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Copyright 2006 Augsburg Fortress
Used by permission

Throughout its nearly 175 years of history in the United States, Lutheran higher education has striven to follow the ideals of faithfulness to its foundations and service to the world, stepping up to the challenges of the present while not losing sight of its primary goals.

"No teacher...can be satisfied only with the acquisition of facts on the part of the student. Teaching must be formative as well as informative. Our thinking today, even in our church schools, concerns itself altogether too much with the fact of preparing students for white-collar jobs with easy living and good money. Students should be taught to think in terms of service, with a concern for and sensitivity to the needs and aspirations of the people, the development and improvement of individuals and institutions, and the bettering of human relations."¹

Agnes Larson, a St. Olaf College history professor, made this statement in 1944 at a meeting of the Conference of Lutheran College Faculties. Nearly a quarter of a century earlier, addressing graduates at Elizabeth College, a Lutheran college for women, campus ministry executive Mary Markley asserted: "Knowledge that is not applied is barren." She contrasted such barren knowledge to self-knowledge gained by inner vision joined with visualization of the world's demands that "becomes an incentive to volition and spirit: becomes an incentive to service, high-minded and self-sacrificing."²

These educators sounded themes that are still familiar to those involved in Lutheran higher education. Both faculty and students recognize the emphasis upon service - using what one learns for the benefit of one's neighbor. While neither woman used the term vocation, each surely understood that the call she articulated was God's call.

Early Foundations
The logic of the call that these women issued to faculty and alumnae of Lutheran colleges was entirely consistent with Martin Luther's defense of education. The three purposes for education that Luther identified - in support of the believer's own faith, in preparation for serving the needs of one's neighbor, and to equip the clergy to proclaim the gospel - have informed American Lutheran ventures in higher education from the establishment of Gettysburg College in 1832 to the present. So, too, the tensions Larson and Markley noted between preparation for an occupation and service and between the love of learning and its usefulness are perennial.

The quarter century between Markley's 1920 address and Larson's remarks was a time of transition for American Lutherans. The influx of immigrants from Europe that had swelled the number of Lutherans, Lutheran churches, and Lutheran colleges in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries slowed to a trickle. The tercentenary of the Reformation in 1917 was marked by reduction in the number of church bodies through formation of the United Lutheran Church and the Norwegian Lutheran Church of America by mergers. Members of these and other Lutheran churches were increasingly at home in the United States. They and their churches moved toward and into the mainstream of American culture. These changes in the churches and in the members' circumstances were both a consequence of the colleges' work and an indication that their work was changing.

Of the 50 colleges associated with North American Lutheran church bodies in 1985, only five were founded after 1926; of the 28 colleges associated with the ELCA in 2005, only one was founded after 1903.³ While these schools varied considerably with regard to theological emphases and styles of piety, intensity of ethnic identity, structure of relationship to the church, and even specific programs of study, they also shared several key characteristics. Some similarities grew out of shared Lutheran teachings about the purposes of education and God's mode of activity in the world; others reflected the American context, both the particular needs it produced and the models for higher education it offered.

Historical Phases
The history of American higher education is instructively considered in three, or perhaps four, phases marked by introduction of new models. The first phase begins with the establishment of Harvard College in 1636 and extends through the mid-nineteenth century. More than half of the ELCA institutions were founded in these years, and all bear the impression of the "old-time college" model typical of the era. In the early decades, all of the students at Harvard and similar schools were young men being prepared for lifelong roles as citizens and clergymen. These schools were generally quite small, enrolling a few hundred students (often fewer), most of whom resided on campus as did the faculty. Faculty members and other supporters of the school usually were affiliated with the sponsoring religious group, though the students' religious membership may have been more varied. The set curriculum stressed students' acquisition of the repository of knowledge through studying classical materials and languages.

Lutherans have been less directly involved in sponsoring education in the models that emerged in the subsequent phases of American higher education, although many Lutherans have been students and faculty in these types of schools. The second model, the modern research university devoted to the discovery and production of new knowledge, gained prominence in the second half of the nineteenth century. Lutheran campus ministry is a significant mode of Lutheran involvement on these campuses.

Following World War II, rapid expansion of numbers and types of institutions and numbers of students signaled the third phase. Recent developments in instructional technology that allow education to take place outside the former constraints of place and time may be ushering in a fourth phase.

The founder of Gettysburg College, Samuel Schmucker, attended Princeton College. He was eager to provide Lutherans in the United States with clergy trained in the United States who were well informed about their own tradition and in cooperative relationship with their Protestant neighbors. Gettysburg followed the current model for collegiate education. It drew support from church members and from the local business community. Its student body included both young Lutheran men preparing to enter nearby Gettysburg Seminary and others who were neither responding to a pastoral calling nor Lutheran. Unlike schools founded beginning in the 1850s by recently arrived German and Scandinavian Lutherans, Gettysburg and other colleges founded by the descendents of pre-Revolutionary Lutherans were little concerned with preservation of ethnic identity. Rather, regional loyalties and varying theological positions characterized these schools. Wittenberg (1845) was founded by a close associate of Schmucker, while Muhlenberg (1848) was established by those seeking an alternative to his more Americanized version of Lutheran theology.

