As someone who works at my own alma mater, I’ve spent much time thinking about what it means to call this place “home.” As a young woman from a small, rural community in Nebraska, moving to a small town in Kansas didn’t feel like a huge stretch. In fact, I remember telling people that was something that drew me here. By student population, Bethany College was about the same size as my high school at the time. I was excited to be 3 hours away from home and in a different state, knowing I could feel at home here. Although I’m not Swedish, I look much like some of the first students at this institution as a white, Lutheran, farm kid.
While there was certainly great diversity represented when I was a student, that only accelerated over the 8 years I was away following graduation. In this community, we know the story of our founding well. Founded in 1881 by white, Swedish Lutheran settlers, Bethany College came into being to provide access to education for the Swedes who immigrated to this place. Very early on, the education of women was also a priority. These are stories Bethany College and the wider Lindsborg community tell through festivals, traditions, and our local culture. As I think about this legacy, I wonder what this means to the students who call this place home today.
One of our own NECU students shared, “I don’t want to feel like I’m being welcomed into your home. I want to feel like this is my home, like I belong.” As students return to our campus this fall, this articulation of belonging has stuck with me.
It is good and lovely that our NECU institutions have been home to so many of us. And…there is room to do some wrestling with our welcoming and the stories we tell. What do these Swedish, Lutheran, immigrant roots mean for our students who come from 38 states and 21 countries, who represent 35 faith traditions and a wide breadth of ethnic and cultural diversity? At Bethany, we’ve begun to think about these questions, but these experiences aren’t yet part of our institutional story.
Dr. Mindy Makant (Lenoir-Rhyne University) was on campus recently leading some vocational reflection with faculty and staff. While she invited us to think about our vocational stories, she shared, “We don’t have a choice about the story of the past, but we do get to decide how we tell that story forward.” We get to choose how who we have been shapes and informs who God is calling us to be.
By telling these stories forward, claiming them, and living them, we can decide to make space for our students in their fullness. By doing so, we are celebrating them and making space for their stories, too.
-
Editorial
From the Editor
Colleen Windham-Hughes
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.
-
Editorial
From the Publisher: Reflections on the 2024 Vocational Leaders in Higher Education Conference
Lamont Anthony Wells
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.
-
Article
Access, Accessibility, & Change: A Call for Trustworthy Leadership in Higher Education
Emma Jones
Jones surveys the converging pressures on higher education — cost, the enrollment cliff, shifting demographics, and declining public confidence — and uses Reichheld and Dunlap’s four factors of trust (transparency, capability, reliability, humanity) to call campus leaders to rebuild trustworthy leadership from the inside out.
-
Article
Creation, Justice, and Communio: Lutheran Insights Empowering Educational Access
Mary Elise Lowe
In her VLHE keynote, Lowe names three Lutheran commitments — continuing creation, neighbor justice, and communio — as the “why” that empowers ELCA colleges and universities to pursue equitable access for students often left behind by persistence and graduation gaps.
-
Article
Committed to Paradox
Caryn Riswold
Riswold lifts up paradox — saint and sinner, lord and servant, Rooted and Open — as a distinctive Lutheran root that lets institutions honor the complicated truth of who their students are and embrace the messy, ever-reforming work of access and accessibility as a theology of the cross.
-
Article
2024 VHLE Conference: "Rooting Access" Panel Talking Points
Guy Nave
Nave reads “access” across Deuteronomy 23, Ruth, Isaiah 56, Acts 10, and Matthew 15:21-28 as an ongoing biblical conversation that evolves from exclusion to ever-widening welcome — and presses ELCA institutions to shift their focus from “student readiness” to “institutional readiness.”
-
Article
Affirming, Entrusting, and Acting: A Baptismal Grounding of Affirmative Action in Lutheran Higher Education
Peter Carlson Schattauer
Schattauer draws on the Lutheran baptism liturgy — where the gathered assembly publicly affirms what it is for and is entrusted with responsibilities for justice and peace — to argue that NECU institutions create truly inclusive communities by affirming commitments, naming responsibilities, and acting in ways that embody both.
