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.
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