I went back to check a news release by VU in 2016 (see below) that gives an indication of the positive atmosphere on campus about enrollment at that time. I remember the cheerful tone of faculty and administrative meetings at that time, the increases in budgets. All that seems so distant now. Likewise, 2015-2016 was the year of the great Valpo basketball team led by Alec Peters that had a 30-7 overall record. A new building was opened almost every year during about a decade in time: Christopher Center Library, Harre Union, Fites Engineering, Arts & Sciences Building, Welcome Center, Beacon Hall, Helge Center, Sorority Housing Complex, etc. The future looked bright....
"With 4,544 undergraduate, graduate and law students, Valpo’s total enrollment is at the highest level in 41 years. Total graduate enrollment, at 916 students, is the largest since the Graduate School’s inception in 1963. As Valpo prepares students to enter an increasingly globalized workforce, it has increased the diversity of its student body. International student enrollment is at 727 students, the highest level in the University’s history. The total percentage of undergraduate American minorities is also at its highest level at 19 percent."
I spent a couple of weeks on campus during the fall of 2016, my first extended visit to VU since my 1981 graduation year. I had returned there for Homecoming and arranged to spend several weeks after that working on a book project in the library, as part of a research sabbatical from my own university.
I, too, felt an upbeat atmosphere on the campus. It just felt good to be there. And as I walked around the campus itself and checked out the new (at least to me) buildings, I thought to myself, hey, it would be fun to go to school here!
The exception was the mood at the Law School, which during the summer had to deal with that long and sometimes unflattering profile in the New York Times, using VU Law as a case study in the crisis facing regional law schools dealing with the post-Great Recession drop in law school applications. When I did a luncheon guest lecture there during my visit, the tensions among faculty were palpable.
But generally speaking, I perceived a positive, energetic, confident vibe on campus. It was matched by all the great places in downtown Valpo to grab a bite to eat or hang out over a coffee. Whereas Valparaiso c.1981 felt like a town adjacent to a university, Valparaiso c. 2016 had much more of a small college town feel to it.
That doesn't change the fact that Lutheranism, and Christian affiliations as a whole, are becoming less attractive to younger generations. Just as law became an increasingly unattractive degree to the midwest. As for ties, I happen to have multiple ties to people who were closely involved with VU, it did not change my decision at all. In fact, I know of a lot more people who have family who work at VU and decided to use the "Christian College Transfer Agreement" to attend institutions such as Marquette as opposed to going to VU. Connections mean nothing when your publicity in recent years has been nothing but negative. Which is a completely different can of worms to open, but that I can fault the university for. The fact of the matter is, that connection to the Lutheran Church is dwindling due to a decline of interest in Lutheranism. That connection is not declining because of some fantastical reason of the school becoming "less Lutheran" or not being BYU and forcing mandatory church service amongst other items.
As for the Italian restaurant paradox. Lert me give you this example. Say that Italian restaurant is seeing less and less business because, for some reason or another, Italian food just doesnt interest the public anymore. Do you
A. Adapt your Italian heritage and cooking traditions to create new menu items that appeal to a wider audience.
or
B. Double down on your "Italian Heritage" and say that only true Italians or people I think appreciate Italian food are allowed to be served at my restaurant.
You aren't, "Adding a cheeseburger and some chicken nuggets to the menu" as Realist suggests, but rather adding new menu items that incorporate your Italian heritage while also appealing to a wider audience.
If Notre Dame was asked by its president or board to increase its enrollment by 30% and do it quickly by largely recruiting students from China and Saudi Arabia, I do suspect the ND faculty might feel like the context of their A&S classes had just shifted dramatically.
