4 Professing
Graduate study enabled my college teaching career. It began as a TA at the University of Iowa in 1964 and ended as an adjunct at Concordia College in 2007. As a freshly minted PhD, I spent one year as a sabbatical replacement at the University of South Dakota (USD). At that time, professing had permeated my higher education. Believing strongly that them that lectured had taught me more than them that discussed, I instructed in the same mode. I usually assigned short paperbacks instead of standard textbooks, set-aside some class time for discussing the reading, and evaluated students with writing assignments or essay examinations rather than multiple-choice tests. Over time higher education shifted from lectures transmitting common bodies of knowledge toward group participation teaching students how to learn. Skill development is essential for success in the flat world Thomas Friedman described yet too much focus on honing skills can displace imparting equally essential knowledge about human cultures and values.

USD with its Law and Medical schools is tucked into the state’s southeast corner at Vermillion just thirty-four miles from Sioux City, Iowa. It had 5,070 students in 1969 compared to about 9500 today, and ranked 53rd in salaries among U.S. states and territories. South Dakota, populated by too many colleges and too few people, could not afford to pay its academicians well. Yet it offered excellent retirement benefits to talented professors who gave a good return on the state’s meager investment before reaching their golden years. Soon after my arrival a newly appointed commissioner of higher education told the faculty: “Ideally the state should have established just three institutions and placed them in Sioux Falls, Pierre, and Rapid City. Instead, it founded seven schools and located just one in a major population center and none centrally.” I did not envy him his difficult task, and he did not last long doing it.
The history department numbered nine men besides me. All but one held doctorates; all did research; several had published; and some were outstanding teachers. A few became special friends. I already knew Americanists Joe Cash and Gerald Wolff from Iowa graduate school. Ray Harris, an exemplary ancient history teacher, had been a steeplechase jockey and told engaging stories about racing on the international circuit and being evacuated from London as a child during the Blitz. His life ended prematurely due to a rare shrinking skin disease that he never discussed. Affable Steve Ward ably taught English history and welcomed us socially. American historian R. Alton Lee published books into his eighties long after he left the classroom. Chair Cedric Cummins, a kindly Hoosier gentleman, hired me sight unseen for the one-year appointment. Roger Bridges, an SCI friend who had held the position, told me about the vacancy at the Philadelphia OAH Convention and encouraged me to apply. After reviewing my placement papers and surely asking Bridges and the recently hired Cash and Wolff about my character and abilities, Cummins telephoned an offer of $9500 for teaching nine credits of American history survey and American Social and Cultural history each semester. “If you complete your doctorate, it is too low,” he said. “If you don’t, it is too high.” Simpson College would have paid me just $7500 to teach seven different four-credit courses. Despite having more students at USD, three fewer preparations would be less work, I reasoned. I am grateful to Cummins for giving me my first job, and for later helping me secure a tenure-track position at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota.
Vermillion, the Clay County seat, is a lovely prairie town situated on a bluff overlooking the Vermillion River. At 9,128 people in 1970, it also was the smallest place my wife and I had lived since we left home for college a decade before. Just one movie theatre and the lack of other cultural amenities did not trouble me as I remained confined to my study, grinding out lectures day and night for the entire year. Jo complained about one super market not fulfilling her bargain hunting needs. She thus carefully planned shopping expeditions to Sioux City. It was not unlike settlers of the Old West taking the wagon to town for purchasing supplies. On a positive note, we found a modern furnished apartment located just ten blocks from the university and the downtown. I easily walked or biked to work and every morning Jo readily picked up the Des Moines Register because we were not yet ready to sever completely our Iowa ties.
The apartment occupied one end of a relatively new, one-story brick structure, giving us neighbors on just one side. This was a good thing because the husband turned out to be a short-tempered screamer. He also did not clean up after a dog he tied in the back yard. During periodic winter thaws the area looked and smelled like a cattle feed lot. The landlord eventually solved this problem. Still, it was the nicest place we had lived and reasonably priced at $125 per month, utilities and off street parking included. A back entry opened into a spacious modern kitchen set off by an island from the dining and living areas entered from the street. A hallway to the bath and two large bedrooms had pull-down stairs giving us access to an overhead storage area. For the first time we enjoyed the luxury of both a tub and a shower. I made one bedroom my study, the site of such toil that Christmas felt like time off for good behavior.
I embarked on doctoral studies intending to become a good college teacher of history. It turned out to be harder than anticipated. Despite my social studies teacher training and Iowa TA experience, I gave little thought to pedagogy and used no films or other supplementary materials. Rather than typing my lectures, I spent additional hours writing them in long hand thinking it would facilitate my recall of the material, and also lived in fear that my prepared remarks would not sufficiently fill fifty- or seventy-five-minute class periods. Tied to my manuscript on the lectern, and only moving to write an occasional word or phrase on the chalkboard, classes were deadly dull for both students and me, which I might have relieved by stealing jokes from Thomas Bailey’s popular textbook. Despite frequent despair and rare elation, I soldiered on, hopeful practice eventually would make me better.
Departmental agreement on a common textbook committed me to using Dexter Perkins and G. G. Van Deusen, The United States of America for my two survey sections of American History, 1763-1877. I supplemented it with William Styron’s controversial novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner and three anthologies: The Advance of Democracy, ed. J. R. Pole; The Abolitionists: Reformers or Fanatics? ed. Richard O. Curry; and Reconstruction, ed. Staunton Lynd. I led discussions of interpretive essays from each collection as well as Styron’s novel. While few participated, the feeble attempt briefly relieved the tedium of my lectures.
The combined enrollment of 150 students drove me to use multiple-choice examinations, another time-consuming task. The final grade distribution fell far short of the Lake Wobegon “all above average” ideal: 8.5% A; 25.6% B; 33.5% C; 19% D; and 6.6% F. If I had not graded on a curve, 64% would have received D or F. Poor teaching partly explains these dismal results. I had not excited students or keyed them into what they needed to know. Since I did not require attendance or take daily roll, many stopped coming. When I invited those who had done poorly to my office, even complete strangers insisted they had faithfully attended class. All asked for extra work to raise their grade. I refused, insisting they should devote more time to reading the texts, coming to class, taking notes, asking questions, and studying for the tests. Most ignored my practical advice.
The willingness of upperclassmen to discuss the assigned reading and raise questions made American Social and Cultural History, 1620-1860, more stimulating. All received a C or better. Five earned an A. Enrollment rose from twenty-one to twenty-eight for the second semester. I assigned two expository essays as take-home examinations and a ten-page paper analyzing a prominent primary source and setting it in historical context. I limited their choice to J. Hector St. John Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer; Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography; Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia; Ralph W. Emerson, “Nature,” “The American Scholar,” and “The Poet;” Alexis de Tocqueville’s, Democracy in America; or James Fenimore Cooper, Home as Found. I additionally assigned Cushing Strout’s Intellectual History in America, an anthology of important interpretive essays, as well as Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness, Daniel Boorstin, The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson, David B. Davis, ed., Ante-Bellum Reform, and John William Ward, Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age.
For spring term, I team-taught a larger survey section of American History, 1877-1970, with Cedric Cummins at his request. He may have acted out of kindness to relieve my visibly evident stress. I benefited from having a lighter teaching load (just two courses), fewer students (only 100), and less lectures to prepare. Besides the Perkins and Van Deusen text, we assigned Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery, W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, John Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath, and Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Ced liked the latter’s Indian character, an important consideration in light of South Dakota’s large Native American population. He used an overhead projector for sharing an outline and important terms with students, which helped improve my teaching. He also added an essay question to the multiple-choice examinations. Yet our final grades were only marginally better than those I had assigned in the fall: A 14%, B 23%, C 39%, D 21%, and F 3%.
Texts for American Social and Cultural History, 1865-1970, included the second volume of Strout; Darwinism and the American Intellectual edited by R. J. Wilson; Charles Forcey, The Crossroads of Liberalism; Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in America; Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual; and Burton Wolfe, The Hippies. Analytical papers could be based on Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams; Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class; John Dewey, Democracy and Education; Randolph Bourne, War and the Intellectuals; Paul and Percival Goodman, Communitas; or John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State. The class enrolled several excellent students, including a future Rhodes scholar. Final grades reflected their high abilities. More than half earned an A or B; no one failed and only one lost soul got a D. As Thorstein Veblen said: “My grades are like lightning. They might strike anywhere.”
Nine months of writing lectures and reading both broadened and deepened my knowledge of American history. Yet work constricted our social life once more. It usually lasted until 10:30 on Friday and Saturday nights when I stopped to watch TV. Jo popped corn and I popped a 16 oz can of Budweiser. She fell asleep long before the delightful and politically incorrect Charley Chan and John Wayne films ended. We went to USD football games and plays like Waiting for Godot. We watched the televised men’s basketball games. I played basketball with administrators and faculty on Monday nights as well as softball at a History Club picnic. I later moderated a panel for the organization on whether or not African American History courses should be taught. It takes time to make new friends in new places so we appreciated invitations to parties hosted by Steve Ward, Joe Cash, Gerry Wolfe, my office mate Don Price, and their spouses. When my parents visited in September, we spent a Saturday at the farm of Father’s cousin near Canistota. Iowa City friends Robert and Joan Klaus came for Thanksgiving; we reciprocated over the Christmas holidays. Steve and Jean Wurster stayed overnight on their trip west in June.
