Loren Swartzendruber ’76, MDiv ’79, DMin

After a couple of decades of massive scandals in the U.S. financial world – Enron, the savings and loan industry, the federal bail-out of this country’s top banks – it has become commonplace at business departments at colleges and universities across the country to speak of the value of “ethics” and of considering “the public good.”

At the risk of sounding immodest about EMU, our business and accounting professors have been raising such matters since this institution began offering business classes. Many of those interviewed for Crossroads credited their church-rooted parents for instilling in them the importance of maintaining their integrity and caring for the well-being of others, both at home and at work. But they also credited EMU for reinforcing this ethos.

That was certainly my personal experience, growing up in a business-oriented family and then attending EMU. My father owned a farm-implement dealership in Kalona, Iowa, where I worked from an early age through college. My first experience with “fundraising” was going into the fields to find farmers and ask for the payments they owed my father.

Dad could not stay in business, and keep supplying farmers with the equipment they needed, if he did not collect on debts. Yet, sometimes, in cases of real hardship, Dad did write-off debts. And my parents always contributed (financially and as volunteers in many roles) to our church, regardless of the economic circumstance, because they believed we were part of a larger church community that also could not survive without regular infusions of money.

Dad’s business practices were a bit unusual. He and his business partners paid themselves an hourly wage rather than take a salary. All employees received a bonus after a profitable year. In quite a few years Dad took unpaid “vacation” weeks to teach Summer Vacation Bible School in our home congregation and at a mission church out of state. For most of his 40+ year business career, Dad worked six days a week, but I didn’t mind because I was with him when I wasn’t in school.

We need our people in finances and business, and they need the thoughtfulness and ethical foundation that comes from being part of a larger community that asks the hard questions, as does an organization to which I belong, Mennonite Economic Development Associates. I believe this is why EMU was teaching about “ethics” and “the public good” long before many other educational institutions realized the importance of such teachings.

Loren Swartzendruber
President

Pat and Loren Swartzendruber (seated in second row, third and fourth from left, beside Jim and Ann Hershberger) connected with the Guatemala cross-cultural group in the spring of 2009.

Tim Swartzendruber ’95, one of Pat’s and my four children, recently recalled his cross-cultural with these words:

When I compare my seven semesters on EMU’s campus to my cross-cultural semester in France and Ivory Coast, it’s like comparing coffee to espresso – both are fantastic, but the latter is doubly intense and stimulating. The intellectual, spiritual, and social growth that I experienced on campus was even more pronounced during (and after) that one semester overseas.

My 27 classmates and I saw Anabaptist values modeled by French Mennonites, learned from our caring host families in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, delved into West African literature, culture, and religion, dramatically improved our French language skills, and laughed and cried together as we experienced varying degrees of culture shock. Two buddies from that group would eventually be groomsmen in my wedding, and several others also became life-long friends. I will always be grateful to Dr. Carroll and Nancy Yoder, our faculty leaders.

Now, living in the Washington D.C. area, I’m friends with alumni of well-known colleges who invariably say to me, “Man, I wish I had that kind of opportunity as a college student!” One of my greatest motivations in working as an EMU advancement officer is to provide a similar opportunity – a life-shaping gift, really – to future EMU students.

I can’t improve on Tim’s testimony, but I can provide a bit of background to it.

When EMU’s faculty voted in 1981 to require cross-cultural study for all undergraduates, they were venturing into uncharted waters. As far as anyone knew, EMU would be the first liberal arts college in North America with such a requirement.

The faculty and staff wondered how they would shuttle off-campus students through sequential courses, when the first level is typically offered in the fall and the second in the spring? And how would EMU’s sports teams be impacted?

Yet the faculty, led by academic dean Al Keim, held that a truly sound education requires us to recognize that we are members of a “global village” and need the insights and empathy necessary for our that village to be sustainable. Time has proven the validity of their bold initiative 30 years ago. When I talk to alumni today they tell me almost without fail that their cross-cultural was the most important part of their EMU experience.

I hope to see you at Homecoming and Parents Weekend in October when we will celebrate the 30th anniversary of our beloved cross-cultural programs.

