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 students and 800 graduate students. The university 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.

Augsburg was founded as a seminary by Norwegian Lutherans. 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, by 1873, 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. Expanding its mission, undergraduate classes began in the fall of 1874, with the first class graduating in the spring of 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, with women first admitted to the school in 1921. To further expand its mission, a high school level Augsburg Academy was provided on the campus until it closed in 1933.

Wikipedia