At the end of Summer, just as the academic year was unleashing its usual cannonade of events, excitement and stress, I was gifted an opportunity to unplug. While campus was engulfed by move-in weekend, student orientation, the hustle to find twin-XL sheets and door-mounted full-length mirrors, I escaped to the north shore of Minnesota and the wild coast of Lake Superior. I slept by waves beneath a cliff. I reflected on glaciers, granite, greenstone, greywacke. I sorted rocks and hunted agate. And since I can’t really unplug: I thought about Staff Governance.
Staff Governance at St. Olaf does not exist. At least, not formally. But, as it does exist, it is a lot like the rocky beach up north: many individual pieces, composed of various layers and materials, set under extreme pressure and conditions over a long period of time. Some are worn smooth by the water, weather and currents. Others are younger breaks, still jagged and sharp at the edges.
Our work on Staff Governance began, as likely is the case on many campuses, as a reaction to trauma. For St. Olaf staff, we’d felt a steady decade of difficult events; In the past 10 years the community has directly experienced Title IX conflicts, anti-racism student protests, departmental reallocations, public departures of prominent staff and faculty. A global pandemic. The murder of George Floyd. And meanwhile, the balance between personal lives and work as staff were asked to stretch further than ever to support connection and belonging and the worthy outcomes of student success.
It has been a convergence of many efforts, made crystal-line through common struggles and a shared vision: that staff would have a voice and seat at the table, alongside Faculty and Students, with the deciding leadership of the college. Affinity groups began providing spaces where staff could unite and speak freely. The Council for Equity and Inclusion investigated methods to improve promotion, retention and arbitration of complaints. The Task Force to Confront Structural Racism at St. Olaf unearthed the gaps in staff representation within the college and researched models of governance at peer institutions.
In 2022, facilitated by HR, members of these groups, plus others from across all divisions of the college, met in earnest to draft potential bylaws and committee structures. This new group consisted of hourly and exempt staff. The draft was completed and given to St. Olaf’s new president, Dr. Susan Rundell Singer. After an early meeting with her we were encouraged to continue working as a community. This year we’ll be communicating with staff to gather feedback and interest. We’ll work with Faculty allies and learn from our peers who have also recently taken these paths. We wish to bring our work to the surface.
It no longer feels accurate to say that our development of a Staff Governance model is simply work in progress and instead is, with the power of a glacier, advancing steadily forward. I’ve been honored to work alongside so many dedicated people at this institution. What has been a sustained effort by the staff community, now over 3 years, is a demonstration of some of the best qualities you would hope to see in any workforce: thoughtful in their approaches, resilient through difficulties, and possessing an intentional compassion for the most marginalized voices and underrepresented members of their body. It feels we can move, albeit slowly, and reshape the landscape of our work.
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Editorial
From the Editor: So That We, Too, May Flourish
Colleen Windham-Hughes
Windham-Hughes introduces the 2023 VLHE conference theme of educator flourishing, drawing on Dr. Monica Smith’s plenary challenge — “How can we flourish if only some are centered and others are at the margins?” — and invites readers to ground themselves in Us/We, the cover art by Augustana graduate William Hatchet, and join the conversation.
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Editorial
Maintaining Our Lutheran Identity: A Source of Strength
Lamont Anthony Wells
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 Lutheran Call for Educator Flourishing
Krista E. Hughes
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
Do One Thing: Academic Vocation in the Age of Burnout
Jonathan Malesic
Malesic draws on Oliver Burkeman’s 4,000 Weeks and Søren Kierkegaard’s Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing to argue that academic burnout is fundamentally institutional — a widening gap between mission ideals and working conditions — and urges colleges to resist “projectitis” by focusing on the one thing that matters most.
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Article
Cultivating Staff Flourishing in Lutheran Higher Education: A Framework for Advocacy and Engagement
Laree Winer
Winer narrates her own “love affair” with Lutheran Higher Education to argue that the heart of the tradition — vocation, de-emphasized hierarchy, and shared humanity — equips NECU institutions to advocate for staff flourishing through data collection, professional development, and ongoing relational commitment.
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Article
Vocare: A Spiritual Practice for the Spaces Between
Charlene Rachuy Cox
Cox introduces Vocare, a six-word spiritual practice developed through the Nourishing Vocation Project at St. Olaf, that uses the acronym V-O-C-A-R-E to help individuals and communities honor the spaces “between no longer and not yet” and discern their callings for the common good.
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Reflection
The Importance of Connection
Alex Piedras
Piedras reflects on the 2023 “So that We, Too, May Flourish” Conference at Augsburg as a refreshing space for a weary DEI advocate — surfacing burnout, the Talking Circle on Indigenous Issues, and Dr. Monica Smith’s Racial Healing Circle as opportunities to recharge the soul and build authentic connections for the long journey.