Loren Swartzendruber
Class of ’76, MDiv ’79, DMin
President

Loren Swartzendruber '76, MDiv '79, DMin

Uncle William did not look like a hero to me when I was a child. As I got older, I came to realize that this Iowa farmer had been one of hundreds of young men who served the nation during World War II by tending to people who previously had been treated as beneath “the least of these.” William H. Nisly was a conscientious objector in Civilian Public Service from Oct. 3, 1942 to March 1, 1946. Much of that time, he was an attendant in the Kalamazoo State Psychiatric Hospital in Michigan.

When Uncle William returned to Iowa after the war, he talked about the deplorable conditions he had seen in Kalamazoo. He spoke about how he and his fellow conscientious objectors had tried to improve these conditions with simple kindness, despite severe staff and material shortages. Today, the importance of “kindness” in dealing with mental illness is disputed by no one. But this wasn’t the case 70 years ago, as the nation discovered when the conscientious objectors helped draw attention to widespread mistreatment of mental health patients.

At least 29 alumni – counting those who came to EMU either before or after the war – served in one of the 22 mental health facilities staffed by Mennonite Central Committee. It is no accident that in the late 1940s, the Mennonite church began to take steps to establish model programs for mental health care. At one of these programs, Prairie View Behavioral Health Center in Newton, Kansas, my wife Pat served as vice president from 1994 to 2003, after having begun her career as a psychiatric nurse at the University of Iowa Psychiatric Hospital.

Many of EMU’s graduates have interned or worked in one of these model programs, including one of my children, Angela Hackman, a graduate of Hesston College in 2001, EMU in 2003, and finally the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned an MSW. Angela is employed at the Penn Foundation in Sellersville, 40 miles north of Philadelphia.

Here at EMU we are continuing the tradition of concern for mental health through our psychology department, applied social sciences department, and master’s in counseling program. We aim to remain on the forefront of this field, as demonstrated by an unprecedented conference at EMU in the spring of 2011 on the theory of “Attachment.” More than 1,000 people came to hear distinguished speakers discuss current neurological and psychological research showing that healthy attachments are crucial for humans to survive and flourish. Christians, of course, have been saying this for millennia, but it is gratifying to see our beliefs in love and community confirmed by science.

I hope you will read these pages with appreciation for the footsteps in which we are walking as we reflect on the dramatic overhaul of mental health care since 1945 and continue to strive for improvement.

Loren Swartzendruber
President

President Loren Swartzendruber ’76, MDiv ’79, DMin, at the dedication of EMU's first solar array.

This issue of Crossroads comes to you soon after a historic action of the Harrisonburg City Council to grant a 20-year 100 percent tax exemption for commercial solar projects. Our first solar array, on the roof of Sadie Hartzler Library, online since November, is producing 2 percent of our campus electric consumption. The action of the City Council boosts the possibility of adding a much larger array over the University Commons’ north parking lot.

The April 2011 issue of Virginia Business magazine features an article on “green” initiatives around the Commonwealth, with the solar projects at EMU highlighted. The University of Virginia and other higher education institutions have contacted us to learn about our projects!

The late Dr. Robert C. Lehman, a physical science professor at EMU in the 1960s and 1970s, was the first to systematically address ways that EMU was frittering away natural resources – he spent his 1976-77 sabbatical studying campus energy consumption. Since then many faculty and staff members have worked at better managing our utility costs, thereby saving the institution thousands of dollars and, more importantly, reducing our consumption of non-renewable resources. Eldon Kurtz, director of EMU’s physical plant since 1997, has long championed environmentally sustainable practices. Our strategic plan calls for future buildings, new and renovated, to be constructed to LEED [Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design] certification standards.

Students have strongly encouraged the institution to be creative in our stewardship of the earth’s environment. EMU has responded to this interest with a new major in environmental sustainability, where students can choose between concentrating on the social, economic and political aspects of sustainability, or concentrating on its biological and chemical aspects.

This issue of Crossroads highlights more than 100 EMU alumni who are making major contributions to the sustainability movement around the world. We believe that caring for God’s creation is a theological and faith imperative, as well as a matter of good science, and that sustainability practices should not be dependent on one’s political persuasion. We do not believe it is God’s intention that humans should take a cavalier attitude toward the environment, a point on which we may differ from some segments of the faith community. We believe that sustainability practices should begin with how we care for ourselves physically, organize our family and community life, and promote a healthy approach to living that encompasses every aspect of human existence.

