Types, Methods, and Sagas in Lutheran Higher Education: Learning from Childers
Ty pes, Methods, and Sagas in Lutheran Higher Education: Learning from Childers
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Types, Methods, and Sagas in Lutheran
Higher Education: Learning from Childers
In 1977, the Association of Lutheran College Faculties published The Church-Related
College in an Age of Pluralism: The Quest
for a Viable Saga. The book was the result
of a resolution passed at Dana College in
1969 “to formulate a philosophy of Christian
higher education” and to identify “key
issues for discussion” (Baepler 9). In a
series of annual presentations during the
early 1970s, Lutheran college faculty in
that era reflected on the current state of
church-related higher education, offered
an extensive bibliographic review of the
subject, and sought to articulate for a new time what
it meant to be engaged in Christian higher education.
“Pluralism” was the resounding theme of the period, and
these authors were keen to engage its ethnic, epistemic,
religious, and ethical forms.
Valuing an Institution’s Saga
For the Association, the organizing trope that guided their
book was “the saga.” Perhaps it had a natural appeal to
Scandinavian Lutherans, but its connection to Biblical
narrative was not lost on the authors. Its more immediate
debt was to another book that few would recognize today.
Burton Clark’s The Distinctive College: Antioch, Reed,
Swarthmore (1970) argued that the “organization saga”
of an institution is the most important
element of a college’s distinctiveness.
Too many colleges, argued Clark, lack
distinctiveness and a sense of their
unique purpose in American society. Their
missions are bland; their stories are not
compelling; and they look and act like
others as a result.
“We are attracted to Mr. Clark’s
category of the ‘saga’ for a variety of
reasons,” stated the Association’s authors,
and then continue:
The concept fits our experience. Those
with positive experiences in church-related colleges
can recall, in retrospect, being inspired by the story
of the college. Those with negative experiences can
recall disappointment in the contrast between the
saga and reality. Moreover, the concept provides a
“handle” for diagnosing the current dilemmas of our
institutions. The state of the story of an institution is
a barometer of its health. (Baepler 12-13)
The authors cautioned readers against confusing a
college’s saga with the lofty goals and fanciful
educational philosophies of “catalog prose,” but how the
“rhetoric” relates to the “reality” of the college is itself
part of the saga that must be studied to grasp the
college’s distinctive mission.
Lake Lambert is Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia. Prior to his appointment at Mercer
in 2010, he was Professor of Religion and the Board of Regents Chair in Ethics at Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa.
Most importantly, the Association’s authors learned
from Clark that the college saga must be told and retold
even as it is lived, reshaped, and grown. This too fit their
experience because the Biblical saga was never far from
their minds:
The narration of Biblical events is never undertaken
for merely historical reasons. The story of the Exodus
is retold at a critical time as a way of establishing
confidence in a new and radically different future.
The God who led the Israelites out of Egypt is leading
them still. This theological dimension of saga should
especially encourage church-related colleges to view
their convictional basis—not as a millstone which
binds those institutions to past performance and past
possibilities—but rather as a charter which inspires
them to think through a creative and courageous
relationship to the future. (Baepler 13)
The reference to Exodus is especially interesting because
the Association did not see the college’s saga as something
to slavishly follow and measure disobedience against as
much as it is (or should be) the way a college’s character
and ethos is formed and lived amidst rapid change.
From Sagas to Types and Back Again
This must be the starting point for understanding Eric
Childers’ College Identity Sagas: Investigating Organizational
Identity Preservation and Diminishment at Lutheran Colleges
and Universities (2012). Based on Childers’ doctoral
dissertation in higher education at the University of Virginia, the
book adopts Clark’s concept of the saga to understand three
Lutheran institutions: Gettysburg College, Concordia College
(Moorhead), and Lenoir-Rhyne University. While Childers
seems unfamiliar with the importance of the same idea to
the Association of Lutheran College Faculties thirty-five
years earlier, he knows Clark well and sees in the
institutional sagas of Lutheran colleges an unexplored opportunity.
Childers offers a “thick description” of his three chosen
institutions using interviews, documents and observations
as his primary resources. The interviews are particularly
illuminating because he spoke with presidents at each as
well as key faculty and staff leaders, includ (...truncated)