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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Institutional Focus
Facing Tornados and Climate Change: An Interview with Jim Dontje about Environmental Innovation at Gustavus
Jim Dontje
No. 36 · Fall 2012
Dontje, director of the Johnson Center for Environmental Innovation at Gustavus Adolphus College, describes the Center’s work with solar thermal and photovoltaic systems, LEED certification of Beck Hall, recycling and conservation initiatives, the Linnaeus Arboretum, and the difficult work of building consensus around climate response—reflecting on how Gustavus’s 1998 tornado recovery shaped a community capable of collective action, and on how the “Lutheran identity” both restrains and energizes the college’s environmental ethos.
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Article
"Our Calling in Education": Working Together to Generate a Strong Social Statement on Public Schools, Lutheran Schools and Colleges, and the Faith Formation of Children and Young People
Marcia Bunge
No. 23 · Summer 2006
Bunge, Professor of Theology and Humanities at Christ College, Valparaiso University, makes two claims about the ELCA’s forthcoming social statement on education: first, that it should be built on a robust Lutheran understanding of vocation, addressing four common misconceptions (vocation as occupation, as self-fulfillment, as ordained ministry, and as “vo-tech”) and recovering the breadth of Luther’s teaching; and second, that the statement should narrow its focus to three urgent areas affecting children and young people — public schools, Lutheran schools and colleges, and faith formation — rather than addressing the full lifespan of education in equal depth.
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Article
Finding Purpose in Chaos: Reflection In and Beyond the Public Health Classroom
Lena R. Hann
No. 52 · Fall 2020
When the pandemic hit her new public health professionalism course, Hann recalibrated her teaching from the “how” of professional preparation to the “why” of vocational reflection — and recounts how Augustana public health students and alumni found purpose in the chaos through food banks, disaster response, palliative care, and research on health inequities.
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Reflection
The Neglected Miracle of Pentecost
Susan M. O'Shaughnessy
No. 32 · Spring 2010
O’Shaughnessy, in a homily delivered at Concordia College in 2008, reads the Pentecost narrative of Acts 2 through Maria Lugones and Elizabeth Spelman’s 1983 critique of white feminism’s cultural imperialism. She argues that the miracle is not the disciples’ speaking but the immigrant Jews’ hearing—and that the writer of Acts withholds the content of what was said precisely to teach disciples that people of privilege know less than the foreigner, the immigrant, the oppressed, the woman, the child, and must learn to listen in new languages before they can speak.
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Article
Civic Engagement, "Baylor In Deeds," and Engaged Learning
Rebecca Flavin
No. 63 · Spring 2026
6 min audio
Flavin describes how Baylor’s strategic plan “Baylor in Deeds” and its Office of Engaged Learning are building civic engagement into the Arts & Sciences core curriculum, with early Global Engagement Survey data showing gains in civic efficacy and global civic responsibility.
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Article
Wake Up Running! A Call to Ethical Leaders in Quest of Democratic Space
Walter Earl Fluker
No. 62 · Fall 2025
Abridged from his VLHE keynote, Fluker draws on Habakkuk and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower to call a new generation of ethical leaders to “wake up running” toward democratic futures, packing their runaway bags with love-filled-justice, grace-filled-empathy, and hope-filled-resiliency for the soul-filled work the moment requires.