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Post by wildcats0075 on Feb 17, 2020 17:55:44 GMT -6
Harding’s professional programs in Little Rock give them a sustainable model but they will be challenged as a residential university. Lipscomb is, of course, in the best market other than Pepperdine but clearly they don’t have the resources of the other three. ACU has reimagined itself as a Christian university in the C of C tradition rather than a C of C University. It seems to be working albeit at the cost of a more secular community. And that seems to be the path that HSU is going down. I think closing the seminary has more to do with distancing themselves from the Southern Baptists. They will still have Bible degrees and programs. My opinion based on nothing at all. What has changed that makes it "a Christian university in the C of C tradition rather than a C of C University?" I follow the sports teams pretty closely but I am guess not the religious aspects of the school.
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Post by jCat on Feb 17, 2020 18:04:27 GMT -6
The most straightforward answer here is the changing demographics of the student body. In the 80's or '90s, around ninety percent of the student body were affiliated with the CofC tradition. Today, the student body has perhaps 30 to 35 percent with a CofC background.
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Post by mavsman53 on Feb 17, 2020 18:05:25 GMT -6
Logsdon has struggled for several years and have continually been in the red financially. Their leadership has known about this for years, but never thought it would come to this. It's kind of sad to see all of this backlash from students, faculty and alumni.
There are many reasons students that attend HSU don't attend ACU. ACU is more expensive for sure ($37,800 for ACU versus $28,900 at HSU. While ACU has become more of a christian university, all of the faculty must attend a church of Christ. So, the Bible faculty teach from that perspective; and I do not say that in a negative way, just as a reality. I found it very challenging as a bible major to take bible classes and not attend a church of Christ. I also knew that the majority of churches coming in for Lectureship and now Summit would not have interest in hiring me. Do I think ACU has made huge strides in the past 15 or so years? I do, but I also think the school needs to bring in more churches that are outside of the churches of Christ for hiring purposes. When more than half of your undergraduate population do not come from a church of Christ background, that needs to be looked at more.
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Post by OscarWildeCat, Admin on Feb 17, 2020 18:47:59 GMT -6
Logsdon has struggled for several years and have continually been in the red financially. Their leadership has known about this for years, but never thought it would come to this. It's kind of sad to see all of this backlash from students, faculty and alumni. There are many reasons students that attend HSU don't attend ACU. ACU is more expensive for sure ($37,800 for ACU versus $28,900 at HSU. While ACU has become more of a christian university, all of the faculty must attend a church of Christ. So, the Bible faculty teach from that perspective; and I do not say that in a negative way, just as a reality. I found it very challenging as a bible major to take bible classes and not attend a church of Christ. I also knew that the majority of churches coming in for Lectureship and now Summit would not have interest in hiring me. Do I think ACU has made huge strides in the past 15 or so years? I do, but I also think the school needs to bring in more churches that are outside of the churches of Christ for hiring purposes. When more than half of your undergraduate population do not come from a church of Christ background, that needs to be looked at more. I’d be really interested in your perspective on what “teaching from a C of C perspective” means. Forty years ago C of C’s had a distinctive set of beliefs and practices that in my experience no longer exist.
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Post by mavsman53 on Feb 17, 2020 20:19:32 GMT -6
I grew up church of Christ and have deep love for my heritage. When I was a Sophomore in college, I started going to Grace Bible Study. My senior year, I began attending Beltway Park. I was there for 2 years until I took a job in Fort Worth. During my last 2 years at ACU, I saw a lot of "we do this because it's tradition." So as a student, and later when I was over Chapel, I got a lot of pushback on things. As a student, we had a man come in from another tradition in chapel. He did "an altar call or a "come to the front call." At first, no one moved. After a few minutes, around 300 students came forward to be prayed for. Honestly, for me, that was one of the top 5 chapels in my 5 years as a student. But we would hear things like, we don't do that. Well, why don't we? I would try and ask questions about styles of worship, and I would get, well of course you don't understand, you're no longer church of Christ. I wasn't trying to argue or cause a fight, I just wanted to learn why do we think the way we do. My favorite class was church history with Doug Foster. There, I heard how our heritage was started and the desire to be "Christians only." Somehow, that got turned into we are the only Christians. There was a mindset among other bible students that you only hung out with bible students. I wouldn't do that. I couldn't look at a business major, art major or theatre major and think I knew more than them or was better than them because I was studying Bible.