Our reclusive existence is the stuff of which divorces are made as I already had learned from painful experience. Still, circumstances left me little choice. Jo completed a master’s degree in physical education despite becoming sleepier and less energetic in the New Year. Pregnancy ended her teaching career despite being an excellent instructor much beloved by elementary school children. She decided that one constantly laboring teacher in the family was enough; she assumed the responsibility for rearing our children.
Given my one-year appointment, I immediately started searching, sending sixty some letters inquiring about jobs at various west coast, Colorado, and midwestern institutions. Many did not respond; others sent mimeographed no vacancy letters. Martin Lutter, chair at Concordia College – Moorhead, Minnesota, was the exception. He wrote a three- page letter explaining that while the department presently had no openings, he would keep my inquiry on file and let me know should any occur. Meanwhile, North Dakota State University (NDSU) in Fargo telephoned in November. Cummins, who had spoken with them as well, predicated they would invite me for an interview. They never contacted me again. I later learned that Dean Archer Jones had awarded the job to the wife of a recently hired administrator without consulting the department.
Lack of notifications from the University of Iowa Placement Office persuaded me not to pay the cost of attending the post-Christmas American Historical Association Convention in New York City. I instead scheduled a meeting with Lawrence Gelfand, the current handler of placement for the Iowa history department. After he showed me a drawer full of disorganized files and gave me no leads, I concluded that Gelfand would be useless. Fortunately for our peace of mind as newly expectant parents, Concordia College invited me to interview six weeks later.
We spent a blustery February weekend meeting with the dean, associate dean, president, department, and Martin Lutter. While the position looked attractive, I doubted that a Lutheran school with so many faculty of the one true faith would hire a reprobate like me. Yet Concordia surprised me with a contract. Lutter trusted Cummins’s endorsement because several Concordia graduates had completed USD master’s degrees. My examination field in the history of American religion and lengthy SCI graduate essay about Reinhold Niebuhr also aided my cause. Being stricken by the flu at the same time I wrestled with how I could fulfill Concordia’s “sympathy and loyalty” requirement seemed an ominous omen. “Isn’t Paris worth a mass?” Robert Klaus asked, referring to Protestant Henry IV’s accession to the French throne in 1610. After reflecting one week, I signed. Resurrecting my church membership and attending chapel should show my institutional sympathies sufficiently, I decided.
Later that spring, the professor I had replaced resigned to remain at the University of Tulsa. Colleagues immediately asked me to apply for the newly created tenure-track position. Another nominated me for USD honor’s program director. Ced quashed this talk, declaring he would not be a party to breaking my Concordia contract. He was right, of course. Besides, I had decided that a small Lutheran Liberal Arts college would be a better fit for me. The job paid more ($11,000) for teaching better-prepared students in smaller classes. Equally important, Fargo-Moorhead’s population of 100,000 people afforded Jo better shopping opportunities.
On July 1, 1970, I embarked in a U-haul truck on our 300-mile trek north to the billiard-table flat Red River Valley. Jo followed in our Mustang until going ahead to pick up the keys for the college-owned house we had rented for $160 monthly plus utilities. Conveniently located on the corner of 12th Avenue and 5th Street South adjacent to Hvidsten Music Hall, it was unfurnished except for a kitchen table and chairs left behind by a previous resident as well as a refrigerator, stove, and wringer washing machine. The college had purchased several of the latter at bargain prices just a few years before. An estate sale nearby conveniently furnished the downstairs with a rocker, easy chair, sleeper sofa, and dining room set for just $191. A second-hand bedroom suite (recently acquired from a USD colleague) went into the largest upstairs room. Kristen occupied an adjacent walk-in closet after her birth on October 6. A desktop door, lamp, chair, and two bookcases made another room my study. The bathroom, brightly painted in red and white stripes, startled us awake each day.
We spent the next two months settling in. Jo found a pediatrician. Lutheran hospitality helped us make new friends. Admissions officer Jim Hausmann enlisted me for “noon ball” as the Monday, Wednesday, and Friday faculty-staff basketball games were called. Neighbors Elinor Torstveit (Biology) and Al Monson (Speech) recruited Jo and me to play tennis with them until her ninth month. Jo then worked a few weeks in the new Charis Outreach Office until delivering our firstborn. I explored the well-stocked Ylvisaker Library, continued to read widely, and thought about how I would revise my USD courses for the coming school year. Welcome Wagon delivered free movie tickets and restaurant coupons, which afforded us welcome air-conditioned breaks during hot summer days.
Concordia Academic Life
Norwegian clergy and laity founded Concordia College in 1891 when they formed the Northwestern Lutheran College Association and purchased six acres and the defunct Bishop Whipple School in south Moorhead. Their decision emerged from trans-Atlantic Norwegian migration to America, settlement of “Little Norways” in the Red River Valley, westward expanding higher education institutions, and Lutheran synodical battles. More specifically, the Norwegian Lutheran academy movement planted more than seventy-five coeducational secondary and normal schools in the Midwest, Pacific Northwest, and Canada. Most perished, but Concordia and a few others grew into colleges and survived. During the Protestant Reformation, Lutheranism emerged within German universities as an educating faith. Martin Luther articulated the doctrine of vocation and advocated schooling all boys and girls for the wellbeing of society. Lutheran nations attained high literacy rates. Norwegian-American academies perpetuated ethnic identity and facilitated assimilation by teaching religious and secular subjects, citizenship, English, and an ethic of service enabling graduates to fulfill their Christian and civic duties in whatever occupation they pursued. Frequently used phrases “Soli Deo Gloria—to God alone the Glory”—and “family” defined Concordia as a community of God’s people. The school imparted the high cultural traditions of Western Civilization to its students while it mirrored the folk culture of its owning Norwegian Lutheran congregations in northern Minnesota, North Dakota, and eastern Montana.
By the time I arrived on campus, the towering figure of President Joseph L. Knutson had presided for two decades. Born the son of a Hauge Synod minister in Grafton, North Dakota, Knutson’s pietistic upbringing kept Jesus Christ foremost in his life. He graduated from Saint Olaf College and Luther Theological Seminary, and held pastorates in Illinois, Iowa, and Minnesota before being called to head Concordia. Knutson evidenced intellectual curiosity with wide reading in theology, philosophy, and history. His dynamic forcefulness, unassuming folksy charm, and strong conservative opinions expressed while speaking extemporaneously throughout the corporate territory instilled confidence in him and Concordia. Although inclined toward the divine right of college presidents, “Prexy Joe” learned to live with faculty governance because he trusted atomic physicist Carl Bailey and other talented administrators. Knutson’s traditional Republican dislike of government did not prevent his administration from taking advantage of new federal programs to grow enrollment from 890 (1951) to 2400 (1969), more than triple the amount of funds raised, and construct thirteen new buildings, including a library, five dormitories, a theatre, and music, science, and dining halls. The relatively new physical plant sold me on the college when I came for an interview.
Given the seriousness with which Dean Bailey had expressed the college’s Christian commitments during our first meeting, I should not have been surprised when the two-day faculty and staff workshop at the end of August opened with hymn singing, prayers, and a homily. An eminent University of Michigan professor delivered two lectures on the Christian higher education tradition. The rest of the exacting schedule was spent on practical matters. The experience soured me on workshops for the next thirty-two years. I would have preferred using the time for getting courses ready. The college instead highlighted its more important goal of Christian community building. “It only unites most of us in feelings of aversion,” I cynically remarked. No matter. My bad attitude changed nothing.

The Concordia Handbook stated sympathy for and loyalty to institutional goals as the first criterion for faculty retention. Although not mandated, I made chapel attendance Exhibit A for displaying my fidelity. Initially held in Memorial Auditorium, Chapel relocated to the new Centrum in 1975. Twenty-five minute services typically featured Lutheran liturgy, hymns, and homilies delivered by one of two campus pastors, a religion professor, President Knutson, or one of many Fargo-Moorhead Lutheran clergymen. I showed up two or three times weekly every year except when terminally irritated by Pastor Carl Lee’s oft-stated sympathy for overworked students or some other grievance with what the administration had done. Although cynically claiming to pray only for tenure, listening to Lutherans taught me a lot about their beliefs; reflecting upon the cosmic context for my work gave me solace. Chapel grew more varied and inclusive over time as laity and adherents of different faith traditions spoke. When student presenters had God on speed dial and claimed to converse with HIM daily, I recalled how seventeenth century New England Puritans banished Anne Hutchinson for similarly communicating with God by voice.
