackneyed expression often shows a lack of imagination, as this character joked. Sometimes, however, using a well-worn phrase is the best way to express a truth. Applying hackneyed higher education expressions to NECU colleges and universities in 2020 is a case in point. Two of them—“you are not just a number” and the “college experience”—tell the truth about our institutions as they have responded to the challenges of Covid-19 and sustained their educational missions when doing so.
“You are not just a number” at our colleges and universities, we often proclaim. It is a hackneyed expression, but at NECU institutions, it is also the truth. Care for students as individuals is real at our schools, even under the conditions of the pandemic. NECU colleges and universities attended to student success and well-being long before the higher education industry discovered “student-centered” education, and our commitment to students has not waned or been de-railed because of Covid-19.
We also offer an “experience” that allows students to grow into their fullest capacities as ethically informed and spiritually astute persons. This type of educational “experience” is the truth at our colleges and universities, and it has remained so even during the pandemic. Despite the pandemic’s complications, many students have been anxious to return to our campuses. A number of NECU institutions have even seen retention numbers rise. That’s because students are not just “numbers,” and because they “experience” an education that calls and empowers them to serve the neighbor so that all may flourish.
Please do not misunderstand. Adjusting to the pandemic has been incredibly tough. The pandemic has pushed already stressed budgets to the breaking point, requiring many beloved campus employees to be furloughed or laid off. Administrators and faculty have had to work continuously since last spring to revise and restructure instructional practices and campus life. Nothing is close to what we used to call normal. Nonetheless, core truths about higher education, encapsulated by expressions often over-used when times were much easier, still describe our realities.
The pandemic has ravaged our nation and world. It has threatened the well-being of our college communities. Our schools, however, have “risen to the challenge”—a third well worn, but truthful, phrase. Through the herculean efforts of governance boards, administrators, faculty, and students, the mission of Lutheran higher education is alive and well. In the NECU community during the Covid-19 pandemic, the hackney expressions are the simple truth.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
Mahn narrates a year of crisscrossing pandemics — Covid-19, economic collapse, partisan politics, and the long pandemic of white supremacy revealed anew by the murder of George Floyd — and argues that Lutheran liberal arts schools, by educating for vocation, are uniquely poised to help students respond with character and capable callings.
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Article
A New Image for an Ancient Call: Lutheran Higher Education Amidst Pandemics Today
Caryn Riswold
Pairing Wartburg’s Lebenskreuz sculpture with the Matthew 25 acts of mercy and the commitments of Rooted and Open, Riswold reads the calls to feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, and care for the sick as urgent summons for Lutheran higher education in a year of overlapping pandemics — and as a call to dismantle the structures that produced them.
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Article
Learning from Luther on Covid-19
Carl Hughes
Reading Martin Luther’s 1527 treatise “Whether One May Flee from a Deadly Plague,” Hughes finds practical and spiritual guidance for a pandemic age: serve the neighbor, follow medical experts, honor those whose vocations put them at risk, and trust that even when we fail, God will not abandon the community.
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Article
Radical Hospitality on Haunted Grounds: Anti-Racism in Lutheran Higher Education
Krista E. Hughes
Writing from Newberry College’s campus on land once home to the Cherokee and within a day’s drive of Mother Emanuel A.M.E., Hughes argues that NECU’s call to “practice radical hospitality” demands that predominately white institutions open themselves to the hauntings of racism — pursuing belonging rather than mere welcome, and risking kenotic transformation of institutional identity itself.
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Article
Activism, Justice, and the Danger of Silence
Dezi Gillon
In conversation with Jason Mahn, Augustana College alumnux Dezi Gillon traces the call to action they felt as a Black student organizing for Black Lives Matter on a predominately white campus — through seminary, art, spirituality, and restorative justice work — and warns white professors that staying silent “actually speaks volumes.”
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Article
Leadership in Lutheran Key at a Time of Pandemics
Deanna Thompson
Thompson draws on Luther’s theology of the cross and Shelly Rambo’s theology of trauma to sketch a Lutheran model of leadership for a season of pandemics — one that is attentive to pain, responsive to need, and intentionally nourished by food, friends, and deep conversation.
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Article
Through Truth to Freedom—by Way of Reconciliation
Paul C. Pribbenow
Reflecting on Augsburg’s 150th-anniversary motto “Through truth to freedom,” Pribbenow argues that in a season of three pandemics — pandemic illness, economic collapse, and the racial sin laid bare by the murder of George Floyd — higher education’s most authentic work is to educate for truth and freedom by way of confession and reconciliation.
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Article
Finding Purpose in Chaos: Reflection In and Beyond the Public Health Classroom
Lena R. Hann
When the pandemic hit her new public health professionalism course, Hann recalibrated her teaching from the “how” of professional preparation to the “why” of vocational reflection — and recounts how Augustana public health students and alumni found purpose in the chaos through food banks, disaster response, palliative care, and research on health inequities.
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Reflection
The Long Pilgrimage of 2020-21
Kara Baylor
Drawing on Martha Stortz’s definition of pilgrimage as “intentional dislocation, for the sake of transformation, where the body teaches the soul,” Baylor invites students and educators worn out by the 2020-21 academic year to ask what is essential, to listen to what their bodies are telling their souls, and to be more open to the transformations the dislocation might still yield.