As a prof, I don't feel think that regional or cultural diversity in the student body makes it harder to get to the substantive questions of institutional or personal identity. To some extent, having genuine difference of experience or disagreement of views in the room is actually useful for getting students to make explicit what they already believe or may want to assert. If you really want to get some American Christian kid to reckon with what they believe about democracy or the resurrection, it's probably just as much if not more effective to put them into debate that includes an Indonesian Muslim than have them talk with only more kids like themselves. Most Valpo students are culturally Christian but effectively moral therapeutic deists, sort of vaguely committed to a sense of being a good person like Jesus, but where life is largely a project of self-realization through worldly success as an individual or maybe economic comfort for your friends and family. It's pretty hard to shake that up in any meaningful way. So we could stand to have some greater experiential and intellectual diversity. Wouldn't it be great to have some students from Korea or Syria who could explain whatever just went down in terms of the pro-democracy/anti-martial law protests in Korea or the overthrow of the Assad regime? I'm embarrassed to say I didn't even know there were rebel groups in Syria strong enough to kick Assad out, and I haven't the slightest clue what religious or anti-authoritarian sentiment animated them.
I do hope Valpo retains or recovers some substantive sense of its Christian intellectual heritage rather than sinking into some generic technical school/community college identity, but IMHO, the "contextual" issue that's much more corrosive to the university mission on 'Athens and Jerusalem' is a) the growing anti-intellectualism of Board and Upper Administration so focused on metrics, short term 'business' ROI, and extractive corporate deals of various kinds, and b) the increasingly distracted and untenable conditions of falling pay and rising teaching loads under which they're asking faculty to operate and students to attempt learning. If Notre Dame is better focused on its mission (even as they have a far higher international student percentage than Valpo!), don't you think it might have something to do with the fact that they pay their faculty about double to tripe the salary to teach one third to one half the course load per year? There's really no point in comparing the institutions because they are so different. And I don't have much hope in Valpo's Lutheranism somehow saving us from the toilet bowl since people at the top have seemed perfectly fine to say "Lutheran mission!" a lot while charging students ever higher tuition for a falling quality student experience. The Presidents Office people generally do manage to weave in lingo about the Lutheran identity in the same meetings and townhalls where they announce their strategies for offering a more stripped-down and mediocre education. But I have complained about Valpo's downward spiral approach to school operations many times on this e-board, and I know I'm at risk of beating a dead horse, so I'll shut up!
These numbers are kind of disingenuous in my opinion. By n Large a lot of my generation simply doesn't align with religious affiliation to as high of a degree as previous generations. The ECLA saw a drop of about 3 million members in the span of 2010 to 2024. LCMS, depending on who you ask. Has either stagnated at 1.7 million members, or dropped to below 1 million. Even so St. Paul's has seen a severe drop in attendees each Sunday, as well as St T's and Emanuel. Heck, the largest crowd I saw at Emanuel in recent years was for a funeral of a well respected member of the Valpo community. There is a reason that a lot of formerly affiliated universities have swapped to the interdenominational format. Unless your history with a denomination is extensive and historic, and you have much more to offer beyond your religious affiliations, (IE Notre Dame) that well is going to continue to dry up. Lets not forget, Valpo was not originally a Lutheran school and has only been such for about 100 years now. There is 1/3 of school history that is time unaffiliated with Lutherans. Valpo does have a niche market, but that market is drying up rapidly. The school don't want another incident adjacent to the law school where the university kept milking a dry cow until the cow spontaneously combusted.
DISCLAIMER: I am not suggesting VU attempt to go to the interdenominational model. I am merely suggesting that a hard sell to Lutherans and only Lutherans is going to come up empty
@rezynezy , this is a poor argument on so many levels. You suggest that the numbers are disingenuous - but the numbers are the numbers, and what @mj08 was showing was the dramatic drop in Lutheran students. This has been discussed many times on this board. You are correct that the overall numbers of Lutherans from the LCMS and ELCA are down, yet the number of Lutheran students at VU (and LCMS students in particular) are dramatically down. What the numbers show is about a 12X decline in the number of LCMS students from 2006 to 2024. This is important because the LCMS students (and their parents, grandparents and great grandparents) were some of the long-term donors and supporters of the University.
