The Augsburg Podcast

The Augsburg Podcast


Paul Pribbenow: Putting Students First

January 18, 2019

Paul Pribbenow: Are students college-ready? That's the kind of language that gets used and you hear it all the time. "Are students college-ready?" You will hear on a lot of campuses that there's real concern about that. We've turned that on its head and said, "No, is this institution student-ready?"


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Paul Pribbenow: Augsburg University educates students to be informed citizens, thoughtful stewards, critical thinkers and responsible leaders. I'm Paul Pribbenow, the president of Augsburg University and it's my great privilege to present the Augsburg Podcast. One way you can get to know some of the faculty and staff I'm honored to work with every day.


Catherine Reid Day: I'm Catherine Reid Day, host of the Augsburg Podcast. We're speaking today with President Paul Pribbenow, who's in his 13th year as Augsburg's 10th president. We'll explore with him Augsburg's future in higher education and his aspirations for the university. Welcome, President Pribbenow.


Paul Pribbenow: Thank you.


Catherine Reid Day: As often as some people in the university get to hear from you, we don't always know what brought you here and what keeps you committed to the work. Can you tell us a little bit about what brought you here?


Paul Pribbenow: Well I think I'm here for a variety of reasons. Things that are a part of my own, kind of, growing up and being formed both in my faith community as well as in my education. I'm a Creator Lutheran, 61 years old as of this date and my dad was a Lutheran pastor and I grew up in lots of small churches, church basements. I think I'm very comfortable in church basements, parsonages and moved around a lot with my dad. I was the oldest of six and then I went to Luther College, one of our sister schools down in Decorah, Iowa, which was the family school. Entered there thinking that I would, in fact, become a pastor just like my dad. That was sort of the tradition back in those days that the eldest child would go in to follow dad. I got about half way through my time at Luther and was starting to really question whether I was called to the ministry but I still had this great love for the questions around faith and religion and the kind of role that it plays in our world and in our lives.


Paul Pribbenow: Had a great faculty member who, hearing a little bit of my doubt said, "Well there are these places called divinity schools." I didn't even know what that was to be quite honest but he sent me off to visit the University of Chicago Divinity School, which is where I ended up doing all of my graduate work in social ethics. Two things that you see in that story right there. One is the commitment to the faith, particular to the Lutheran faith in ways that shaped me personally and that I think have actually led me to have an understanding of what we're called to do in the world. What God calls us to do in the world. At the same time, an educational experience that took me from small town Decorah, actually to Chicago, to the south side of Chicago. Which then shaped my commitment to urban life and social ethic's, I've found myself really drawn to faith based institutions located in cities.


Paul Pribbenow: That was something that was very important to me and ultimately when the call came 13 years ago to think about coming to Augsburg, it was really the combination of a place deeply steeped in the Lutheran faith tradition but yet in the heart of a city that really drew me to this place.


Catherine Reid Day: Can you tell us who you brought with you and who's with you here today?


Paul Pribbenow: Yes, the fascinating part of the decision that Augsburg's made to hire me as it's president was because it made a very different choices about, kind of, the family that came with me. My wife and I had adopted our children, Thomas is from Vietnam and he is now 17, about to turn 18 and Mia is from China and she is 14, about to be 15. They were two and five when we arrived. That's fairly unusual for presidents. Often presidents take on roles when they're beyond the child rearing age, you know? When their family's already gone. In many ways I loved that moment because it was, for me, a chance to remind this community of some of what is the best of small liberal arts colleges. That is that faculty and staff come to a community, they raise their children together and they care for each other.


Paul Pribbenow: That, for me, had been powerful. The kids were two and five and we would come to campus and set them free. They would just wander the campus and people would take care of them, you know? It was a level of trust that we had that these were the kids. Then other kids came as a result of our kids were coming. We went back to kind of an idea that, you know, even in a deeply urban place, not small town, you know, liberal arts college but a urban place where that could be the case and it's still the case. My kids wander this campus now, people know who they are. A bit shocked by the fact that my five year old little Vietnamese boy son is now 6'2" and 230 pounds, you know? That's kind of a shocker but it's been wonderful for them to grow up here and to be embraced by the community. It's been an important part.


