“This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.” When HAL runs the seminary.
By Nathaniel D. Porter
October 7, 2014 | Despite spending my days working at a secular public institution, seminaries have been on my mind quite a lot lately. At least two major scandals have taken place in rapid succession at respected and accredited graduate seminaries.
First, eight of the ten full-time faculty members at General Theological Seminary (GTS) were dismissed for resisting what they felt was a corrosive and divisive culture among administrators, particularly the president and dean, Kurt H. Dunkle. The president-elect of Andover-Newton Theological Seminary (ANTS), Martin B. Copenhaver, subsequently revealed that he had cheated on his wife for an extended period of time. Like President Dunkle of GTS, Copenhaver received the trust and support of his board of trustees (and was duly inaugurated).
While there is much that can and should be said specifically about the individuals and institutions involved, perhaps we should begin by considering the meaning of the presumptuous yet sad tone of the acceptance by GTS of its faculty’s so-called resignations or the call of the ANTS board to forgive and forget Copenhaver’s moral failings.
Aside from the clearly unclear signals sent by university leaders, there is something telling in Victoria Weinstein’s observation this earlier this week on The Narthex that “this is how shock works in a system.” If you want to see the stages of this kind of shock and grief, you need look no further than my own institution, Penn State, where the Jerry Sandusky scandal has played out as public melodrama going on four years now. Beginning with anger and blaming, the university moved to hiding a statue of Joe Paterno indefinitely in an undisclosed location for fear it might become either a casualty or a rallying point. The drama continued with a major turnover in the board of directors, and today the Penn State community continues to argue over details of new statue honoring Paterno’s wobbly legacy.
Most tellingly, even after firing everyone who might have been able to forestall at least some of Sandusky’s crimes, the culture looks largely the same from inside. There are more mandatory trainings for employees and students concerning harassment and reporting, but major decisions still happen behind closed doors in Old Main and the rally on the lawn after the football team’s bowl ban was lifted drew a larger crowd than the candlelight vigil for Sandusky’s victims.
I don’t pretend to be as familiar with the situation at either GTS or ANTS as some commentators. Still, my training in systematic theology and ethics combined with three years watching the Sandusky scandal unfold from inside affords a unique perspective on the kinds of institutional leadership implosions that The Narthex and numerous other outlets have traced over the past two weeks. As a sociologist living through Sandusky, the most frustrating part is this: I can tell you any number of reasons these things tend to happen. From a systems perspective, the new candidates who are qualified to replace lapsed administrators come from the same pool of people with similar experiences, biases, and social networks (consisting largely of other administrators and wealthy people). From a neo-institutionalist perspective, universities (or seminaries) will always tend over time toward isomorphism—Greek for “more of the same”—because they encounter similar sets of problems, serve similar niches, and just plain copy each other. The list could go on and on. There’s obviously no single, simple explanation.
I’ve still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission.
Even so, if there can be said to be a single culprit common to all three institutions, I would argue that it is this: the idolization of mission and purpose to the detriment of identity and formation.
In an era of hyper-quantification of outcomes for every person and organization, mission becomes a sort of enhanced inertia, a constant striving to be exactly the same but to look just a little better.
Failure (at what has been done before) is not supposed to be an option.
Is it too farfetched to worry that HAL 9000, the charming AI antagonist of the Stanley Kubric film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, who is so focused on the mission that he kills off the crew, has infiltrated seminary boards and presidents’ offices across the country?
HAL: I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I’m afraid that’s something I cannot allow to happen.
Dave Bowman: [feigning ignorance] Where the hell did you get that idea, HAL?
HAL: Dave, although you took very thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips move.
It’s not that seminary boards and administrative executives don’t try and succeed at important new initiatives. They do. But even these successes can contribute to a certain kind of inertia as mission becomes primarily additive. All of the machinery and stuff of the institution is behind mission-related goals even as there are fewer and fewer people participating in the mission as they understand it. There are buildings to maintain, programs to fund, chairs to endow, and so on, all of which require a steady stream of administrators, alumni, donors—all of whom expect things to look much like they have in the past.
