From the Publisher: Navigating Affirmative Action, DEI Policies, and Lutheran Vocational Identity
Intersections No. 59 · Spring 2024
In the ever-evolving landscape of higher education, institutions across the United States find themselves at a crossroads, addressing critical issues that will shape their futures. In recent years, the Network of ELCA Colleges and Universities (NECU) has leaned into our foundational roots to strengthen our resolve in addressing multiple challenges. Among these, the debates surrounding affirmative action, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies, and the preservation of religious and vocational identities, such as that of the Lutheran tradition, stand out as particularly pressing.
Affirmative Action in Flux
The landscape of affirmative action in higher education is currently in a state of uncertainty. Recent legal challenges and Supreme Court rulings have prompted many institutions to reevaluate their admissions policies. The crux of the debate lies in balancing the desire for diverse student bodies with the legal constraints on considering race as a factor in admissions. As a result, universities are exploring alternative approaches to achieve diversity, such as increasing outreach to underserved communities and emphasizing holistic review processes that consider a wide range of applicant experiences and attributes. In this publication of Intersections, we draw from varied perspectives of engaging affirmative practices, sociological viewpoints, and theological responses.
DEI Policies Under Scrutiny
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives have become central to the mission of many higher education institutions. Each NECU institution has experienced positive results and significant success in myriad ways of achieving diversity on its campuses. These practices and policies aim to create a more inclusive and supportive environment for all students, particularly those from historically marginalized groups. However, several NECU schools are facing challenges from various quarters about DEI efforts, including political pressures and debates over academic freedom and free speech. Across the tumultuous landscape, Lutheran institutions are navigating these complexities by fostering open dialogues, adapting their approaches to be more inclusive of diverse perspectives, and ensuring that DEI efforts are integrated into the fabric of their academic and administrative structures.
Amidst these broader trends, Lutheran-affiliated institutions are grappling with how to maintain their distinctive vocational identity. The Lutheran tradition emphasizes a holistic approach to education, integrating faith, learning, and service. In a time when higher education is increasingly focused on career preparation and immediate job outcomes, Lutheran institutions are striving to preserve their commitment to forming individuals who are not only skilled professionals but also thoughtful citizens and ethical leaders. This involves fostering a campus culture that encourages spiritual growth, critical thinking, and engagement with the world’s complex social and ethical issues.
As NECU institutions navigate these challenges, they are also embracing opportunities for innovation and transformation. Our strategic plan opens us to an alignment with strong liberal arts education in concert with competitive STEM programming that meets the needs of this present age and the future to come. Our efforts to augment technology play a pivotal role in reshaping teaching and learning, with the rise of online education and digital resources expanding access and enabling new pedagogical approaches.
Partnerships between several NECU colleges and employers are becoming more common, providing students with practical experience and a smoother transition to the workforce. For instance, Tim McCarthy (Wittenberg University ’02), has served as the first Professional-in-Residence for his alma mater. McCarthy, former owner of the Raising Cane’s Ohio franchise, volunteers a significant amount of his time to help guide students through the transition into career exploration as a young professional. Drawing from the core values taught in Lutheran education institutions, He hopes to encourage budding entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurs to continue their development of community and national projects that serve the common good as sources of America’s future success.
In conclusion, the state of higher education is marked by a dynamic interplay of challenges and opportunities. Affirmative action, DEI policies, and the preservation of Lutheran vocational identity are just a few of the issues that NECU institutions are addressing as they strive to fulfill their missions in a rapidly changing world. This coming summer at the Vocation of Lutheran Higher Education Conference (VLHEC), we will grow deeper in our collective understanding of each of these topics as we navigate a path forward that will require a commitment to embracing diversity, fostering inclusivity, and maintaining a clear sense of purpose and amplifying the Lutheran identity. I hope to see you at VLHEC in Minneapolis, July 8-10, 2024.
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Editorial
From the Editor: Vocation as Action in the Affirmative
Colleen Windham-Hughes
Windham-Hughes frames vocation as practicing “at the borders of our incompetence” — every small yes to the callings we experience, every effort made in the direction of life, is action in the affirmative — and previews the issue’s essays on diversity, transformation, AI, championship team culture, and dreaming big within and beyond our limitations.