Paul Pribbenow: It's one of the reasons I think we've settled in here. I don't know that we would have imagined that we would have stayed at Augsburg 'til retirement but I think that's gonna happen and that's a gift, I think, to our family. It's been wonderful to be embraced by the Augsburg community in that way.


Catherine Reid Day: What's it like to have a student preparing to go to college?


Paul Pribbenow: Yeah, so that's the fascinating thing is that I'm on the other side of the table right now with a senior in high school who's doing the college search. I find myself on college visits having to just hold back, you know? Sort of hold back not to in any ways have the process be effected by my presence, you know? So I'm just "dad" in those settings. It is interesting to think about how places pitch themselves, if you will, and how fragile it is. Thomas went on a recent college visit and was on the tour and walked away after an hour and a half on campus and said, "Not going here. Terrible tour." The tour guide didn't do what he needed that person to do in terms of really engaging him and introducing him to the place and yet, other places he goes in and says, "I love this place because, you know, it's a great tour guide, you know, had the pattern down that they got to see the right things on campus."


Paul Pribbenow:  I think if I can get beyond the fact of that my son maybe is gonna make some decisions about whether going to college includes there being a Starbucks in the student union, you know, and get something more meaningful. Again, a reminder that we're in a business where 18 year olds make decisions about where to go based on a lot of factors that we don't necessarily have control over. Good learning for me and I brought those lessons back to how we think about what we do here at Augsburg.


Catherine Reid Day: So was it in Chicago that you discovered Jane Adams and how that's informed your thinking about the settlements and the relationship of the university to it's neighborhood?


Paul Pribbenow: That's really the way that I began to think about the role of higher education in urban settings. I had been introduced to Jane Adams when I was actually working at the University of Chicago in the graduate school of social work there, which had been founded by residents of Hull House, where Jane Adams had lived for her entire life from 1889 until she died in 1935. For me, I was really drawn that the settlement house movement is about what it means for folks to settle into a neighborhood, that's where the word comes from. Not for the sake of actually fixing the problems with the neighborhood but in fact to come in and be neighbor. To walk alongside of neighbors and for Jane Adams, those neighbors were all immigrants of various sorts that she lived in that neighborhood alongside of them and found ways to engage with them and how to create a healthier, more just, more compassionate neighborhood.


Paul Pribbenow: It was something in that settlement tradition that, for me, I had resonance in the 21st century, late 20th and early 21st century for the role of higher education in urban settings. So actually when I arrived at Augsburg and looked around this neighborhood and realized that it's an immigrant neighborhood, as it has often been through it's 150 years, at the same time thinking the fact that Augsburg had settled here and had been here now for almost 150 years that I started to realize that Augsburg might be an example of a 21st century urban settlement. I'd been struck with how that, kind of, concept has actually helped us to make sense of a lot of what we do. We don't go into the Cedar Riverside neighborhood with our Somali neighbors for the sake of fixing them or bringing some kind of objective knowledge or expertise to bear. We walk into this neighborhood to say, "What does this neighborhood need to be? Who are these neighbors? We see you. We want to understand who you are. We want to be your neighbor and think about how together we make this the kind of neighborhood we aspire for it to be."


Paul Pribbenow: That has led us into some remarkable partnerships and initiatives. I always like to think about the fact that this has become our classroom in some ways. Our students have an opportunity to really see the world through different eyes as they engage our neighbors. I really feel like that settlement of idea has found residents here in the 21st century in a way that's very powerful.


Catherine Reid Day: Let's talk just for a second about that transition. You said that you were at the University of Chicago and then you went off to other institutions and departed a little bit from your Lutheran tradition. Can you talk about what that experience was like?


Paul Pribbenow: If you think about it, as I said, growing up in the Lutheran church and then going to Luther, that was a wonderful experience for me and it was a deep, kind of meaningful way to be educated. When I left Luther I went to the University of Chicago so that was 1978 and until I came to Augsburg in 2006, I then spent that entire 28 years in non-sectarian, that is non-faith based institutions. I was at the University of Chicago, I worked at the Art Institute of Chicago, I worked at Wabash College, then I was the president at Rockford College in Illinois before I came to Augsburg. That entire stretch I found myself working alongside of folks that I couldn't assume they shared my faith commitments. At the same time, I didn't give up on my faith commitments. What I recognize in the work that I did there and kind of ever increasing, you know, roles in administration and other functions was that I had to figure out how to translate the things that were important to me out of my faith tradition and make them relevant to the folks that I worked with.


