Proposal to Discontinue Several Programs at Valpo (Including Theology)

This morning I learned that several programs at my university are now slated for discontinuance. Included in the proposal are all theology programs. Also included are foreign languages, music, and other programs in the humanities and the sciences. To see the list of programs slated for discontinuance, go here.

Many faculty who teach in these programs will likely have their positions cut.

Here is the letter that I received this morning from the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences:

Dear Members of the Department of Philosophy and Theology,

 

I write to inform you that the Theology major and minor, the Theology and Ministry major, and the Philosophy major and minor will be entered into the Academic Discontinuance Process today. I met with your department chair earlier this morning to inform the department via the chair, but I also wanted to directly inform all full-time department members via email before a campus-wide email is sent out by the Provost’s Office.

 

I have attached a copy of the discontinuance memorandum from the Provost’s Office and a copy of the program discontinuance policy. Entry into discontinuance does not automatically mean that a program will be discontinued. Your department will have up to 60 calendar days to respond to the proposed discontinuance.

 

As your department works on its response documents, [name withheld] agreed to provide data and advice. You are also always welcome to schedule an appointment to meet with me or any representative of the Dean’s Office. If you have questions about data and the best ways to present information, both offices have individuals experienced reading, analyzing, interpreting, and presenting both quantitative and qualitative information. We are more than willing to help. Additionally, the Provost and the chair of the Faculty Senate, [name withheld], agreed to host open office hours this afternoon starting at 1 PM. 

 

Finally, I know this is a difficult day. The staff at the Chapel and the Employee Assistance Program are both available. You are, again, always welcome to come talk to me too.

 

Respectfully,

[Name withheld]

My brief commentary: 

Given that Valpo's administration hired the same consulting firm that recommended major cuts to programs in the humanities at West Virginia University (and at other schools), today's overall decision is not surprising, but it is sobering. (One of my younger colleagues, who teaches NT, learned at 9am today that she was promoted to associate professor with tenure, only to learn at 11:30am that her tenure no longer will mean anything. She has a young family and is uncertain about her future employment here.)

Today's decision at Valpo was and is entirely market-driven. No attention seems to have been given to how these proposed program cuts will adversely affect the stated mission of the university.

Some elements in today's announcement did catch me and others by surprise. The proposal includes the elimination of tenure (even for those of us who have been tenured for decades), the establishment of one-year rolling contracts for all affected faculty (which means that any one of us could be told mid-year that our contract won't be renewed for next year), and the requirement (at least for me) to teach an additional course per semester at no additional pay. (I have been teaching a 3-3 load, and occasionally a 3-2 load, since I joined the faculty in 2004. The proposal requires a 4-4 teaching load for all affected faculty--at least those of us who don't lose our jobs [or lose them right away].)

It is not at all certain that the current theology requirement (two required 3-hr courses in the gen ed curriculum) will continue. The basic 200-level "Christian Tradition" course will likely continue, at least for a while, but the upper-division theology courses could easily go away. If that would happen, the dept would eventually disappear, since no prospective faculty member will want to come to an institution where they can't teach in their area of expertise and research. As theology faculty retire (or if their contracts are not renewed), those spots won't be filled. Who would want to join a dept if the university can only offer new faculty a one-year rolling contract, no tenure, no program per se, no support for research, just "service teaching" in the gen ed curriculum at a 4-4 level?

I should add that my department is among the most productive departments in the university with respect to research and publications. Each year, it seems, at least one of us publishes a book or comes out with a major article. These publications help to draw attention to Valpo.

Today's administrative decision, if implemented, will completely dismantle the stated mission of the university, it seems to me. Valpo will no longer be "grounded in the Lutheran tradition of scholarship, freedom, and faith," nor will it really be preparing students "to serve in both church and society." With the elimination of foreign languages, music, the theology programs, and other programs in the humanities, Valpo will no longer be a liberal arts university.

My colleagues and I will put up the best argument we can for keeping the theology major and the current two-course theo requirement, and we will join other departments in defending their important role in our overall university's mission, but we also need alumni and others to let their voices be heard in the coming days and weeks.

One of my friends who taught theology at Valpo for around four decades wrote the following to me earlier today, after learning about this announcement:

"Our world and country are changing in fundamental ways. Training has taken the place of education, and education is little valued. A millennium of thought about what it means to be a university and to educate has come to an end. It's time to grieve, but also to hope and to ponder reinvention."

Please keep us in your prayers.

