By Gary Hesser<\/p>\n
The following stories represent the foundation for this sixty plus year history in which Augsburg has served its local and wider communities as an \u201cagent and architect of democracy and steward of place.\u201d<\/p>\n
(Other examples can be found in \u201cOn the Shoulders of Giants\u201d, chapter 1 in Service-Learning in Higher Education, <\/em>Zlokowski, ed)<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 In 1958 he assumed the chair role of this metro-wide committee of 60+ leading civic organizations.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n In the spring of 1964 before congress finally passed overall civil rights legislation, Joel delivered a series of 6 lectures on \u201creligion and race in America\u201d on KTCA public television.\u00a0 They combined his scholarly analysis with his religious faith to teach about the \u201crole that religion had played in America\u2019s historic dilemma caused by the wide gap between its democratic creed and its racist practices.\u201d<\/p>\n In the 1960\u2019s Joel and president Oscar Anderson began to publically refer to Augsburg as a \u201ccollege of the city.\u201d This evolved into the faculty\u2019s approval of Joel\u2019s sabbatical position paper, \u201cthe liberal arts college and the city\u201d, 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 \u201cin vogue\u201d or acceptable.<\/p>\n In 1968, solidly undergirded by this consensus, two responses marked Augsburg\u2019s response to the assignation of Martin Luther King, Jr. May 1st [1968] was declared \u201ca day in May\u201d 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.\u00a0 This \u201cday in May\u201d tradition continued for many year and has been revitalized by students in recent years.<\/p>\n 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 \u201ccrisis colony.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n HECUA was housed at Augsburg and led by professors Torstenson, Robert Clyde as it evolved under Joel\u2019s leadership with strong support from the administration.<\/p>\n Addendum: In 1946, Minneapolis was declared to be the most \u201canti-Semitic\u201d city in the U.S. The recently elected mayor of Minneapolis, who would gain national fame in 1948 by challenging the Democratic Party to \u201cembrace human rights\u201d over \u201cstates rights\u201d, turned to President Bernard Christensen to serve on and chair Humphrey\u2019s newly created Human Rights Commission. Professor Torstenson would later chair that commission as an appointee of Mayor Arthur Naftalan, Minneapolis\u2019 first Jewish mayor and the former deputy mayor under Humphrey.<\/p>\n GARRY HESSER is a professor of metro\/urban studies and sociology at Augsburg College.<\/em> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Gary Hesser The following stories represent the foundation for this sixty plus year history in which Augsburg has served its local and wider communities as an \u201cagent and architect of democracy and steward of place.\u201d (Other examples can be found in \u201cOn the Shoulders of Giants\u201d, chapter 1 in Service-Learning in Higher Education, Zlokowski, <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":6577,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[63,76,52],"class_list":["post-159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured-stories","tag-auggie-voices","tag-sociology","tag-spring-2012"],"wps_subtitle":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=159"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13427,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159\/revisions\/13427"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}