It’s About the Mission – Period

When the board of trustees of the University of Dubuque elected to revisit its mission over six years ago, we encountered much debate within our academic community about whether this turn back towards our Christian identity was a sound idea. Many and passionate were the voices that argued that a move towards the cross and away from what was loosely defined as multi-culturalism would sound the death knell of the university. Surely no students would attend such a “narrowly” defined institution and, further more, what on earth did things religious have to do with biology, aviation, business or education? “We already have a theological seminary,” the argument continued, “Why do we now have to theologize the college?”

But the board persisted, sometimes in a blind faith kind of way. An acting president whose “credentials” included a career in banking, several tours of duty on the session of his Presbyterian church and a childhood marked by perfect Sunday school attendance, led the charge to reclaim the school’s Christian identity. “If we keep going the way we are currently going, we are going to die,” he said, “so if we are going to die, we might as well die trying to be who we were created to be.” And so the implausible rebirth of the University of Dubuque began, and continues to this day.

Guided by that new mission, we restructured our institution by eliminating $2.5 million from our operating budget in the form of tenured and non-tenured faculty positions, staff and administrative positions, programs and majors. In addition to adverse regional and national press that decried these “draconian measures,” other academic entities looked on with a fair amount of skepticism and distain. As president, I received more threats than I care to remember ranging from physical harm to career devastation, and for the first time in our married life, my wife and our young family had to put a security system on our home; a home located in Iowa of all places. To this day, the entire experience was painful — and necessary — for all of us. Those of us who remain from those troubled years will never be quite the same. New members of our community are often surprised by how healthy a community we have become. In the space of five short years, and because of an abundance of grace and perseverance, we are finally becoming the university that our mission invites us to be.

Since the implementation of the Plan for Transformation five years ago, our school has grown an average of between 10-15 percent per year, our overall enrollment is up 70 percent, our rate of persistence has dramatically increased, and our university community is positive, hopeful, full of debate and equally committed to achieving our purpose. We are understaffed, overworked, disagree, agree, sometimes lose our tempers and, almost to a person I would suggest, are irrationally committed to that which we have together been called to do. At a recent gathering of the university, an employee who has been on this campus for over a decade proclaimed that, for the first time, she actually enjoys working at the university. “We are,” she paused, “becoming a family.” Total annual giving to this mission known as the University of Dubuque has tripled, placing the university for four consecutive years in the top tier of regional fund-raising receipts and, in the midst of the worst economy in some time, we are experiencing the best fund-raising year in our history.

Along the way, we have received gifts to construct new facilities, renovate buildings, and expand technology infrastructure. Our trustees are growing and maturing in their willingness to support and interpret this mission. In the best use of the term, they literally are becoming stewards of this university. Through the darkness and into the light, we have encountered, but not succumbed to, either the “embarrassment” or “confusion” over our designation as “Christian” as Ross describes. In fact, I sincerely believe that it is that very designation which has helped to form us into a growing community of faith and scholarship, purpose and cohesion. We are not even close to being where our mission invites us to be. We are imperfect and still struggling but, on our best days, we are an identifiably Christian institution located in the Reformed tradition, and we are not turning back.

And so I believe that it was fortuitous that Art Ross so clearly and succinctly articulated the divide that exists in Presbyterian higher education today and, in that description, provides an appropriate conversation partner with a vastly different point of view. Debate, conversation and talk are good, are significant passengers on our quest for truth. Ross believes that journey is best taken incognito, minus the designations “church-related” or Christian,” given that some of the baggage in our collective trunk includes “… the crusades, the Ku Klux Klan, anti-Semitism and countless mean-spirited actions.” I, on the other hand, would like to offer a different point of view to the readers of The Outlook. A counter-cultural vision which posits that, as practicing Christians and as Christian, church-related institutions, we cannot live bifurcated lives caught between our faith and professional or institutional commitments. As Reformed Christians, we understand that, vocationally speaking, we have been created and called by God for a purpose. We are, in a sense, integrated Christians whose faith commitments inform who we are, what we say and do and, in our case as a university, those faith commitments inform and shape a particular institutional point of view.

