Bruce Church has left a new comment on your post "Lutheran Seminary Fraud: Students Are Bankrupting ...":
President Harrison was at a conference at St. Louis where, evidently, reps from the two LCMS seminaries, and maybe the LCC Canadian seminary, participated in strategizing their joint mission to the world, and also getting a handle on what counts as proper stewardship of resources. It seems Paul Raabe, a CLS Hebrew prof, was the M.C. and organizer, and Harrison was one of the presenters.
They should have had this meeting decades ago before tuition at the two LCMS seminaries got way out of hand, but the seminaries were like lenders of late who couldn't wait to profit off of yet another subprime interest loan of an outrageous amount for a rundown shack.
It seems to me that the seminaries turned their enterprise into a sort of world missions--where the professors have to jet off to far flung corners of the earth to teach a class at different seminaries since it's so boring to just teach at one campus for a few years straight. So just like missions in the LCMS and WELS got terribly expensive and the LCMS at least had to severely limit the number of jet-setting missionaries and jet-setting mission executives, now the synod has to pull in the reins on our jet-setting seminary professors and their administrators. Of course, all this jet-setting was put on the students' tab, and they paid for it via federal student aid at 6.6% interest, maybe for life.
Harrison talked about a joint fund he's setting up to fund the 3 seminaries (2 LCMS and the LCC) to the tune of $1 million per year. The fund might need $50 million in it to generate that much interest in today's environment, I'd guess. It was advertised on p. 31 of the May 2011 Lutheran Witness (links below).
I'm guessing Harrison wants it to be a joint fund since the LCC is basically a LCMS seminary now since LCMS students are escaping to Canada to get their M Divs at a lower price, and also the LCMS has often taken in their students on colloquy. The LCC probably feels the LCMS owes it a lot of support. I'd bet the LCMS seminaries rue that join fund since now the LCMS is basically subsidizing students to go to Canada. But the LCMS seminaries brought it on themselves.
Just think--a brand new Walther library on the lake and not many students to use it. Maybe Ft. Wayne will be the next Perry County seminary (now a log cabin museum) when Ft Wayne is mothballed.
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links:
Global Impact Meeting AKA Paul Raabe’s War Room
http://www.wmltblog.org/2011/06/global-impact-meeting-aka-paul-raabes-war-room/
The final portion of the meeting discussed the funding challenge first presented in the May 2011 Lutheran Witness, “Blessings, Gifts, Challenges…” (click here for the issue) which specifically challenged the Synod to raise $250,000 for theological education (see http://lcms.org/projects) or click here to give now to this challenge. The goal is to have $1,000,000 per year to divide between Concordia Seminary Saint Louis, Concordia Theological Seminary Fort Wayne, and the Lutheran Church Canada to provide theological education consisting of bringing future leaders to LCMS and LCC seminaries, sending seminary professors overseas to teach, and to support regional seminaries of partner churches.
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Theological Education Initiatives in the May 2011 LW:
http://classic.lcms.org/witness_archives/may11/index.html
