In a time of great financial trouble in academia, perhaps we should examine our goals before setting budgets

Read the CDSP Strategic Task Force report here.

CDSP is going through a strategic restructuring of its assets.  Or, so says the report that all the students received yesterday.  The proposal to cut tenured faculty, increase contracted instructors, and remove any deployment staff at the school makes me cringe.  In a seven page document the mission statement of the school stands out, only because it is a foot note - yes, it is seriously a footnote.

The report structures itself as saying that the school must attend to the different ways in which it delivers theological education.  And yes, the school has done that.  However, it has not done it in a fashion which is either sustainable, or provides the idea that it takes that role seriously.  An example: this summer, about two weeks before school started actually, the student employee staff person sent out an email in search of someone to fill a fairly specific job.  That job was to capture, catalog, database, upload, and make available for professors and students all the hybrid offered courses that involve both in-class and/or online participation.  This job was to be a student worker (or in this special case, treated as such even if the person was not a student) position and the pay was set at $12/hour and limited to 12 hours per week.  Further, the position was to be eliminated at the end of the Fall term.  The fact that CDSP places the distribution, creation, and imagination of new forms of educational pedagogy at the same level as it does answering phones, trimming hedges, and filing paperwork is disconcerting.  A job such as the one mentioned above is easily a full time position, the emphasis that needs to be placed on new media pedagogy is immense.  If we are, as we were told today by Rod Davis, "going to be leaders on the edge education at the GTU" how are we going to do that if we can't take seriously that education is changing.  Let alone the changing needs of the church and the world.  

The major problem that I have with addressing institutional change from a solely budgetary standpoint is that it fails to get at the human factor.  There is an unfortunate sense, to me, that CDSP has forgotten that students are not news outlets and don't want press releases emailed to them; they are not potential donors who need to be sold on the school; they are not simply numbers in a strategic budget plan.  Students are the face of the school right now, faculty are the face of the school for years to come.  Disenfranchised students and faculty paired with a balanced budget does little to help the school.  CDSP needs radical systemic change.  We need to recognize that this is not business as usual.  Money can be made in Denniston by seriously taking it on as a sustainable cafe and getting that word out into the streets.  Money can be saved by planting community gardens, zero-scaping the lawns, attending to the simple energy loss that occurs throughout the buildings due to lack of maintenance.

I love CDSP.  It is an amazing place.  But lately it has been awkward to really push the school to potential students I meet around the country.  I hope that the school, the staff, the president, and the faculty all take on the challenges that a new century, a changing world, and a changing church throw at it.  Systemic change is not inevitable, but death is.  I raise my glass to change rather than death this week.   

When we think about ecology, we think about home.

I am a fan of recognizing the fact that we are aware of what goes on around us but at the same time there are things going on that we never realize.  Our realization that home means different things to different people is a good example.  What we don't realize is that there is a certain way in which we think of home and organize our lives around it that is beyond our own personal notion of 'home'.

Oikos is the Greek word for house, which could then be expanded to understand home.  From oikos we get the latinate prefix eco- which is relating to those things around us which make home.  Ecology, the branch of science which deals with living organisms in relationship to their surroundings; economy, the disposition or regulation of the parts or functions of any organic whole, or an organized system or method.  Ecology and Economy act as two structures in which we, as humans, think about our home.  The relationship that we have between our surroundings and living organisms, and the exchanges that are present as an ordering system present in those structures provide most of what we need to know when we think about home.

Social structures which frame ecology or economy forget that the two insist each other when we think of home: ecology and economy.  We, modern animals of 30-second lattes and outsourced calendar keepers, seem to forget that home is both our interaction with our surroundings and how we order those interactions.  What we must remember in structuring our world that we carry with us values which need expression through close relationship.  A relationship understood as intimacy between ourselves and other humans; between ourselves and our immediate surroundings; between ourselves and the our resources; and especially in an intimacy with our own thoughts.  Reconciling our inner thoughts is the first step to reconciling ourselves with our oikos.  Until we recognize, within ourselves, what we want home to be we will not be able to manage its maintenance; in the case of ecology, we will be unable to steward its creation.

In a similar vein I see the loss of home as something which is unimaginable.  I think of those who have lost their physical homes to natural disasters.  They are devastated and nearly paralyzed by the concept that one must continue, either rebuilding their old home or making one anew.  There are lessons to be learned about our stewardship of ecological systems from those whose homes have been lost.  The greif that is felt is concrete and the steps they take to managing that greif are real and present.  That is the same greif that we are starting to feel about the loss of control over our own ecological systems.  But, like slowly rising flood waters our home is being lost room by room at the moment.  We have not yet been forced to action because some parts of our home still maintain their veneer.  The paint has yet to start peeling however, there is a black mold growing between amongst the plaster.