Back in the day when the Graduate Theological Union was emerging as a consortium, first of three, then five, and finally nine seminaries, the sky was the limit. And to anyone who doubted that fact there was the GTU Library, made up of the combined holdings of these seminaries, plus the holdings of the Jewish, Orthodox, Buddhist, and Islamic centers; in short, the largest collection of interreligious research material in the world. But then there was the Flora Lamson Hewlett Library, the library endowed largely by Flora and her husband William.
When I was a seminarian back in the 1980s, I worked at the library as a Serials librarian to help pay the bills. Upon returning to Berkeley in 1996 following my doctoral studies in Chicago my first real job upon my return was as Assistant to the President of the GTU, Glenn Bucher, liaison to the Board of Presidents, and joint coordinator of ATS-WASC accreditation. No one in 1998 could deny the overwhelming challenges facing the GTU back then. It was not the “bricks and mortar” that posed a problem; any number of Silicon Valley scions with spiritual interests were more than willing to pony up buckets overflowing with stock options if it meant seeing their names on buildings. The problem was getting these same revenue streams to contribute anything more than lip service to flesh and blood, faculty and students. (The exception here were donors to the Arts and Religion program, a legacy of the wonderful Jane Dillenberger, since endowing this program, by definition, was about flesh and blood, and color, and texture, and shadow. . . .) The GTU fielded one of the most expensive programs in the nation, in real dollars, not only because living in the Bay Area proved so much more expensive than living in the neighborhoods of other similar seminaries, but also because Princeton, Yale, Harvard, and Chicago provided tuition waivers and housing to entering graduate students, and handsome salaries and virtually free housing to faculty.
We already knew all of this back in 1998. We knew we needed to focus our attention on faculty and students, not on buildings. An example. When a property just west of the central campus came up for sale in the late 1990s, featuring five sturdy 2000 square foot duplexes arranged horse-shoe around a verdant meadow, the GTU to my knowledge did not even consider purchasing the property, which in 1999 was going for less than $1M; yes, less than $1M for all ten units. Purchase of the plot would have provided dirt-cheap housing for ten faculty members and their families. By 1999, however, the GTU board, now under the fiscally conservative leadership of the late John Dillenberger, was already in cost-cutting mode; cut staff, cut faculty, cut services, cut . . . cut . . . cut. Never mind the universal recommendation of our ATS-WASC review, which warned a rocky future for the GTU unless it directed more of its resources to faculty and students at its member institutions.
What we were witnessing at the GTU was the full boar metastasis of the neoliberal theological education driven by board members, presidents, and donors who read far too little Jürgen Moltmann and Dorthee Sölle and far too much Milton Friedman and Wall Street Journal.
I am bringing this up again thanks to my friend and former professor Rebecca Lyman’s posting of news from the tragedy unfolding at Episcopal Divinity School (EDS). I am not privy to the details of this conflict beyond what was reported in the news. And, yet, remarks by the President and from the consultants she hired to plan for the future at EDS remind me a great deal of discussions circulating around the GTU in the 1990s.
Faculty are “trying to unravel the consultation and delay our going forward,” said the Very Rev. James Kowalski, chair of the EDS board of trustees and dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. Consultants will not interview faculty and others this summer.
The Very Rev. Kowalski might just as well have said that the “faculty are trying to ensure that theological education has a chair at the table.”
Faculty were introduced to the board-hired consultants and then dismissed. The board then counted the “meet-and-greet” as “consultation.”
Those interviews were to be “the heart and soul of beginning seriously to engage the whole community and its various stakeholders in this question about sustainability,” Dean Kowalski said. “What’s our next step? We’re not sure.”
But just what does Dean Kowalski mean precisely by “sustainability”? We could wish that what it meant was that the Dean is determined to bring the draw rate on the EDS endowment to 5 per cent and protecting the integrity and expanding the quality of EDS instruction. We could wish that Dean Kowalski did not see these two as a zero-sum game. Yet, if this is what Dean Kowalski meant, then it flies in the face of the board’s decision to eliminate tenure for its announced opening in History. How do you bring the draw down to 5 per cent? You sacrifice the independence, integrity, and quality of future faculty appointments. That’s how.
Although trained as a Church Historian, I have now been teaching in the Economics Faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, for several years. And I can tell you that most seminary boards are composed in such a manner as to ensure the death of the institutions they are charged to oversee. That is because when they sit in closed session in the board room these board members begin to channel the bankrupt rules of thumb of the worst kind of neoliberal economic theory. Believe me, I have been there. And there is not a one neo-Keynesian in the room.
This contrasts to the board room of the 1960s when the GTU was born. In the 1960s anyone espousing notions remotely similar to Milton Friedman’s neoliberal policies would have been expelled from the board room. Everything was growth, expansion — the future drawing the present towards its immanent realization. Obviously, this, too, was poppy-cock. Unending growth is unsustainable in a world composed of material being. But the error in such thinking is that, like neoliberalism, it takes its bearings from the independent variable, economic well-being.
And that is the wrong variable for theological educators to peg their institutional policies. Yes, bring the draw from 7 per cent down to 5. But if, in order to do so, you need to sacrifice the core of theological instruction (which is what the elimination of tenure amounts to), then you do not have a right to sit at the table. Clearly, in that case you need other minds at the table whose stake falls closer to the theological core; and that means faculty.
Educational administration and finance is an admittedly hard nut to crack. The right mix of tuition, endowment, costs, taxes and depreciation is never easy to hit right on the mark. But never ever in that mix ought boards to include the elimination of tenure, the sacrifice of program, or tuitions that are so burdensome as to deprive theological education a diversity that reflects that of society (and not simply the church). Should they include any of these components, this is prima facie evidence that the board is hostile to the overall mission of theological education. Better to share the costs of a full-time tenured faculty member with other institutions than to eliminate tenure or eliminate faculty. Better to purchase those ten units at the bargain basement price of $1M. But board members who have grown too comfortable with neoliberal thinking have also grown too lazy to think creatively about its future.
But from the sound of things at EDS, the nail is already in the coffin. The President and board are on the same page. They are determined to save the institution by killing it, which is the essence of neoliberalism. And all the faculty can do is sit and watch and eventually pack their bags and leave; or they can resist, which is what the GTU faculty should have done, but failed to do back in the 1990s when it still could have made a difference. Obviously it is also in the interests of the faculty to reduce the draw rate; but not if doing so sacrifices the mission of EDS.