Loren Swartzendruber
President

In the early fall of 2010, workers installed the largest solar deployment in Virginia on the Hartzler library roof. It has the capacity to generate104.3 kilowatts of electricity from 328 high-efficiency photovoltaic panels and is projected to eliminate more than 6,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions over 35 years.

AN ESSAY HEADLINED “A Climate-Change Activist Prepares for the Worst,” published in the Outlook section of the Washington Post one recent Sunday (Feb. 27, 2011), sparked 444 online comments before the Post closed the discussion. The essay also prompted more than 1,800 people to recommend it via Facebook.

The writers of the 444 postings were sharply divided, perhaps 35 to 65 percent.

About one-third expressed some degree of agreement with author Mike Tidwell, executive director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network. He described steps he had taken recently to try to protect his home and family against the effects of devastating climate change, including stockpiling food, investing in an emergency generator, and taking skeet-shooting lessons. The shooting lessons were in case he needs to protect his family due to anticipated social unrest caused by climate-related food shortages – and this is despite calling himself “fundamentally a pacifist.”

The remaining two-thirds of the Post readers who commented online thought Tidwell was nutty – or pursuing a leftist-environmentalist agenda – and dismissed his worries about the pace at which earth seems to becoming uninhabitable. (Tidwell’s executive assistant is Nathan Kauffman ’10.)

Tidwell opened his February article with these words:

Ten years ago, I put solar panels on my roof and began eating locally grown food. I bought an energy-efficient refrigerator that uses the power equivalent of a single light bulb. I started heating my home with a stove that burns organically fertilized corn kernels. I even restored a gas-free lawn mower for manual yardwork.

As a longtime environmental activist, I was deeply alarmed by new studies on global warming, so I went all out. I did my part.

Tidwell went on to explain, however, that he feels “we’re running out of time” to avert the physical and social upheavals that will result from global warming.

Fourteen months earlier (Dec. 6, 2009), the Post’s Outlook section published another essay by Tidwell in which he criticized the “go green” movement for leading people to believe that small changes in one’s personal lifestyle would add up to ultimately rescuing the planet. He said personal changes – like the way he used a Prius and ate a “low-carbon-footprint vegetarian diet” – are drops in the proverbial bucket.

He challenged his readers: “No more compact fluorescent light bulbs. No more green wedding planning. No more organic toothpicks for holiday hors d’oeuvres . . .

“Instead of continuing our faddish and counterproductive emphasis on small, voluntary actions, we should follow the example of Americans during past moral crises and work toward large-scale change.”

AGREEMENT ON BEING GREEN?

Given the divided readership of the Washington Post, it seems safe to assume that the readership of Crossroads is not united on the subject of climate change.

When we asked readers to “tell us your path to ‘going green’” on the back cover of the fall/winter 2010-11 issue of Crossroads, we received a flurry of contributions from alumni who are putting solar panels on their roofs, riding bikes or walking instead of driving a mile or so, growing as much of their own organic food as possible, and building well-insulated homes from local materials.

Nobody wrote in to say: “Bah-humbug. It’s fine to drive huge gas-guzzling vehicles, live in mammoth McMansions, eat seafood that is flown half-around the world to our dinner tables and that is also in danger of extinction, and remove mountain tops to extract coal to power our electricity-hungry homes and businesses.”

Yet, even in the absence of messages from readers uninterested in “going green,” there are certainly tens of thousands of us who don’t choose to live as simply as Martha Ann Burgard  ’66 in Alabama or as self-sufficiently as Mary Beth  ’72 and Lester  ’71 (MA-religion  ’94) Lind in West Virginia.

A few of the environmentalists interviewed for this issue have opted not to have children, believing that over-population, with concurrent consumption, is part of the problem. They would agree with Paul Hawken, founding owner of a $75 million company specializing in garden supplies. After operating his company from 1979 to 1991, he wrote a book arguing that “the drive for unrestrained economic growth … has become the most important problem facing humanity.”

