If you haven’t received a call from one of our student callers and would like to make a gift to the Augsburg Fund, go to to make a secure online gift or call 612-330-1613.

Kaleb Williams ’13

Major: Public relations and advertising

Hometown: Lakeville, Minn.

Activities and interests: Football

Interesting fact about me: I always say I’m like an old black man; I have an old soul. I think I would have fit in well in the 60s or 70s.

Favorite things about Augsburg and the city: It’s such a diverse place, and everyone seems to get along well. Every day I feel like I meet someone new.

Favorite Augsburg experience: The football game last season against St. Thomas. It was a home game, and the stands were packed. At the time, we were the top two teams in the MIAC, so it was pretty exciting.

Anya Cleaver ’14

Major: Political science, minors in German and communication studies

Hometown: Technically, Buxton, England

Activities and interests: Queer and Straight in Unity (QSU), Echo newspaper, Augsburg Atheist and Secular Humanist group

Interesting fact about me: I moved to Minnesota at age 12 from a town outside of Manchester, England, because England is drab and rainy.

Favorite things about Augsburg and the city: I’m a film buff, and I love the independent movie theaters. I also like the riverfront and Harriet Island in St. Paul.

My favorite Augsburg experience: I was a summer orientation leader and got to connect with many students from different backgrounds. It helped me learn about being more inclusive, and I made a lot of friends.

Katherine Walker ’12

Major: International relations, minor in peace and global studies and religion

Hometown: Brainerd, Minn.

Activities and interests: Study Japanese, volunteer tutor, editor for the Honors Review

Interesting fact about me: I plan to go to Vietnam this summer to teach English at the British Embassy.

Favorite things about Augsburg and the city: I love Augsburg’s emphasis on community service. I think that if I had gone to another college, it wouldn’t have given me such an introduction to the community. I feel like I live in this neighborhood; I don’t just go to school here.

Favorite Augsburg experience: I went to El Salvador to take a class over winter break two years ago with assistant religion professor Matt Maruggi. We studied liberation theology, and we got to interact with local people, community activists, and religious leaders. We stayed in a small self-sufficient community in the middle of the jungle, and there were baby pigs running around.

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Last season, he didn’t make any three-point shots, pull down any rebounds, or have any assists on the court. But Roger Griffith ’84, executive vice president of the Minnesota Lynx, did have a great season—in part because the Lynx brought home their first championship title, and in part because of the team’s dedicated fans.

Griffith came to the Timberwolves franchise in 1994 as a finance officer. When the Lynx, Minnesota’s Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) team, came to the state in 1999, Griffith took on the role of executive vice president. In that role, he is responsible for making decisions about the head coach and working with the coaching staff on player and personnel relations. He also maintains the team roster and oversees scouting and drafting functions as well as the signing of free agents. Basically, he said, his work supports the coaches so that they can focus on coaching.

And that is how he contributed to the Lynx’ winning 2011 season. In October, the team completed its season, beating the Atlanta Dream in a three-game sweep of the WNBA championship series. It was the team’s first championship and first appearance in the playoffs since 2004.

“The championship game was very nerve-wracking,” Griffith said. The team was behind at half-time, but Griffith said they weren’t worried. “We had always been a good second-half team, and we knew we had the skills and talent to pull ahead.” They did, but nearly lost their lead in the final minutes of the game.

“It was stressful,” Griffith said, “but it was also fun and exciting to see the large number of fans who traveled to Atlanta to support the team.”

Griffith said the Lynx fans are one of the best parts of his job. “Last year, through the whole season, it was great to be able to sit in the stands and look away from the game to see how much the experience meant to the people,” he said. “Our fans have been extremely loyal and supportive, and they got their payoff when we took the championship title.”

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Higher education is often viewed as separate from the public arena, something accessible to a few and beneficial to only the individual. However, higher education greatly impacts the public good, and that impact is the true mission of higher education. In transforming individuals, we transform our communities and our world.