Fundamental Theology - Second Edition

I'm pleased to announce that my new book on fundamental theology was published today. While technically it is a second edition, no paragraph from the first version has been left unchanged. I also added a few new chapters. To learn more about the book, go here.

Rev. Arthur Simon+

Longtime family friend Rev. Arthur ("Art") Simon died on November 14, 2023. To read an official announcement, go here.

Art's father and my grandfather were colleagues in ministry, serving as fellow Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod pastors in Oregon. Art, his brother Paul (not the famous songwriter/singer but the famous US senator from Illinois, who was also a one-time presidential candidate), my uncle Bob, and my dad were friends when they were active in the LCMS's youth organization, the Walther League. Art wrote briefly about his friendship with my dad in the opening chapter of one of his books, The Rising of Bread for the World (Paulist, 2009). He also wrote about my dad, and about my nephew Andrew, in another of his books, Rediscovering the Lord's Prayer (Augsburg/Fortress, 2005). Art and my uncle Bob were co-students at Concordia, Portland, and Concordia Seminary, St. Louis. And then, years later, after the death of my dad, Art and my mom became very close friends, not least because of their shared interest in the Oregon Ducks football team. I thought perhaps Art and my mom might get married, but that didn't happen for various reasons. In 2014, when my wife, son, and I visited Art and his wife, Shirley, in Baltimore, he graciously gave me his entire library, which we brought back to Valpo in a large rented van. 

From my time on the faculty at Concordia, Portland, through my years here at Valpo, Art has been a mentor to me, especially in matters regarding the relationship between Christian faith and public service. (When I was facing oppositional headwinds in the LCMS over the issues of women's ordination and six-day creationism, Art was a frequent conversation partner. He provided me with a lot of pastoral consolation in those difficult years!)

I'm grateful to God for Art's life and ministry. I am also glad that some of my former Valpo students, while serving as interns in Washington (or as participants in various summer fellowships), benefited from Art's vision and expertise when they reached out to him. 

As the founder and first president of Bread for the World, Art tirelessly worked to end poverty and hunger. His engagement with these issues initially grew out of his pastoral ministry on the lower east side of New York City. Along with a dozen other church leaders in his region, Art began to brainstorm about how they could address the local and global root causes of hunger. They wanted to lead Christians to try "to prevent hunger from happening in the first place rather than just reacting to it." So toward that end, Bread for the World was founded in 1974. (If you watch Rick Steves' travel show on PBS, you'll see a brief promo for Bread. I once had a brief conversation with Rick, in which he shared how much Art's first book about hunger had changed his whole outlook on that issue.)

To learn more about Bread for the World, go here.

To quote from Bread's announcement about Art's death: "His work has helped initiate programs that have reduced hunger, decreased poverty, and improved nutrition, impacting hundreds of millions of people in the United States and around the world."

Bread's current president, Eugene Cho, nicely summarizes Art's legacy: "To this day, I’m inspired by the three ideas he had in the founding of Bread: to prevent hunger from happening in the first place rather than just reacting to it; to work within the system of American democracy to ensure political leaders hear about hunger from their constituents; and to organize Christians to speak up collectively against hunger – these speak to things that are as relevant in the 2020s as they were in the 1970s."

Precious in the eyes of the Lord is the death of his saints. May light perpetual shine upon Art, and may God grant comfort and peace to Shirley, their family, and all who mourn Art's death.

Crossings Table Talk about Atheism

On Tuesday, Nov 28, at 1pm (Central Standard Time), I will be leading an online Crossings "Table Talk" discussion about atheism, based on a chapter from my upcoming book, Fundamental Theology , 2nd ed. (Bloomsbury, 2024). 

For an introductory "trailer" for this Table Talk, go here.

This talk is free, but you must pre-register with Cathy Lessmann via email. After registering, you will receive an invitation to join our Zoom-based Crossings Table Talk. 

To register, go here.

The Beauty of Dusk

On the morning of Christmas Eve 2018, after getting out of the shower, I couldn't see very well. The vision in my right eye was clouded by large blind spots, scattered gray areas, splotches of nothingness. I initially thought I was suffering from an optic migraine, which I have experienced several times throughout my life. But the blind spots didn't go away. During that night's Christmas Eve service, all I could do was to keep wondering, "Why can't I see out of my right eye? What has happened? Lord, why this blindness?" Needless to say, my Christmas that year was a bit more anxious than normal.