Exhibit B—joining a local congregation—took longer. Although Lutherans populated both sides of my family tree, I had been reared in the German Evangelical and Reformed Church where Father had been baptized and confirmed. After he started farming near Elkader, it was more convenient to attend his church than Mother’s more distant Norwegian Lutheran congregation. When the United Church of Christ formed from merging the Evangelical Reformed and Congregational Christian churches, I became a member of the new denomination. Soon after arriving in Moorhead, Jo and I worshipped two Sundays at the Plymouth and First Congregational churches. Pastor Don Gibson preaching without notes impressed us. He called on me at Concordia. I said we would join. Yet my anxieties and the birth of our daughter made it easier to stay home on Sundays. Still, pledging $78 to First Congregational-Moorhead for 1971 made us checkbook Christians. When we finally filled a pew, the Reverend Myron Meckel had replaced Gibson, who had been dismissed for moral turpitude. Meckel baptized our two daughters, and we joined First Congregational in October 1972 because Congregationalism had greatly enriched American culture, and I admired brothers Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr. As fifty-year members, we do not regret choosing this particular brand of progressive Christianity.
Despite President Knutson’s institution-building successes, collegiate protests similar to those affecting many other campuses troubled his last years. Viewing himself as pastor of the Concordia family charged with preserving Christian community, he resisted calls for changing the parietal rules that banned social dancing, female smoking, and dormitory intervisitation. Even though a sociology department survey revealed that 72 percent of the students and 62 percent of the faculty favored on-campus dancing, Knutson insisted the ban exemplified the college’s distinctive Christian life style. Not until January 1969 did Concordia become the last American Lutheran Church College to permit on-campus dancing because, Knutson said, it could no longer keep a style of Christian living that many Lutheran parents had abandoned. He also resisted agitation for increased interdorm visitation until March 1974 when the college set new dormitory hours from 1:00 to 5:00 p.m. every Saturday and Sunday. The school meanwhile recognized women’s equal right to cancer by smoking in 1970 and eliminated a curfew for women in 1973. Knutson had provoked a crisis in December 1970 by suspending publication of the campus newspaper and dismissing editor Omar Olson when he advertised a New York City abortion referral service. The constituency sent Knutson hundreds of supportive letters and telegrams, pleased one president still upheld Christian authority and decency. Faculty believed he had overacted; as longtime philosophy professor Reidar Thomte pointedly commented in his thick Norwegian accent over coffee: “You don’t need a cannon to kill a canary!”
Besides being put off by some of the president’s remarks and actions, I did not warm to my older, more conservative history colleagues. I soon heard about a disgruntled business professor and his historian wife who had voiced their frustrations in an exit interview with Knutson the previous year. Her departure was a loss for the college; she soon finished a doctorate at Berkeley and published her dissertation. “Look at your history department,” her husband had fumed. “All you have is a missionary, a farmer, and a fool!” Kindly Herman Larsen and his wife were preparing for mission work in China when the Japanese incarcerated them in the Philippines during World War II. The postwar triumph of Chinese communism turned him toward earning a Yale Ph. D and teaching at a college of the church. Friendly Hiram Drache operated a modern cattle-feeding operation in addition to teaching European history. After publishing his UND doctoral dissertation as a well-regarded book on bonanza farming, Hiram went on to write many other volumes promoting his “get big or get out” view of American agriculture. Interviewing wealthy farmers helped the Concordia Development Office realize gifts to the college totaling millions of dollars. Hiram oozed confidence. He served as a B-17 Flying Fortress navigator during World War II. Being among the 24 percent of flight crews that escaped unscathed shaped his belief in the power of positive thinking. Hiram habitually discussed department business directly with the president, irritating his history colleagues.
“Martin Lutter is different,” Ced Cummins cryptically said as I departed USD. I soon learned what he meant. Well meaning, passionate, loquacious, and terribly insecure, Martin excited many students about history and inspired several to graduate study. Yet he talked longer than most people listened. As political scientist Harding Noblitt observed: “Sharing an office with him was like teaching an additional course.” I experienced this when his telephone call interrupted my viewing Eugene O’Neill’s “A Long Day’s Journey into Night.” The TV program ended before our conversation. I never let him do that to me again. It pained me to treat Martin badly; he had been responsible for bringing me to Concordia (and he also drove me nuts).
Many other history colleagues subsequently came, stayed or departed. The nineties enrollment surge to over 2900 students swelled their numbers. Africanist David Sandgren took the fifth tenure spot in 1971 when he arrived from Kenya where he had done doctoral research for his University of Wisconsin – Madison degree. Similar in age and political sympathies, we become good friends and worked well together until I quit. Herman’s departure in 1980 allowed us to hire Asian historian Linda Johnson who earned her doctorate from Stanford University. I quickly learned to listen closely when she talked. She was very smart and taught me a great deal about how to teach history. When Martin retired in 1985 at age seventy partly for health reasons, he said, “My life is over!” He cared that much about teaching. It took a few years to replace him. Beverly Stadum, a University of Minnesota American social history doctorate, refused a tenure track appointment. When she departed late in the summer after teaching two years, Gretchen Harvey filled in capably with only a University of Wyoming Master’s degree. She later returned to teach Native American and Environmental history courses after earning an Arizona State University doctorate. Brenda Child, a Native American graduate student from the University of Iowa, stayed just one year. The University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee offered a better job at a higher salary, and she blamed me for insisting she attend new faculty orientation seminars.
Joy Lintelman, a University of Minnesota doctoral student specializing in Swedish immigration studies, at last filled the tenure track position in 1989. Her husband Rick Chapman, an American social historian with fields in geography and Latin America, taught as an adjunct until the college tenured him after I departed. Europeanist Dr. W. Vincent Arnold arrived when Hiram retired in 1991. Bruce Stewart, an American Studies doctorate from University of Minnesota replaced me when I took a one-year leave for writing the college centennial history. This pleased the Business and Economics department who prized his wife and her accounting doctorate. Dean David Gring departed for the Roanoke College presidency without informing the history department he had given Bruce a three-year appointment. For the next few years, Stewart lobbied Dean H. Robert Homan for a chance to teach my advanced courses because he could do it better. Business Chair Cliff Harrison never understood why I wasn’t willing to share. The situation was resolved when the Stewarts took jobs at the University of Singapore. When Bruce asked to return three years later, the history department refused. Meanwhile, Bruce Cruickshank, a Yale doctorate, arrived to teach Asian history when Linda served as Associate Dean. He had Latin American history training so I happily surrendered that course to him. Bruce was a creative instructor who worked well with students one-on-one. He came on a two-year appointment and stayed a decade until taking a tenure track position at Hastings College in Nebraska. He blamed the department for not tenuring him at Concordia, failing to understand how rare new tenure lines were in the tightly managed Dovre administration.
All these historians, whether they stayed one year or many, enriched the college with their gifts. They brought cutting edge knowledge from graduate schools as well as new teaching ideas and textbook suggestions. Serving on their evaluation committees facilitated my borrowing from them all, which improved my own teaching. Among those who earned tenure, David Sandgren published two African history books and did important global studies education work. Linda Johnson published several articles, taught Women’s Studies, and held administrative jobs. Joy Lintelman taught Native American and Women’s Studies, won a Minnesota Book Award for her book, I Go to America: Swedish American Women and the Life of Mina Anderson, and instituted a Museum Studies program. Europeanist Vince Arnold won awards for outstanding teaching, led several May Seminars, and served as the MIAC Faculty Athletics Representative. Collectively these talented colleagues made my last decade happier than my first.
Medical problems complicated my initial Concordia year. Anxiety made it difficult for me to speak or eat in public. Teaching tied me into knots. When I sought medical assistance in mid-October for stomach discomfort, a Fargo Clinic doctor diagnosed me with an ulcer even though the X-rays had been inconclusive. When I telephoned him several weeks later to report that the prescribed medication and bland, alcohol-free diet had not relieved my symptoms, he bluntly dismissed my complaint: “The only alternative is putting you in the hospital. You don’t want that, do you?” Bullied into submission, I continued on his treatment plan for many months until a different doctor suggested a better drug and I recovered. Diffidence to authority had once again served me ill. When the doctor’s daughter taught as an adjunct history professor years later, I did not share my low opinion of her physician father. Illness made me a dull boy and limited our social life. Jo coped with another hard time by bonding with other new mothers, hosting South Dakota friends Ann and Steve Ward at Thanksgiving, and driving to my parents’ Iowa farm at Easter to surprise them with a visit from their first grandchild.
