« The government is subsidizing the development of robots as caregivers for the old. | Main | Strolling through someone else's graduation »
May 9, 2008
Death of an Ecclesial Community
I've been following the end of Seabury-Western Theological Seminary with some interest - it's always luridly interesting for someone like me to see how a board of trustees can fire an entire tenured faculty by declaring financial exigency. Hobart and William Smith has a long relationship with Seabury-Western - our previous chaplain, indeed, left these Colleges for a chair at Seabury-Western. I also have been an irregular reader of AKMA's Random Thoughts, a blog from a Seabury faculty member for a few years.
Here's the board's own position on the closure. Note the wishful thinking in the last paragraph about keeping a doctoral program open. How do you do that without a faculty?
Captain Yips points out a lo-how-the-mighty-are-fallen moment in the affair:
Considering Seabury-Western's collapse, it's worth noting that the Seabury Board thinks that they need $18.7 million, and that this goal "significantly exceeded Seabury’s fundraising capabilities."It's not a small amount, to be sure, but in the fundraising and nonprofit worlds $18.7 mil is relative chicken feed. There was a time that a more confident and assertive Episcopal Church could have raised that money (in 1890 dollars) over lunch at the millionaire's table at the Chicago Club, from some guys named Field, Armour, Pullman, Shedd, Higginbotham, and Swift - and for this purpose, the older version of TEC would have had a seat at that table. Some of the millionaires were, to be sure, scoundrels, but they were civic minded scoundrels, and the amount needed would have barely dented their resources. Northwestern University's top student charity fundraiser, Dance Marathon, pulls in $700,000 every year. That Seabury doesn't even consider the effort is an interesting marker on the road to collapse.
Really. They didn't try to raise a little less than $20 million to save an institution in Chicago? Admittedly, the alumni/ae of seminaries are seldom sources of large contributions, but whatever happened to all those rich Episcopalians?
Posted by CrankyProfessor at May 9, 2008 8:48 AM