Augsburg University

Augsburg University is a private university in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It is affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. It was founded in 1869 as a Norwegian-American Lutheran seminary known as Augsburg Seminarium. Today, the university enrolls approximately 3,000 undergraduate and 800 graduate students. Augsburg is known for its emphasis on service learning; volunteering in the community is both an instructional strategy and a required part of a student's coursework. History Norwegian Lutherans founded Augsburg as a seminary. It was named after the Augsburg Confession of 1530, the primary confession of faith presented by Lutherans in Augsburg, Germany, and contained in the Book of Concord of 1580. Augsburg Seminarium opened in September 1869, in Marshall, Wisconsin. Three years later, it moved to Minneapolis, changing its name to The Norwegian Danish Evangelical Lutheran Augsburg Seminary to reflect the name of the church body that sponsored the school. Undergraduate classes began in the fall of 1874, with the first class graduating in 1879. In 1892, the school's name was shortened to Augsburg Seminary. In 1893, reacting to what it deemed overly hierarchical elements in the Norwegian church, Augsburg leaders organized the "Friends of Augsburg", which by 1897 had coalesced to form a new Lutheran denomination, the Lutheran Free Church, a body that flourished for 70 years. During its early years the college and seminary served men only; women were first admitted in 1921. To further expand its mission, a high school level Augsburg Academy was provided on the campus. It closed in 1933. Augsburg Seminary remained the school's name until 1942, when it was officially changed and expanded to Augsburg College and Theological Seminary, a name that had been informally used since the 1910s. When the Lutheran Free Church merged with the much larger American Lutheran Church (ALC) in 1963, Augsburg Seminary merged with the ALC's Luther Theological Seminary, later renamed Luther Seminary. The name of the remaining undergraduate college became Augsburg College. In 2017, the name of the school officially became Augsburg University.