Concordia became a more congenial place for me when layman Paul Dovre succeeded the Reverend Knutson as president in 1975. The forty-year-old Minnesota native and Concordia graduate had quickly earned a masters and doctorate in speech communication at Northwestern University and returned to the college in 1963. He immediately became a highly regarded debate coach and professor, and soon rose rapidly in the administration as associate dean (1967), acting vice president for academic affairs (1968), executive vice president (1969), and vice president for academic affairs (1971). To be sure, Dovre carried on Knutson’s policy of hiring Lutherans mostly and perpetuating the school’s traditional religious identity. A year’s study at Lutheran Theological Seminary funded by a Rockefeller Fellowship equipped him to assume Knutson’s pastoral role seamlessly. Yet he ceased Knutson’s problematic pietistic policy pronouncements and dedicated himself to expanding meaningful faculty participation in college governance. During the next twenty-four years, Dovre’s achievements made him the school’s greatest president. He launched the first capital campaign since World War II despite a skeptical Board of Regents. Its success built the badly needed Jones Science Center. Subsequent drives raised more than $150 million that greatly expanded endowment, paid for the necessary addition of information technology; renovated Bishop Whipple, Park Region, Old Main, and the Hvidsten Hall of Music as well as constructed the Olin Art and Communications Center, the Olson Forum and Skyway, and several Concordia Language Village facilities.
While one cannot know how good the many non-Lutherans not hired might have been, the college under Dovre’s leadership recruited a more qualified and professionally active faculty and enhanced its academic program. His conscientious attention to detail, thorough preparation, effective management, and oratorical skill benefited Concordia in countless ways. Among many accolades Dovre received, the Norwegian Knight’s Cross-First Class, Order of St. Olav and inclusion among the top 100 college and university executives best evidenced his excellence.
Lutherans still comprised 86 percent of the Concordia’s predominantly White student body when I arrived. The Sixties Civil Rights Revolution inspired the college and other higher education institutions to recruit other races on the grounds Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’ Connor later upheld: Minorities bring varied perspectives that better prepare all collegians to live in a pluralistic world. Although these efforts persisted throughout my teaching career, it was hard to recruit and retain students of color to a college located in dual cities that remained more than 97 percent White until the 21st century. They invariably experienced culture shock and racism upon arrival. Concordia did not have the financial resources to employ any of the few available minority staff that students demanded. If the college did find someone, bigger schools usually lured them away with more money. Even so, African American and Native American enrollment respectively peaked at more than fifty and at about fifteen in the Seventies. External grants funded for a time worthwhile exchange programs with Virginia Union, an urban Black school, and Fort Lewis College in Colorado, which had substantial Indian enrollment. New courses on Black and Indian history and Ethnic Minority and Social Differences appeared in the curriculum. Black Congressman Andrew Young delivered a commencement address, and well-known comedian Dick Gregory, civil rights leader Julian Bond, and American Indian Movement activist Dennis Banks also spoke on campus.
The persistence of racism so angered thirty Black students in 1976 that they picketed the administration building and boycotted classes for a week. Although administrators negotiated their demands and promised reforms, numbers eroded though graduation thereafter. Twenty-seven minority collegians comprised just 1 percent of the student body in 1978-1979. A decade later, only nine African Americans were enrolled when Asian and Native Americans boosted the number to fifty-seven, and the minority student body share to 2 percent. Wholeness through diversity programs continued through the Nineties. The McKnight Foundation paid historian Ward Churchill and other Native America lecturers. The Teagle Foundation helped assess attitudes about diversity, study nearby Latin- and Native-American communities, enable immersion in New York City and Chicago, support hiring and recruiting strategies, host more diversity events, and pursue a multicultural core curriculum requirement. According to the 1999 Teagle survey Whites believed on-campus discrimination occurred rarely or never. Students of color disagreed. Efforts have persisted after my retirement. The decline of Fargo-Moorhead’s White population to 86 percent and the larger number of affordable minority job candidates finally enabled Concordia to achieve some of the diversity goals it had so long sought. Several African American alumni meanwhile served on the Board of Regents; several funded minority student scholarships. Their dedication to Concordia evidenced some success for the college’s longstanding multicultural efforts.
Courses and Teaching
The Concordia Faculty Handbook stressed good teaching as the most important criterion for retention and promotion. I accordingly devoted much effort to class preparation. My first-term load consisted of 104 students in three three-credit courses; the second had 134 in four three-credit courses. I taught two sections of the two-semester American history survey and one section of American Social and Intellectual History each term as well as Modern European Intellectual History, a new offering, in the spring. It is fortunate I could revise subjects I had taught at USD. For the survey, I replaced Perkins and Van Deusen textbook with Charles Sellers and Henry May, A Synopsis of American History and a two-volume anthology edited by Alan Davis and Harold Woodman on the conflict and consensus schools of interpretation in American history. I retained Styron’s novel and added Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin for the first term. Second term texts did not change from Washington, DuBois, Sinclair, Steinbeck, and Kesey. I gave three essay examinations based on review sheets distributed one week before.
For first semester American Intellectual History reading, I kept books by Perry Miller, Daniel Boorstin, and John William Ward and added primary texts by William Bradford, Samuel Sewall, Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Alexis de Tocqueville, and James Fenimore Cooper. Students wrote a ten-page analytical paper comparing and contrasting two primary sources as well as two ten- to twenty-page take home examinations. For the second term, I retained Lasch’s New Radicalism and added Richard Hofstadter’s Social Darwinism in America as well as books by Jane Addams, Randolph Bourne, Paul Goodman, William Buckley, and Eldridge Cleaver. Students wrote two ten- to twenty-page take-home examinations. Despite complaints about “Too much reading,” my American history students seemed engaged in what I had to say.
European Intellectual History did not go as well because I did know as much about the subject. The class studied the 17th century Scientific Revolution, 18th century Enlightenment, 19th century Romanticism, Liberalism, Marxism, and Irrationalism; and 20th century Russian Communism, German National Socialism, and French Existentialism. I assigned Crane Brinton’s textbook, The Shaping of Modern Thought; Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man, Edmund Burke, Reflections on The Revolution in France, Marx and Engels: Basic Writings, The Portable Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, Vladimir Lenin, What is to be Done, and Albert Camus, The Stranger. Students wrote papers for examinations.
European Intellectual History aside, my teaching greatly improved. No longer anchored to my notes, I moved about the room and outlined lectures on the chalkboard as I spoke. I distributed questions on the assigned reading, devoted class time to discussing, and promised to reward those who participated with higher grades. I took attendance daily and threatened to lower grades for the excessively absent. As I anticipated, Concordia students did better overall than those at USD because fewer of the least qualified enrolled. For these reasons, my second year grades were higher than my first. Among 196 survey students 14.3% earned A, 37.8% B, 36.2% C, and 11.2% D. Only one failed. Among the thirty-six taking intellectual history, 27.8% received A, 36.1% B, 22.2% C, 8.3% D, and 5.6% F.
I taught introductory American history nearly every semester until retirement. Between 1974 and 1980, enrollment in my sections ranged between sixty-five and seventy-two, giving me a heavy student load nearly every semester. New section caps of fifty in the Eighties and thirty-five in the Nineties significantly eased my burden. When Concordia implemented a course-based curriculum in 1972, standard student and faculty semester loads became four and three four-credit courses respectively. The department cast aside two-semester surveys in favor of one-semester perspective courses. My older colleagues complained that reducing the amount of factual information studied had watered down the survey. I did not mind. The new curriculum enjoined us to teach students how historians practiced their craft and hone the skills they needed for acquiring new knowledge. Ironically, younger colleagues insisted on resuming two-semester surveys in the Nineties.
I initially framed American History in Perspective by assigning Carl Degler’s Out of Our Past: The Forces That Shaped Modern America. He showed how Europeans transplanted enduring Puritan values and fostered capitalism and social mobility by settling a vast continent, displacing Native Americans, and enslaving Africans. The major crises of American Revolution, Civil War, and Great Depression severely tested the USA before it emerged as the foremost world power after World War II. Edward Hallett Carr’s What is History? demonstrated how the discipline demands interpretation because historians always must transform facts of the past into historical facts. I varied my pedagogy by employing small group discussions; board game simulations like “Frontier,” “Promotion,” or “Intervention;” and such documentary films as We the Women, American Negro Slavery, FDR: The Man Who Changed America, Edward R. Murrow’s Harvest of Shame, and Frank Capra’s Prelude to War. The new Tri-College University Film Library facilitated using audiovisual materials for teaching.
Frequently assigning new books on new topics revised America in Perspective over the years. For example, I addressed the role of disadvantaged minorities with a succession of autobiographies or biographies: Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, Geronimo, Black Elk, or Gary Clayton Anderson, Little Crow: Spokesman for the Sioux. I examined women’s history through Lois Banner’s Elizabeth Cady Stanton, William Chafe’s Women and Equality: Changing Patterns in American Culture, or Sara Evans’ Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and The New Left. My favorite texts for teaching American foreign policy were E. O. Reischauer’s Beyond Vietnam: The United States in Asia, Richard Van Alstyne, The Rising American Empire, and Thomas Patterson, On Every Front: The Making of the Cold War. Frederick Lewis Allen’s The Great Pierpont Morgan, Harold Livesay’s Andrew Carnegie and the Rise of Big Business, and John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash of 1929 illustrated the rise of industrial capitalism and its social impact.