The primary concern is that a world of over six billion people striving for material satisfaction is drawing ever more heavily from finite supplies of natural resources to fuel an economic growth model destined to lead to an ecological disaster and global poverty without precedence.

Those who disagree with Hawken tend to hold the opposite view on “unrestrained economic growth.” They believe the innovativeness and expansiveness of capitalism hold the key to solving the problems facing humanity and the rest of the natural world, including possibly climate change (without necessarily conceding that this is an actual problem to be solved).

Andrew K. Jenner ’04, a freelance writer who is largely responsible for the reporting on pages 8 through 36, suggested that we follow up this issue of Crossroads by inviting readers to discuss “going green” in the form of a moderated online blog. We have set up a forum for discussion, open until June 1, 2011, at.

While we invite discussion, we must confess that a clear majority of EMU’s current administrators, faculty, staff and students seem to be arrayed on the side of those who believe the preponderance of scientific evidence of major climate change and who wish to reverse climate change or at least responsibly address its devastating effects.

As one Washington Post reader wrote in response to Tidwell’s article: “The precautionary principle would suggest that we do what we can to protect our own survival, even if it [climate change] is not human-caused… There is no room for honest disagreement, the science is clear; but were there room for disagreement, there is no excuse for not acting… just in case.”

EMU president Loren Swartzendruber, DMin, was one of 98 signatories – many affiliated with the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities – on a document issued in February 2006 called “Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action.”

The statement made four points: (1) human-induced climate change is real; (2) the consequences of climate change will be significant, and will hit the poor the hardest; (3) Christian moral convictions demand our response to the climate change problem; and (4) the need to act now is urgent – governments, businesses, churches, and individuals all have a role to play in addressing climate change, starting now.

EMU’S PUSH FOR SUSTAINABILITY

Since the 2007 founding of EMU’s Creation Care Council – made up of representatives from all parts of campus – every corner of EMU is reshaping itself to be more “green.”

In the spring of 2008, the EMU board of trustees decided that all new buildings at EMU would meet basic LEED standards, at a minimum. (LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.) This decision followed presentation to the board of semester-long research by 14 students in a “Green Design” class taught by science professors Douglas Graber Neufeld and James (Jim) M. Yoder ’94, who both did their PhD dissertations on topics related to the environment.

In the fall of 2010 EMU became host to the largest solar deployment in Virginia, with capacity to generate 104.3 kilowatts of electricity from 328 high-efficiency photovoltaic panels on its library roof. The lead visionary for the project was Tony Smith, PhD, co-director of EMU’s MBA program and CEO of a private company called Secure Futures.

In some cases, these efforts represent renewed interest in initiatives begun decades ago. Five faculty membersjoined with students in the early 1970s to launch the Earthkeepers club, which was mainly focused on recycling newspapers.  Retired biology professor Kenton Brubaker ’54, PhD, one of the founders of Earthkeepers, recalls using the proceeds from selling newspapers to a recycling firm to buy a van, a front-end loader and a pre-fabricated metal building to pick up and store newspapers, as well as to start a compost pile for gardening east of the Suter Science Center.

The 1970s is also when EMU planted an arboretum and experimented on its own land with the best way to treat soil for maximum vegetable production.

Recycling of paper, glass and plastic is now integrated into the work of EMU’s Physical Plant Department, which collects these materials by bicycle rather than van. Earthkeepers, now run by students, continues to work at composting – student volunteers collect discarded food and biodegradable paper from the dining hall for composting near the Suter Science Center. They also join with others in running Food & Farming Week each year.

In 1986, EMU took the risk of installing an innovative, but then-unproven, closed-loop heating and cooling system in the newly built Campus Center. Designed by LeRoy Troyer, an Indiana architect who was raised Amish, the building has withstood the test of time in being a model of energy efficiency. Physical plant director C. Eldon Kurtz ’76 estimates that the center saved EMU $3 to $4 million in energy costs its first ten years of use.

REDISCOVERING ROOTS OF THE LAND

Reaching even deeper into EMU’s history, in the decade after it was founded in 1917, EMU had pig pens, cows, poultry sheds, corn fields, and vegetable gardens on its grounds, with students fresh off the farm who knew how to deal with such matters. Ironically, however, most of these students were more interested in reducing their need to do manual labor to survive. They wanted to engage in more intellectual pursuits, rather than remaining bound to the farms of their ancestors.