Paul Pribbenow: That, to me, was a kind of form of missionary work. Again, I wasn't trying to convert someone to my faith tradition but I was trying to say, "There are gifts that I have been given in my tradition that I think are relevant to the work we do." Gifts of the concepts of vocation. What does it mean to be called to work? Even if you don't necessarily hear that call from the divine. Maybe you hear it through a set of values you have or of a particular family situation. What about the concept of covenant? That is, you know, we're such a contractual kind of society. We like to make contracts with each other but covenant reminds us that we actually make promises to each other. I found that language to be very valuable in thinking. Especially in philanthropic work. How are we actually making a covenant between the donor and institutions in the work that we are going to do together to further a mission?


Paul Pribbenow: Then finally the concept of stewardship was also one that became a very important part of my understanding of leadership. That is that I've been called to this role to be steward of the gifts that have been given to me and they don't belong to me, but my job is to help, okay, figure out how to take care of them. I found that experience to be very valuable. When I showed up at Augsburg then in 2006 I came into a place, again, with a deep faith commitment but I actually found, I think, not surprisingly, an institution, a community, that maybe took some of those gifts for granted. Some of what I did over the first several years that I was here was to try to think about how again, we could translate what did make us distinctive in ways that people could understand how it was shaping the way that we did education here.


Paul Pribbenow: Augsburg already had a deep commitment to vocation. We were started there but I found as I talked about leadership as stewardship, as we talked about the Augsburg promise, which became kind of a major theme during my first few years here that people started to resonate. Then those themes also appealed, if you will, to the folks that were joining us who did not share our faith commitment because at that point, we were becoming a more diverse institution. We were beginning to live into what we've become today. A place where we can't assume that those students who are with us, those faculty members, those community members share our faith and yet, we want them to in some ways experience the gifts of our faith tradition.


Paul Pribbenow: When I think about our very diverse student body taking the required religion courses here, one of which is always focused on the theological concept of vocation, coming out of our Lutheran tradition. In a classroom you will have yes, perhaps a handful of students who come out of Lutheran churches but you'll have our muslim students, you'll have our Hindu students, our native students and what I hear from those students is not, "You're trying to impose something on me," but in fact, "You've given me a gift that helps me to think about my faith and its connection to my life in a different way." I think that's a form of Evangelism. That's not necessarily what people always mean by that word but I think that's what my life trajectory taught me and I think it's been really wonderful to watch it sort of unfold here at Augsburg, as well.


Catherine Reid Day: You've spoken before about how having this student population that is increasingly and intentionally diverse has, in some ways, made the Lutheran identity of Augsburg stronger. Could you articulate that a bit?


Paul Pribbenow: Yeah, I think a lot of folks think that to be Lutheran, to be faith based, you have to, in fact, have a certain quota of, you know, membership, if you will. You have to have a certain percentage of your students or a certain percentage of your faculty and staff and I just think that's the wrong way to think about it because I always like to say that it's because we are Lutheran that we actually have become a place that can be open and hospitable and committed to justice in the world. I've done a lot of work thinking through what the, you know, you call the "gifts" or the "Charisms" of this tradition are and certainly vocation is one of those gifts that we share very widely here.


Paul Pribbenow: Another one is what I would call commitment to critical and humble inquiry. That is liberal arts, but it's actually a way of believing that, in fact, we don't have all knowledge so we are humble. We ask questions about what's going on in the world and we're not afraid to ask those questions. I think about the gift of a commitment to neighbor. Always like to point out that Martin Luther used the word "neighbor" more than he used almost any other word in all of his writings because he believed that we had been freed to serve the neighbor. There is in our Lutheran tradition this commitment to ecumenism. To thinking outside the lines of our own faith, to engaging others who don't share our faith tradition.