In this era of globalization, individualism seems to serve little purpose. Preparing children to live in a global society is essential and should begin in the K-12 years. Higher education then is a continuation of that learning and a time to step out into the world. With this in mind, while higher education does serve the individual, the larger goal is the influence each individual will have on the greater public good.

The impact of higher education is increasingly more visible and far reaching. More frequently, civic engagement has become part of higher education curriculum. The need for students to see and experience a more seamless connection to their acquisition and application of knowledge is essential. Knowledge is not only something centered in higher education institutions; it is also something constructed and exercised within the community. Knowledge then becomes transformative not only to the individual but to the broader community, society, and world. This is increasingly being seen through civic engagement projects such as Public Achievement, service learning, and travel abroad experiences where students and faculty “develop agency” through active rather than passive means that, in turn, inform theory and future practice.

SUSAN O’CONNOR is an associate professor of education at Augsburg College.

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Arts programs in higher education are all the more vibrant when a wealth of voices and bodies come together to create and discuss work. Community-engaged performance is progressive pedagogy; it’s theater by, for, of, and about the people—and it can be an integral part of a civic-minded college culture.

Last winter, the student ensemble of The Living Newspaper Project: Everyone Has Something used collective research, writing, workshops, and performance to generate discussion about a taboo topic: the stigma attached to mental illness. They engaged with audiences through post-show talkbacks and panels, academic conferences, letters in the Augsburg Echo, and outreach to local community organizations.

Next fall, students will be invited to tackle a Town Hall Nation project by creating short performances around campus that generate civic dialogue on campus about students’ financial needs and crises. Town Hall Nation is a national engagement initiative inviting arts organizations, colleges and universities, and other community groups to create 30-minute events that demonstrate, present, or embody an ideal town hall meeting. Students of any major may audition for or volunteer to participate in the Town Hall Nation project, as with any other Theater Department production.

SARAH MYERS is an assistant professor in Augsburg’s Theater Arts Department.

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In his book My First Summer in the Sierra, John Muir offered a sentiment which, more than 100 years later, represents as good a justification for higher education in contemporary society as one is likely to find in any college catalogue: “When we try to pick out anything by itself,” he says, speaking of the profoundly ecological nature of the world, “we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”

To be sure, college campuses—meaning the empirical kind with living, breathing students, with staff, teachers, textbooks, trees, quads, and stadiums—sit squarely at the various junctures of this tangled-up creation, seeking from these vantage points to understand through intensive study the pressing issues, the timeless questions, and the persistent, ineluctable mysteries that unite our places in time and space with those of countless others.

College is literally where and when we hope to experience the joy that comes with accessing the eternal through the particular. It is where we come to study, in our specific yet overlapping disciplines, the problems of the world so as to appreciate the complexity of all things—because it is, without question, an informed appreciation for complexity that inspires reflection and breeds compassion.

COLIN IRVINE is an associate professor of English at Augsburg College and serves as the summer 2012 research coordinator for the College’s Office of Undergraduate Research and Graduate Opportunity (URGO).

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The following stories represent the foundation for this sixty plus year history in which Augsburg has served its local and wider communities as an “agent and architect of democracy and steward of place.”

(Other examples can be found in “On the Shoulders of Giants”, chapter 1 in Service-Learning in Higher Education, Zlokowski, ed)

In 1954 after the Supreme Court decision declared school segregation to be illegal, Augsburg sociology professor, Joel Torstenson, was appointed as an Augsburg delegate to the joint committee for equal opportunity.  In 1958 he assumed the chair role of this metro-wide committee of 60+ leading civic organizations.

Joel turned its attention to housing discrimination and led the churches in forming a fair housing committee. Led by professor Torstenson and President Christensen, who earlier had chaired mayor Humphrey’s human rights commission, Augsburg hosted an organizational meeting and convinced the president of the American Lutheran church to chair a new fair housing committee of the council of churches in 1960. They spent the next two years educating church members, mobilizing the press, and lobbying the Minnesota state legislature.

The culmination of their efforts was a large meeting with legislators at Christ Lutheran church near the capital in 1962. Shortly after that, Minnesota passed fair housing legislation. This was a full 6 years before the U.S. Congress would enact such legislation.

