About PLU & Diversity, Justice, & Sustainability (DJS)

Mission

PLU seeks to educate students for lives of thoughtful inquiry, service, leadership and care-for other people, for their communities and for the earth.

Vision

At PLU, caring means more than kindness and consideration. It means a bold commitment to expanding well-being, opportunity, and justice. It’s a community-wide commitment to care for each other and for our neighbors both down the street and around the world. The PLU experience allows students’ ambition to blossom into purpose, their skills to sharpen into tools, and their caring to become a transformative force. Learn more.

Tess Matsukawa, Former Community Director for Harstad Hall & RHA Advisor: “What I love about PLU is how deeply the mission is integrated into the work that we do.  As someone who is passionate about equity and inclusion, the mission provides a framework that makes social justice learning for students and staff a priority.”

DJS: Living Diversity at Pacific Lutheran University

Diversity, Justice, Sustainability. These three values are central to the mission of Pacific Lutheran University.

Pacific Lutheran University has a strong commitment to diversity, social justice and sustainability rooted in our Lutheran heritage and lifted up in the PLU Strategic Plan. Our Lutheran tradition calls on us to see diversity, social justice and sustainability not as three separate concerns but as one crucial cause demanding our best attention and action. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has called on all people to “defend human dignity, to stand with poor and powerless people, to advocate justice, to work for peace, and to care for the earth in the processes and structures of contemporary society” (The Church in Society: A Lutheran Perspective, 1991).

These guiding values are created to assist Pacific Lutheran University move boldly forward so that our students, faculty, and staff might be good global citizens and creative leaders in furthering the cause of diversity, social justice and sustainability.

Campus Life partners closely with PLU’s Center for Diversity, Justice, and Sustainability (DJS), Campus Ministry, and Wild Hope Center for Vocation to enact PLU’s values of diversity, justice, and sustainability in fulfillment of PLU’s institutional vocation and commitment to these values. Campus Life is co-located with these spaces (i.e., we share a suite with DJS and the lower-level floor of the Anderson University Center with Campus Ministry) to foster close partnership.

Dream Gonzales, Community Director for Ordal & Stuen Halls: “What I really enjoy about seeing how Campus Life incorporates DJS values is in their openness to critically explore our responsibility to students in creating equitable policies. They encourage space for questioning and suggestions, creatively imagining how we can better serve our students.”

Vocation: Being called into relationship with others to promote human and ecological flourishing

Vocation is a guiding principle of PLU’s educational philosophy and one of the ways in which we fulfill the distinct PLU mission. Discovering your vocation is far more than just choosing a career. Vocation is the resounding sense of one’s purpose in life — something that makes you feel truly alive. Vocation can ideally exist both within one’s career and outside it, as what matters to each of us relates to all the facets of our lives and the roles that both our passions and professions can play.

• We are called by new knowledge and experience, by other people, by pressing need, by global events and crisis, and-for many-by the numinous, a higher power, by God, into awareness that life is more than securing a comfortable existence for oneself.

• We are called into relationship, into communities both temporary and life-long marked by diversity in life and thought, where we live into mutual responsibility for each other, trusting that we can be and do more together than apart in isolation.

• We are called together to promote human and ecological flourishing–the mission of this university–and so let learning animate service and care for this world and our commitment to strive for justice and peace wherever we find ourselves.

About the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA)

PLU is affiliated with the ELCA. The ELCA’s recent decisions to be a Sanctuary Church, address issues of sexism, condemn white supremacy, affirm inter-religious commitments, and to apologize to people of African descent aligns with the university’s vocation and the PLU Center’s missions and commitment to upholding the values of Lutheran Higher Education and Diversity, Justice, Sustainability. The PLU Centers Coalition is proud of our University’s connection to the ELCA!