Paul Pribbenow: Finally there's the gift of simple [reformanda 00:14:05]. That is this notion that, again, no institution in permanent. We have to always be open to changing. I take those gifts and in the aggregate, what they offer me is a vision of what this institution is becoming. A place that is hospitable, that is committed to the liberal arts, that is committed to not "business as usual," being open to new ways of doing the work that we're here to do, to live out our mission. I would argue that in fact we may be, at this moment, more Lutheran than we've ever been but of course we are more diverse than we've ever been and I don't think that's a contradiction. I think that's actually the result of some very sophisticated thinking and living by this institution, kind of into that promise.


Catherine Reid Day: Can you talk a little bit about that "freeing ourselves" and also that Lutheran "free" tradition and how does that show up here do you think?


Paul Pribbenow: So for folks that don't know that the history of our particular branch of Lutheranism in, I think it was 1893, there was sort of a split between the St. Olaf Lutherans and the Augsburg Lutherans that led to Augsburg actually forming his own denomination, what became known as the Lutheran Free Church and that particular denomination existed from 1893 until it merged into the American Lutheran Church in 1963. For 70 years, Augsburg was the college and the seminary of the Lutheran Free Church. The Lutheran Free Church wasn't all that distinctive from other branches of the, especially the Norwegian Swedish Lutheran churches but it had this kind of radical egalitarianism in it that I think is probably the piece of that tradition that is so clearly part of the culture still here at Augsburg.


Paul Pribbenow: I always like to point out that when we say "free," when they said, "free," they meant "free." Free from hierarchy, free from... so it really was a congregational kind of perspective. Theologically it meant that, that as the congregation makes decisions for itself. It doesn't have a bishop telling it what to do. I think what it means for us today is that this is a very democratic place. A place certainly that has that normal trappings of shared governance between faculty and board and administration but it goes beyond that to a place where every member of this community wants to have voice and should have voice in who we are and what we do. Its led to a whole variety of very concrete things that we do with each other. We have regular gatherings that bring the entire community together. We have a very collaborative processes when it comes to organizing strategic plans. It leads to students being on almost every committee so that they have a voice in kind of important ways.


Paul Pribbenow: I think, I love that part of our tradition. I love how that has shaped this institution. It certainly doesn't make the work always smooth or easy but it actually probably makes it more real. It probably makes it the way that the world is and so students who experience that here, when they go out into the world they've seen that democratic impulse. They've seen what it means to build community and so my hope is that when they go into organizations or businesses or a neighborhood they will carry with them that sense of how this place was run. I get the sense that students get that. They have colleagues at other institutions who don't have that same set of commitments necessarily and so there's a difference, I think, when they leave us in the impact they have on the world.


Catherine Reid Day:        I wonder if you could just talk a minute about what it means to be a student centered institution and how that has been forming during your tenure here?


Paul Pribbenow: I think that in many ways I would say that actually Augsburg is an example of a radically student centered place in a way that is perhaps counter cultural in the narrative about higher education in the world. Everyone cares about students but, in fact, do you really walk that talk when the students arrive? The way I like to paint this picture is that we started to realize when our student body started to change and become more diverse here, you know, a decade or so ago that the students were coming to us, were bringing us life experiences, gifts and values that were different than perhaps had been the case even 20, 25 years ago and certainly going back in our history. The question is, were we open to those gifts in a way not to this sense that we had to change them, somehow turn them into something else. But were we open to how they would change us? That is, are we ready for the students that are showing up here?


Paul Pribbenow:  We actually have what I like to call the New America right here on our campus. These are our future leaders, these are the students who will go on to lead businesses and be involved in public service and leading community organizations. We want to be shaped by them, we want to learn from their life experience and figure out what they can teach us. That piece of being student centered, I always like to say, "It's not student controlled," you know? There are limits but on the other hand, being open to what I call "inclusive" or "democratic" [excellences 00:18:50]. What they bring to us that perhaps we wouldn't have otherwise discovered in ourselves.


Paul Pribbenow: I've seen it. I've seen it in the classroom. It changes the way classrooms operate. I've seen it in the governance system and how students participate and the questions they ask. I've seen it in student organizations and leadership around campus in so many ways. They brought their energies to bear on remaking this institution and that's actually, I challenge our students every summer when they arrive on campus. I say to them, you know, "This is your opportunity. You get to remake as this institution has been remade in generation after generation by the students." Who show up and given who's showing up, we now know that they're remaking us in new and I think exciting ways. Sometimes you feel like you're along for the ride and that's good. Other times you have your understanding of higher education turned upside down.


