Southern Seminary Changes Mind on Northland

Wow.

“Trustees also voted to revoke its prior acceptance and decline the gift of a Wisconsin Christian university campus, as well as to decline to establish an extension campus of Boyce College, the seminary’s undergraduate school.

Mohler said he has “great disappointment” that the gift of Northland International University campus in Dunbar, Wisconsin, had to be declined.

“We had entered with energy and hope in anticipation that we would be able to have a successful transition in terms of receiving the campus and then opening a Boyce College Northland campus this fall,” he said. “We knew from the beginning that it would be a difficult challenge, but we also saw it as a great opportunity.”

Mohler added that the seminary “is no less committed to work in partnership with the state conventions in the upper Midwest to try to do everything possible to encourage church planting, theological education, and every other good work.”

http://news.sbts.edu/2015/04/22/southern-seminary-trustees-elect-new-faculty-celebrate-historic-enrollment/

My sympathies to everybody involved there. Whether you’re a fan of the whole SBC idea or not, all these changes are surely difficult for faculty and staff and their families to navigate. Pausing to pray for NIU today.

Why didn’t Southern think of this months ago? After all the time and money promoting and celebrating the NIU/Boyce partnership, shouldn’t they have done their due diligence beforehand? Useful information yesterday folks!

While Southern and NIU didn’t specify the reasons for Southern backtracking, it is a virtual certainty it comes down to finances and the amount of money Southern would have to pump into NIU over time to make it viable and self-sustaining.

This is sad, but not surprising to me.

This is still on NIU’s website as of today, so I’m assuming it’s still a go. Mohler is the keynote speaker:

http://northlandcamp.org/camps-and-events/leadership-summit

I imagine it might be a bit awkward or bittersweet now…..

Has Northland been taking registration for the fall 2015 semester?

Speaking from a corporate perspective, what I read in the articles is that when the initial acceptance was given, the board was divided—that’s what Mohler’s comment about knowing about the difficulties means—and they all knew that there would “be some doing involved” in making NIU work for them. I would have to guess that after the initial acceptance, someone on the board got the willies and decided to reexamine the business case—and found (rightly or wrongly) that the business case really didn’t make sense. Now the board is on board—perhaps unanimously—saying that they’d better not do this.

Although such a process can be acrimonious or underhanded, it doesn’t have to be. I know because when I was serving a church as a deacon, we’d gone through budgeting—God had been very good to us the year before—and therefore our initial budget was fairly optimistic. What I did when I got the willies was to ask the treasurer for the overall numbers, and they illustrated what I suspected; the budget was fairly optimistic and we were fairly sure the economy was heading into recession.

So I made this point in an email, and the whole board was—again rightly or wrongly—convinced. So this kind of thing is out outside the realm of respectability. It is most likely just a second look at the business case, and in a case where the business case was much more difficult than a little church’s budget.

What’s weird is that the website for Northland Lodge has a link to Legacy Hotel, the hotel for Southern Seminary in Louisville.

I just saw someone post on another blog, “I believe the main contributing factor was that the quota of students signed on for the fall semester was not met.”

No support or source for it was given. Don’t know if that is true or not, I haven’t seen a confirmation of this yet.

However, from a business perspective this makes sense. Why would Southern sign-on to accept NIU if there wasn’t some level of confidence about the amount of revenue they would receive the next year?

One would think that a top-notch institution like Southern, with financial professionals on staff and on the board, would have done thorough due diligence before they ever agreed to accept Northland. And surely such due diligence would have included an expectation that in the short-term enrollment might have dropped until the existence of an extension school of Boyce became widely known by Southern Baptists.

[Jonathan Charles]

What’s weird is that the website for Northland Lodge has a link to Legacy Hotel, the hotel for Southern Seminary in Louisville.

I think that there are bigger and more immediate problems at NIU than whether or not the webpages are updated for right now.

Current enrollment numbers?

[mmartin]

I just saw someone post on another blog, “I believe the main contributing factor was that the quota of students signed on for the fall semester was not met.”

No support or source for it was given. Don’t know if that is true or not, I haven’t seen a confirmation of this yet.

However, from a business perspective this makes sense. Why would Southern sign-on to accept NIU if there wasn’t some level of confidence about the amount of revenue they would receive the next year?

Just read a post on FB that seems to confirm the idea about enrollment for the next fall wasn’t high enough to sustain a viable financial model for Southern. It would’ve cost Southern too much money. The word used to describe current enrollment for next fall was “pathetic.”

Looks like Southern is doing some things to help out current students and faculty & staff.

I’m guessing total students, faculty and staff might be only 100 total.

Hits the faculty hardest. But early decision will give them time to search for opportunities