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Called to Reckon: Replacing History and Reclaiming Mission at a Midwestern College

Editat de Jane E. Simonsen Cuvânt înainte de Steven Bahls Contribuţii de Harrison Phillis, Sarah Lashley, Lauren Hammond-Ford, Monica M. Smith, Chris Strunk, Lizandra Gomez-Ramirez, Robert Burke, Mark Safstrom, Jason A. Mahn Epilog de Andrea Talentino
en Limba Engleză Paperback – 12 ian 2026
A bold, necessary model for institutional self-examination
Augustana College, a predominantly white institution in Rock Island, Illinois, was founded by Swedish Lutheran settlers with a mission to educate for the common good and “serve the neighbor so that all may flourish.” This collection—written by historians, alumnae, diversity leaders, and religion scholars—reveals the stories of those who have held the college accountable to its foundational mission. 
Drawing from archival research and interviews with students, staff, faculty, administrators, and community members, Called to Reckon weaves together issues of race, indigeneity, sexuality, religion, and belonging, linking past conflicts to present-day challenges. The essays examine the “town and gown” dynamic, exploring tensions between the college and its more diverse surrounding community. Other contributors recount key moments in the growing presence and power of Black students on campus from 1925 to 1975, placed in the context of African and African American history. A chapter documents the history of Latinos/x Unidos, while another essay demonstrates how queer members of the Augustana community helped reshape the campus in the post-Stonewall era. 
By placing Augustana’s history in conversation with broader movements, this book offers a rich, critical perspective on the liberal arts tradition itself. It makes a key contribution to the growing field of whiteness studies, particularly in the understudied Midwest, and is an essential read for anyone committed to understanding how educational institutions can move toward justice—not just in aspiration, but in action. Useful for faculty, administrators, staff, and trustees alike, Called to Reckon challenges all of higher education to live up to its highest ideals.
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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9780809339853
ISBN-10: 0809339854
Pagini: 372
Ilustrații: 27
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 25 mm
Greutate: 0.59 kg
Ediția:First Edition
Editura: Southern Illinois University Press
Colecția Southern Illinois University Press

Notă biografică

Jane E. Simonsen is a professor of history and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies and the Richard A. Swanson Chair of Social Thought at Augustana College. She is the author of Making Home Work:Domesticity and Native American Assimilation in the American West, 1860-1919.
Contributions by Steven Bahls, Robert Burke, Lizandra Gomez-Ramirez, Lauren Hammond-Ford, Sarah Lashley, Jason Mahn, Harrison Phillis, Mark Safstrom, Monica M. Smith, Christopher Strunk, and Andrea Talentino. 