Paul Pribbenow: I always joke that when my dad took me to Luther in 1975, he dropped me off at the door and basically said, "I'll see you in three or four years, you know, when you're finished." That doesn't happen anymore. We have a very different kind of connection to our students, to their families, to the networks that have supported them. Especially for the students who are coming from the communities of color. We, I think, have a special obligation to them. I mean, they're trusting us to have their students come here. Yes, get a really high quality education as we've always offered but also be open to who they are and what they need from us to be successful. That's not always easy work but it's good work. It's the right work, I think, for Augsburg right now.


Catherine Reid Day: I wonder if you could talk about why it's important to look at the whole student and what kind of pressures that might place on the institution and how is it changed the institution as you're bringing in people with greater need and with different points of view and perspectives?


Paul Pribbenow: We understood that normal ways of helping students navigate college was not adequate to the students that were coming to us and we're not alone in this more generally in terms of changing demographic for student profile but students are coming to us often as first generation students. So more than 50% of our students are first generation at this point, which means they don't have parents or family networks that understand how to navigate college so that's a starting point. We have students coming to us that perhaps have learned different languages along the way or maybe family languages, you know, first language is not English and so they've had to learn English. We have to respond to that because again, we're still gonna teach in English but we need to make sure that they're capable of doing the work in the language.


Paul Pribbenow: We have students coming to us with different cultural expectations, different religious expectations from their families and then we have the students coming to us with a whole range of emotional and other challenges in their life that are just a result of, I think, kind of nature versus societal stresses and the like that we know are out there. Students, especially students, for example, who are immigrant students who come to us afraid, perhaps, of what's going on in the political world. We can be a sanctuary to them but we actually can't undo the pressures that they and their families are feeling with some of the demonization that's going on there. So for us that's meant how do we step into that? I love our faculty because they have consistently said to me, "Our job is to teach the students who are in front of us." I love that phrase. To teach the students who are in front of us.


Paul Pribbenow: Then our job as an administration, as an institution is to step in around them and say, "Okay, if they're gonna do that, what do we have to do? What do we have to provide in order to make sure that, in fact, they are gonna be successful here." Again, our goal is to have them walk across that stage after four years and graduate. You would see advising offices, of course. We always had those but you're also going to see trio programs that are particularly focused on students who are first generation and you'll see academic coaching offices, you're gonna see our Gauge Center for Student Success, which has a whole range of accommodation specialists who help students who have perhaps learning challenges, learning... you're gonna see a writing lab, you're gonna see really a whole set of folks who's job is every day to show up here and think about how do we help the students who are here be successful?


Paul Pribbenow:  Now that's expensive, because it's a range of services that perhaps would not you would normally find at an institution but we think that's the kind of investment we need to make because this is again, going back, this is the promise we make to students. You come here, bring your gifts, we come along on your journey, take responsibility for your education but we are gonna surround you with faculty and staff who care about your success and that's the beauty of what you see here every day. I mean, you walk this campus and you see the mosaic of humankind on this campus and then you see these amazing staff and faculty who, probably in their own education, wouldn't have had this experience but they come here and they said, "These are the students that we get the privilege to serve. How can we help them be successful and to step into their lives?"


Paul Pribbenow: It used to be that you'd go see your advisor once a semester maybe to sign off on your registration for the following semester. Now we have what they call "intrusive advising." Which is proactive. We step back into their lives 'cause we know, maybe they don't know necessarily the kind of unwritten rules of how you navigate college and that intrusive advising takes lots of different shapes on campus, especially through our work in mental health. That's probably the fastest growing area of need on a college campus today and we have been investing heavily to make sure that we have, if you will, that safety net that really allows our students to know that we've got their back on some of the stresses in things that they're facing. Our job is to get them through and what it takes to get them through is different than it was even 20, 25 years ago.


Catherine Reid Day:  You've decided to embark on an endowment campaign for the university. Can you talk a little bit about what led you and the regents to agree that it was time to pursue an endowment campaign and what you hope to achieve with it?


