April 2, 2022

Good afternoon! It is a great pleasure to welcome our President’s Council, Legacy Trust, and Heritage Club members back to campus, and I’m particularly grateful that you tapped into your Norse spirit by braving the April snow to get here. You are stalwart and consistent friends and supporters of Luther College, so no one should be surprised if you don’t let a few late season snowflakes stop you from joining us for this special event.

Just as you have experienced in your personal lives, your families, your communities, and your workplaces, we at Luther have experienced a great deal of disruption and anxiety over the past couple of years of pandemic life. In my case, I had barely started my presidency–which I knew would involve stewarding Luther at a time of great transition in higher education anyway–when COVID came along. There were no established relationships, no trust already built, no history of many gatherings where we could muse together on the past, the present, and the future of this great college, before the proverbial needle scratched across the record. And still we had to work on making needed changes to attend to the fast pace of change around us, combined with a demographic shift that has led to sharp decreases in 18-22 year olds nationwide.

How do you ask a community to do this work, even as they are worried about their health and safety, with little certainty about what this novel virus will bring and how we will have to adapt from day to day? Over two years in, this is the question that I wrestle with daily, especially as pandemic fatigue and frustration continue to take their toll on our students, faculty, and staff.

I spoke with our faculty last week on March 29, and I shared a memory with them. On that day in 1998, I was a faculty member at Gustavus, and was the director of the International House in Johnson Hall. My apartment was there, and I and my cat Eliot were enjoying an unseasonably balmy afternoon at the beginning of spring break. Two students were in residence over the break: Karin and Johannes. A faculty colleague called me from Mankato to warn me that a big storm was heading our way and at that moment, tornado sirens started going off. We didn’t really have a basement in Johnson, but I gathered Eliot and the students and we headed down to the lowest level, as far away from windows as we could get.

Long story short, a massive wedge tornado plowed through Gustavus and the town of St. Peter, and Johnson Hall took the biggest hit on campus. We were OK, but the building was taken down. I remember as we were being evacuated, Karin insisted that she needed to retrieve her passport and other items first–she knew just where they were in her dresser in her third floor room. And I remember trying to get through to her that she couldn’t go to the third floor, because that end of the third floor was gone. And that meant the dresser was gone. And that meant the passport was gone.

Gustavus was physically devastated and people believed it was the end of the college. But it wasn’t. We reopened in three weeks and taught the rest of the semester in FEMA trailers or in classrooms in which the floor tiles had been scraped up, and our shoes stuck to the glue as we wandered around to make compelling points about Goethe’s Faust. It would have been very easy and completely understandable to stop there–with the devastation and the stories of our demise. But we took that narrative of decline and instead we turned it around. We got to work.

Luther has not had a tornado, but we have seen lower enrollment numbers–that were predicted over a decade ago. We have not had to replace every window on campus, but we do need to catch up on some practices that our prospective students and their parents look for as signs of health: named and demonstrated outcomes, for example, that show how the excellence of our faculty can lead to success for our students; ways of teaching that align with how this generation of students learns; or how the academic enterprise and student engagement are no longer separate concerns, but are intertwined in the lives of our students.

We have an opportunity to take a narrative of decline and turn it into a narrative of adaptability, hope, and opportunity, but it will be both easier and harder than what Gustavus did. We were fixing broken and busted THINGS–windows, buildings, uprooted trees. It was awful. What Luther is facing is culture work, which requires a willingness to ask the existential question of who we are TODAY and in the future. Just as Karin had to get past the belief that her passport was still where she had left it, we have to get past a PAST that informs our story but shouldn’t fix us in time. We must learn to hold on to what I have come to refer to as the “Luther blue thread” that pulls through the fabric of this institution, even as the surrounding pattern of the fabric changes with the world around us.

This is what I see as the biggest challenge and the biggest source of optimism I have as President in this time.

I think we all hoped we could wait out the pandemic before we took on this hard work, but I am grateful to our faculty for plunging ahead to do a program prioritization study starting in spring of 2020 and to–fingers crossed–complete a revision of our core curriculum this year. They are sorting through a working draft at the moment that will look at ways to provide a coherent program of study that is developmental–starting and ending with Paideia bookends; ensures attention to multiple literacies; has experiential learning components; and provides a framework for the formation of citizens who are both grounded in this place and global in commitment. We are also launching a new interdisciplinary major: Law and Values, which takes from Political Science, Philosophy, and Economics; and a new interdisciplinary minor in Counseling, which is a joint effort between Psychology and Social Work.