Later, when I was over the Chapel program, I had a professor complain to me because a speaker we had didn't read out of the NIV. The best part of it, he wasn't even in Chapel, he just heard that later from students. On a Wednesday, we took communion together, to remind ourselves what Jesus did for us and that we are a Christian community. You would have thought that I hurt someone because we took communion on a Wednesday, not a Sunday.
My last year over Chapel, I began to question why we do Chapel. Listen, very few faculty and staff attend. The students, talk or do their own thing during Chapel. I sat in a team meeting and said, "chapel doesn't matter. Unless it matters from the top down and there is a mandate that ALL faculty and staff attend, it doesn't matter." I told leadership, bring the Board to a chapel in November; let them see what it's really like. The Board comes for Opening Chapel and Sing Song. Guess what, it looks amazing! That's NOT reality.
All that to say, I felt like an outsider.
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Post by Cat_A_holic on Feb 18, 2020 10:29:02 GMT -6
Logsdon has struggled for several years and have continually been in the red financially. Their leadership has known about this for years, but never thought it would come to this. It's kind of sad to see all of this backlash from students, faculty and alumni. There are many reasons students that attend HSU don't attend ACU. ACU is more expensive for sure ($37,800 for ACU versus $28,900 at HSU. While ACU has become more of a christian university, all of the faculty must attend a church of Christ. So, the Bible faculty teach from that perspective; and I do not say that in a negative way, just as a reality. I found it very challenging as a bible major to take bible classes and not attend a church of Christ. I also knew that the majority of churches coming in for Lectureship and now Summit would not have interest in hiring me. Do I think ACU has made huge strides in the past 15 or so years? I do, but I also think the school needs to bring in more churches that are outside of the churches of Christ for hiring purposes. When more than half of your undergraduate population do not come from a church of Christ background, that needs to be looked at more. I’d be really interested in your perspective on what “teaching from a C of C perspective” means. Forty years ago C of C’s had a distinctive set of beliefs and practices that in my experience no longer exist.
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Post by OscarWildeCat, Admin on Feb 18, 2020 14:35:52 GMT -6
I grew up church of Christ and have deep love for my heritage. When I was a Sophomore in college, I started going to Grace Bible Study. My senior year, I began attending Beltway Park. I was there for 2 years until I took a job in Fort Worth. During my last 2 years at ACU, I saw a lot of "we do this because it's tradition." So as a student, and later when I was over Chapel, I got a lot of pushback on things. As a student, we had a man come in from another tradition in chapel. He did "an altar call or a "come to the front call." At first, no one moved. After a few minutes, around 300 students came forward to be prayed for. Honestly, for me, that was one of the top 5 chapels in my 5 years as a student. But we would hear things like, we don't do that. Well, why don't we? I would try and ask questions about styles of worship, and I would get, well of course you don't understand, you're no longer church of Christ. I wasn't trying to argue or cause a fight, I just wanted to learn why do we think the way we do. My favorite class was church history with Doug Foster. There, I heard how our heritage was started and the desire to be "Christians only." Somehow, that got turned into we are the only Christians. There was a mindset among other bible students that you only hung out with bible students. I wouldn't do that. I couldn't look at a business major, art major or theatre major and think I knew more than them or was better than them because I was studying Bible. Later, when I was over the Chapel program, I had a professor complain to me because a speaker we had didn't read out of the NIV. The best part of it, he wasn't even in Chapel, he just heard that later from students. On a Wednesday, we took communion together, to remind ourselves what Jesus did for us and that we are a Christian community. You would have thought that I hurt someone because we took communion on a Wednesday, not a Sunday. My last year over Chapel, I began to question why we do Chapel. Listen, very few faculty and staff attend. The students, talk or do their own thing during Chapel. I sat in a team meeting and said, "chapel doesn't matter. Unless it matters from the top down and there is a mandate that ALL faculty and staff attend, it doesn't matter." I told leadership, bring the Board to a chapel in November; let them see what it's really like. The Board comes for Opening Chapel and Sing Song. Guess what, it looks amazing! That's NOT reality. All that to say, I felt like an outsider. Thanks for taking the time to respond in such detail.