Paul Pribbenow:   Endowment campaign is a fairly audacious undertaking for this institution because in many ways Augsburg has been driven really throughout it's history by enrollment. That is, tuition dollar shave helped us to create a sustainable financial model and I don't think that that's the case for the future. I don't think we can count just on enrollment, in particular, if we're going to continue to serve the students that we're serving. We benefit highly from both federal and state support for our students, but it takes more than that. If you think about fundraising at Augsburg, always been a focus on helping to raise money for operations, that's important. Always been a focus on philanthropy that helps us to build the kind of facilities our students need and we're certainly proud of our latest project. The Hagfors Center is a wonderful example of where philanthropy really came to a new level here.


Paul Pribbenow:  As we finish that project, the regents and I really came to the conclusion that in order to secure the future of Augsburg University, that is to provide a foundation for the future from a financial standpoint, we needed to focus on how we could put in place permanent assets that would allow this institution to know that it had the safety net, the leverage points, that it needed for future support. It's been really fascinating now in the year and a half or two years that we've been in this campaign for our 150th anniversary with a particular focus on endowment because we've had just one gift after another where people are coming forward saying, "I understand that student ..." Support scholarships, support for faculty members who are doing remarkable work, endowed support for particular initiatives and programs like our Step Up program serving students recovering from addiction or the program, the Gauge Center program or signature programs like athletics or music. People are finding ways to say, "I wanna ensure that that program or those commitments exist into the future and I know that my gift to endowment can help to do that."


Paul Pribbenow:  I always think that endowment wasn't something that was a major focus for Augsburg. We have endowment, you know, 50 million or so just certainly better than it was even a decade ago but we think that in order to really provide that foundation we need to see that number move to 150 or 200 million over the next several years. We've started to make progress on that goal but when you haven't done fundraising for endowment, you have to also make the case to folks that, in fact, that gift that exists in perpetuity is in fact going to be well stewarded by this institution. It's truly going to serve those purposes. I always talk to donors when we're having this conversation, I say, "I understand that endowment gifts are a leap of faith." They really are a leap of faith because you are saying that "I believe that this institution, Augsburg University, will steward this gift and it's intentions well into the future. Probably beyond the time that I'm around to ensure that that happens."


Paul Pribbenow: We take that very seriously, again, that we're entering a covenant, a promise with those donors that that leap of faith will in fact be realized. That they will know that this institution has another 150 years to go and that we in some ways helped to make that happen. I think that's why the regents have come to this. Like I said, we're very excited about the early results of this campaign, with the upcoming 150th anniversary celebration we know that there will be a lot of emotion and passion, love for this institution that we think will unleash even greater generosity and we're very excited about what that will mean for our students, for our faculty and for our community.


Catherine Reid Day: As you think about that threshold, that 150th year and then what comes after, what are the distinctions that you hope will be identified and recognized and carried forward into that next 150 years?


Paul Pribbenow: Yeah it's a great moment for us to think about that. I mean, you know, sesquicentennial, 150th anniversary celebrations can be nostalgic, you know? We certainly will have our moments where we will look back but I have been focusing on the fact that this is actually a foundation for looking forward. When you think about what we've accomplished over 150 years, what are those threads that actually allow us to think about responding to a very different landscape for higher education but taking the distinctions that truly have made Augsburg what it is today and making them relevant in a continuing way. When I think about that in the broadest sense, you know, there's no doubt that our continuing commitment to access to students of all backgrounds and experiences is gonna be critical to that. We have carved out a space for Augsburg that is hospitable to a wide range of students of all, quite honest, all ages, all backgrounds and we're known for that and I wanna make sure again, that that's secured for the future.


Paul Pribbenow: That will be Augsburg's legacy. That we, at this moment in time, responded to what was going on in the world. We saw a change in the demographic that stood for something important about future leadership in our country and our world and we stepped into that. I wanna make sure that that commitment to access and all that goes with it is continued. You know, I certainly believe, I love Augsburg's little 20 acre campus. We don't step beyond our boundaries. We have wonderful relationships with our neighbors. On the other hand, there are continued needs for facilities that we do need to respond to. I very much, in addition to the Hagfors Center, as a kind of major marker of our, kind of, commitment to this place and to this neighborhood and to our students, I would hope we'll be able to renovate Old Main as a kind of major project. To take that beautiful building back to it's kind of original splendor but make it relevant for 21st century teaching and learning.