With sociological, organizational and theological sophistication and strong support from Augsburg and Trinity Lutheran congregation where he was an active member, Joel literally changed the thinking of both the church and the wider culture concerning racism and injustice in areas where Jesus had only taught indirectly.

In the spring of 1964 before congress finally passed overall civil rights legislation, Joel delivered a series of 6 lectures on “religion and race in America” on KTCA public television.  They combined his scholarly analysis with his religious faith to teach about the “role that religion had played in America’s historic dilemma caused by the wide gap between its democratic creed and its racist practices.”

In the 1960’s Joel and president Oscar Anderson began to publically refer to Augsburg as a “college of the city.” This evolved into the faculty’s approval of Joel’s sabbatical position paper, “the liberal arts college and the city”, a comprehensive revision of the curriculum to include community-based experiential education in all majors and general education, along with a new metro-urban studies major. Augsburg was a national pioneer in experiential education and service-learning in this regard well before it was “in vogue” or acceptable.

In 1968, solidly undergirded by this consensus, two responses marked Augsburg’s response to the assignation of Martin Luther King, Jr. May 1st [1968] was declared “a day in May” with all classes cancelled and members of the wider African-American community invited to lead discussions and share insights and feelings about this tragic event.  This “day in May” tradition continued for many year and has been revitalized by students in recent years.

Shortly after the assassination and uprising on the north side of Minneapolis, Joel, with strong support from Myles Stenshoel, chair of political science, and the administration, responded to an invitation by pastor Joe Bash to create a summer “crisis colony.” It was a residential-academic program on the north side of Minneapolis that made full use of community residents as community educators. The colony included students from a few other colleges and universities and evolved into the higher education consortium for urban affairs [HECUA], a consortium of 18 private colleges and the university of Minnesota.

HECUA was housed at Augsburg and led by professors Torstenson, Robert Clyde as it evolved under Joel’s leadership with strong support from the administration.

Addendum: In 1946, Minneapolis was declared to be the most “anti-Semitic” city in the U.S. The recently elected mayor of Minneapolis, who would gain national fame in 1948 by challenging the Democratic Party to “embrace human rights” over “states rights”, turned to President Bernard Christensen to serve on and chair Humphrey’s newly created Human Rights Commission. Professor Torstenson would later chair that commission as an appointee of Mayor Arthur Naftalan, Minneapolis’ first Jewish mayor and the former deputy mayor under Humphrey.

GARRY HESSER is a professor of metro/urban studies and sociology at Augsburg College.

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In our society today, people have become so medicalized that we often forget that health is not about the absence of disease but a place of belonging. At Augsburg College, the Department of Nursing has focused on returning to what nursing was originally intended to be about—relationships—by opening two drop-in community health centers.

One of these centers provides care to people living on the streets of Minneapolis. This center has been in existence for almost 20 years, and the nurses there engage with 120 people each week. We listen, provide basic necessities, and take the time to make sure people feel they are supported and are part of a community.

Our other drop-in center, the Health Commons at Dar Ul-Quba, is a new project focused on immigrant health in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis. Our efforts at Dar Ul-Quba have been about trying to help people not only to understand our healthcare system but also to realize how they can practice health and healing as they did in their country of origin. The center also helps people come together to create the change they want to see in their neighborhood.

To us, being citizen nurses means that we are working to strengthen our communities in ways that avoid the expert model. We see people as collaborators and co-creators. Through their experiences at the drop-in centers, Augsburg nursing students are changing their worldviews in ways that benefit our society. Our hope is to continue to do just that.

KATIE CLARK is an instructor in Augsburg’s nursing department and serves as coordinator of the Augsburg Nursing Center.

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For many years, Augsburg, with its mission of educating students to be “informed citizens, thoughtful stewards, critical thinkers, and responsible leaders,” has resisted forces turning higher education into a private benefit rather than a public good. When the public opinion group Public Agenda recently sounded people’s views on the role of higher education, they found little awareness that colleges and universities can contribute to the health of neighborhoods, or that they educate students to be problem solvers with skills of working across differences.