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Article
Called to Flourish: An Ethic of Care
Mindy Makant
Drawing on Lenoir-Rhyne’s core value of Care, Glennon Doyle’s Untamed, Darrel Jodock’s “Gift and Calling,” and Luther’s plague-era practice of opening his home to the sick, Makant argues that flourishing is interdependent — that self-care is a means to extending care, and that an ethic of care is the meaningful, transformative work to which Lutheran liberal arts education is called.
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Article
Called to the Moment: A New Vocation for Lutheran Colleges
W. Kent Barnds
After a derecho ravaged Iowa in August 2020 and Pastor Katy Warren preached on 1 Peter 4, Barnds watched line workers, neighbors, and Augustana colleagues simply show up where they were needed — and proposes that the true vocation of a Lutheran college may be making the case for “meeting immediate need with a deep willingness” alongside the longer work of vocational discernment.
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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. 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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Article
Rooted and Open: Background, Purpose, and Challenges
Mark Wilhelm
No. 49 · Spring 2019
Wilhelm traces Rooted and Open’s seventy-year backstory — from Conrad Bergendoff’s 1948 call for a Lutheran philosophy of education through the recovery of the vocation tradition — and describes the document’s process, purpose as a teaching and study resource, and the embodiment, contextual, and cultural challenges it implies for NECU institutions.
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Article
The Ought
Ned Wisnefske
No. 19 · Summer 2004
Wisnefske observes that students and faculty raise contradictory objections to moral education—that students are already morally formed, and that teachers must not form them—and argues that both share the same fear of “the Ought.” He proposes that the Ought is best encountered not in front of us but behind us, nudging us, as we exercise impartiality, sympathy, and free will and discover that the persons participating in moral inquiry deserve respect; the Ought can then reform our past formations and transform our wants, so that it is never too late, or a mistake, to be shaped by it.
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Article
Lutheran Higher Education and the Public Intellectual
Ernest L. Simmons
No. 26 · Fall 2007
Simmons argues that college faculty and administrators are, like it or not, public intellectuals, and that Lutheran higher education’s dialectical understanding of Christ and culture is well suited to support four functions of the public intellectual: articulating constructive critique of received social explanation (especially the “collage identity” described by Renate Schacht); presenting a transcendent theological perspective through the theology of the cross that takes seriously God’s hiddeness, the presence of ambiguity, and the reality of suffering; pursuing the common good amid the demise of the “commons” through H. Richard Niebuhr’s “Christ and Culture in Paradox”; and educating for citizenship through Christian vocation by connecting the practical and existential dimensions of the question “Why are you here?”
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Article
Learning and Teaching as an Exercise in Christian Freedom
Tom Christenson
No. 6 · Winter 1999
Christenson, the 1998 Wittenberg keynote, argues that what makes our institutions Lutheran is not the percentage of Lutherans served or employed, ethnic celebration, or self-conscious difference, but a theologically informed vision of the educational task framed by the linked ideas of gift, freedom, and vocation. Drawing on Joe Sittler, Wendell Berry, David Orr, Harold Kushner, John Updike, Frederick Buechner, and Luther’s On the Freedom of a Christian, he reframes the liberal arts as four “liberating arts”—critical/deconstructive, embodying/connecting, melioristic/creative, and arts of enablement and change—and closes with his mother’s “end-of-the-month soup” as an image of vocation in a particular place.
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Article
Engaging the Local Community: Why Bother?
Mary S. Carlsen
No. 27 · Spring 2008
Carlsen traces the often adversarial history of town-gown relations from the medieval universities through the Battle of St. Scholastica Day to the “ivory tower” pattern of American higher education, then argues that Lutheran colleges should engage their local communities for practical, educational, ecological, moral, and theological reasons. Drawing on her work in social work education at St. Olaf and on Ira Harkavy, Ernest Boyer, and the ELCA’s “Our Calling in Education,” she offers a recipe for engagement that is Passionate, Ethical (Needed, Welcomed, Mutual, Long-term, Attentive to diversity, Strengths-based, Respectful), and Reflective.
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Article
Lutheran Identity, Academic Integrity, and Religious Diversity
Storm Bailey
No. 25 · Spring 2007
Bailey argues that one might rightly say of a college “that’s a pretty good school because it’s religious,” defending the proposition under three headings: academic and curricular virtues, free inquiry, and religious diversity. Drawing on Mark Schwehn’s Exiles from Eden, Richard Hughes on the Lutheran tradition’s “most potent theological resources” for the life of the mind, Parker Palmer, Lendol Calder, Mill’s On Liberty, Newman’s Idea of a University, and the AAUP’s 1940 Statement, he proposes a “critical mass” alternative in which the Lutheran commitment to truth-seeking and self-critique itself requires—rather than tolerates—a religiously diverse faculty whose opposing voices are needed for the mission to flourish.
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Article
“A Decolonizing Conversation”: Indigenous Engagement at Luther College at the University of Regina
Marc Jerry, Sarah Dymund
No. 58 · Fall 2023
Jerry and Dymund describe Luther College at the University of Regina’s response to Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission — Land Acknowledgments, a Starblanket ceremony, the Project of Heart, an Elder in Residence, and the unedited video conversation with Elder Lorna Standingready that anchored their 2023 VLHE keynote.