Novels like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle or John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath dramatized worker and immigrant lives, as did the memoir Plunkitt of Tammany Hall or Herbert Gutman’s Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America. I often assigned books about the reforms spawned by economic problems: William O’Neill, The Progressive Years, John Morton Blum, Progressive Presidents, Joan Wilson, Herbert Hoover: The Forgotten Progressive, or J. W. T. Youngs, Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life. When I focused on the post-Civil War era, Richard Hofstadter’s Great Issues in American History gave me an excellent document collection eventually replaced by more recently published anthologies recommended by my colleagues.
When I returned to the two-semester United States survey at the end of my career, I used brief two-volume editions of texts like A People and a Nation: A History of the United States, authored by social historian Mary Beth Norton and others as well as the document collection Opposing Viewpoints in American History, edited by William Dudley. I supplemented these with three books each semester. Apart from Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812, the rest were modern editions published by Bedford Press: The World Turned Upside Down: Indian Voices from Early America, edited by Colin Calloway; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk; Addams’s Twenty Years at Hull House; and Ellen Schrecker’s The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents.
Syllabi now clearly stated my academic expectations and history department skill objectives. Students should be prepared and punctual, attend daily, and participate frequently. They should analyze primary and secondary sources, access library collections and computer data, examine theoretical perspectives, and practice written and oral communication. These habits and skills were useful for future employment. They earned grades by accumulating a possible 500 points from three essay examinations (48%), an analytical paper (16%), daily work (16%), attendance (10%), and participation (10%). Quizzes, journal entries, and other in-class writing on daily assigned reading kept them engaged. The paper required them to analyze a major historical monograph and a professional journal article located by searching the America History and Life database.
My standard seventy-minute class format now consisted of brief lectures supplemented by small group discussions of assigned texts and by film clips played on TVs and VCRs permanently placed in classrooms. My pedagogy had become more varied than the standard lectures I had delivered in my early years. Yet more technically skilled younger instructors had already far surpassed me by adopting power point and other computer-generated bells and whistles. My inability to adapt more quickly to the new technology was an important factor in my early retirement decision. While I had conscientiously signed up for several computer workshops, I did not benefit fully because the tech-savvy teachers would not use paper handouts. They could not understand why print generation members like me required such assistance.
Intellectual history in the new curriculum became two integration courses entitled American Thought and Culture and Modern European Thought and Culture. Martin Lutter applauded the more user-friendly titles. “Intellectual history intimidates students and frightens them away,” he had warned. Integration courses capped Concordia liberal arts education by demonstrating how two or more academic disciplines illuminated significant problems. I argued that both courses qualified because they introduced students to the variety of disciplinary perspectives employed in the study of intellectual and cultural history. Both studied cultural materials produced by literary figures, philosophers, political and social theorists, scientists, and theologians. Both borrowed scholarly tools from the humanistic disciplines of literature, philosophy, and religion and the social sciences of economics, politics, and sociology.
I used Stow Persons’ concept of social mind to organize American Thought chronologically into five successive cultural patterns: Puritanism, Enlightenment, Democracy, Naturalism, and Neo-Democracy. According to my mentor, social minds are clusters of ideas that give societies a distinct character at different times. They bind together an intellectual community, giving it a shared set of assumptions that facilitate thinking. I taught American Thought twenty-one times. During the Seventies and Eighties, enrollment peaked at fifty-two (1973) and reached thirty or more on four other occasions. As job-conscious collegians sought more practical learning in the Nineties, numbers declined to between ten and twenty.
As with American History in Perspective, I revised American Thought by recycling previously used primary texts and adding new ones such as Jonathan Edwards’s The Nature of True Virtue, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden or Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century, William Sumner’s What the Social Classes Owe to Each Other, and Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. I sometimes assigned secondary sources like Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden, Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture, and Christopher Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism, The latter so impressed Jimmy Carter that he invited Lasch to the White House for a conversation that informed the depressing national address that he later gave, which fueled the landslide victory by the much sunnier and vacuous Ronald Reagan. The meeting with Carter recalled a classroom discussion on the social role of intellectuals that I had witnessed at Iowa. A precocious undergraduate asked Lasch whether his criticism of intellectuals selling out to people in power didn’t stem from the fact he had not been consulted. I was amused when Lasch spoke directly to power fifteen years later and the result harmed President Carter who had sought his advice.

Starting in the Nineties, I assigned books that showed how the practice of intellectual and cultural history had changed: Robert Crunden’s A Brief History of American Culture, Lawrence Levine’s The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in the History of American Culture, and The American Intellectual Tradition, a two-volume anthology of documents edited by eminent intellectual historians David Hollinger (to whom I bear an uncanny resemblance) and Charles Capper. Crunden and Levine revealed how African Americans, jazz musicians, Hollywood movies, comic books, and other expressions of popular culture had shaped American society over time. Hollinger and Capper selected sermons, treatises, and other genres devoted to purposive discourse. These were written by prominent male and female thinkers, who sought to define the theoretical basis for religious, political, social, economic, scientific, and artistic practice. I devoted class time to lecturing about the social context for intellectual life and to leading discussions about the assigned reading. My almost daily collection of reading journal entries facilitated participation.
European Thought and Culture peaked at thirty-five students (1989) and previously topped twenty and thirty three times each. Numbers then fell into the teens, bottoming out at eight (2001) before bouncing back to eighteen (2004) and thirteen (2006). To keep my interest, I often changed texts: Early Modern – Machiavelli, The Prince, Thomas More, Utopia, Francis Bacon, The Great Instauration, or John Locke, The Second Treatise on Civil Government; Enlightenment – Montesquieu, The Persian Letters, Voltaire, Candide, Jean Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on Inequality, or Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels; 19th Century – Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground or The Grand Inquisitor, and Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons; and 20th Century – Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon, George Orwell, 1984, and Jean Paul Sartre, No Exit . Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Women, John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women, Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, and a dramatization of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own examined women’s roles.
I normally supplemented longer works with handouts of shorter documents by other thinkers. In the Nineties, I returned permanently to an anthology that I had adopted earlier: Classics of Western Thought, Vol. 3: The Modern World, edited by E. E. Knoebel. It included selections from most of the intellectuals I had always taught: Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, Pascal, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Voltaire, Burke, Marx and Engels, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Freud, Lenin, Hitler, Sartre, and several others. At the same time, I shifted to assigning texts that showed how the discipline of intellectual history was now practiced. Margaret Jacob’s Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West demonstrated how science made England the first industrial nation. Robert Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History revealed how the ideas and attitudes of the inarticulate might be studied and understood. Roland Stromberg’s Makers of Modern Culture: Five Twentieth Century Thinkers illustrated the more traditional practice of intellectual biography. Several films made abstract ideas accessible. For the study of science, I used Carl Sagan’s popular Cosmos Series: “Harmony of the Worlds” (Johannes Kepler), “One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue” (Charles Darwin), and “Journeys in Space and Time” (Albert Einstein). Sergei Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin (1925) and an edited version of Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will (1936) respectively introduced Russian Communism and German Nazism.
I also taught a version of European Thought and Culture sixteen times as Modern Europe in Perspective for the Credo Honors Program. It fulfilled the Core Curriculum Area D distribution requirement (History, Philosophy, and Religion.) I initially offered American intellectual history in tandem with French Professor Tony McRae’s American Film course. I learned a lot about cinema studies from this experience until Academic Vice President Gerald Hartdagen excluded the course from the program. At his insistence Credo was revised to include what he deemed academically respectable courses devoted to an overarching theme: “Making of the Modern Mind.”
While it was a plumb teaching assignment, Credo always struggled to enroll and retain students. Even when many started few finished. Most dropped out to collect double majors and two or three minors, the favorite undergraduate sport. As I taught sophomores, my enrollment averaged a respectable twenty-five even as it fluctuated between a low of twelve (1992) and a high of forty-two (1988). When I taught the European version for the first time in 1980, I had my best class ever. Among the twenty-six enrolled, twenty-three earned an A. They practically taught themselves in small groups as long as I stayed out of their way. Despite having several superior Credo groups, none ever matched this excellent and enthusiastic class. After new Associate Dean Virginia Coombs launched a review of what she called a moribund program, I withdrew in favor of younger and better colleagues.
When the history department designed the perspectives courses, it included one on Latin America even though no one was qualified to teach it. It was hoped that someone in the Spanish department might offer the course for history credit. Upon hearing new Vice President for Academic Affairs Paul Dovre announce at the fall workshop that ten faculty positions would be eliminated, I decided to make myself more useful by teaching Latin America despite being woefully unprepared. I had read about the conquistadors for United States history, written a paper on the conquest of Mexico for European history, and read a few comparative studies of slavery for Afro-American history. Talks with Latin Americanist Charles Hale (University of Iowa) and Dieter Berninger (Moorhead State University) gave me ideas about topics to cover and books to assign. Most helpfully, Hale suggested focusing on Mexico and the “ABC countries” (Argentina, Brazil, Chile) once independence was achieved. Even so, I had an exceedingly thin store of knowledge, barely keeping ahead of my students in writing lectures and reading assignments during my first year and after.
