What is Required of You?: Higher Education Leadership in a Moral Key

Excerpted from an opening plenary address at the Vocation of Lutheran Higher Education Conference, July 14, 2025

Each year, I offer an opening convocation address to our incoming students with the title, “What is required of you?” In it, I remind them that change happens—as it always has—but I also let them know that there are things that have not changed for our university because they are at the heart of our identity and values and mission. Students will receive the highest quality education we can offer—in partnership with each other and a remarkable faculty. They will be challenged by ideas and experiences and relationships new to them—because that is what it means to be educated. They will meet friends and peers for life. And they will be equipped for democratic citizenship—because the world needs them.

I begin with the obvious allusion in my title to the well-known passage from the Old Testament prophet Micah, the sixth chapter, verse eight:

6.8 He has showed you, [O mortal,] what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.

And, if I was smart, I might leave it right there, because if each of us were to behave as Micah claims the Lord requires, all would be well with the world. Justice, mercy and humility set a high bar for God’s faithful people, but the theological claim embedded in Micah’s prophetic words is not mine to negotiate for our students. The links between their faith, their relationship with the divine, and how they live in the world, are for them to explore and work out. We provide a rich and challenging context for them to do just that, but we do not pretend to know how they will make sense of what the Lord requires of them.

On the other hand, there are some things that we can and do require of our students. And that is the simple message I share as they commence their Augsburg education. And maybe—just maybe—if they do what we require of them, they will find a pathway to understand what the Lord requires of them. That would be the bold claim at the heart of an education for vocation in the world, that how and what they learn here, that who they meet and engage here, that what they find out here about themselves and their various gifts, will offer them a clearer idea of what it is that they are called to do and be in the world.

This message lands with some urgency at this time, because in a time fraught with social and political division and fear, many are questioning whether or not both higher education and our democracy will survive. Throughout the past few years, our city, country and world have been torn apart by violence fueled by all sorts of isms—racism, nationalism, fundamentalism. During our lifetimes, our economic lives have been marked by a growing gap between those who have and those who have not, a gap that threatens to unravel the social fabric of our communities.

In the midst of all of this volatility, we welcome our students to an institution that at its very core believes in democracy, not simply as a political system, but as an ethic, a way of life. And this democratic ethic means that they become members of a teaching and learning community—students, faculty, staff and partners—that believes that there are clear parameters for our lives together, in classrooms, residence halls, playing fields, in this chapel and everywhere we navigate daily life. There is, in other words, what Yale law professor Stephen Carter has called an “etiquette of democracy,” rules we must follow if we are to live and work and study in ways that live out our mission as a college.

I have always believed that a college education is about challenging ourselves with new ways of thinking, provocative questions, mind-stretching inquiry and conversations, pursuing knowledge and wisdom with abandon. And that is deeply intense and sometimes emotional work. The commitment to our academic vocation—critical thinking, openness to other perspectives and experiences, having your mind changed and your life transformed—may be even more difficult in the midst of our social disruptions. It can be frightening to learn new things; it can make us angry to be challenged by provocative ideas and experiences; it can be threatening to risk our social identities in the midst of those who do not share our paths in the world.

And for all of these reasons, the etiquette of our lives together has perhaps never been more important to the well-being of our common lives. Here is the wrestling that our students must engage and here is the call to be generous and gentle with each other, perhaps with a portion of forgiveness and grace, not so that freedoms are abridged or opinions squashed—college is not meant to be a safe place for our minds, students will encounter provocative, even troubling ideas—but so that we might pursue our teaching and learning in ways that advance our mission and our democracy. Gentle and generous, the etiquette of democracy—a claim upon all of us in the university.

In this context, then, I offer our students the following challenge—a challenge to wrestle with an ethic that may be more relevant than ever in our university and in our democracy.

Show up

The first requirement is really pretty fundamental but certainly not simple.