These colleges used the American old-college model to provide education addressed to the three goals that Luther had set out, but none of them extended this cultivation of faith or preparation for service to female students, who were excluded from the office of pastor. Sixteenth-century Lutherans offered both girls and boys the most basic sort of education, but they limited girls' education in keeping with their understanding of the offices a woman might hold: mother and wife were primary.

By the mid-nineteenth century, American women were offered collegiate education in three ways: informally in arrangements such as the one that predated establishment of Radcliffe College, in women's colleges such as Mt. Holyoke, and in coeducational colleges such as Oberlin.⁴ Lutherans tried each of these. Marion College, the last women's college, closed in 1967, by which time all the remaining schools were coeducational. Nursing schools attached to Lutheran hospitals had largely female student bodies. Thiel College (1866), among the several institutions founded by William A. Passavant, was the first Lutheran school established as coeducational. Those colleges, founded not as seminary preparatory schools but as academies or normal schools, were more likely to enroll female students from the outset. Both nursing and normal schools provided occupational training in areas conventionally associated with women. The liberal arts colleges also encouraged many female students to take up such work, but even in the early twentieth century they equipped others to enter unconventional fields.

Beginning in the 1850s large numbers of German and Scandinavian Lutheran immigrants were busy forming church organizations and institutions, colleges among them. These schools shared goals common to American higher education, were of small size and limited resources, had general patterns of curriculum, and enjoyed fierce loyalty from their constituents. Often a group's college provided a symbolic and social center for its identity and work. Ethnicity was an important part of that identity, but piety and theological views divided the Danes and Norwegians into several bodies, each with its own school.

Along with standard education purposes, these schools strove to prepare their students to enter fully into American culture, yet they also hoped that those students would remain connected with their church and communities. This double purpose was well articulated by Lars Boe, president of St. Olaf College, in this oft-quoted statement: "Ours is the wealth of two cultures and often the poverty of the desert wanderer. We live between memory and reality. Ours is the agony of a divided loyalty and joy in the discovery of a new unity. To us has been given the task of mediating a culture, of preserving and transferring to our children in a new land the cultural and spiritual values bound up in the character, art, music, literature, and Christian faith of a generation no longer found even in the land from which the fathers came."⁵

That these two goals might be at cross purposes did not prevent the desire for both. Indeed, pursuit of these twin goals contributed to the transitions of the second quarter of the twentieth century. While each college cultivated its own religious (and sometimes ethnic) community, the association of faculty Agnes Larson addressed was one of the first pan-Lutheran organizations. Faculty and administrators frequently moved from one school to another forging lines of connection that supported mergers that would dilute constituent loyalty to individual schools. Similarly, success in launching students into the mainstream culture also allowed them to aspire to the "easy living and good money" that Larson found troublesome.

Linking Past and Future
The tension between the two goals continues in the ongoing life of these schools in the early twenty-first century. Although every school declares its intention to become more culturally and racially diverse, most also cultivate some continuity with the heritage of their founders. Beyond holiday rituals, the legacy of these schools includes the cultural ethos of their founders in worship patterns, communication patterns, and leadership styles.

Since the mid-twentieth century Lutheran higher education continues to respond to the changing character of American Lutheranism and of American higher education. A few schools have closed, notably Upsala in 1995. Others, such as The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod's Concordia University, have been significantly restructured. Only a very few, including California Lutheran (1959), have been founded. Several have grown larger and diversified their faculty and student body. Some have refocused their programs. Augsburg College, for example, made its campus handicapped accessible, has recruited aggressively from its urban setting, and developed programs for adult learners.

Through these decades and changes Lutherans in higher education have continued to be informed by the ideals Luther articulated centuries ago. National church bodies, since 1988 the ELCA, have sponsored an array of programs to inform faculty and administrators of those ideals and this history as well as to stimulate active engagement with both. The social statement on education proposed for the 2007 churchwide assembly is one entry in a lively conversation about Lutheran theological resources for the educational enterprise (see Social Statement on Education).

Local campus programs cultivate similar reflection among Lutheran and non-Lutheran faculty. The Lutheran Academy of Scholars and the periodical Intersections: Faith + Life + Learning facilitate conversation between campuses and Lutheran participation in the larger national discussion about these matters. Valparaiso University contributes to that discussion and development of future leadership by sponsoring the Lilly Fellows Program Network.

As Larson and Markley asserted long ago, all of these efforts are finally directed toward educating students who will use their learning for improvement of the world. Lutheran educators are careful not to confuse education with salvation or to think that they or their students will solve all the world's problems, but the success of Lutheran higher education is perhaps best measured by the contributions its graduates make to the work of caring for God's beloved world.