When pressed to the limits, one of the many problems with Ross’ position is that the future of his kind of secular education will ultimately be characterized, not by the virtues of Christianity and the hope we have received as a gift from God, but by the values of humanism and pluralism; ultimately groundless values that tend to be defined by those who dominate the academic culture. While humanism and pluralism are certainly superior to intolerance, they are far from the riches offered by the virtues of the Christian tradition, and to suggest that, somehow, a dominant academic culture can affirm humanism, but with a latent Christian twist is, at best, naive.

I know that at the University of Dubuque there are a variety of opinions about what our mission statement does and doesn’t mean, and that’s OK. But one thing is for sure: the mission, clearly stated, is a living, breathing part of our community life together, and for the mission to be real, to ring true, we must be a community in which a critical mass of people are practicing their Christian faith commitments on this campus day in and day out. If we are faithful in the realization of our Christian mission, there will be plenty of room in this community for people with different faith traditions, or for no faith commitments at all. Hospitality is key to the Reformed understanding of Christianity — and as a Christian school we will be hospitable to all those who see truth and live in love.

In a recent seminar, I made a statement that startled a few people. In response to a question, I said that, if really pushed, it would be fair to say that, as president, the mission of this university is really the only thing that matters to me. I made this rather audacious claim because I believe that this mission is that which defines and brings together the vast, diverse, constituencies and stake-holders known as the University of Dubuque. It informs who we are, what we do, how we teach, what we aspire to be and do, and how we treat each other. The most important part of the university is not the students, is not the faculty, is not the staff, is not the board, and is not the administration. The most important parts of the university are not our buildings, our grounds, or our traditions. The most important part of the University of Dubuque is its mission. In the final analysis it is the only thing that matters because it is the one thing— the fundamentally one thing— that shapes our community and gives our life and work together its cohesive purpose.

The mission gives shape and meaning to what we are called to do, and it is impossible to speak of vocation and mission apart from the knowledge that these begin and end in God — the One who calls us to teach and to learn; to question and to confirm, “… to serve the whole church and the World.” We are individually and institutionally, created and called to serve. It is part of the air we breathe, and in breathing that air, we are, by grace, being formed into an academic community of faith, and it is in only that kind of community that an intellectual and formational education can occur. Ideas in this kind of community are not somehow first sifted through a thought police charged with approving and disapproving the idea of the day. That we are Christian and, as part of that Christian history, continue to carry baggage that we would rather discard, is informative and intellectually responsible. The pursuit of truth through the testing and application of ideas is always best achieved when fully cognizant of our success as well as our failure, our doubts and our certainty, our shameful wrongs and occasional rights.

Have elements within the Christian tradition been willing accomplices to obviously horrendous events in our history? Yes! Has the Christian tradition and the Reformed tradition in particular been involved in reforming these awful events in our collective experience? Yes! A Christian institution located in the Reformed tradition owns its history, good and bad and, by grace, endeavors to make the future a better future because we have been created and called to do so. A Christian institution is not one that buys into the economy of cultural pluralism where all is relative and yet nothing is certain; where the concept of truth exists only as it relates to your experience or my experience, aided by a limited and convenient history but never tied to any ultimate reality. Through our curriculum and lectures, mission trips and athletic events, chapel services and service opportunities, our mission calls us to take students from where they are—not from where we wish they were—and to help them become free, creative, selfless individuals God calls them to be. Our business is to educate and to form, but for a purpose. We are to open as many students as we possibly can to the wonderfully creative and important possibilities that exist for them; possibilities that, if pursued, will necessarily take them from the “isms” that imprison them and us, freeing them to experience and facilitate the creation of an improved world…at least for them and those who would follow them.