But describing these roles in focus groups also generated animated discussion and created hope. Many remarked that few places any longer teach such skills. There was the sense that the country is dangerously polarized and losing control over our collective future.

On January 10 at the White House, many higher education groups launched a major new coalition, the American Commonwealth Partnership, to respond to the civic crisis. It has support from the Department of Education, which released a new “Road Map and Call to Action,” emphasizing citizenship education.

Augsburg is the inaugural host institution for ACP, which seeks to mobilize colleges and universities in developing “civic identity, not simply civic activities.” By engaging in this exciting project, Augsburg is at the crest of a new wave of reengagement of higher education with communities and the world.

HARRY C. BOYTE is the director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College and serves as national coordinator of the American Commonwealth Partnership.

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As part of the dialogue about the role of higher education in building civic identity, we asked Augsburg faculty from various academic departments to provide their perspectives on how higher education serves the public good. Their responses are published here.

To join the ongoing discussion about higher education as a public good, follow the .

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After completing her PhD from Yale in 2009, Chandra Erdman ’02 was in high demand. She was recruited for tenure track teaching positions at several universities, and the global banking firm Goldman Sachs also came calling with an attractive offer. But Erdman’s dream job was to work for the U.S. Census Bureau.

Today, she is one of the 39 percent of Washington, D.C., residents who work for the government. She is a mathematical statistician in the Center for Statistical Research and Methodology, a group that makes up less than one percent of U.S. Census Bureau employees.

She also happens to be the only African American ever to obtain a PhD in statistics from Yale University.

There was a time, however, when Erdman did not care about graduating from high school, much less obtaining a college degree. But with the encouragement and support from those who recognized her potential, she has not only succeeded as a scholar, she has also landed her dream job.

In the 10th grade, Erdman was truant 59 days; if she had missed 60 days, she would have been expelled. While speaking to mathematics students at Augsburg in January, Erdman said she had an “attitude” in high school. Despite her truancy and her bad attitude, she maintained a 4.27 grade point average (out of 4.33).

At the end of her 10th grade year, she met a man who directed a program that helped inner city youth focus on their education. “I didn’t think college was an option for me,” Erdman said. Neither of her parents had graduated from high school, and in the low-income housing community where she grew up, she knew no one who had gone to college.

Erdman enrolled in the Post-Secondary Enrollment Options program (PSEO) at the University of Minnesota. After two years, she transferred to Augsburg to complete her undergraduate degree in mathematics. “My only aunt who had been to college went to Augsburg,” she said, “and this just felt like the right place for me.”

Erdman continued to excel at Augsburg as a McNair Scholar, a federally-funded program that assists first-generation and low-income students with preparation for graduate school. She also conducted faculty-led research, served as a supplemental instructor for Calculus I and II, and tutored in mathematics. Through McNair, and with the guidance of several staff and faculty members, Erdman realized that a graduate degree could be in her future.

“They helped me along each step of the way, getting me prepared and helping me do what I needed to become a strong applicant to grad school,” she said. Erdman applied to and was accepted by three graduate programs in statistics. She chose Columbia, where she received a full fellowship.

In the summer before graduate school and again following that year, Erdman participated in Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education (EDGE), a program aimed at helping women prepare for graduate study in mathematics. She completed her master’s program in one year and then went on to Yale to pursue a PhD.

When she finished her PhD program, Erdman applied to the Census Bureau and heard nothing from them for three months. Then she learned that the director of the statistical research division was speaking at a conference in Washington, D.C. She bought a train ticket and went to meet him. “At the end of his presentation, I walked up to him, handed him my C.V., and said, ‘I want to work for you.’” They talked, and he later invited her for an interview.

Today Erdman works in the Center for Statistical Research and Methodology at the U.S. Census Bureau. “I wanted to work at Census because I wanted to look at good data, but I got put into the missing data methods group that only looks at bad data,” she said. Still, she loves her work and speaks enthusiastically about the projects in which she has been involved.

Now that she is finished with school and settled into her career, Erdman hopes to find a way to mentor other young women through the EDGE program.

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