Paul Pribbenow: I think that there's some wonderful work to be done in our campus and on the edges of our campus in making it clear who we are and how we are both proud of our place but we are also a place that welcomes the community in. Always interested in how, as we're doing work around the edges of campus, how are we both claiming the place as something that we take care of but at the same time, being clear of what our hospitality to our neighbors. I also think that in many ways, securing those pieces of our history that are truly signature is something that is critical to our going forward. Our commitment to faith and to the Lutheran faith. Our commitment to our campus ministry program, which has so meaningfully responded to the different faith traditions of our students in a commitment to interfaith work.


Paul Pribbenow:  Still have that core commitment to the Lutheran faith and to daily chapel, which is critical, but at the same time doing remarkable and actually nationally known work now, interfaith work. I think about the work that we've done in educating students for democratic citizenship, another area of focus where given who our students are, we can equip them to go back to their communities as citizens in addition to good teachers or business people or nurses or whatever but that kind of combination of what it means to be a citizen professional is another area that I think we'll want to really focus on as we go forward.


Paul Pribbenow: Those are some of the broad areas. You know, I had the privilege to be the 10th president and I, God willing, I'll serve here for a couple decades and have a chance to take in my moment here but it's never about me. It's really about a community that we challenged when I first arrived to take the threads of work that was already happening here and figure out how it all worked together in a way that really set Augsburg apart and I think as we enter our 150th year, that's probably the part I'm most proud of here is a community that has, in some ways, claiming its distinctive place in American higher education and it's living it out. It's not easy, again, there's lots of challenges, lots of stumbling blocks, as they say. It's a community that has not given up on that claim about who it is and what it cares about and what it's distinctive mission is.


Catherine Reid Day: Can you tell me a story that embodies something about the experience or kind of your hope and your dreams for Augsburg?


Paul Pribbenow: I think about [Jule 00:32:02] as a wonderful student who joined us back, you know, probably 10 years ago. Was a student who was Mexican and was undocumented at a time when that wasn't as common. In fact, he was one of the first undocumented students that came to campus. That's a challenge because at that point they don't have access to government aid. At that point they didn't. We had to support him and he had to bring other support from his family but he was dedicated. He was in the honors program, dedicated to being successful and stepped into his role here at Augsburg in all kinds of ways that led him ultimately to be the president of the undergraduate student government, which was a prominent role for someone. He did an undergraduate research project with me during one summer where he actually explored the immigrant history of Cedar Riverside going all the way back and then actually explored Augsburg's relationship with those immigrant communities, which actually were not always healthy. It was a very candid look at our history as an institution in this neighborhood.


Paul Pribbenow: he also founded an organization called Navigate, which is actually still operating, which was an organization focused on the needs of undocumented students helping them to navigate college. I remember one of his first years here he invited me to come over on a Saturday morning to campus and sit with a group of undocumented students from Augsburg and the U and St. Kate's and really hear from them what they were up against in their life and it was just eye opening to me. The fact that he helped me to see that is just an example of where students, being student centered and being willing to listen to their voices and their experiences can shape commitments that we make as an institution and the kind of leadership that I'm able to offer.


Paul Pribbenow:  Today where we probably have 100 undocumented students on campus, I can tie that commitment back to Jule and to the ways that he opened my eyes and ultimately he graduated and went to law school and he's doing great in the world.


Paul Pribbenow:  Cody, a young man who came here to be a pastor, came on that path right from day one said he was gonna be a pastor. I remember when he did his senior chapel talk he got up in the chapel and it was April 15th and he looked out at the audience, he said, "I came here to be a pastor. I'm gonna be a tax accountant and this is my happiest day, April 15th." I thought, "I love the notion that we help people discern their calls that may be different than their expectations for their life." But probably the most compelling stories, for me, are those students who come that we wouldn't have expected them to either come or to be successful.


Catherine Reid Day: Thank you for joining us today. That was President Paul Pribbenow speaking with us for the Augsburg Podcast.


Paul Pribbenow: Thanks for listening to the Augsburg Podcast. I'm President Paul Pribbenow. For more information, please visit Augsburg.edu.