For information, I relied heavily on Hubert Herring’s well-written and encyclopedic A History of Latin America, John Edwin Fagg’s more current if less interesting Latin America: A General History, and Charles Gibson’s excellent survey of colonial Mexico, Spain in America. Gibson had been the Iowa history chair who admitted me to the doctoral program. For assigned reading, E. Bradford Burns’s brief textbook, Latin America: A Concise Interpretive History and Frank Tannenbaum’s Ten Keys to Latin America competently surveyed the sprawling, complex subject. Eric Wolf’s Sons of the Shaking Earth provided an overview to the Indian peoples of Middle America. My three remaining texts were selected from the Borzoi Books on Latin America series. These were anthologies of highly regarded interpretive essays edited by specialists in the field. The Origins of the Latin American Revolutions, 1808-1826, edited by R. A. Humphreys and John A. Lynch, provided materials on the wars for independence. Once independence was achieved, I developed three broad themes: the quest for political stability (1820-1870), an era of material progress (1870-1920), and nationalism, social change, and economic development (1920 to present). Dictatorship in Spanish America, edited by Hugh Hamill, and Background to Revolution, edited by R. F. Smith, contained several articles addressing these topics. I soon replaced Smith with R. E. Ruiz, Cuba: The Making of a Revolution, which became one of my favorite teaching texts.

After my initial, ill-prepared year, I received a study grant that financed a summer with Concordia Spanish students at the Instituto Technologico de Monterrey. While there I earned six credits in Mexican history and anthropology and read an additional twenty books on Latin American history. I also traveled with the group to Mexico City. Teotihuacan, the Modern Museum of Anthropology, and the Ballet Folklorico de Mexico were tour highlights. The former is a vast archaeological site northeast of Mexico City. The Avenue of the Dead bisects the once-flourishing pre-Columbian city and links the Temple of Quetzalcoatl to the Pyramid of the Moon and the Pyramid of the Sun, which offer panoramic views from their summits.
I taught Latin America twelve times between 1972 and 1985 with an average enrollment of twenty-eight each semester. It peaked at thirty-four (1972) bottomed out at sixteen (1975), when we decided to offer it only once each year. The department farmed it out to Dieter Berninger who taught it annually between 1976 and 1979 while I offered humanities courses and took a one-year sabbatical. I resumed teaching the course annually until the recently hired, more qualified Bruce Cruikshank took it over in 1985. Even though I had managed to read eighty-four books on Latin America over the years, I still lacked the depth of knowledge and the language facility required to do the subject justice. I do not regret doing the course. It increased my knowledge of the Americas and the southern hemisphere’s economic underdevelopment.
I also designed Contemporary American Society, the first colloquium required for a history major under the new curriculum. I offered it six more times during the decade as an integration course, retitled Contemporary American Culture. The department then decided it lacked the staff for teaching two 400-level required courses when our major lost students to the better job prospects afforded by more practical studies like business, communications, and psychology. History therefore dropped its colloquium. I did not mind because the Sixties seemed less relevant with each passing year. Events proved me wrong. By the Nineties, the Sixties were at the crux of culture wars then dividing American politics. Many memoirs and books published at the time would have resonated more with students than other subjects I had chosen to teach. Several graduates have since praised Contemporary American Culture as their best course.
The colloquium examined the United States power structure, excluded groups, and prospects for change. William O’Neill’s Coming Apart: An Informal History of America in 1960’s provided an historical context for discussing books about these topics. John Kenneth Galbraith’s Economics and the Public Purpose and G. William Domhoff’s The Higher Circles: Governing Class in America explained the American power structure and raised key questions. How is power defined? What are its limits? Who has the most power? Was the power structure pluralist, controlled by a power elite, or dominated by a ruling class? Other works depicted the excluded and analyzed factors contributing to their condition: race, sex, class, alienation, apathy, disorganization, and poor education: Michael Harrington’s The Other America: Poverty in the United States, Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, and Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style of American Politics.
Examining future prospects concluded the course. Did excluded groups threaten the establishment? Could they alter the power structure? Would the establishment accommodate them or change? Or would it repress or co-opt dissent? Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals provided practical tips for organizing the have-nots. E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered examined several global challenges to United States hegemony. For example, an energy shortage and resource scarcity might widen the gap between haves and have-nots within the United States, the United States and the Third World, and the Third World and the Fourth World (the real have nots). These conditions could destabilize the establishment and foster more authoritarian and militaristic exercises of power.
The history department retained the research seminar as the capstone for its major. The course sought to develop essential skills of the professional historian. These included abilities to 1) research historical topics thoroughly by locating and using all relevant sources; 2) evaluate primary documents and formulate historical generalizations from them; 3) assess and evaluate conflicting historical interpretations of past movements and events; and 4) write a coherent, properly documented historical narrative. Seminar members must manifest a cooperative spirit in critiquing each other’s work and presenting their finished papers on schedule.
I offered the Research Seminar seven times—1978, 1983-1984, and 1992-1994. It was difficult to teach. Students struggled to meet expectations. Researching and writing a long paper overwhelmed many as the years passed. The concept of primary sources mystified most. Others resisted local history topics for which documents were at hand. To develop nuts and bolts skills I assigned Jacques Barzun and Henry Graff, The Modern Researcher or A Guide to Historical Method edited by Robert Jones Shafer. Mark Gilderhus, History and Historians, imparted some basic knowledge about philosophy of history and historiography. To ease “big paper anxiety,” I broke the process down into several graded steps, enabling students to earn sufficient points for passing grades in the event their final papers fell flat. My grading formula assigned 15 percent to topic selection, thesis formulation, and note cards; 10 percent to the Shafer-Gilderhus examination; 20 percent on class participation, presentation, and critique; and 55 percent to writing a bibliographical essay and two drafts of the final paper.
This was not a fail-safe system. One year five people got F’s by doing nothing. Still, twenty-four of seventy-seven enrolled in my seminars earned an A or A- by diligently completing each step. The class had some distinguished alumni. The Red River Valley Historian published Earl Lewis’s paper on African Americans in Fargo-Moorhead. He earned a doctorate from the University of Minnesota and had an outstanding career before being named head of the Andrew Mellon Foundation and elected president of the Organization of American Historians. After obtaining a master’s degree from Tufts University, Joel Amlie embarked upon a Foreign Service career. Alan Bjerga took his communications master’s degree from Minnesota, became a Bloomberg News journalist, and was elected National Press Club president. While I do not claim credit for their achievements, it appears I did them no harm.
My love for the introductory humanities courses at ISTC led me to teach the subject at Concordia. In spring 1975, French Professor Don Negri and I offered Humanities 201, “Enlightenment and Revolution: France and America in the 18th Century,” an introductory course in a new humanities major we recently had helped design. We used our respective disciplines of literature and history to study how Enlightenment ideas shaped the American and French Revolutions. We assigned Robert Palmer’s The World of the French Revolution, Carl Becker’s The Heavenly City of the 18th-Century Philosophers, Voltaire’s Candide, La Mettrie’s Man a Machine, The Enlightenment: A Comprehensive Anthology edited by Peter Gay, and The Political Writings of Thomas Jefferson edited by Edward Dumbauld. The course attracted forty-seven students; the heavy reading, two essay examinations, and research papers soon drove eleven from the fold. Evaluations were good, not great. Negri and I did not get along and did not repeat the course.
Teaching the 1977 Tri-College Humanities Forum for two semesters with Moorhead State philosopher David Myers and NDSU German professor Johannes Vazulik was one of the best classroom experiences I have enjoyed in a long career. They both knew a lot more about what they were doing than I did, although Johannes credited my organizational skills for putting his and David’s ideas into a coherent course on “The Rebellious Spirit—the Nature of Creative Thought.” We wanted to know what compelled creative thinkers to break with tradition and accepted theory despite hostility and social pressures. We explored the thought of Galileo, Marx, Beethoven, Nietzsche, Freud, and others. Feminists attacked us for neglecting women, an oversight we corrected with anthropologist Margaret Mead’s autobiography, Blackberry Winter, and Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Thirty-five students, including eighteen from Concordia, enrolled for the first term taught at MSU. The second semester at NDSU attracted twenty-two from Concordia as well as those from the other two schools.
During the early Eighties, I served on a curriculum review commission that established an introduction to the liberal arts as a required first-year course. Ironically, I was the only commission member that voted against it in committee and the only one that ever taught in the program because Academic Vice President David Gring threatened to cut history department staffing if I did not. Principia 101, “Justice and the Just Society,” provided all freshmen with a common intellectual experience. Course objectives 1) nurtured understanding of liberal arts values; 2) furthered development of the liberal arts skills of critical inquiry, reading, discussion, and writing; and 3) stimulated a desire to apply liberal arts values and skills throughout the college years and beyond.
