Although it is located in a small rural town in the middle of the state, Newberry College in a sense belongs to the entire state of South Carolina, which in turn sits on the unseeded lands of the Kusso, Yemassee, Santee, Cherokee, Saluda, and Catawba. Not only does the college have deep connections to the state’s historic and cultural roots, but also its current student population mirrors the state’s demographics.
Located 154 miles from Charleston, where approximately 40 percent of all enslaved Africans were brought into the United States, Newberry College owes its history to the practice of enslavement. The college’s founder, Rev. Dr. John Bachmann, gave the opening blessing at the South Carolina Secession Convention, and he wrote eloquent theological defenses of the institution of slavery (curiously, even as he affirmed, in contrast to other scientific writer of his day, that whites and blacks were of the same species).
Fast forward to today and to who our students are: Newberry is one of the few schools in the state that nearly perfectly mirrors the demographics of South Carolina— in terms of race, gender, socio-economic status, and urban-versus-rural origins. A predominantly white institution, its proportion of minority students reflects the population of the state. Yet it is less reflective of the city and county of Newberry, where there is a slight majority of Black residents, with white residents close in number and only a tiny percentage of Latinx and Asian residents. Socioeconomically, there is also mirroring, with the City posting a median income is $31,000, while the student population of the college includes 50 percent first-generation students, 40 percent Pell-eligible students, and a little over 30 percent racial minority students (with significant overlap across these categories).
Our ‘culture of community’ has both promise and plenty of room for growth.
Our “culture of community” has both promise and plenty of room for growth. On campus, we are trying to build a culture of true belonging, which is the central theme of the DEI Strategic Plan developed by a Presidential Task Force during the 2020-21 academic year. We conducted a campus-wide campus climate survey (HEDS) and have established a series of listening session opportunities for students to come and speak openly about concerns. Our student orientations and student fairs have had more intentional aims to connect students no only across campus but with the broader community. Finally, in the last couple of years, students have established the Social Justice Club and Spectrum (for LGBTQ+ and allies) with campus-wide impact beyond their small membership sizes.
In and with the city of Newberry, the Muller Center for Exploration and Engagement is heavily involved with civic engagement activities—connecting students, staff, and faculty to opportunities for community-based learning and service opportunities. There’s also a strong connection between the athletics department and the community, and the support travels in both directions. There is tremendous community support for the college’s sports teams. In turn, our athletic teams lead the campus in volunteer work in the community, followed by the campus’s Greek organizations and students in community-engagement courses.
The challenges of building a sense of community on campus and off are plenty, however. First and most central is a basic lack of time and energy. For students, staff, and faculty, schedules are packed with demanding commitments, while community-based education and relationship-building takes time. Even when the desire and will is there, there is scant breathing space.
This draw to broader activist movements frequently orients students away from the local and toward the national and global issues.
Another challenge is the generational characteristics of Gen Z students, where there tends to be less focus on service and more on activism, often based on social media. This draw to broader activist movements frequently orients students away from the local and toward the national and global issues. The way technology can mobilize coalitions across space and time is nothing short of miraculous. The challenge is to not sacrifice local relationships and needs.
Whereas that is a challenge for students, there is a specific one for the personnel of Newberry College—namely, the fact that a large proportion of the upper administration and faculty, along with some staff, do not live in the city of Newberry. The community is small, and there is a widespread impression that there is not enough to do and/or the local public schools are not strong enough. This means, however, that the people who live in Newberry the city and the people who work at Newberry the college do not overlap as significantly as they could, which in turn impedes the development of organic relationships of trust, support, and collaboration.
And yet, there are ample signs of hope. Where city-college relationships are good, they are really strong. The mayor and Newberry City Council regularly recognize the college as the largest provider of volunteers in the city, and annually the city holds a ceremony to honor those graduating seniors who have shown strong service to the city during their time as Newberry College students. In addition, there are alumni and alumnae who have chosen to remain in the community following graduation; several now serve in influential positions in the city—from city administration to churches to the local newspaper.
What is more, civic leaders from the community and the campus are currently involved in two significant projects: Coming Together for Newberry, an alliance of people seeking to practice and advance interracial engagement and understanding in Newberry County, and the Gallman School Project, an initiative to acquire and renovate the historically significant Black high school and establish a community center that will provide a range of services and opportunities for the surrounding community.
Finally, the growing number of international corporations coming to the area promises to turn little Newberry into a global city where the possibilities for collaboration among the town, the college, and the business industry will grow.
There is plenty of room to grow in terms of community-building on campus and beyond. There is also a great deal of promise, rooted primarily in the already rich relationships that are possible only in a small town.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
Mahn introduces the “Called to Place” theme of the 2021 VLHE Conference, arguing that Lutheran higher education’s emphasis on vocation must be grounded in particular geographies and embodied communities — for, as Wallace Stegner put it, “If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are.”
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Article
Where Your Feet are Standing: Institutional Engagement and Place
Melissa Maxwell-Doherty
Maxwell-Doherty draws on Cal Lutheran’s Hispanic-Serving Institution designation and its location on Chumash, Fernandino Tataviam, and Ohlone lands to ask how the university’s mission might shift if it depended on where its students are standing — not just where the institution sits.
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Article
Just Communities: From Liberal Arts in Prison to Racial Healing over Zoom
Monica Smith
Smith showcases how Augustana College’s commitment to social justice extends into the Quad Cities through two initiatives: the Augustana Prison Education Program at East Moline Correctional Center, and Racial Healing conversations developed through the Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation framework.