In the 30th anniversary edition of Living More with Less (Herald Press, 2010), Sheri Hostetler, pastor of the First Mennonite Church of San Francisco, advocates rediscovering the knowledge of self-sufficient people, who are often the oldest generation: “People over the age of seventy and those who have come more recently from countries in the global South have experienced life in societies not based on cheap oil. Thus they have skills and stories about how to live more self-sufficiently, sustainably, and locally.”

EMU has embraced a Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) – called “Peace with Creation” – whereby every undergraduate learns about the importance of good stewardship for creation and reflects on ways that he or she can help. First-year students are given writing assignments on the topic and sustainability is threaded into the coursework of every major.

As part of this QEP, cross-cultural trips are being retooled to increase environmental awareness. Vice-president and undergraduate dean Nancy Heisey, PhD – who has committed to using public transportation when possible and to walking to destinations a less than a mile or so from her home or campus – will be leading a trip in the summer of 2011 where the students travel (to Montreal) by train instead of by airplane.

Biology professor Jim Yoder led a trip to New Zealand in the summer of 2010 that included a tour of a geothermal power plant. The group also studied how New Zealand is dealing with invasive species, especially rats and possums, to restore its bird populations.

TO ENGAGE IN POLITICS OR NOT?

Most of the people featured in this issue of Crossroads are focused on “being the change they want to see,” to borrow Gandhi’s words. They believe that change necessarily begins with oneself and in one’s community – as in the slogan “act locally, think globally” – and that such grassroots changes can result in a shift over time in larger socio-economic paradigms.
Writing in a book published in 2000, Mel Schmidt applauded the record of Mennonites and their institutions for practicing what they preach in terms of living in a responsible manner. But he criticized their traditional reluctance to address issues at the macro or policy level:

By their faithful track record on peace and justice issues, as well as their historical love of the land, Anabaptist/Mennonite faith communities have earned the right to speak out on environmental issues but are quite content to be die Stillen im Lande [quiet of the land] – an irony of our time.

This is puzzling and mystifying, particularly in view of the fact that even the most isolationist groups among them will dig in their heels and take tough political stands on controversial issues when the need is clearly present…Even more puzzling, perhaps, is the nearly total absence of any identifiable Anabaptist/Mennonite political activity in an area that one would think is near and dear to their hearts – sustainable agriculture.

Schmidt asked why the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition based in Washington DC has no institutional Mennonite presence or overt Mennonite support.

Referring to the More-with-Less Cookbook, he wrote, “The publishing of cookbooks is not to be demeaned. Responsible consumption is at the core of our efforts to save the earth. But, having done this one thing well, have we neglected to do other things just as needful?”

Recent graduate (2010) Nathan Kauffman may exemplify interest among a small minority of alumni in tackling environmental problems via political involvement. Kauffman went from majoring in history and social science at EMU to working full-time for the Chesapeake Climate Action Network. He had interned for this group while spending a semester at EMU’s Washington Community Scholars’ Center. This internship paved the way for him to be hired as its special projects person and executive assistant to Mike Tidwell, the man who wrote the provocative Post article.

Kauffman has become accustomed to preparing talking points for reference and distribution, donning a business suit, and knocking on the doors of state and national legislators in the mid-Atlantic region. He and his colleagues recently (Feb. 2011) succeeded in persuading the Virginia General Assembly to pass legislation that will establish a revolving loan fund to help Virginians install solar energy projects on their homes. He then turned his attention to the Maryland General Assembly and legislation to help create off-shore wind farms.

Kauffman is the only alumnus found by Crossroads to be working full-time to improve environmental policies at the state or national levels. (If there are others, please let us know at Crossroads@emu.edu.) Sharing a basement apartment in Northwest Washington with Josh Brubaker ’06 (grad student at American University), Kauffman says it is not feasible for him to practice the kind of sustainable lifestyle – a vegetable garden, solar panels, bicycling everywhere – described elsewhere in Crossroads. Living in “the District,” as locals refer to it, however, does enable Kauffman to function without owning a car.

