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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Reflection
John 3:16-17
Richard Priggie
No. 27 · Spring 2008
Preached at the Vocation of the Lutheran College conference in August 2007, Priggie’s sermon on John 3:16-17 reads the Greek word “cosmos” as evidence that “God was into globalism long before we were” and calls Lutheran colleges to embrace Matthew Fox’s “deep ecumenism” — an embrace of and care for all created things. Drawing on J.B. Philipps’s Your God Is Too Small and the movie Pleasantville, he invites his hearers to come to Rock Island in order to leave Rock Island, to be Christian in order to be more than Christian, and to find the places where the roads don’t go in a circle but just keep going.
-
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.
-
Reflection
Danya Tazyeen
Danya Tazyeen
No. 40 · Fall 2014
Tazyeen, a Pakistani-American Muslim student at Augustana College, reads Qur’an 49:13 — that God made us into peoples and tribes “that you may know one another” — as a charge to break down fear with open dialogue and to see one another as flawed and relatable fellow human beings.
-
Editorial
From the Publisher: Introduction and Invitation
Lamont Anthony Wells
No. 57 · Spring 2023
Wells introduces himself as the new Executive Director of NECU, succeeding Rev. Dr. Mark Wilhelm, and frames this Spring issue as a passionate response to the crises facing higher education amid threats to academic freedom and the well-being of educators.
-
Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 28 · Fall 2008
Wilhelm introduces himself as the new Director for Colleges and Universities and publisher of Intersections, thanks his predecessor Arne Selbyg, and previews an issue devoted to the aims and purposes of Lutheran higher education—reflections from Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson, two pieces from Wartburg College’s fall 2008 campus conversation about being a college of the church (his own essay and the Benne/Christenson dialogue), and a sermon by Lake Lambert III preached in the Castle Church in Wittenberg.