I taught Principia seven times between 1985 and 1989. Each section normally enrolled about thirty students and ideally shared a common syllabus. Most like me followed it more closely than a few prima donnas who did what they damned well pleased. The class began by discussing the liberal arts and then examined ancient Greek and Judeo-Christian conceptions of justice through reading the Biblical books “Amos” and “Matthew” and selections from Plato’s The Republic. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (socialism), William Graham Sumner, What the Social Classes Owe to Each Other (capitalism), and the 1984 Bishop’s Letter (Catholicism) presented modern conceptions of economic justice. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland: A Lost Feminist Novel introduced the injustice of sexual prejudice. Memorandum, a film about the Holocaust, and selections by Russian poet Yevtushenko and composer Shostakovich stimulated conversations about the arts and the injustice of racial discrimination. The course concluded by looking at the social responsibilities of science through reading Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Bertold Brecht’s Galileo.
After I returned in 1990 from a paid leave to write the Concordia centennial history, I dropped Principia intending to focus on teaching history. Then assessment and accountability emerged as dominant higher education buzzwords and compelled me to take part grudgingly in departmental self-study and assessment planning. As a consequence, new teaching assignments gave me lot more work. With college enrollments at an all-time high of more than 2900, we now had nine historians instead of five. Six were tenure track; two were faculty spouses looking for work; and one had a two-year temporary appointment extended for more than a decade. To free up more history courses for everyone, I dropped out of Credo, returned to teaching Principia, picked up a Modern Europe survey section to relieve our over-taxed Europeanist, and took on Modern England that had been farmed out to a NDSU professor.
When I resumed teaching Principia in 1996, a new theme made it a new preparation. “The Examined Life” explored the nature of wisdom by reading Plato’s “Apology” and the Biblical book of “Job.” Augustine’s Confessions, Dante’s Inferno, and Simone Weil’s “Spiritual Autobiography” examined faith. Rene Descartes’ Discourse on Method and Francis Bacon’s “Four Idols” depicted ways of knowing. Evelyn Fox Keller’s “Feeling for the Organism,” Alice Walker’s “In Search for Our Mother’s Gardens,” and Ludwig Beethoven’s “Heilgenstadt Testament” offered alternative views to conventional science. Selections from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America examined community. Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s “The Solitude of Self” and Tillie Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing” analyzed women’s lives. Zitkala-Sa’s “The School Days of an Indian Girl” and Michael Dorris’s Yellow Raft in Blue Water described aspects of Native American existence. Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country dramatized South African apartheid and Vicktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning probed the Holocaust. I based grades on attendance, participation, Reader’s Journals, and four essay examinations. I taught the new Principia theme seven times before retiring.
On leaving the Credo program, I soon offered a regular section of Modern Europe in Perspective from 1500. I did not mind assigning the textbooks picked by my colleague because Western Civilization Ideas, Politics and Society: From the 1400s and Sources of the Western Tradition, Vol. II: Renaissance to the Present had a strong intellectual history orientation. I varied supplementary texts during the seven times I offered the course, ending with Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre, Mary Shelly, Frankenstein, and Elie Wiesel, Night. I kept formal lectures short, held daily small group discussions, and showed film clips frequently, including The Return of Martin Guerre and two versions of Frankenstein, stoutly arguing that Mel Brooks had more accurately depicted Shelly’s creature. I determined grades with three essay examinations, an analytical paper on a professional journal article and a primary text, daily work of short writing assignments, and attendance. I found “normal” students as much fun as bright Credo ones.
Modern England—my last new course—offered an interpretive study of English politics, society, and ideas from the start of Tudor monarchy in 1485 through World War II. I taught it six times to just over one hundred students, who were often excellent; one-third earned an A- or A. Classes involved short lectures, overheads, film clips, and small group discussion of the reading. Written work included three essay examinations, a research prospectus, an annotated bibliography, and a paper. The course refined and built upon the skills and knowledge that students had developed in their lower division history courses. These included analysis and critical thinking, techniques of good writing, accessing computer data, knowledge of historical literature, and executing an analytical research paper using primary and secondary sources. The department hoped thereby to better prepare students for the capstone Research Seminar.
My course design did not match the usual two-semester break at 1603 or 1688, which complicated textbook selection. I first assigned Clayton and David Roberts, A History of England, Vol. II: 1688 to the Present and Walter L. Arnstein, ed., The Past Speaks: Sources and Problems in British History, Vol. II: Since 1688. I put the first volumes of each set on library reserve. Eventually, I assigned Susan Brigden, New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors, 1485-1603, Stuart E. Prall and David Harris Willson, A History of England, Vol. II, 1603 to the Present, and Arnstein, supplemented by handouts of Tudor and Stuart documents, Charles Dickens, Hard Times, and George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier.
During forty-three years of professing from September 1964 to April 2007, I taught six thousand or more students in thirty separately titled courses. A small college allowed me to range widely over many cultures and chronological periods and avoid narrow large university specialization. The downside is that I could be convicted of dilettantism. Still, my student evaluations were very good once I became established. Some faculty evaluators described me as “a master teacher,” and administrators generally accepted that judgment. Others with whom I worked did not agree. As one snarkily remarked: “Some people aren’t all they are cracked up to be.” His problem stemmed from some Credo students preferring my class to his. Still, several in every class I taught would have seconded his negative view. Teaching quality varies according to the beholder. Techniques may appeal to most but not all. Deficiencies never ceased diminishing the luster my successes.
Devoted to careful course preparation and teaching well, I seized on the several professional development opportunities offered by the college and attended many summer seminars over the years: “Teaching Improvement” (1972); “Humanities” and “Credo” (1977); “Plato on Education” (1978); “Work, Life Values, and the Liberal Arts” (1980); “Principia” (1985-2002); Global Studies (1987-1988); “Feminist Pedagogy” (1991); “Christian Faith and the Liberal Arts” (1991); and Computer Skills (1991-2001). Although I most enjoyed exploring philosophical issues with colleagues, eventually workshops focused more on practical pedagogical skills. The college also made available modest travel funds enabling more frequent attendance at national and regional history conferences than I might have done otherwise: once each at the American Historical and American Studies associations; twice at Women Historians of the Upper Midwest; and eighteen times at the Organization of American Historians. In addition, I went twenty-three times to the Northern Great Plains History Conference where I chaired seven sessions, presented seven papers, and commented four times. Conferences kept me connected professionally, facilitated research and publication, and gave intellectual stimulation.
Serving the Community
College and community service were the third and fourth faculty handbook evaluation criteria. After being free from service at USD and in my initial Concordia year. I totaled over one hundred committee memberships from 1971 to 2003. I eased into the process on the Lectures Committee. It had no work because the college had no funds for speakers. Paradise ended the next year when elected to the Senate as well as the Student Affairs Committee. The latter met weekly; it addressed issues liberal collegians raised and a conservative president resisted. It was no place for a tenure aspirant, I thought. Being twice elected chair made my situation more precarious. Ending women’s hours and giving them the right to smoke on campus acceded to collegiate demands. Yet interdorm visitation proved tougher to resolve.
When the Student Association (SA) proposed expanding inter- visitation hours, President Knutson stood in the dormitory doorway, shouting “No! No! No!” Bedroom visitation fostered fornication, he believed. After two years of agitation, the president approved new hours of 1:00 to 5:00 p.m. every Saturday and Sunday for all dormitories. His pietistic legacy lingered for a long time after his retirement although President Dovre defended his administration’s relatively restrictive policies on rational grounds. SA presidents pushed for more intervisitation and the college at times incrementally increased hours only if it accepted the reasons students offered. Concordia’s “24-hour intervisitation policy (per week)” became a joke that collegians ruefully shared. Not until the 21st century did presidents Pam Jolicoeur and Bill Craft respectively permit coed dormitories by floor and end intervisitation restrictions. As Dovre later admitted, parental support for limited incremental changes had been eroding even before he retired in 1999.
Perhaps my most important college service came on vice presidential search committees. I was first named in 1973 to recommend a vice president for student affairs when Dean Dovre appointed the student affairs committee to do the job. He fortunately overlooked me as the current chair when he picked past chair Dorothy Johnson to head the effort. His oversight was just fine by me! The process went well and we recommended an excellently qualified candidate for the position. Unhappily for us, President Knutson did not agree. He lacked sympathy for the recent higher education tread toward relying on search committees. Intending to retire soon, he also did not want to saddle his successor with a newly appointed vice president. He therefore ignored our recommendation and instead named two on-campus applicants as co-deans of student affairs. One of them, Morris Lanning, headed the office with considerable distinction for more than forty years. Maybe Knutson made the right choice after all.
Three times the faculty voted me on committees seeking vice presidents for academic affairs. The first effort by a large and unwieldy body headed by former Dean Carl Bailey resulted in the appointment of historian Gerald Hartdagen. He had strong recommendations for good working relationships, industrious leadership, and straightforwardness during his extensive university-wide committee experience at Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis. Some (including me) thought insular Concordia would benefit from an outsider’s fresh perspective. Be careful of what you wish for, I soon learned. While Hartdagen proved an efficient administrator, what passed as straightforward at an urban university seemed abrasive at Concordia. Many were happy to see him depart for a deanship elsewhere. Hartdagen’s Assistant Dean, David Gring, proved a happier choice by the next committee. He retained strong faculty support until he left a decade later for the presidency of Roanoke College in Virginia.