Extras

From the Introduction
A college that is more than a century and a half old accumulates stories. Whether collected in archives, set down in institutional histories, or passed on between generations of students and faculty, stories help to define a community. They remind tellers and listeners of those who came before, provide origin stories that root people in place, and help to craft a shared sense of identity.
But institutional memory can fail—must fail, in fact, to create the sense of progress and coherence crucial to so many histories. These failures become faultlines, cracks in the landscape of the past through which wandering stories and voices drift, like restless, unnamed ghosts. Some say that ghost stories do more than imagine that the departed return to rectify unredressed crimes: they link communities to places that have been the sites of collective invasions and national traumas. The specters of enslaved people and Indians commonly appear in homes and on landscapes (often respectively) in American ghost stories. Tiya Miles, in her study of how “dark tourism” capitalizes on histories of slavery, describes these tales as a “cultural process” through which groups communicate ideas about events “excluded from active, embraced memory.” Colleen Boyd and Coll Thrush, investigating the phenomenon of “Indian ghosts,” write that legends of hauntings “disrupt dominant and official historical narratives” and are one method through which societies simultaneously grapple with and dismiss “patterns in the history of conquest” such as slavery and land dispossession. Miles explains that ghost stories “call to mind disturbing historical knowledge that we feel compelled to face, but they also contain the threat of that knowledge by marking it as unbelievable”—lurking just below the surface of official histories.
Augustana College, like many long-established institutions, has its hauntings. It was founded in 1860 by the Augustana Synod of the Lutheran Church in America as a seminary serving immigrant Swedes in Chicago. It moved to Paxton, Illinois for a decade before the first building opened, in 1875, at its current location a half mile south of the Mississippi River where it bends west through Rock Island, Illinois. Gradually adding undergraduate degrees, it continued to train mostly ministers, serving Swedish immigrants and their children from Chicago, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Kansas. In its new location, though, it attracted more women and American-born students and grew along with rising national college enrollment in the latter half of the twentieth century. In 1963, the seminary moved to Chicago, leaving the college as a traditional four-year undergraduate liberal arts institution.
Today, the campus covers 115 acres, with an imposing, domed Old Main, a grassy Quad, and dorms above a wooded ravine. It is often named as one of the nation’s most beautiful campuses. It has an undergraduate population of about 2500 students, and while the college is affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), the vast majority are not Lutheran. More Black students began attending in the 1960s, followed by Latinx students in the 1980s and ‘90s. Between 1980 and 2005, the number of domestic students of color fluctuated between about 5-10% of the student body; after 2006, this number rose steadily, even dramatically. The international student population was almost non-existent until the late 1990s. Since 2014, however, the number of international students has more than quadrupled. As of 2024, 45% of its student body identified as a domestic student of color (24.4%) or an international student (19.9%). One story of the college, then, is one of physical and cultural growth, enlarging its footprint as it embraced new and diverse populations. But most triumphal stories, Miles reminds us, have their ghostly doubles. What stories might our ghosts tell us?  
Andreen Hall, a dormitory finished in 1937, is rumored to host at least three ghosts. Students have claimed to hear furniture moving, to see lights flickering and faucets turning on, and to witness the unexplained opening and closing of doors. That ghostly sightings are informed by shared anxieties is clear: in the early 2000s, all three of the ghosts reported in the Observer were mysterious male figures in the halls of a women’s dorm. According to a 1969 article in the campus newspaper, the Augustana Observer, reports of ghosts in Andreen had surfaced the previous year. The author, who called themselves “rabbit,” explained that “this year the conditions have gotten worse and more people are believing their Ouija boards concerning ghosts in Andreen Hall.” While “rabbit’s” voice is edged in irony, the reports of paranormal activity in the dorm were likely due to campus concerns around shared living spaces that were linked to broader power struggles. In 1969, the campus was steeped in unrest: student leaders were campaigning for a Student Bill of Rights, which protested restrictive dorm policies, especially for women. Women were reporting feeling unsafe on campus due to several break-ins. The Vietnam war draft was looming. The new Afro-American Society was pressing for greater attention to Civil Rights—the campus had just hosted a Black Power Symposium two weeks before the story ran. In 1968, three Black student protesters had been shot and killed by the Highway Patrol at South Carolina State University, and by the end of the 1969-70 academic year, four students would be gunned down at Kent State University by members of the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC). Just days later, two Black students were killed by state patrolmen at Jackson State University in Mississippi. Augustana College, like most across the nation, roiled with confusion over how to confront student activism and state-sponsored violence. 
Unsettling presences arise in unsettling times. One of the ghosts of Andreen who apparently made his presence felt in the turbulent year of 1969 was reputedly that of Chauncey Lee Morton, Jr., shot and killed in a dorm room by a friend a decade earlier. Morton was one of a tiny handful of students of color—perhaps as few as three or four—when he arrived at Augustana in January of 1958. A resident of Chicago’s Hyde Park and a member of Salem Lutheran Church, an old Swedish-Lutheran Church that integrated along with its neighborhood in the early 1950s, Morton had graduated from Chicago’s Parker High School in January and enrolled at Augustana for the spring semester. He was an aspiring pre-med student who hoped to follow in the steps of his father, a physician who served southside Chicago’s Black community at Provident Hospital. Morton participated in Track and Field at Augustana and curated a weekly segment of jazz music on WAUG, the college’s student radio station. His involvement suggests he was not afraid to take part in college activities, despite there being little support for students of color. Nevertheless, it must have been jarring to leave the Black community in southside Chicago for a predominantly—almost exclusively—white college.
While at Augustana, Morton befriended Richard Buchholtz, a fellow student in Andreen. Buchholz, who was white, bespectacled, and youthful looking, wrestled at Augustana and had been a member of the South Shore High School ROTC. South Shore, mostly white when it opened in 1940, was integrating by the time that Buchholtz attended in the late 1950s. The two first-years were described by Morton’s roommate Lynn Christian as the best of friends, and this sentiment was echoed by their peers. Both were known to have taken part in the masculine postwar culture of “phrigging,” or pranking, on campus—a ritual of belonging that likely would have tempted two young men attempting to find their places in a new environment. Not two weeks before his death, Morton, Buchholtz, and five other Augustana College students had stolen a parade float from Saint Ambrose College, across the river in Davenport, Iowa. The float was burned sometime on October 12th; the owner of the trailer was seeking $250 in damages.
Both Morton and Buchholtz were also gun owners. Morton had falsified his age when the two had purchased .22 caliber pistols from a Rock Island sporting goods store a few weeks earlier, and Buchholtz’s ROTC experience would have made him familiar with firearms. Buchholtz told authorities that they would sometimes use the guns to fire blanks in the dorms to startle dormitory residents. He also described a kind of dormitory “horseplay” that involved one student placing a gun against the head of another and pulling the trigger. In the room where Morton had been shot, authorities discovered holes from .22 caliber bullets in the window screen and others in the wall that had been taped over or filled. According to Buchholtz, on the afternoon of October 24, 1958, they were meeting in Morton’s room to discuss repairs to the stolen trailer. Whether “playing” or arguing, Morton and Buchholtz struggled over the gun; Buchholtz shot Morton, who was pronounced dead upon arrival at Moline Public Hospital at 4:45 p.m., and then hid the gun in nearby Lincoln Park. When the Chicago Defender, the nation’s leading Black newspaper, contacted Morton’s parents, they were “too distraught to give the Defender a statement about the tragic shooting.”
While Buchholtz was charged with manslaughter and appeared before a grand jury, it dismissed the charges, deciding that Morton’s death was the unintentional result of a “friendly scuffle.” Other than acknowledging that Morton was a “Negro,” race did not enter into the conversation—perhaps the young men’s friendship made it impossible for the community to imagine that race might have influenced their relationship, even under the stress of being implicated for phrigging. For their part, college officials denied allegations that young men used firearms to disrupt the constraints of dorm life, hewing to a story in which Buchholtz was both innocent and untrustworthy: a press release claimed that “Publicity which indicates that horseplay with guns was a common occurrence in the dormitory is contrary to fact, and must be understood as a statement from a person who has already told conflicting stories of his own unfortunate accident.” The college held a memorial service on Tuesday, October 28. Morton’s counselor spoke and the Dean of the College, George Arbaugh, delivered a response. The day before the service, the AugustanaObserver printed a message with the title ‘In Memoriam:’ “The Augustana Observer, on behalf of the administration, faculty, and students wishes to express its deepest sympathy to the family and friends of Chauncey Morton. We know that sources of solace are far too few to all concerned with this tragic death.”While Buchholtz was asked to leave the college for the remainder of the school year, the College noted that “Future re-instatement will depend on factors not yet determined.” Though he never returned to Augustana, Buchholtz was not permanently expelled nor was he ever convicted of a crime. His innocence, and the college’s, was preserved.
[end of excerpt]