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Reflection
Caught in a Place Between Caesar and God
Darrel D. Colson
Colson reflects on his anguish, as Wartburg’s president, over an Iowa law that prevents him from requiring student COVID-19 vaccinations — reading Luther’s “Whether One May Flee From a Deadly Plague” alongside the conflict between obeying the law and serving neighbor.
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Article
Hospitality to the Wild
Laura M. Hartman
Drawing on research with a Wild Ones Native Landscaping chapter and Marilyn Matevia’s ethic of “creature comfort,” Hartman argues that Christian hospitality must extend to non-human animals and plants — and asks whether college campuses can foster not just human diversity but biodiversity.
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Article
Return to Purpose: Learning in an Age of Collapse
Ahmed Afzaal
Afzaal argues that the cascading crises facing higher education are not temporary glitches but symptoms of planetary and civilizational collapse — and that colleges must embrace “double-loop” learning and return to a shared sense of purpose if they are to help humanity descend gradually rather than catastrophically.
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Article
A Lutheran Call for Educator Flourishing
Krista E. Hughes
No. 58 · Fall 2023
Hughes argues that without educator flourishing there is no student flourishing, traces how an exploitative “passion tax” can distort vocation, and offers seven Lutheran “third-way” value pairings — including Metrics/Grace, Efficiency/Kairos, and DEI/Priesthood of All Believers — to reframe institutional success at NECU campuses.
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Article
Radical Hospitality on Haunted Grounds: Anti-Racism in Lutheran Higher Education
Krista E. Hughes
No. 52 · Fall 2020
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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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
No. 5 · Summer 1998
Christenson introduces the issue as an illustration of the diversity of interests Intersections aims for, surveys the contents (Lagerquist on method, Mori on art and ritual, Baer on falling walls, Bergendoff as memorial, Funk and Powell in dialogue), urges readers to send in “your good stuff,” asks for distribution feedback, and closes with a sabbatical-year reading list—Kieran Egan, Robert Coles, Daniel Kemmis, David W. Gill, Sallie McFague, Roger Scruton, E.M. Adams, Freeman Dyson, Colamosca and Wolman, Gribbin and Goodwin, van Wyk, Wislawa Szymborska, and Flannery O’Connor.
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Article
Uneasy Partners? Religion and Academics
Storm Bailey
No. 11 · Spring 2001
Bailey, a philosopher at Luther College, takes up the reflex of describing church-related colleges as “pretty good in spite of the religion” and argues instead that religious commitment serves academic goals on three fronts: service as central academic purpose (Richard Hughes on Mennonite colleges in Models of Christian Higher Education), educational community (Plato’s dialogues, Parker Palmer, and Mark Schwehn’s Exiles from Eden), and integration of knowledge across disciplines against Nelson and Watt’s “entrepreneurial disciplinarity.” He then defends academic freedom on Christian grounds by drawing on Mill’s On Liberty argument from fallibilism, the centrality of epistemic weakness in the Christian tradition, and Wolterstorff’s claim that to infringe academic freedom is to desecrate an image of God—making personal and institutional religious commitment a foundation, not a foe, of the liberal academic ideal.
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Article
Why Diversity and Civic Engagement Don't Talk to Each Other on College Campuses: The Need for Public Work
Jose Marichal
No. 25 · Spring 2007
Marichal opens with Thurgood Marshall’s line from Milliken v. Bradley and traces the “decoupling” of campus diversity and civic engagement initiatives back to their shared grounding in Benjamin Barber’s “thin” or pluralist democracy. Reviewing CIRCLE data on youth political disengagement, the limits of mandatory volunteerism, and persistent residential segregation, and drawing on Mary Ann Glendon, Lani Guinier, Caryn McTighe Musil, and Richard Rorty, he argues that only Harry Boyte’s notion of “public work” can bind diversity and civic engagement together—and contends that Lutheran colleges, with their understanding of vocation as call into the world, are uniquely positioned to build that infrastructure.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
No. 6 · Winter 1999
Christenson explains that three of the five papers from the 1998 Wittenberg Vocation of a Lutheran College conference appear here (with Robert Scholz and Cheryl Ney to follow in the next issue), passes on Andy Sheppard’s “Books for Belarus” appeal from Southwestern College, and reflects on Douglas John Hall’s The End of Christendom and the Future of Christianity—its claim that disengagement from cultural dominance is the prerequisite for faithful re-engagement, and its retrieval of Christ’s metaphors of “a little salt, a little yeast, a little light” as a possible session topic for a future VLC Conference.
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Article
Community-Based Research as Engaged Citizenship
James Paul Old
No. 63 · Spring 2026
6 min audio
Old argues that genuine citizenship requires more than charitable gestures — it demands long-term, reciprocal community partnerships — and describes how Valparaiso’s Community Research and Service Center embodies that vision even amid the financial pressures threatening such programs.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
No. 13 · Winter 2002
Selbyg reports that Executive Director Leonard Schulze has challenged the ELCA Division for Higher Education and Schools to develop a comprehensive communications plan reaching high school students, college students, parents, pastors, and journalists, and invites Intersections readers to review the redesigned elcacolleges.org website, the “FREE STUFF” brochures, the journal’s advertisements in The Lutheran and related publications, Ernie Simmons’ new Augsburg-Fortress book Lutheran Higher Education: An Introduction, and the ELCA video magazine Mosaic—and to send in their own ideas.