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Article
Forming the Division for Access, Equity & Belonging at Susquehanna University
Amy Davis, Dena Salerno, María L. O. Muñoz, Nina Mandel, Scott Kershner
Five Susquehanna University colleagues trace the institution’s 166-year arc from a Missionary Institute founded to remove barriers to education through the formation of a new Division for Access, Equity & Belonging in 2023, arguing that access rooted in Lutheran origins must continue to drive policy revision, infrastructure, and belonging for minoritized communities today.
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Article
On Recruiting Diverse Students, Rooted in Mission
Eric Rowell, Jason A. Mahn
Jason Mahn interviews Eric Rowell, Assistant Director of Admissions and Diversity Outreach at Augustana College, about how recruiting students from a wide variety of backgrounds — rooted in Augustana’s Lutheran commitment to vocation and educating across difference — remains essentially unchanged in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decisions on affirmative action.
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Article
What Our Lutheran Heritage Entails for Lutheran Colleges and Affirmative Action
Mark Ellingsen
Ellingsen argues that the Lutheran Two-Kingdom Ethic — far from leading to political reaction — supports the church-relatedness of ELCA colleges and obligates them to keep affirmative action alive, even reading a Chief Justice Roberts “loophole” in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard as an open door for Black community partnerships, ELCA congregations, and Lutheran colleges to act in the affirmative.
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Reflection
On the Power of Transformation and Becoming Human
Ken Yanai Flores
Flores, a Cal Lutheran sophomore, reflects on personal and institutional transformation as the slow work of shedding the armor of trauma responses, engaging discomfort rather than turning away, and trusting that the work of becoming more human — more empathetic, knowledgeable, and free — will be reflected in our institutions as well.
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Article
The Critical Role of Lutheran Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Jose Marichal, Maya Goehner, Tyler Haug
A Cal Lutheran political science professor and two of his students draw on Rooted and Open to argue that Lutheran higher education is uniquely positioned to stake out a middle path between AI utopianism and AI doom — cultivating a “healthy sense of human limit,” resisting data colonialism, and forming students to see the neighbor rather than the enemy as the world becomes increasingly synthetic.
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Article
Team Culture is Key to Success: Learning from Student-Athletes
Colleen Windham-Hughes
On a December weekend in “Championship City” Salem, Virginia, both California Lutheran’s Women’s Soccer Team and St. Olaf College’s Men’s Soccer Team won NCAA Division III national titles. Windham-Hughes talks with coaches, faculty mentors, and student-athletes about how off-the-field team culture — built on trust, relationships, and shared why — translates onto the pitch and into liberal arts and sciences education.
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Article
Low-Hanging Fruit, Moonshots, and Coffee: Dreaming Big Within and Beyond Our Limitations
Jeremy Myers
Myers shares the process used by Augsburg’s Christensen Center for Vocation to help teams move from a shared experience to next steps — an Ignatian-rooted Awareness Examen followed by naming low-hanging fruit, moonshots, and the coffee conversations that build the coalition to make it all happen.
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Editorial
From the Publisher & Editor
Colleen Windham-Hughes, Lamont Anthony Wells
No. 63 · Spring 2026
6 min audio
Wells and Windham-Hughes frame vocation as “ground game” — the practical, public living-out of faith through civic engagement — and introduce the issue’s focus on how Lutheran higher education equips students to repair the world.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Lamont Anthony Wells
No. 62 · Fall 2025
5 min audio
Wells frames the issue as a record of the 2025 VLHE Conference at Augsburg under the theme “Ethical Leadership in a Changing World,” arguing that vocation is never solitary but a collective, public witness of ethical formation, theology and care, flourishing and belonging, and leadership rooted in God’s grace.
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Article
Fostering Moral Imagination and Inclusivity: The Role of Ethical Leadership in ELCA Colleges and Universities Amid Societal Challenges
Lamont Anthony Wells
No. 62 · Fall 2025
12 min audio
Wells argues that “moral imagination” — the capacity to envision ethical alternatives, empathize across difference, and respond creatively to injustice — is the heart of ethical leadership in NECU institutions, and that anchoring leadership in this principle positions Lutheran higher education to cultivate socially responsible citizens.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Lamont Anthony Wells
No. 61 · Spring 2025
5 min audio
Wells introduces So That All May Belong: Lutheran Roots for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice as a theological and institutional articulation of NECU’s commitments, and previews four accompanying essays that frame vocation as a societal responsibility rooted in justice and not solely an individual pursuit.
