@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.
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.
Thanks, VU95! I came during the Heckler years so this kind of comparative history is helpful. It does seem like there used to exist a thickness of connection between the university and LCMS churches in particular that has been lost. And in general, the issue of 'trust' is kind of poignant. That seems all-around hard to come by these days!
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.
Great question, and I don't really know!
I'm not Lutheran so just take this as kind of cultural analysis guess from a friendly observer who wants the Lutheranism to matter and often wishes the Lutherans would get their act together:
My sense is that the ideological commitments and litmus tests are, at this point, mostly unhinged from doctrine. Before I came to Valpo I studied up a bit on Lutheran thought because I figured I should have some understanding of whatever theology or political philosophy must inform the organizational life of Lutherans. So I read a bunch of stuff written by Luther and secondary scholarship on Lutheranism -- about grace, justification, law and freedom, notions of sovereignty, communal ethics, etc. I thought it was great and still do have a lot of respect for it! But the weird thing upon arrival and meeting real live Lutherans was that neither the LCMS or ELCA Lutherans seemed to talk about any of that, and overall most of their litmus tests seem to be about much more mainstream American politics (anti-immigration or pro-immigrant, anti-diversity or pro-diversity, anti-evolution or pro-evolution, etc.) I don't know if the Lutherans just don't know their own intellectual tradition, or if they've just given up on it to fall into line with the more dominant political Right vs Left antipathies? At any rate, I just haven't met very many Lutherans where the religious teaching is clearly animating anything.... It seems to me that most are first politically conservative or politically liberal, and then secondarily Lutheran in a follow-up way. It's for that reason that I do worry the Lutheranism ends up being a kind of no-man's zone for enrollment, since there are far more stereotypically conservative or liberal universities out there. If LCMS families really want a politically conservative and explicitly anti-woke place, then they're going to go to Hillsdale and Taylor and the like because -- even if those places aren't LCMS -- they hit all the conservative buttons they care about. If ELCA families really want to somewhere liberal and explicitly social-justice-y, then they're going to go to Oberlin or Grinnell or something because -- even though they're not ELCA institutions -- they hit the liberal buttons that matter. Or either type of family may just end up sending their kid to the cheaper state school. So yeah... I do have doubts about the recruit-ability of Lutherans as such.
I'm sorry if that sounds ungenerous -- but the grimness in this assessment comes from a sense that we'd all be better off if the Lutherans could actually figure out their Lutheran convictions on a more substantive level. From a sociological sort of perspective, I suspect that it is because the LCMS and ELCA are so untethered from actual Lutheran thought that they get so easily pulled into the church polarizations as a mere cipher for American 'red vs. blue' politics... and that leaves VU more easily co-opted by utterly external pathologies from the higher ed industry and corporate finance worlds. Anybody with an agenda can invoke the "Lutheran mission" and since nobody's really sure what it means, it can be wielded in any which way. So while the little piggies run from right to left, the wolves gladly take up residence in the house.