Yes, you are right that VU has not been Lutheran-affiliated for its entire history, but it was so in its "Modern" history and that is also important for a school with the Chapel of the Resurrection at its center of campus.
No one ever, to my knowledge, has suggested VU focus on a hard sell to Lutherans and Lutherans only, and they never did - that is another example of a poor, straw man argument. However, the facts are that President Heckler was the first non-LCMS president in its modern history. Most of the prior leaders were ordained LCMS pastors, or had deep and long-standing ties to the LCMS. President Heckler's leadership failures are well documented on this board, yet during his tenure the drop in VUs historic, core constituency was rapid and visible even when the strategy was to grow enrollment. The LCMS students and families did not trust his leadership, and voted with their feet. He also was not successful in attracting more ELCA students, again as the numbers show.
@valpo95 Really, no one has argued that VU make a hard sell to Lutherans? Then tell me what the constant moaning and groaning about "loosing sight of tradition" and "Loosing Lutheran Interest: is all about. Or how about claims that the Lutheran market was abandoned that seems to be a constant within this thread. Heck. Someone recently even got upset about a focus on international students 10 years ago and if they would be taking part in the chapel and taking part in worship. That is Lutheran adjacent at a minimum is it not. These numbers were proposed as an argument for VU loosing sight of Lutheran tradition and an abandonment of the Lutherans in order to chase some dream. I simply proposed the notion that those numbers didnt accurately reflect the reason for the downturn in Lutheran students when there is verifiable evidence that Gen Z has strayed away from tradition faith based organizations. When there are no new Lutherans to court. How do you expect to keep a high number of Lutherans enrolled and feeding your pocket books? Gen Z is simply not interested in the church as much as previous generations were. What we are interested in is cost of attendance and the various perks that paying for an education is going to get. VU is not BYU.
@vuindiana, thanks for your passionate and articulate support for VU. I don't know that we have ever met, though I am glad to make my small donations to VU to support faculty members like you who are doing good work.
Part of the challenge for VU today is that the bills from past failures are coming due. I have recently highlighted the amount of debt (both long term and short term / line of credit) that is facing VU. If instead of paying $5M in interest every year, if there are 200 faculty that would be a raise of $25,000 per faculty member which would go a long ways toward market-rate salaries.
President Harre, to his credit, did not build buildings unless they were mostly paid for though donations, and even wanted donations to pay for the maintenance and upkeep of the new building. Those controls seemed to be tossed aside when he left. President Harre went out of his way to maintain good relationships with the LCMS, something that seems to have been cast aside by President Heckler.
Now, President Padilla is trying to clean up the mess because it is not sustainable to draw $24M from the endowment every year. That makes short term improvements in the financial situations critical.
@valpo95 Really, no one has argued that VU make a hard sell to Lutherans? Then tell me what the constant moaning and groaning about "loosing sight of tradition" and "Loosing Lutheran Interest: is all about. Or how about claims that the Lutheran market was abandoned that seems to be a constant within this thread. Heck. Someone recently even got upset about a focus on international students 10 years ago and if they would be taking part in the chapel and taking part in worship. That is Lutheran adjacent at a minimum is it not. These numbers were proposed as an argument for VU loosing sight of Lutheran tradition. When Lutheranism and Christianity as a whole is loosing popularity with younger generations. When there are no new Lutherans to court. How do you expect to keep a high number of Lutherans? Gen Z is simply not interested in the church as much as previous generations were. What we are interested in is cost of attendance and the various perks that paying for an education is going to get. VU is not BYU.
@rezynezy, the facts are that LCMS students are voting with their feet. Perhaps you could explain why Ft. Wayne Lutheran High School no longer sends any of their graduates to VU? It is not as if that high school has closed down, it is because VU has lost the trust of leaders at that high school and many others. (My wife got to know the Principal there when both were at a different school, and has a pretty good idea what he thinks of VU's abandonment of traditional Lutheran values, but I digress.) Discussing why students from schools like Ft. Wayne Lutheran (who were part of a traditional core of VU's student population) are going elsewhere is way different than suggesting a 'hard sell to Lutherans and Lutherans only' as you put it.
