It’s an odd thing to reflect on the meaning of academics gathering for lunch when you’re an academic on sabbatical. I relish so much about these occasional sabbaths from teaching: the time to rest and recharge, the opportunity to enjoy our twins’ first months in high school, the chances to travel and do research. Still, I miss our department’s weekly lunch in the Bethel Dining Center. Taking off ten minutes from the archives to wolf down a ham sandwich by myself just isn’t the same as having a regular hour-long occasion, in Peter Dougherty’s words, “to enjoy each other personally, to exchange ideas spontaneously and to turn work briefly into play, the true province of creativity.”
At the same time, being removed from my own faculty lunches at Bethel made me more sensitive to that meal’s importance for other professors at another time in our university’s history.
This sabbatical, I’ve been researching the women’s history of Bethel. None of our previous institutional histories — mine included — has ever centered Bethel’s story on the experiences and perspectives of its women. So I’ve spent the last several months interviewing everyone from pioneering administrators and professors to recent alumni and current students, revisiting debates over feminism and dating culture in back issues of our student newspaper, and sifting through archived copies of Title IX reports and draft policies on maternity leave.
It’s a work in progress, but it’s already become clear that one of the turning points in the women’s history of Bethel came in the early 1980s, when the College finally launched a baccalaureate nursing program. Adding a field so dominated by women permanently changed the gender demographic of Bethel. Already majority women, the student body soon neared its present 60/40 female/male split. Hiring a full complement of nursing professors instantly doubled the number of women on the Bethel faculty.
“It was an infusion of estrogen,” chuckled psychology professor Kathy Nevins during an oral history interview this summer, “in a way that I think sort of got people off their bums and doing things.” But that only happened, she said, because the nursing program’s founding chairperson, Eleanor Edman, “wanted her departmental faculty to be actively involved in the entire school.” Conscious that nursing instructors would often be off campus for clinical instruction, Edman encouraged her colleagues to serve beyond their department; several soon took leading roles in faculty governance and faculty development.
As importantly, she urged them to eat lunch in the faculty lounge. “I don’t want to say she would drag us down because we went willingly,” recalled nursing professor Beth Peterson in her oral history, but Edman wanted us “to eat lunch with other faculty and talk about whatever faculty talk about. Sometimes it was politics, sometimes it was faith, sometimes it was nonsense. But whatever it was, I think we became known.”
Twenty years later, I showed up at Bethel as a young history professor and found my mentors nudging me to bring my brown bag lunch down to the same ugly lounge. They wanted someone too eager to impress to slow down his day. (“Perhaps most important,” says Dougherty, lunch “takes time.”) They wanted someone new to Christian higher education to get to know — and be known by — older colleagues who shared my faith and my occupation, but not my stage of life. Before long, I was also showing up to a monthly breakfast off-campus that included retired professors, whose stories became my first draft of the institution’s history.
But by the time I got to Bethel, Edman had retired. I rarely saw more than a couple nursing professors as I dutifully ate in the lounge for a year or two. Soon I made other plans for lunch, as I felt less need for informal mentoring and more desire for spontaneous planning conversations within the programs I served, as I began to take on leadership roles myself.
After some time, the faculty lounge itself went away. Like my first office, it was converted into an engineering lab, as Bethel began to build discipline-specific spaces where students could spend more time with peers and professors from their major. The Nursing Department, ironically, took over the space that used to be Bethel’s cafeteria.
You’ll still find faculty lunching together in our new dining center, but usually in departmental/disciplinary clusters like ours. And I’m only an occasional participant in those meals, since I haven’t quite shed my COVID-era habit of socially distancing during lunchtime. Most days my lunchroom is my office, where I catch up on work as I eat.
All those changes have reasonable rationale, and I don’t really miss the faculty lounge itself. But I do miss what happened within its cinder block walls, as faculty from across our institution gathered for lunch. And I do think that the disappearance of that tradition points to some larger losses in our community.
First, the end of those faculty lounge lunches feels like one more version of Robert Putnam’s “bowling alone” phenomenon. Getting together even once a week with colleagues you wouldn’t normally see helped build both types of social capital that Putnam describes. On the one hand, “lunching alone” habits like mine minimize chances to develop the bonding capital that holds together like-minded members of what we used to call our “Christian learning community.” I suppose our weekly department lunches still serve that purpose, but they don’t build bridging capital among practitioners of distinct disciplines who both work physically apart from each other and too often compete against each other for attention and resources. As Dougherty puts it, “One does not have to travel to China to feel separation from others.”
At a time of economic scarcity in higher ed, we need more practices to reconnect scholars who belong to a Body having one Lord and one mission. For if the eye and head cannot tell the hand and feet that they are unneeded (1 Cor 12:21), no more can the Christian professor of history operate as if he had no need of his colleagues in chemistry, music, or social work. Faculty lounge lunches served the same purpose as our old practice of intermingling anthropology, biology, business, history, political science, and sociology offices in the same hallway — they reminded us of the unity of our purpose as scholars who study different facets of the same Creation to the glory of the same Creator.
It’s probably too late to change the ways that we’ve reconfigured our physical space, clustering professors and students into discipline-specific suites. But it would take nothing more than intention and discipline to gather nurses, artists, theologians, and scientists over a meal that can embody a core idea for any Christian university: the interconnectedness of knowledge.
Indeed, that’s the other reason that Eleanor Edman nudged Bethel’s first nursing professors to eat with practitioners of the arts, humanities, and sciences. She knew that Bethel’s first attempt at starting a nursing program had stumbled in the face of opposition from faculty who saw professional majors as dangerous deviations from Bethel’s liberal arts identity. But by lunching together, it was inevitable that professors with distinct training would not only start to share vocational joys and frustrations that spanned their disciplines but would start to discuss with each other the same questions of faith, truth, justice, and purpose that were bound to come up independently as they returned to their different lecture halls, laboratories, studios, and clinical sites.
It may seem overwrought to suggest that something so humble as nibbling on salads and sandwiches together can help make the college more collegial or unify the university, let alone make visible the invisible reality that all truth is God’s truth. But then, the diverse followers of Jesus who commune around their Lord’s table at worship should be open to the possibility of a simple meal meaning far more than its elements.
