Yesterday was a mix: a wintry mix that turned to rain which lasted all day, lots of cooking (chicken stock and pumpkin bread), sermon research, never as much writing as I hope to do but some. And then, in the late afternoon, news that the Lutheran seminary in Columbia (LTSS) will be relocating to the Hickory, NC campus of Lenoir-Rhyne. If you want lots of information, this website is fairly comprehensive.
Of course, that website can't tell me some of what I'd most like to know--it can't predict the future, and it can't give me specific details about professors. There's no mention of the spiritual direction certificate program, which I imagine will relocate along with the seminary.
The graph that shows enrollment is shocking, but not surprising. If I'm interpreting the graph correctly, there are 40 MDiv students enrolled right now. When I attended graduation in May, I was surprised by how few seminary graduates there were; the bulk of graduates were in Occupational Therapy and other programs run out of the Columbia campus. Each time I've been on campus during the past few years, I've been surprised by how few people are on the campus. Lenoir-Rhyne is formalizing what has been happening informally for years, if not decades.
I do wonder what will happen to the campus. If I had several million . . . wait, it would take more than several million. Even if I could buy the campus for several million, there's still lots of maintenance work that needs to happen, millions in deferred maintenance. And I can barely manage a small house on a small piece of land; why do I think I can handle a small campus?
I imagine that the departure won't mean much to the larger city of Columbia--there are other schools and universities that are much more integral to the economy of the town and the state. And I do understand that by being at the larger Lenoir-Rhyne campus, seminarians can take a wider diversity of classes, like language classes, management classes, and a huge array of counseling classes. Those kinds of classes would have been available at the University of South Carolina, but it's not easy to take classes elsewhere and get them transferred back in, not easy for schools to create transferability.
I feel most bad for students who will have decisions to make. A move from Columbia, SC to Hickory, NC is no small thing--it's not a commutable distance. There's never a good time to endure this kind of upheaval. Potential seminarians with families to consider have probably already made different decisions. Other seminaries have done a better job with distance learning that LTSS, and students who needed flexibility probably made different choices along the way; I know that I did.
I feel sadness, too, because of family history. My grandfather and great uncle went to that seminary, and various friends of mine did too. I completed my certificate in Spiritual Direction there and loved the campus, even as I wondered where all the people had gone.
I feel more than a quiver of worry about larger aspects of the future and the decline of all sorts of higher ed. It's not just seminary enrollments that are down. There's a lack of support for higher ed, and all the other kinds of education, in this country and beyond. I know that some people are worried about what the decline in seminaries means for the future of the Church, and I do think/hope that people are having those conversations in a larger way, in the groups that do more of the decision making. I have a sense of the larger scope of history, and I know that times of wrenching change can bring all sorts of positive developments in the aftermath.
Let now be one of those periods (and let the wrenching change give way to positive developments sooner rather than later).
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