Cuprins

Contents
List of Illustrations
Foreword
Stephen Bahls
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Naming Our Ghosts
Harrison Phillis and Jane Simonsen
1. Towards Right Relations with Native Neighbors
Jane Simonsen
2. Serving Students and Neighbors: Community Implications of Campus Expansion
Sarah Lashley
3. Performing Blackness: A History in Three Acts
Lauren Hammond-Ford and Jane Simonsen
4. Institutionalizing Voices of the Marginalized: A Journey toward Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Justice
Monica M. Smith
5. Contested Counterspaces: Creating Latinos/x Unidos at a Midwestern College
Chris Strunk and Lizandra Gomez-Ramirez
6. Queering the Landscape: Radical Hospitality at the “Good Life” College
Robert Burke
7. Toward a Pedagogy of Accompaniment: Transformative Community, Spiritual Formation, and Augustana's Useable Past
Mark Safstrom
8. The Value(s) of Lutheran Liberal Arts in a Neoliberal Age
Jason A. Mahn
Epilogue
Andrea Talentino
Bibliography

Recenzii

“What happens when a college creates time and space to think about the ways that it has changed over its history? The result is beautifully documented in this book: a reframing of the institution’s story that gives credit to the past, confesses mistakes made along the way, and re-situates the institution in its (markedly different) twenty-first century setting. Academic leaders at all levels, and across the entire higher education landscape, have much to learn from this institution’s remarkable effort.”—David S. Cunningham, author of Reading is Believing and editor of Vocation Across the Academy
“In a world grappling with ecological despair, divisive paradigms, and spiritual disconnection, this book offers a luminous and grounded vision for hope. It calls us back into the sacredness of inclusion and deeper reflection. This is not only a work of literary beauty—it is a theological and pedagogical reckoning.”—Lamont Anthony Wells, executive director of the Network of ELCA Colleges and Universities

Descriere

Called to Reckon offers a non-traditional history of Augustana College by centering the narratives of racially and ethnically diverse students and educators often overlooked in the institution’s past. The book traces how the college, founded by Swedish Lutherans with a mission to educate for the common good and “serve the neighbor so that all may flourish,” has been challenged to live up to these values over its 160-year history.