Being on paid leave to write the college centennial history spared me from the process when the search for Gring’s successor occurred. Yet a decade later I would be picked as chair of the search that ended in appointing Elizabeth Bull Danielson, the college’s first female academic vice president. She took the lead in launching a long-deferred curriculum review, managed to maintain the college’s benchmarks for salaries and benefits, and helped end the institution’s contentious tenure-quota policy. Despite these noteworthy achievements, many disliked her blunt manner they associated with her maiden name (Bull). This pervasive criticism cured me of serving on any more college-wide search committees. Apart from Gring, with whom I parted on poor terms, my choices had not proved successful.
Equally significant service came from my membership on the Professional Policies Committee (later retitled Promotion, Tenure, and Evaluation). The faculty elected me for twelve yearlong terms and the senate named me chair six times. Promotion and tenure decisions were always hard and certain to provoke inquiries from spurned nominees and departments. Those occasions when the president or dean had not forwarded the committee recommendation always placed the chair in a difficult position. I normally described the process to the aggrieved candidate and encouraged them to speak with the president and the dean about why they had not been promoted. I also advised them it would not be productive to mention committee support. The tenure-quota, which the president backed, was the most contentious question. As chair, I brought two compromise proposals before the senate to address grievances and to enable tenuring desirable faculty. After President Dovre retired, I urged the committee and Dean Danielson to study doing away with the tenure-quota. President Tom Thomsen consequently recommended abolition, which the Regents approved.
Many curriculum-related bodies occupied my time and energy. I held Core Curriculum Committee memberships on four separate occasions, totaling nine years, and chaired the body twice. I also served on the Humanities and Social Studies Program Committees that designed those respective majors. I was a fifteen-year member of the Humanities Committee, and chaired it from 1993 to 1999. I worked on the Blueprint III Pre-Planning Group and co-chaired the Blueprint Study Commission for Academic Life. Because no good deed goes unpunished, this put me on the commission that wrote the Agenda for Academic Life. The document brought about a redesigned the Core Curriculum introduced by the common Principia experience. While I refused to become the program director, I did serve on the Principia Steering Committee. When the college launched another academic self-study, I chaired Curriculum Review Team I that had been charged with developing a framework. As a longtime senator, I participated in many debates about legislating curriculum issues.
The emergence of systematic faculty evaluation corresponded with my arrival at Concordia. I took part in an early teaching workshop and the history department pilot study of evaluation. The policy adopted in 1975 called for three-year evaluations of every faculty member. It sentenced me to fifty-one teaching evaluation committees during the next twenty-eight years. I chaired many of these and wrote the evaluation reports. Besides historians, I evaluated business, classics, library, literature, music, religion, sociology, social work, and philosophy professors. It was time-consuming, soul numbing, and even enlightening!
Academic chairs generally held three-year terms and ideally rotated among all department members. I took my turn on three occasions, which put me in the faculty senate to which I was regularly elected for three-year terms at other times. Hence, I served thirty-one years in the Senate from 1972 to 2003 with three and one half years off for good behavior (i.e. paid and sabbatical leaves). My lengthy membership might be regarded as an honor bestowed on me by faculty peers. Like the tarred-and-feathered character in one of Abe Lincoln’s stories, “I would have rather walked!” In any case, I question my worthiness given periodic spells of terminal irritation triggered by what I regarded as wrong-headed policies.
My long, varied, occasionally meritorious record qualified me for administration in the eyes of a deluded few. In 1975, the president’s assistant encouraged my applying for assistant dean. The president believed such work groomed more valuable faculty leadership. When philosopher Tom Christianson, a man whose intelligence I greatly admired, learned about this he said simply: “The job would consume him.” He was right! Knowing I could not stand the heat kept me as far away from the kitchen as possible. Still, some committee work put me closer to the flame than I wanted to be. When President Thomsen called me about becoming the acting Vice President for Academic Affairs in 2001, I knew that sociologist Polly Fassinger already had proposed mathematician Jim Forde and historian Linda Johnson for sharing the job. Considering them more qualified than me made it easy to say no to the president. Realizing he had awakened me at the early hour of nine o’clock in the evening made it easy for him to accept.
My extensive college service left me with little time or energy for community tasks. This did not matter for personal advancement. Still, my lack of visibility did nothing to enhance the college’s public reputation. When called upon, I accepted invitations to speak. For example, I gave several talks on Congregationalism to groups at Barnesville, Detroit Lakes, and Moorhead. I delivered the annual Tri-College History Lecture on Concordia history and gave fourteen additional talks about the Concordia College history to the Red River Valley Heritage Society, the Moorhead Rotary Club, the Trinity Lutheran Church Adult Forum, and other groups. I also held several leadership positions at my church: Council, Diaconate, Stewardship Committee Chair, Moderator, and Trustees. While secretary of the latter board, I handled both the budget preparation and the stewardship campaign during two terms totaling six years.
Since retirement, I have tried to give more back to the community by serving fourteen years as First Congregational Church Clerk as well as taking positions on the Moorhead Cemetery and the Fargo Moorhead Communiversity boards in 2008 and 2011 respectively. I taught courses in the FM Communiversity on “Local Economic History,” “Railroads and the Birth of Fargo and Moorhead,” “The Solomon Comstock Family,” and “American Lives, American Values, American Culture.” In 2015, Concordia celebrated the 50th anniversary of Communiversity by honoring its founder, James Hofrenning. Shortly afterward, financial exigency compelled the college to give the program a decent burial. I mourned its passing because I really enjoyed volunteering for that organization. Meanwhile, I gave twenty talks on my Fargo and Moorhead book, fifteen more about my Iowa boyhood book, and several others on my Probstfield family book to the Zandbroz Bookstore, several Senior Centers, Kiwanis, Moorhead Jaycees, Fargo Fine Arts Club, Tre-Lag Stevne, the Moorhead library, and other community groups.
It seemed like the work required for teaching and service was never done, and constrained our social life. History colleague Dave Sandgren and his wife Carol and political scientist Peter Hovde and his wife Paula were good friends. who stood as baptismal sponsors for our daughters. Sadly, divorces ruptured these relationships. We established more enduring ties with Old Testament Professor Les Meyer and his wife Joan Meyer with whom we played pinochle and still broke bread even after they moved to St. Cloud until Les died in 2019. We celebrated wedding anniversaries for more than forty years with World Religion Professor Larry and his wife Lynda until he passed away. Sociologist Nick Ellig and his wife Donna shared a decade of going out on Friday nights for a meal and movie. For nearly thirty years, we played bridge on weekends with philosopher Gregg Muilenburg and his wife Pat. After our children finished college, our socializing shifted from to family and friendships faded.

We kept in touch with some Iowa City people. Joan and Robert Klaus hosted us each summer for nearly a decade until they moved away to Champaign-Urbana. We visited them there once, saw them a time or two in Chicago, and three times at their retirement home in Galena before Robert passed away. Kathy and Russ Menard returned to Minnesota in 1976 when he took a job at the University. Our frequent visits to their St. Paul home meant concerts at the Ordway and Orchestra Hall, theatre at the Guthrie and other venues, and many movies. Our children grew up together while we vacationed at various rented lake cabins. We became known to neighbors as “the readers” because only the kids swam. Tennis doubles filled our mornings. Gin and Tonics told us it was four o’clock. Weenie-beanie hot dish was everyone’s favorite meal. We visited less frequently after Russ suffered a stroke and our children married and raised families of their own. Russ, a nationally known economic and slavery historian, died in 2023.
My modest professing salary rose from $11,000 to $72,000; Jo’s secretarial income peaked at $26,000. It was enough to raise a family and purchase our first and only house near the college. Daughter Rachel arrived three weeks after we moved in. During the Eighties, we vacationed on both the West and East coasts at Disneyland and Washington, D.C. Both girls traveled with us on a May Seminar to Greece, Italy, Paris, and London, displaying more maturity than some collegians who generously included them. They took music and gymnastics lessons and acquired excellent educations at Moorhead High School and St. Olaf College. Both were better students than their parents. Kristen was Valedictorian, Phi Beta Kappa, and earned a master’s degree in physical therapy at Iowa and a doctorate in exercise science at SUNY – Buffalo. Rachel might have undertaken graduate study but chose a less stressful life. After they left home, its small size made downsizing unnecessary. Thanks to TIAA-CREF, other investments, rising real estate values, inheritances totaling $430,000. and thrifty living, we accumulated substantial assets. Fifty years ago, I scoffed when Development Vice President Roger Swenson said, “A lot of people are millionaires today!” Yet we miraculously joined their ranks. Our thrifty, agrarian parents of modest means surely would be surprised.