Because a hard sell to Lutherans and Lutherans only was what some people were implying? VU hasn't "abandoned Lutheran Values". I feel like I am a broken record at this point, but Gen Z is moving away from traditional religious values Entirely. Re read previous comments. Concordia Students may be choosing to go else where for personal reasons, however their student population is also on a decline. According to The Lutheran Church national Report. Concordia serviced 772 students in 2016. In 2021, when they stopped releasing reports, their enrollment had fallen to 621 students. U.S. News currently has Concordia at 596 enrollees. Also, with the notion that Gen Z students are not aligning themselves with the faith, why would they even bother to attend Faith based institutions over PFW or other satellite schools. If there is evidence that these students went to other faith based institutions please elaborate. But its grasping for straws to claim that they left for other faith based institutions without backing me up. (Exactly what you were accusing me of).
@rezynezy I think you are the one grasping at straws, not me. Yet here are a few facts, including the list of plans for the 2024 high school class of Concordia Lutheran High School https://www.clhscadets.com/apps/news/article/1935455
There are 80 graduates listed (and surely not all are Lutheran). In fact one graduate is considering either Valparaiso or Indiana University. (I was thinking of past years graduates, where none of them came to VU rather than one who is considering VU).
Of note, by my quick count seven students are going to a Concordia, and six are going to other faith-based (or faith forward) including Anderson, Grace, Hillsdale and Taylor. On the secular side, seven are going to IU Bloomington, nine are going to Purdue (West Lafayette) and three are going to Butler. There are of course many other fine universities listed. Surely some of the students who are tracking engineering at Purdue would have come to VU in the past, but are going elsewhere.
These graduates from Ft. Wayne Lutheran are a macrocosm of how Valpo has lost its way with its traditional student base. When I was a student at VU, I had classmates who were graduates of that high school. The modern Valparaiso University was established by LCMS members, many of whom had strong ties to Fort Wayne. This was a generational pipeline for students, families and donations that seems to have been lost or at least greatly diminished.
**edit - I mis-sorted some of the graduates in my quick count - there are 118 graduates from Concordia Lutheran HS in 2024. There were 11 going to a Concordia, 10 to Indiana Bloomington, and 13 at Purdue West Lafayette**
These graduates from Ft. Wayne Lutheran are a macrocosm of how Valpo has lost its way with its traditional student base. When I was a student at VU, I had classmates who were graduates of that high school. The modern Valparaiso University was established by LCMS members, many of whom had strong ties to Fort Wayne. This was a generational pipeline for students, families and donations that seems to have been lost or at least greatly diminished.
This is a stinging indictment of Valpo and its strategy of the past decade. The mismanagement is staggering. I’m hoping the Board of Directors is starting to pay attention to this issue.
Hy Rez, thanks for engaging in the restaurant analogy. You make a great counter-argument. But thanks to you, I have been salivating over a plate of manicotti and chicken nuggets over the last 24 hours. 
Gen Z has strayed away from tradition faith based organizations.
Allowing for your observation that Gen Z students have "strayed away from tradition faith based organizations," one must still question why the reduction has been much more evident among Lutheran students than Roman Catholic students, especially at a Lutheran University that should emphasize recruitment of Lutheran candidates for whom the university has much to offer and whose promotion materials should feature a prominent Lutheran chapel. In VU's most recent peak year of enrollment (2015-2016), 22% (716) of undergraduates identified as Lutheran and 21% (691) identified as Roman Catholic. Currently, only 10% (221) list themselves as Lutheran while 16% (349) are Roman Catholic.
Is the answer that VU is making a more aggressive and targeted pitch to high school students who are Hispanic, a predominantly Catholic group, whose undergraduate population at the university has gone up from 251 (8%) in 2015-16 to 290 (14%) this year? If so, does this speak to a lacking in similarly targeted and successful recruitment strategies for Lutheran students?
especially at a Lutheran University that should emphasize recruitment of Lutheran candidates for whom the university has much to offer and whose promotion materials could feature a prominent Lutheran chapel.