“It’s impossible to totally devote yourself to everything simultaneously,” he says. “I am working on policy, and it takes almost all of my time, and other alumni are living in truly sustainable ways, and it takes a lot of their time.

“Making policy is hard, and biking everywhere and gardening are hard. If you try to do everything, you end up being ineffective. At some point you have to throw your lot in with something and commit to it.”

At the local level in Harrisonburg, EMU senior Jakob zumFelde has worked with the New Community Project to encourage city planners and elected representatives to support a pathway for pedestrians and bicyclists to safely travel from the northwest corner of the city to downtown.

Outside of the political arena, alumni certainly have worked on projects with wide environmental impact – Catherine Mumaw ’54, for example.

In 1981-82, Mumaw visited Mennonite Central Committee units in northeast Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, Guatemala, Jamaica, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Kenya, and Somalia to research appropriate technologies used by women for their households. This led to Mumaw’s involvement in international conferences in which solar cooking was a topic of discussion. From 1989 to 1995 she was an advisor to Solar Box Cookers International, which is responsible for more than a half million inexpensive solar cookers in use around the world. (For more information, visit www.solarcookers.org.)

But Mumaw, along with a few of the scientist-alumni listed on pages 33-36, seem to be the exceptions. Most environmentally aware alumni of EMU have chosen to work in their own backyards – either literally or in their immediate communities.

FOR THE THEOLOGICAL ANGLE

In this issue of Crossroads, we did not attempt to delve into the widely varied views on the Biblical basis of “creation care,” or the lack thereof. That would have required a double-sized magazine or a book-length manuscript.

Anyone interested in this topic is invited to read Creation & the Environment – An Anabaptist Perspective on a Sustainable World (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), with conversation-stimulating chapters by 14 authors, including three EMU-linked professors. Calvin Redekop, a sociologist and Conrad Grabel College professor (emeritus), edited the book. You may also enjoy reading Redekop’s chapter “Religion, Leadership, and the Natural Environment: The Case of American Evangelicals” in a new book edited by his son, Benjamin W. Redekop, Leadership for Environmental Sustainability (Routledge, 2010).

For regularly updated information, visit the Evangelical Environmental Network at www.creationcare.org.

President Loren Swartzendruber ’76, MDiv ’79, DMin, with his wife Pat

Aaron Copland, 20th century American composer, shared this perspective regarding music: “The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, ‘Is there a meaning to music?’ My answer would be, ‘Yes.’ And ‘Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?’ My answer to that would be, ‘No.’”

Many of my earliest memories involve music, most often in the context of a worship service in my home congregation. It is amazing that the memories evoked frequently cannot be adequately expressed in words. I am transported back in time and space, subconsciously touched by the rhythms, harmonies, and melodies of hymns. Sitting next to my dad, I learned to sing the tenor line long before I knew how to read the music. For those warm memories I shall always be grateful.

I well recall, however, a deep feeling of incompetence in a public school 7th grade music class when being tested on our ability to recognize the sounds of individual musical instruments. Though many of my classmates could not have joined an a cappella choir and didn’t know the difference between the tenor and bass lines, I was embarrassed to realize that the sounds of individual musical instruments were largely indistinguishable to my ears. Fortunately, through music appreciation classes in high school and college, I expanded my repertoire of understanding.

Copland’s suggestion that music has meaning, but that its meaning can hardly be reduced to words, rings so true at this stage of my life. It is not uncommon, especially if I have no responsibilities in a worship service and if I have experienced some stressful weeks, to be overcome with emotion while joining others in congregational singing. Frequently, I sense that I am part of something much larger than myself and am filled with gratitude for the privilege of being a member of a church that takes corporate worship seriously (and joyously!). There must be a reason why such experiences rarely occur when I am preparing to preach!

Music, in its many forms and genres, makes an essential contribution to the quality of life at EMU and beyond. To quote Copland again, “To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.” The making of music at EMU has always been strong, even when the music was only made with one instrument (the vocal cords). Yet our musical output keeps getting stronger, as EMU’s outstanding musicians embrace and contribute to other musical streams. May we make music forever!

Loren Swartzendruber
President