As the coming days pass, we know that students will be tempted by many distractions and late nights and other obligations to not show up, to miss a class or a meeting, to say that it doesn’t matter whether you attend every class session. I know this tendency—I lived it myself, making elaborate excuses for why I could skip every 7th class session and no one would notice. And we might not notice every time, but they will notice (whether they fully get it now or not) that it is a slippery slope to not show up. Statistics show that skipping even one class session has an impact on whether or not first year college students stay in school, let alone graduate, or perhaps most importantly whether or not they learn something.

But, of course, this is not simply about physical presence. Showing up is also a sort of spiritual practice. It is about being present now. It is about being in relationship to a text, a classmate, and/or a teacher. It is about accompanying each other on a journey that is both solitary and social. The famous educational philosopher, John Dewey, said that genuine education is not preparation for life, it is life itself. And if we believe that, then showing up, being present now, is the key factor in whether or not you get the education you need in order to live in the world.

Pay attention

The second requirement is also quite simple. But the equally simple fact is that we live in a world full of distractions and paying attention doesn’t come easy. This may be the most pressing requirement in this time of unprecedented chaos and confusion

Like all of our students, I’m on social media. I have a myriad of devices. I follow the news through various channels. I do my best to lead a wonderful and complex university. I have a family, and a life full of things I “must” pay attention to—and it’s hard work. And I’m old. Our students are young and have grown up in a time when multitasking is not an option, it’s an expectation. I really can’t imagine how they keep it all together. I admire them, but I also worry about them.

So yes, I ask students to put away all the distractions that they can control. Turn off the cell phone occasionally, spend some time away from the computer. Focus on what teachers and classmates are saying and doing. Find ways to pay attention.

But it is more than that, of course, because even when we have put away all those sources of distraction, it remains our responsibility to figure out what is most important and how you can make what is important the center of your life. The sociologist, Robert Bellah and his associates, have written that “Democracy means paying attention,” (from The Good Society) by which they mean that the psychic energy we use to pay attention is the key to the sort of person we hope to be—as individuals and as a society. If we continue to be distracted, our attention and the energy that it requires of us will also be distracted, and the values and people and ideas and causes we should care about and attend to will not get our energy. And we will not become the people we want to be.

Do the work

The final requirement follows logically from the first two.

If we show up and learn to truly pay attention, we will find that there is work that must be done.

For our students, on many days, the work will be assigned. Read this text, explore these ideas, test this hypothesis, run this experiment, play this scale, practice this drill. Our students know all about doing school work already, but they need to know that this is college and college signals a quantum leap in the work required. Don’t get behind on reading and papers. Take advantage of the support we offer to help manage time and learn to study. Support each other and ask for help when you feel you need it.

Because more and more, on many days the work will be theirs to discern and pursue. There will be no one there to tell them what to do. They will need to seize the work that needs to be done. The profound truth at the heart of our academic mission is that the work our students learn to do—in the classroom, on campus, in the neighborhood and around the world—is the basis for pursuing the important work to be done in the world—and we need them to do it. We are counting on them to do it. That is why our university exists—to educate students to be informed citizens, thoughtful stewards, critical thinkers and responsible leaders—not just because we think it would be nice if they were all of those sorts of citizens and stewards and thinkers and leaders, but because the world needs them. There is utility to this education, there is purpose and direction, there is work to be done by educated folks. Work they are called to do. Work that might just have to do with what the prophet Micah claimed—the work of justice and compassion and humility.

Show up, pay attention, and do the work. That is how I invite our students into the wrestling they are about to commence. In a university dedicated to pluralism and democratic engagement, simple lessons that I challenge them to remember. Lessons that abide, lessons that will help them in college, surely, but most critically and urgently, lessons that ground a democratic social ethic and that will serve them for a lifetime of following their passions and calls for the good of the world. I believe that wrestling with their education—showing up, paying attention, and doing the work—equips our students to live together as engaged citizens in our democracy.