In addition, we are undergoing a campus master planning process that asks the questions: what are the highest and best uses of the spaces we have on campus; how do we ensure that these spaces are appropriate for the programs that inhabit them; and where do we need to make strategic investments as we go forward?

The current strategic plan that my predecessor developed with our community is nearing the end. Many of you have heard me talk about four vision themes to serve as a kind of “crosswalk” between that plan and the next one, and also to serve as a way to focus our efforts on key institutional priorities as we plan for a comprehensive fundraising campaign. Two of the themes are about identity. The first is that we should name and affirm that the overarching concept of stewardship is something that is central to Luther College: we care about and take care of our environment, our resources, our legacy, our internal and surrounding communities, our alumni and donors, and our obligation to educate students. The second is that we are both grounded in a place–Decorah, Iowa, in the Driftless Region of the Upper Midwest–where rivers, prairie, woodland, and bluffs meet, with a Norwegian immigrant and Lutheran background and an increasingly diverse population; and that we are global in outlook: we are faced to the world, and our commitment is to serve the neighbor–near and far–so that all may flourish.

The other two themes are about how we can operationalize the first two themes: one, we need to strive for integration, coherence, and focus. If we have a million priorities, we have none. If we are independent contractors, we are not a community. If we can’t tell a coherent story, we won’t inspire students, families, faculty, staff, alumni, and our community to invest in something they can’t identify. The second is adaptability: to recognize that we must find new ways of doing our work and supporting our students sustainably, and to find joy in the creativity that allows us to imagine those new ways.

I was at the Brubeck Brothers Quartet concert last night, and I was really struck by something Chris Brubeck said. He had met with our Jazz students yesterday afternoon and he was congratulating them on how good they were–how adept they were at two key features of jazz: the ability to improvise and the ability to play through and over changes. As a child, myself, of a jazz pianist mom and a jazz saxophonist dad, I was very familiar with these two concepts. But last night I realized that this is really what we are doing at Luther College right now, especially through the pandemic: we are showing that we can improvise, and that we can play through and over changes.

Those of you gathered here today have certainly shown that you acknowledge and affirm Luther College through your generous philanthropy. Because of you, we are close to completing our new Nursing Simulation Lab and we will start the renovation of the Sports and Recreation Center this summer. These are exciting projects and we could not undertake them without you. Thank you, on behalf of our students, faculty, and staff. But I also want to challenge you with another “ask”--and that is for the gift of your testimony.

This is a tight-knit community, even if far-flung. It is very easy to look at how demographic realities and a need to catch up to a changing world, changing students, and technological advances have led to an unquestionably lower enrollment. We WILL be a smaller college. But we have an opportunity to show that we can be smaller in size, yet greater in impact. What I would ask of you is to embrace that thing that you learned through your liberal arts education at Luther College (or your partner, children, or friends, if you are not a Luther alum), which is curiosity. Be curious about what this generation of students is like. Be curious about how a smaller enrollment can drive a narrative of opportunity, rather than a narrative of decline. Be curious about how the skills and habits of mind of a grounded and global citizenry might contribute to a world where all may flourish, and talk to your church, your community, or your co-workers about how a college in a little town in rural Iowa is playing through and over changes, even in a pandemic, and suggest to them that Luther might just be a perfect college home for their child.

Before I end my remarks, I want to let you know that we are closing in on the selection of our next Vice-President of Development. We have accomplished finalists coming to campus this week, and I am optimistic that we will be able to conclude this search in the coming weeks. In the meantime, I would be remiss if I didn’t thank our entire Development division for their shared leadership in keeping the music playing over in Loyalty Hall during this search, including a successful million dollar-plus Giving Day last month. [Please join me in thanking them. (Applause)] And finally, let me thank Rachel Vsetecka and Sarah Brandt for leading the planning team that put today’s event together. I hope you enjoy the rest of your afternoon, and I will look forward to greeting you later for a reception in Peace Dining Room.

Thank you again for being the ones we can count on to hold fast to that Luther blue thread and help us pull it through to the future. Go Norse, and Soli Deo Gloria!

Jenifer K. Ward
President