@valpopal Your own articles posted here from LCMS leaders seem to suggest differently.
@valpopal Your own articles posted here from LCMS leaders seem to suggest differently.
What articles have I posted from LCMS leaders? As I said, I am not Lutheran. If you asked me to name an LCMS leader, I would have no answer. In addition, about your suggestion that my recommendation for better recruitment of Lutheran students "poses a dark form of thinking" that would "alienate the population of NWI and Chicagoland" Catholics, as well as your detailed history of Roman Catholics: I am Roman Catholic.
I agree with ValpoPal and others who are warning Rez against an overly black-and-white view of the Lutheran issue. I don't think anybody is arguing that Valpo should become a fundamentalist school for diehard conservative Lutherans only, nor is anybody suggesting that Valpo should just entirely give up its Christian particularity to become a totally tradition-less or secular place.
On campus and on this e-board, there are plenty of devout Lutherans who are also committed to welcoming and learning from people of other denominations or backgrounds since at the end of the day VU as an org is not a church but a university - that makes a difference! And there are plenty of non-Lutherans around campus who want to see the school retain its distinctive Lutheran heritage both for the sake of clarity in institutional identity or even for just simple pragmatics/strategy around enrollment and hopefully not continuing to lose a key constituency - let's not shoot ourselves in the enrollment foot, please!?
That said, the Lutheran scene is a toughie (in a way that the R Catholic universities don't have to face) because the Lutheran world is so internally divided between LCMS and ECLA camps that. At this point they have very different cultures and politics, with pretty sharp distrust of each other. Meanwhile, from what I can tell, the Catholics also have a ton of ideological polarization in their ranks, but it's not (yet) an institutional division and so most the Catholics still exist mostly under one umbrella and give some benefit of the doubt to each other when it comes to being in fellowship. But the intra-Lutheran cultural/ideological divisions are extremely palpable and predictable (basically reproducing the secular US politics). So I suspect that structural internal division and distrust does complicate efforts to recruit from Lutherans since whatever prospective families who would factor in Lutheranism at all to the decision will then, on some level, be questioning what Valpo's Lutheranism is and whether it's to be trusted. (And so Valpo's effort to straddle the two and be independent may work for some, but may just end up as a no man's zone in terms of drawing enrollment). There are other denominations that also have structural splits that are variously old/new/tame/raw (Presbyterians, Anglicans, Methodists). They don't really provide a live comparison since these other groups generally never had much of a HS school system or network of universities to begin with - but if they did, their current ideological splits would probably stymie the functionality of their HS-to-College pipelines in a similar way to the Lutheran/ Valpo case.
Even so, I'm not terribly convinced that the Lutheranism matters much when it comes to top-level strategic planning, so I mostly find the "Lutheran identity" and ELCA-LCMS infighting to be a red herring. Obviously, Lutheran identity or spirituality matters a lot to particular offices and people sprinkled across campus in terms of providing some motivational sense of why they do their jobs.... But at the end of the day, when the university is making financial decisions that actually shape university operations and campus culture (construction plans and debt decisions, technology platforms, teaching compensation and loads, contracting food services, hiring external consulting firms to tweak program offerings, setting tuition and financial payment requirements for students to remain enrolled, etc.) the Lutheranism (any version of it) doesn't seem to matter or factor in much at all. These are basically secular people making secular business decisions. The Lutherans -- for all their internal infighting and passion for whatever strain of heritage they prefer -- have been mostly passive and willing to hand over the actual operations of the university to the secular corporate powers and external consultants.
@vuindiana, thanks for your long and articulate post. I could not have said it better myself.
I want to pickup on one point:
...the intra-Lutheran cultural/ideological divisions are extremely palpable and predictable (basically reproducing the secular US politics). So I suspect that structural internal division and distrust does complicate efforts to recruit from Lutherans since whatever prospective families who would factor in Lutheranism at all to the decision will then, on some level, be questioning what Valpo's Lutheranism is and whether it's to be trusted. (And so Valpo's effort to straddle the two and be independent may work for some, but may just end up as a no man's zone in terms of drawing enrollment).
It is probably safe to assume that 95% of all LCMS pastors knew who Alan Harre was, and many personally knew him. President Harre hired Bill Karpenko as Director of Church Relations (not exactly sure of the precise titles over time) and he was in that role for VU for perhaps two decades before he retired in 2005. Dr. Karpenko was a VU alum, and had been at Concordia Seward in charge of the Director of Christian Education programs. Probably 90% or more of all LCMS pastors knew Bill Karpenko, and probably close to 100% of all DCEs knew him. Although the theologically conservative pastors might have had their disagreements with VU, they still knew that Harre and Karpenko were confessional Lutherans - there was a level of trust developed over decades.
In contrast, President Heckler did not have that level of trust. Although the number of Lutheran students was in long-term decline, President Heckler's status as the first non-LCMS president corresponded with a steep drop in the level of Lutheran students at VU, especially as the recruitment and enrollment decisions take years to work through the system. Perhaps neither the Board nor President Heckler fully appreciated that aspect of his hiring.
VUIndiana offered some very insightful comments and he sort of touched on this, but let me ask the question directly. Do prospective Lutheran students and their parents prioritize having many others around them who share their ideological beliefs to the point that they are effectively seeking a homogenous community? I am not Lutheran (nor Catholic), but I have always advocated that Valpo should have robust high quality religious programs linked to its Lutheran identity. I think Valpo does this and has for many years. But it seems that some of the points made here (outside of those regarding Pres. Heckler failing to build and sustain relationships with the Lutheran community) argue that having robust high quality programs is not enough...that Valpo would need to adhere to religious doctrine associated with LCMS or other Lutheran synods to attract a greater percentage of Lutherans.
VUIndiana offered some very insightful comments and he sort of touched on this, but let me ask the question directly. Do prospective Lutheran students and their parents prioritize having many others around them who share their ideological beliefs to the point that they are effectively seeking a homogenous community? I am not Lutheran (nor Catholic), but I have always advocated that Valpo should have robust high quality religious programs linked to its Lutheran identity. I think Valpo does this and has for many years. But it seems that some of the points made here (outside of those regarding Pres. Heckler failing to build and sustain relationships with the Lutheran community) argue that having robust high quality programs is not enough...that Valpo would need to adhere to religious doctrine associated with LCMS or other Lutheran synods to attract a greater percentage of Lutherans.
This, this, this,. My initial argument was surrounded around these suggestions made by some. And as such I proctored my statements around this question. My wording may have been black and white, but I only intended to base my words off of the suggestions being made around a more fundamentalist style of enrollment. That being said, VUIndiana once again proves to be a very inciteful individual.