But this kind of mission-lock tends to be weighed down even by its own successes. A board of trustees is likely to trust their president before their faculty in a conflict, because he is more comfortable to them, knows them better, and is more similar to them in almost every way. A donor is likely to invest in (perhaps more technically savvy but) essentially similar educational programs to those she or he experienced.
None of this need be assumed to come from anything but the best intentions. While it’s possible people genuinely wanted to destroy something, inertia itself is a powerful force, made more powerful by by the weight of these storied institutions’ histories. Even when verified moral lapses (ANTS), climates of negativity and devaluation (GTS), or outright crimes (Penn State) do come about, they are dealt with as they would be in the world of business: as problems to be solved so things can continue as usual. So progress can march on.
Do you read me, HAL?
Institutional inertia produces leadership abdicated to what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “the safe way of duty.” Bonhoeffer writes:
“The safe way of duty seems to offer escape from the bewildering profusion of possible decisions. What is commanded is grasped as the most certain. The person in command bears responsibility for the order, not the one who carries it out. However, those who limit themselves to duty will never venture a free action that rests solely on their own responsibility, the only sort of action that can meet evil at its heart and overcome it. People of duty must finally fulfill their duty even to the devil.”
This kind of mission-oriented leadership collapses into just another type of consequentialism. Bonhoeffer recognized and rejected such an ethic in the work of Mill and Bentham (and related challenges in Kant’s deontology), not on ground that considering the consequences of our actions is negative in itself, but on account that our very freedom necessitates an ethics that begins with character building.
Ethics, for Bonhoeffer, means formation. Formation begins with identity, with who we are. But identity does not develop in a vacuum. Social psychology suggests that we are continually assessing our identity standards, who we imagine ourselves to be and how successful we think we are at living that image. But we can’t very easily figure out on our own whether we are actually the type of people we imagine ourselves to be. Instead, we rely on the reflected image of ourselves in how others see us to decide (1) whether we are living our identity and (2) whether it should change.
It is only in a diverse community of others who share our values that we can work out who we are and subsequently what we are equipped to accomplish in the world.
I would be lying to tell you I have the answers to the crises of leadership in seminaries around the country. No one does. But this much seems clear: both institutions and individuals must return to a model of mission, ethics, and ministry, that begins with formation in Christian community.
What I am talking about cannot be the kind of formation that the board of trustees at GTS seems to consider its primary concern—that tries to solve institutional dysfunction like an old fashioned union buster, that begins from the questions “What are our institutional goals?” and “What do I need to do to support them?”
What is necessary instead is formation and re-formation that sets out with more fundamental questions for Christians: “Who am I in the Lord?” and, from there, “Who are we called to be—as individuals and as an institution?” Such questions can challenge mission as it’s long been understood—as though carved in stone—calling it out of the inertia of human habit and into the active path of lived formation.
Neither GTS nor ANTS would likely go here, but if I may borrow from Luther, the Christian (and the seminary), “is the most free lord of all, and subject to none … the most dutiful servant of all, and subject to every one.” We are dramatically and completely free, formed in God’s image and re-formed in the light of Jesus’ grace. But the gift is a call: it is in the very freedom we receive that Christians are bound to serve others. Without that foundation, all our efforts are shifting sand. No matter how great the edifice or how noble the effort, they are ultimately one storm away from failure.
Seminary boards may have the power and the freedom to fire professors and inaugurate a new president. But only by connecting mission to ongoing formation can they and those in the communities they serve experience the kinds of genuine intersubjectivity that leads to true freedom—freedom to change, freedom to grow, freedom to heal.
Freedom, even, to turn off the machine, when the machine seems bent on destroying life.
Nathaniel D. Porter is a doctoral student in the sociology of religion at the Pennsylvania State University, where he is also a research associate at the Association of Religion Data Archives. He also has an M.A. in systematic theology and ministry in daily life from Luther Seminary. Learn more about his research here and find him on Facebook or occasionally on Twitter @faithfulchange.
Cover photo: James Vaughan, “1968-‘2001,’”2009. CC 2.0 licensing.
