The ruminations of one Mary Lou College student is a good reminder of a WELS tradition - finish a new building and close the school.
WELS is good at closing schools. They added a $500,000 music building at Prairie and closed it. Now Prairie is a prison with a world-class music building. I can picture the inmates singing "Prisoner of Love" as they rehearse their next musical.
President Voss was working on a new library at NWC when it was closed (merged) with DMLC. WELS turned about 1200 students from two colleges into 600 students at one college - for a mere $30 million. The financial genius behind this and MilCraft was ex-SP Gurgle.
Michigan Lutheran Seminary has spent millions while the school has declined in enrollment. MLS will be the first to go, followed by Luther Prep and Mary Lou. The Sausage Factory is not immune to closing.
WELS did not need a chapel when Mary Lou College was much larger. Now that the school is teetering on insolvency, they are drumming up enthusiasm for their new chapel. The money was given so it had to be spent. Huzzah. I suspect that a big chunk of money came from the Schwan Foundation. The assets had been frozen too long and had to be delivered.
The students could not learn proper worship at the former chapel, which I thought was quite pleasant and attractive. If Kelm and Olson had graduated from Mary Lou, I could understand the synod's haste in building a fancy chapel. However, the school is going to teach Reformed doctrine and methods in a $7 million chapel. Awkward.
As I was saying--before I digressed with the facts--MLC has no reason to exist anymore, according to its own star blogger. The students voted for wide-open dorms, just like the state universities. The school, headed by a Law and Gospel guy, we are led to believe, has handed the place over to minors who have a record of immature behavior, bad spelling, worse grammar, and academic dishonesty.
Some schools have adopted co-ed rooms, not just co-ed dorms or co-ed floors. MLC is not far behind the secular norms. Their plagiarized, but widely supported video, is ambiguous. On one hand, the video is the equivalent of a Black face skit where students carry watermelons and fried chicken. On the other hand, the fan-page students think they are quite camp in loving the frame-by-frame copy of Party in the Fire Island Pines. No college student seems to blush at the illegal use of the Miley Cyrus music (protected by law) or by the student video stars lies about not knowing what they were doing.
MLC teaches against Lutheran doctrine and does not support the most basic standards of student conduct. The school will close in time, but more importantly, the college should close. Ted Hartwig has accomplished his work. It is finished.
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Blake has left a new comment on your post "Schwan Song - Mary Lou College Dedicates $7 millio...":
Haha, yeah. I also felt that the video was equivalent to a blackface skit. For example, Party in the MLC was racist, hateful, and marginalized and mocked an entire group of people simply for the color of their skin.
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GJ - Do they teach reading comprehension in WELS? I doubt it.
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KFax has left a new comment on your post "Schwan Song - Mary Lou College Dedicates $7 millio...":
GJ - Do they teach reading comprehension in WELS? I doubt it.
You're hardly one to critique a person's reading comprehension, Jack.
The students voted for wide-open dorms, just like the state universities.
Wrong. "The policy was changed in the second semester and now members of the opposite sex were allowed every day of the week within a certain time limit."
Before I delve into further details that you didn't even bother to research or ask Mr. Heise about, certain time limit should not automatically equal "wide-open dorms" for you. "Certain time limit" includes from 7pm to 10pm on school nights, and the usual extension to midnight on both Friday and Saturday. The door must remain open enough for the advisers to be able to peak in, and the opposite gender signing in must leave their student ID along with whose room they're staying in, what time they signed in, and what time they signed out. There is also a $1 per minute fine for anyone who stays past the marked time of 10pm. It is hardly unreasonable, and hardly a reason for you to call it "just like the state universities."
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GJ - I love to read the sophomoric reactions from Mary Lou College fans. The blog cited made the point about the lowered standards, voted by the students! That reminds me of pass/fail being the rage in the 1960s, because students wanted it.
WELS discipline is legendary - in the breech.
About 20 years ago, one WELS pastor told me about MLC summer school being one big sex party among the teachers there for summer courses. They were all married, but not to each other. But I am sure they have tightened standards since then.
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KFax has left a new comment on your post "They Keep Posting about Their Precious Gay Video -...":
MLC is a religious institution run amok. What Jesus would say or would do only comes as an afterthought, if at all. Only individual feelings and opinions really matter.
Yep, because you're the authority, you know every last student, and you're certainly not basing this bold claim of yours off of a biased, ill-researched blog. Looks like even OpenID can't keep the trolls away for long.
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GJ - I thought this was a dead issue. If I were trying to keep MLC afloat, I would silence the yipping Yorkie terriers of Mary Lou College. They are only making my points for me, as they did before.
Almost a thousand readers per day are longing for the wisdom of uneducated, unpublished, unskilled teens, who know good research when they copy it from Wikipedia for their student essays! Kelm beams at them from afar.
I have read the published eructations of MLC students. I need the Rosetta Stone to translate them into English.
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KFax has left a new comment on your post "Schwan Song - Mary Lou College Dedicates $7 millio...":
So what are your standards then? A monastery? Tell me what you think the dorm rules and situation should be like.
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GJ - A false dilemma? What do they teach today! Choose between Peyton Place and a monastery.
To quote my favorite movie, The Music Man, "It's a well-known principle that if you keep the flint in one drawer and the steel in the other, you'll never strike much of a fire."
The traditional concept is to keep the steel and flint in different drawers. There is no Constitutional right for men to be in women's dorms and vice versa.
The rules and fines are so much piffle. Everyone knows that the WELSians rules are for the plebes and not for the inbred nobility. A Chicanery kid or synod official (about the same thing) can do no wrong.
The rules will be changed, as they were mid-semester, and they were wrong anyway.
WELS needs more members but that does not mean the college should foster a passel of illegitimate children to go with their illegitimate doctrine.
