20 An Ethic of Love

I believe in the ideas, goals, and intentions of a liberal arts education as practiced by the faculty and students of Gustavus Adolphus College. I witness every day how students at Gustavus are allowed and encouraged by myself and my faculty colleagues on campus to think and learn across disciplines, make connections between the intellectual, the personal, the shared, the ethical, the spiritual, and the political, and pursue these endeavors in a community that expects and maintains high standards of teaching, learning, and scholarship. I respect the college’s founding by a community of immigrants from Sweden who came in search of a new life over 150 years ago; I would like to (continue) to help Gustavus remember its roots as an institution of higher learning whose purpose was initially, and continues to be, to educate young people of promise who will teach, serve, and be active in their communities. Gustavus still attracts such young people today—though they are coming most-often from countries other than Sweden—and, in the spirit of its founding, should continue to embrace the opportunities to open its doors to the recently immigrated while simultaneously respecting its foundations. Sweden today is a highly pluralistic society—with all of the challenges and joys that come from this. It is a consensual democracy with governments praised for their transparency, and with structures of power and governance in place that intend to work to promote equality across lines of gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, race, religion, and country of origin, yet all of this—all of our world—is constantly and rapidly changing. On a daily basis I teach about contemporary Scandinavia and trace with students how these societies have changed and are changing.

I have worked on committees, as an advisor of students who are majors and minors in our department as well as with those who have never taken a course from me but with whom I have interacted and connected, to try to help promote greater cultural awareness and sensitivity on this campus in order to help realize Gustavus’s efforts to be a liberal-arts community open and welcoming of all. I encourage students to study and work away (through volunteering locally, on a HECUA program in the Twin Cities, on a semester program at sea or in Nepal or in Iceland), and to be curious about the world—from the most local to the most global worlds we share—and those who live in it. I focus my curriculum, classroom discussions, and daily interactions on what we know and what we don’t know, what is familiar and what is not familiar, and all the gray spaces that around found in between these. It is through trying to understand the gray spaces and venture into them, I argue, that maybe a more peaceful world could come to be. I want to help students reach their full potential in all the facets of their lives. Ultimately, I operate and teach with a pretty strong ethic of love, an ethic that I believe has always been central to guiding the teaching, learning, and work done at Gustavus, even long before its current Mission was written.