-
Response
Hitting a Moving Target
Harry Jebsen
No. 3 · Summer 1997
Jebsen, former Provost of Capital University, responds to Reichenbach by arguing that the institutions, the ELCA, congregations and pastors, students, and curriculum are all moving targets. Drawing on Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock and his own fifteen years of hiring as Dean and Provost (a candidate who hoped the cross out front didn’t mean anything), he traces the drift from the “Mr. Chips” faculty who personified Dana and Midland Lutheran to a campus culture where “everybody is nice to each other” has replaced theological substance, and where MBA programs, conservatories, law schools, and adult-education programs further dilute the focus of the residential Lutheran college.
-
Article
"Faithful Nones" and the Importance of a Rooted and Open Pedagogy
John Eggen
No. 49 · Spring 2019
Drawing on a student survey from his D.Min. thesis at Midland University, Eggen identifies a distinctive subset of religious “nones” — the “faithful nones” — who reject institutional religion yet retain substantive beliefs and practices, and argues that the non-binary, third-path pedagogy commended by Rooted and Open is uniquely positioned to engage a generation that has disambiguated faith, religion, and spirituality.
-
Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
No. 18 · Fall 2003
Selbyg reports that the ELCA Church Council’s new strategic directions include the charge to “assist this church to bring forth and support faithful, wise, and courageous leaders whose vocations serve God’s mission in a pluralistic world,” and assures readers that Intersections, the Vocation of a Lutheran College conferences, and related programs will remain among the tools by which the churchwide organization reaches its strategic goals.
-
Article
Money, Sex and Power: An Exploration of Some Controversial Issues in the Public Witness of the Church
Pamela K. Brubaker
No. 21 · Summer 2005
Brubaker explores two controversial issues in the church’s public witness—homosexuality and economic life—and the challenges they present for both church and college. Drawing on Beverly Harrison, Elizabeth Bounds, Ron Thiemann, Linell Cady, Marcia Bunge, Richard Hughes, Darrell Jodock, Ernest Simmons, Karen Bloomquist, Garth Kasimu Baker-Fletcher, and Larry Rasmussen, and on episodes at California Lutheran University around “Harmony Week” and Bishop Paul Egertson’s participation in Anita Hill’s ordination, she argues that colleges related to the ELCA are called to educate for “critical citizenship” by hosting rigorous, bold, and unfettered debate—including debate over the neo-liberal globalism that she names a form of economic fundamentalism.
-
Article
What Could the Lutheran Colleges and Universities Contribute to the ELCA Discussion of Sexuality—But What Would They Actually Contribute?
Robert Benne
No. 22 · Spring 2006
Benne hopes that Lutheran colleges might model fair moral discourse on sexuality by gathering a balanced mix of what James Davison Hunter calls “orthodox” and “progressive” voices from religion and social-science faculties, with the Great Tradition treated as the default position. He doubts this is what would actually happen: citing Klein, Stern, and Western’s research showing a ten-to-one liberal-to-conservative ratio in social-science and humanities associations, he suspects Lutheran faculties skew further left than other private colleges and would simply reinforce the ELCA’s already-progressive seminary and churchwide leadership.
-
Article
The Lutheran Theological Tradition and Recruiting Lutheran Students
Ernest L. Simmons
No. 13 · Winter 2002
Simmons opens with an Abraham-and-Isaac “Windows 98” joke to illustrate the dialectic of faith and learning, then argues that in a new market era of limited religious background, intentional mission and marketing go together. Drawing on Levine and Cureton’s When Hope and Fear Collide for the Millennial Generation born in 1982 and Tom Beaudoin’s Virtual Faith for their GenX parents, he reads “Reclaiming Lutheran Students” survey results showing 86% strong community at ELCA colleges versus 54% at flagship publics and 61% alumni mentoring versus 39%. He then develops three areas where the Lutheran tradition uniquely equips its colleges—community, mentoring and vocation, and the integration of faith and values—using Luther’s “two kingdoms” image of the “Left Hand” (reason) and “Right Hand” (faith) of God, with academic freedom as a product of Ahlstrom’s “Critical Current” in the tradition, and closes with three challenges: recruiting and retaining mentoring faculty, educating church leaders, and reaching potential students and parents.