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
Who Said You Have Only One Calling?
Peter Marty
No. 27 · Spring 2008
Marty argues that our normal practice of thinking singularly about vocation must be enlarged: God has not limited any of us to one expression or gift, and Martin Luther never spoke of individuals as having only one calling. Drawing on Max DePree’s parable of the millwright-poet, William May on the etymology of “career,” Evelyn Underhill on the verb “to Be,” James VanOosting, Scot McKnight’s “Jesus Creed,” and a Golden Gate Bridge patrolman who has saved hundreds of lives, he identifies four features common to every story of vocation in scripture: special purpose, special gifts, a caller from outside, and the requirement of sacrifice and generosity.
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Article
Rich and Poor in an Era of Globalized Religion and Economies: Challenges to Lutheran Colleges
Pamela K. Brubaker
No. 25 · Spring 2007
Brubaker opens with two World Council of Churches communion stories—a generous Aymara potato meal in Bolivia and a gated invitation-only lunch at a prosperous immigrant German Lutheran church in Brazil—to frame the question of which stance Lutheran colleges will adopt toward diversity. Drawing on Richard Hughes and Ernest Simmons on Lutheran “ecumenical confessionalism,” Linell Cady, Ulrich Beck, Held and McGrew, the World Bank’s 2006 Equity and Development report, Mark Juergensmeyer’s Global Religions, Harvey Cox on the Market as God, the WCC’s “economy of life” / AGAPE document, and Larry Rasmussen on universal human rights, she argues that part of the academic work of Lutheran colleges is to educate for critical citizenship by questioning neo-liberal assumptions and equipping students to claim social, economic, cultural, civil, and political rights for the whole human family.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
No. 13 · Winter 2002
Selbyg reports that Executive Director Leonard Schulze has challenged the ELCA Division for Higher Education and Schools to develop a comprehensive communications plan reaching high school students, college students, parents, pastors, and journalists, and invites Intersections readers to review the redesigned elcacolleges.org website, the “FREE STUFF” brochures, the journal’s advertisements in The Lutheran and related publications, Ernie Simmons’ new Augsburg-Fortress book Lutheran Higher Education: An Introduction, and the ELCA video magazine Mosaic—and to send in their own ideas.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Colleen Windham-Hughes
No. 60 · Fall 2024
Windham-Hughes welcomes newcomers and seasoned colleagues to the conversation, lifts up Mary Elise Lowe’s three Lutheran “whys” for educational access, and commends Rev. Jen Rude’s “Sacred Pause” practice as a way to humanize one another and make opening access both easier and more joyful.
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Article
The Vocation of Intersections on its Twentieth Birthday
Jason A. Mahn, Robert D. Haak, Tom Christenson
No. 43 · Spring 2016
The three editors of Intersections — Bob Haak, Jason Mahn, and Tom Christenson (in spirit, following his death in 2013) — trace the twenty-year vocation of the journal itself: its 1996 birth at Capital University; its coming-of-age years of debate over institutional markers, two-kingdoms theology, and Lutheran identity; the ascendancy of “education for vocation” as the central marker of Lutheran higher education; and its ongoing identity in relation to a changing ELCA and to the broader cultural conversation about purpose, wholeness, and the vocation of higher education.
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Editorial
Guest Editorial
Kristen Glass Perez, Richard Priggie
No. 40 · Fall 2014
Glass Perez and Priggie introduce the issue by recounting the campus conversations and the June 2014 Interfaith Understanding Conference at Augustana College that gave rise to it, framing the central question, “What does it mean to be Interfaith at a Lutheran College?,” as a living example of the praxis of being a Lutheran college in the twenty-first century.