Because of the holiday, I couldn't get in to see an optic specialist until after January 1. From him I learned that sometime during my sleep on the night of December 23 I had suffered a stroke to the optic nerve in my right eye. The technical term for my condition is NAION: non-arteritic ischemic optic neuropathy. Thankfully, I was on sabbatical for the spring semester of 2019. I ended up spending a huge chunk of that term in and out of doctor's offices and hospital testing rooms. What was supposed to have been a period of writing a book, ended up being a time of getting pricked and prodded, scanned and studied.

For nearly five years now, I've been mostly blind in my right eye. The optic nerve specialist whom I visit twice a year has told me that there's about a 15% chance that I will suffer a stroke to the other eye as well. It turns out that I was born with abnormally narrow retinal blood vessels, the ones leading to the optic nerve in each eye. Ah, those blessed genes! Nevertheless, so far, so good--other than the blindness in the right eye, which, barring a miracle, will remain permanent. (Btw, my optic nerve specialist happens to be a close friend of a friend of mine who graduated a few years ahead of me at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis. Small world. The Doc and I occasionally discuss a little theology in between our focusing on optic issues.) 

While I can still see a little out of my right eye (which used to be the stronger of the two), most of that right-eye vision is dark and gray and blurry, a milky cloudiness. It's been a real cross to bear. But I'm managing. My brain has adjusted so that my left eye is doing a double load, so to speak.

For the first few years, I suffered pretty bad headaches most days, mainly as a result of the challenges of reading and working on my computer for long hours. Using a very large monitor (and enlarging my documents to 200%), I have been able to keep on writing. In fact, since 2018 I've published three books, totaling more than 2,000 pages. But I'd be lying if I said it has been easy. Much of that writing has been downright painful. The right-eye vision has been just good enough to interfere with the left eye's better vision. The result: some nasty headaches. Depth perception is non-existent. I have a lot more bruises, too, the product of accidentally running into things that I don't see on my right. I try not to drive at night. But now, after my brain has had a few years to adjust to the blindness, I don't suffer as much discomfort as I did earlier--or at least I know now when to stop reading and typing, and  when to give my one good eye a rest.

What Frank Bruni suffered and has written about so eloquently in his recent book, The Beauty of Dusk, is what I have been facing each day. (Mr. Bruni also experienced a stroke to the optic nerve in his right eye, in 2017.) I highly recommend his book, which is about more than just the loss of his vision and the challenges it has created for him. (He had been a columnist for The New York Times, and now he teaches journalism at Duke.) In that book he writes about a number of people who suffer from various levels of blindness. I was heartened and encouraged by the stories he narrates, including his own autobiographical reflections. 

I should add that my dad became legally blind after suffering a terrible battle injury in the Korean War. He was mostly blind from the age of 19 until his death at the age of 73. So his example of living many decades with near blindness, of leading a remarkably full and active life with only one half-way decent eye, has been encouraging to me as well. There's not a day that goes by when I don't think, "If Dad could live his life the way he did, I should be able to do so, too. Just take each day as Dad did, one day at a time." If my dad were still alive, he'd have been a good candidate for a Bruni interview!

The stroke I suffered in 2018 was not a Christmas gift I had wanted to receive that year. It's not the kind of set-back you want anyone to get in any year! But I have grown to see it as a gift of sorts. In a basic way, my partial blindness has led me to be otherwise grateful for things I had previously taken for granted. I'm grateful for the vision I still have. I'm grateful when I wake up each morning and can still see relatively well out of my left eye, that I can then see my beautiful wife across the breakfast table. I'm grateful that I have had to slow down in my reading, to slow down in my writing. I have to pay closer attention to details, to work hard at developing more patience. I'm now a strong proponent of "slow reading" and "slow writing." I think I'm a bit more patient and empathetic with students of mine who suffer from dyslexia or from other vision challenges. I'm grateful to learn from people who are blind, some of whom I've met in a doctor's waiting room, to be inspired by how they are navigating with their disability, with their cross. This blindness, this earthly cross I've been bearing, has taught me to see things in a new way.  I agree with Bruni: there is a new beauty that one can experience from such a loss. I am learning, slowly, the truth and wisdom conveyed in St. Paul's statements in Philippians 4:11-13 and 2 Corinthians 12:7-10. (That Paul wrote the ending to his letter to the Galatians "in such large letters," suggests that he likely suffered from a vision problem as well, maybe as a result of the blinding revelation of the risen Christ that he received on the road to Damascus.)