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Editorial
From the Publisher: Reflections on the 2024 Vocational Leaders in Higher Education Conference
Lamont Anthony Wells
No. 60 · Fall 2024
Wells reflects on the 2024 VLHE Conference theme — “Educational Access: Lutheran Roots, Contemporary Practices” — tracing today’s commitment to inclusivity back to Martin Luther’s radical 16th-century insistence that both boys and girls be educated, and previews NECU’s expanded engagement of student leaders alongside faculty and administrators.
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Editorial
Maintaining Our Lutheran Identity: A Source of Strength
Lamont Anthony Wells
No. 58 · Fall 2023
Wells reflects on the well-being of staff, faculty, and administration in Lutheran higher education across four pillars — rest, creativity and innovation, religious diversity and pluralism, and the preservation of Lutheran identity — and addresses the painful reality of Finlandia University’s closure as a reminder of the network’s shared mission.
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Article
A God of Peace and Love? Reflections From a Biblical Scholar
Karla G. Bohmbach
No. 4 · Winter 1998
Bohmbach responds to Gregory Clark’s call to proclaim Jesus on Lutheran campuses with biblical-scholar reservations. Israel’s sacred texts also include the herem ban, the conquest narratives, and a God who fights for Israel; the Christian canon includes the apocalyptic violence of Revelation. To proclaim Jesus is therefore to proclaim a particular and contested figure within a tradition that has its own internal violence—not a generic God of peace and love. Bohmbach asks what it would mean for staff, administrators, and teachers on a college campus to take seriously the Jesus who made himself vulnerable to the violence of his world, even to the point of suffering for it, and whether Lutheran colleges are prepared for such a vocation.
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Article
Making Diversity Matter: Inclusion is the Key
Monica Smith
No. 50 · Fall 2019
Smith, Augustana’s inaugural Vice President for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, frames the work of a Chief Diversity Officer as that of a disrupter and argues that while diversity in higher education is already happening, inclusion is a choice — one requiring a fundamental institutional transformation that diversifies faculty and staff, infuses diversity into the curriculum, invests in professional development, and draws on senior leadership to dismantle barriers.
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Article
The Challenge of Inclusion in the Ethics Classroom
Faith Wambura Ngunjiri
No. 51 · Spring 2020
Ngunjiri, the only Black woman tenured faculty member at Concordia College, reflects on her students’ resistant and resonant responses to MLK Day programming on “Not Racist: A White Moderate Myth” — and on what it takes to make the ethics classroom a place where students can “BREW”: Becoming Responsibly Engaged in the World.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
No. 43 · Spring 2016
Mahn introduces the twentieth anniversary issue of Intersections, recalling its 1996 birth at Capital University “in the twinkle of an idea” in the mind of founding editor Tom Christenson, and previewing essays by Wilhelm, Amamoto, Kleinhans, Glass Perez, and Simmons that together look back at twenty years of the journal and forward to its work in the decades to come.
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Article
'In, With, and Under:' The Tradition and the Teaching of Christian Ethics
Pamela K. Brubaker
No. 17 · Summer 2003
Brubaker describes how she teaches Introduction to Christian Ethics at California Lutheran University—a religiously diverse classroom where about 30% of students are Lutheran, 30% Roman Catholic, and many are “unchurched”—as a community of moral discourse rooted in the Lutheran dialectic of faith and reason. Drawing on Larry Rasmussen and Bruce Birch, Elizabeth Bettenhausen, Roger Crook, and Robert Benne’s typology of “Hot and Cool Connections” between church and politics, she walks through her course’s units on human sexuality, economic life, and war and peace—including the Bomb Shelter simulation, a mock Disney stockholders meeting on sweatshops, and a Congressional hearing on the School of the Americas—to show how ELCA social statements function as case studies in critical inquiry and education for citizenship.
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Reflection
A Community That Connects
Conrad Bergendoff
No. 5 · Summer 1998
Excerpts from Conrad Bergendoff’s 1990 address at the opening of Augustana’s new library, prepared by David Crowe and published here as a memorial after Bergendoff’s death in December 1997. Bergendoff—Augustana class of 1915, president 1936–1962—recounts eighty years of Augustana memories, insists that “size is pretty much within you, not outside of you,” traces the institution’s bonds to Uppsala from 1860 (and the 1910 visit of the Rector Magnificat), and celebrates Augustana’s graduates “in practically every part of the world” as evidence that a small school can have a universal output.