I consider Valpo to be a “culturally” Lutheran school. Faith is a part of the school, but not its entire identity. It’s not a Concordia.
That was one of the major selling points when I decided to go there.
There are a microcosm of other factors that could contribute to this fact. Rising cost of tuition, poor media and lack of outreach by VU. My aforementioned disinterest by Gen Z for religious affiliations. Ect...Ect.. You cannot claim just one factor as the absolute truth over all other cases which are equally as likely and have equally as much evidence to back them up. To continue on our Logical Fallacy train, this would be called "Cherry Picking:, The LCMS sector of the Lutheran Faith is on a decline. That much is verifiable through enrollment into Lutheran High Schools and the number of reported members. One would argue even more of a decline as compared to other denominations of Lutheranism. ECLA is seeing that same decline. Again, why are we wanting a sign on the front of campus that reads "Lutherans Only(LCMS preferred)", It is a disservice to the Lord himself who regularly communed and engaged in scholarly conversation with those not of his ethnical origin or religious affiliation.
As for Roman Catholic's, VU has had good Roman Catholic relations for quite some time now, due to historical reasons of Chicagoland, they almost have to be. Chicagoland, and by extension NWI, is a predominantly Catholic region due to the immense immigration of Irish Catholics during the early 1900s. (Such is a contributing factor the the sustained success of Notre Dame, but certainly isnt the only reason there.) As such, that population of Catholics has sustained throughout. You have to market to your home base despite being a Lutheran institution. No university survives on transplants alone. To have such a marketing strategy for Lutherans and not Catholics would be to alienate the population of NWI and Chicagoland, which would garner mor distain from the locals regarding university affairs. Most other Religiously affiliated campuses wouldn't even consider building a St. T's on their campus, but VU did to accommodate for the needs of their regional student base. On another note, I would not get into the area of which demographic that the Catholics are from as that is an argument that poses a dark form of thinking that a sports forum certainly doesn't need. Frankly the suggesting that VU is targeting certain demographics of Catholics is quite irksome. Catholicism is also not immune to that same decline as the LCMS and ECLA is seeing. There are as much as 10% less Catholics today than there were in the 2010s.
I agree with MJo8 on the notion that VU is a "Culturally Lutheran" School as opposed to a "Fundamentalist" Lutheran school. Which seems to be the exact issue the LCMS seems to have with the University. Their argument that VU has "lost its ways" seems to be centered around the LCMS's desire for a BYU for Lutherans, which VU has never, will never, and should never be. I say this because the various articles from leaders of the LCMS that have been shared here take the tone that the LCMS desires a BYU for Lutherans. That being, strict dress codes, mandatory masses, 9pm curfew, and limits on conduct and activity off campus. If you desire that kind of experience, more power to you, but you aren't going to find that experience in the city of Valparaiso.
@rezynezy Your habit of making situations discussed into debates between fictional extremes harms the points you make. I did not suggest a "Lutherans only" sign for Valparaiso, nor did anyone else. In fact, I am not Lutheran. I commented that if Valpo wants higher enrollment numbers, there should be a targeted and more successful recruitment of Lutheran high school students, a natural constituency for a Lutheran University that features its chapel and Lutheran tradition in all promotions and mission statements ("Valparaiso University, a community of learning dedicated to excellence and grounded in the Lutheran tradition").
Also, my commending VU for its recruitment of Hispanics, and noting that they are predominantly Roman Catholic rather than Lutheran, which may explain the university's own denomination data, does not "pose a dark form of thinking." I was noting it as a strategic success that should be emulated in recruitment of Lutheran students. Finally, I do not see anyone recommending the caricature of Valparaiso University you paint, with "strict dress codes, mandatory masses, 9pm curfew, and limits on conduct and activity off campus." This is just another example of your creating extreme straw man fallacies.
