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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Poem
Two Poems: The Advent Carol / The Madonna of Dohany Street
Brian Forry Wallace
No. 2 · Winter 1997
Two poems by Brian Forry Wallace of Capital University: “The Advent Carol,” a litany of the babies who were not adored—the Jewish baby shot with a Luger, the Black child hanged from a tree, the female messiah tossed into a river, the Tutsi infant cut by machetes, the Japanese newborn incinerated by atom bombs, the Chinese baby crushed by Japanese bombs, the aborted Mary’s child—ending with the baby “whom we do not understand, cannot feed, whom we kill”; and “The Madonna of Dohany Street,” on a Holocaust photograph in a Budapest museum of a dead mother and her dead Christ-child daughter in the former ghetto, in which annunciation, nativity, adoration, and crucifixion are seen together in a single instant.
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Reflection
Otherwise
David Wee
No. 6 · Winter 1999
Wee’s September 3, 1997 St. Olaf Opening Convocation address takes its title from Jane Kenyon’s “Otherwise” and asks why we gather: to celebrate the gifts of life, place, companionship, and the work we love, and to become “otherwise”—wise about the others in our midst. He honors his own St. Olaf teachers (Ditmanson, Shaw, Stiehlow, Jordahl, Paulson, Meyer, Hove, Clausen, Larson, Jorstad) and the gruff Latvian stamp scholar Gus Eglas and Sherlock Holmes expert Randy Cox, draws Huck Finn’s “All right, then, I’ll go to hell” and Flannery O’Connor’s grandmother into a single argument, and closes on Tim Lull’s expectation that a Lutheran college campus should display contentment, courage, and cheerfulness as a family member faces day-six post-bone-marrow-transplant—“the first day of the rest of your life.”
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Response
Response to Mark Wilhelm: Vocation—Wide Perspective Questions
Mary-Paula Cancienne
No. 56 · Fall 2022
Cancienne, drawing on Iain McGilchrist, asks whether higher education has prioritized micro lenses at the expense of the macro view, and invites educators to hold the drama of individual vocation stories within a wider plot that includes James Webb Telescope wonder, climate grief, the long shadow of enslavement, and the resilience of native populations.
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Editorial
From the Incoming Editor
Colleen Windham-Hughes
No. 55 · Spring 2022
Windham-Hughes introduces herself as incoming editor by reclaiming the root of assess — “to sit by” — and committing to the question “What does this mean?” as she sits with readers in the worth of our work and the universality of vocation.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
No. 25 · Spring 2007
Selbyg notes that most papers in this issue grew out of a pan-Lutheran conference organized by the Association of Lutheran College Faculties in fall 2006 rather than the annual Vocation of a Lutheran College conference, and argues that the ELCA’s ecumenical posture—truthful but open to learning from others—is a good foundation for institutions of higher education whose faculty likewise profess while remaining subject to change based on new research and insights.
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Article
Religion in the Age of Trump
Daniel A. Morris
No. 45 · Spring 2017
Morris reads the 81% evangelical vote for Donald Trump through two historical theses: that evangelicals’ once-coherent story about Godly participation in political life has fallen apart, and that their long-running tendency to exclude others — once aimed at Black Americans and Catholics — has now turned decisively against Muslims. He argues that scholars of religion and politics have a responsibility to tell these stories well, and that appeals to classroom objectivity can no longer be a luxury.