Project Report

After Asticou, 1999

LSTC's project is, at its core, about our efforts to provide a positive experience of how diversity can be explored, negotiated, and affirmed in planning and executing a process of curriculum review. Faced with a changing student body and enormous turnover in the faculty, we hoped that we might foster conversation within the faculty and among faculty, students, and other constituencies of the school. We want to respond creatively to this new historical moment in our life together, with all its many challenges to and opportunities for teaching and learning. In our implementation grant application we stated our intention

To foster a spirit of trust in the LSTC faculty, so that diverse perspectives and interests cannot only be expressed, but explored and negotiated in a spirit that is win-win rather than win-lose.
To structure a conversation (about teaching and learning in a diverse context that may call for curricular change) that leads to decision-making and risk, whether the decisions are about new experiments in bold teaching-learning strategies or about how to re-imagine the curriculum.

Mapping the Terrain

Seismic shifts. In the spring of 1999 the LSTC faculty experienced at least five instances of "future shock," that signaled earthshaking change.

The administrations and governing boards of McCormick Seminary (with whom we'd shared classroom space for over 25 years) and LSTC were clearly headed toward an historic decision. In February 2000 both boards would vote to enter into a "closer collaborative partnership" that would lead to LSTC's leasing land to MTS on which MTS would build a new administration building—thus bringing the two seminaries together on the same campus.
A proposal came to the LSTC faculty (as it did to all other seminaries in the Association of Chicago Theological Schools) to change from the quarter system (according to which we'd all built a smooth process of cross registration) to a 4-1-4 academic calendar. MTS had already decided to make this shift, bringing the prospect of two schools co-existing in the same classrooms with two different academic calendars.
ATS schools across the country were beginning to develop online courses to meet the needs of their students. Luther Seminary, the largest ELCA seminary, was moving toward offering a significant portion of their seminary curriculum online. With LSTC's large commuting student population, we faced not only the continuing struggle to assist them navigate the complexities of theological education as commuters (see Lexington case study) but pressures posed by other schools developing distance education initiatives. By fall of 2000 the three Lutheran faculties of the Covenant Cluster were meeting to discuss our participation in a system-wide movement to provide a series of online courses for Lutheran theological students.
We were getting ready to launch four faculty searches in 1999-00, with the prospect of a fifth search in 2000-01—this would constitute a turnover in over one-fourth of our faculty.
The President announced a 1.5 million dollar gift that would help the school launch a campaign for a new chapel (replacing the chapel auditorium and "undercroft chapel" that have constituted our worship and gathering spaces since the inception of the seminary almost 40 years ago) and endow a new position—Dean of the Chapel and Director of Spiritual Formation. This possibility evokes both joy and anticipation and anxiety over our differences in approach to worship (symbolized by the difference between a public auditorium and a more "traditional" worship space) and spirituality.

The landscape is not the same.

Wednesday, June 6 - At the Faculty Banquet we commemorated the retirements of Philip Hefner and Walter Michel—faculty members for over 30 years. With Phil's retirement the last faculty member who was on the original LSTC faculty has now stepped aside to make way for a new generation.
Monday, June 11, 2001 - Faculty, staff, and students congregated at the large windows overlooking the LSTC "courtyard"—the large "green space" that once lay in the middle of our "U" of buildings. Site of volleyball games, picnics, sunbathing, snowball fights, and home for trees planted in memory of LSTC persons, the courtyard was the major "green zone" in our urban school. Community members watched as the long-expected bulldozers arrived, within a day's time, uprooted the trees and created a huge ditch right in the center of the campus. At strategic places on campus there are photographs of green space fully restored, a beautiful new building on campus, and an underground parking garage. It's a long way from where we are to where we imagine we'll be in a couple years.
September, 2001 - In one decade (1991-2001) the faculty has altered from being nearly all older white males (with a couple men of color and a couple white women added for spice) to a faculty of 13 men and 8 women; 8 white men and 5 men of color; 6 white women and 1 woman of color; an African-American President and a white woman dean. We are suddenly something like what we said we wanted to look like in 1991, learning how to live in a landscape that has altered for us all. In this case, we look fine; the tumult of change is more hidden, but as messy at times as the courtyard.

We have tried to move genuine conversation forward about teaching and learning and about a curriculum that addresses today's new realities and challenges in the midst of these seismic shifts, in which significant external and internal "forces" generate significant anxiety and conflict. Trying to do so has taught us a lot.

What We Learned

Conversation that is carried on in service to change is fraught with concerns about power and choice. We learned a lot about the "murkiness" of our history—about past losses and victories. We learned that when people feel that they have little control about major changes (e.g., the move to 4-1-4 feels "choiceless" to many faculty members), resisting a formal decision is perhaps one important way to exercise agency.
People respond to gifts with gratitude and effort. As a team we learned that in receiving the gift of this Seminar. When we used our funds to purchase books for faculty dialogue about teaching and learning, and gave them as gifts, the attendance at the faculty book conversations was high and colleagues participated with energy.
There need to be some conversations that are carried on without the pressure of immediate decision-making. The monthly "space" we created for open conversation about different concerns, the open faculty forum conversation with which we began this year, seemed to foster that elusive "spirit of trust" we sought to nourish.
It's important to have appointed times and places for conversation.
We should have asked Vic to come to Chicago much earlier than our big retreat, scheduled for this coming September.

Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago : 1999 Seminar