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Article
“A Decolonizing Conversation”: Indigenous Engagement at Luther College at the University of Regina
Marc Jerry, Sarah Dymund
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.
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Article
Beyond Deep Gladness: Coming to Terms with Vocations We Don’t Choose
Deanna Thompson
Thompson, living with incurable cancer, expands Frederick Buechner’s definition of vocation to make room for deep sadness — drawing on Arthur Frank, Shelly Rambo, Beverly Wallace, and Ross Gay to argue that practices of lament, including the public lament of Friday Flowers at St. Olaf, open space for gladness, joy, and even flourishing to emerge.
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Article
Diversity, Integrity, and Lutheran Colleges
Florence D. Amamoto
No. 8 · Winter 2000
Amamoto—a sansei Jodo Shin Shu Buddhist who is “an inside outsider” at Gustavus Adolphus—argues that diversity and integrity belong together in Lutheran higher education, perhaps in a way unmatched by other church-related traditions. She affirms the importance of Gustavus’s 60% Lutheran student body and vibrant Christ Chapel under Richard Elvee and Brian Johnson while warning that numbers and chapel are not enough, draws on Tom Christenson, Patricia Gurin, Sylvia Hurtado, Anthony Carnevale, Martha Nussbaum, W. E. B. DuBois (the deaths of Matthew Shepard and Isaiah Shoels), Richard Hughes’s reading of finitum capax infiniti, Richard Solberg, and Mark Schwehn’s mutual hospitality model, and concludes that the real enemy is not diversity but indifference—and that Lutheran finitude grounds a theological commitment to keeping diversity and identity in creative conversation.
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Reflection
Dreaming God's Dream: A Sermon on Isaiah 56:1-2, 6-8
Stephan K. Turnbull
No. 34 · Fall 2011
Preached at the 2008 “Savvy with Substance” Convocation of the ELCA at Central Lutheran Church, Minneapolis, this sermon by parish pastor Stephan K. Turnbull (First Lutheran Church, White Bear Lake) sets the small dreams of pastors and academics—balanced budgets, peaceful congregations, coherent midterm papers—over against the prophet’s dream in Isaiah 56 of a God who gathers all nations to a house of prayer for all peoples. Turnbull calls educators, preachers, and church leaders to articulate God’s dream of getting the world back through the dying of Jesus the Messiah and the resurrection’s first fruits of new creation.
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Article
A Response to Paul Santmire
Don Braxton
No. 4 · Winter 1998
Braxton appreciates the dialectical structure of Santmire’s mandates—“skeletons in our closets and riches in our own vaults”—and reads it as a faithful expression of the Lutheran tradition of Paul, Augustine, and Luther. He argues that Santmire is on target in warning against premature flight to non-Christian traditions for environmental wisdom (theoretical sensitivity does not translate into ecological behavior in practice), and that classical Lutheran social ethics has too often been quietistic. But Lutheran ethics at its best is dialectical, not dualistic—recognizing the interpenetration of church and world, Law and Gospel, eschatological Kingdom and present realities, as in Hegel, Ritschl, Bonhoeffer, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Larry Rasmussen. Braxton commends environmental responsibility, social criticism of unsustainable practices, and a liturgical practice of resistance to instrumentalism as appropriate next steps for Lutheran liberal arts colleges, especially Capital University.
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Response
Response to Robert Benne
Baird Tipson
No. 17 · Summer 2003
Tipson responds to Robert Benne’s comments in the previous issue about his review essay of The Future of Religious Colleges, affirming their fundamental agreement that the Enlightenment epistemology dominant in higher education poses the most serious threat to the vitality of Lutheran colleges. Using the example of lecturing on early Mormon history and the Book of Mormon, he concedes that the methodological “solvent” of Enlightenment historiography acts on Christian as well as Mormon faith claims, and concludes that while H. Richard Niebuhr’s “inner” and “outer” history and Walter Brueggemann’s approach in The Theology of the Old Testament are comforting to believers, they do not offer an epistemology that can stand alongside the Enlightenment model in evaluating truth claims in the academy.
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Editorial
From the Editor: Vocation as Action in the Affirmative
Colleen Windham-Hughes
No. 59 · Spring 2024
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
Diversity and Dialogue: Twenty Years and Counting
Florence D. Amamoto
No. 43 · Spring 2016
Twenty years after her essay “Diversity and Dialogue” in the first issue of Intersections, Amamoto returns to Gustavus Adolphus College to reflect on what has changed and what has not: rising numbers of students of color and international students, faculty turnover and increased publication pressures, the disappearance of the Center for Vocational Reflection, and the renewed importance of articulating Gustavus’s Swedish Lutheran heritage and inclusive sense of community in a tuition-dependent, cost-cutting environment.