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Post by acutrackfan on Feb 18, 2020 15:08:56 GMT -6
I too think there will be a winnowing of universities in the coming years. In Texas, the reason that the smaller regional colleges have nearly all affiliated with a bigger institution is to try and avoid closure in the future. I just read on-line that Texas Tech has extended an invitation to Midwestern to join the Texas Tech system -- Angelo State did so several years ago.
Undoubtedly, an endowment that has prospered in the past 2 decades should help ACU get through the upcoming challenging year. The endowment is now around $460 million, which generates around $21 million a year. A major portion of that will go toward helping fill the gap between the sticker price and the actual price. At ACU 99% of the students get some kind of financial aid. The average undergrad pays less than 55% of the tuition sticker price. In a perfect world, the difference is made up by endowment earnings and the portion of the endowment that is directed toward scholarship help is not nearly enough to pay for that difference.
I was frankly surprised to see that HSU was having to make up a $4 million deficit -- for a school that is less than half the size of ACU. There were times in early 2000's that ACU was running deficits of $5-6 million, but that deficit has been closer to $1-2 million in more recent years. And, the last 2 years have been virtual breakeven.
It certainly appears that ACU has been somewhat successful in widening its door to more students from a greater number of faith traditions. I think that ACU was an early adopter of reaching out to the growing "community church" population. Also, ACU diversified 20-25 years ago to a wider range of Christian high schools. Of course, most of the K-12 schools that were traditionally associated with the Churches of Christ dropped below 50% CofC members years ago. Many of those traditional feeder schools (Dallas Christian, FW Christian, Westbury Christian, Northland Christian, Southwest Christian) have been only 20-30% CofC kids for years.
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Post by OscarWildeCat, Admin on Feb 19, 2020 5:36:20 GMT -6
“ My favorite class was church history with Doug Foster. There, I heard how our heritage was started and the desire to be "Christians only." Somehow, that got turned into we are the only Christians“
I’d say that’s a good way of describing the evolution of C of C beliefs from it’s beginnings on the frontier (Kentucky was in the frontier at the time) to sometime in the late 20th Century. Beginning sometime in the early 60’s and continuing through today we have come full circle. Most 21st century congregations are more like the C of C of the early 19th Century than the mid-20th Century.
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Post by mavsman53 on Feb 19, 2020 8:49:55 GMT -6
Oscar, I completely agree. And those churches that want to be the only Christians likely won't be around in the next 20-30 years. I have thought about since my previous post- one of the things that has started bothering me, is sometimes we Christians don't walk around with joy. I've noticed recently, whether it is Summit, political issues/thoughts, LGBT rights, that many Christians are saying things out of anger. I had a student come into my office, my last year at ACU and inform me that a professor was very upset with a decision that was made. The student said, can we pray about it. His response was, I'm not going to, as it won't do any good, but I guess you can. That professor is still there today. Will we as Christians agree on everything, nope. We can disagree with each other, which actually is iron sharpening iron, but at the end, we remember that we are on the same side and we walk away with joy. However, if we are not walking around with joy, then why in the world would anyone want to be a part of what we have? One of the passages in the Bible that has really shaped me is, not many of you should desire to be teachers, because you will be judged more strictly.....If you are in a leadership position and around young people, then you lead with humility and grace. You show your vulnerability, but you lead your students well. I just remember walking away from that conversation with that student very sad that this is what was told to a group of students.
Okay rant over
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Post by OscarWildeCat, Admin on Jun 27, 2020 4:17:58 GMT -6
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Post by Outsider on Jun 27, 2020 12:22:02 GMT -6
I hope they can pull everything together. Their football program is worth keeping around.
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Post by SportsWizard15 on Jul 8, 2020 14:14:47 GMT -6
Stanford just dropped men’s and women’s fencing, field hockey, lightweight rowing, men’s rowing, co-ed and women’s sailing, squash, synchronized swimming, men’s volleyball, and wrestling. IVY League also canceled all Fall Sports Today
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Post by bogeyman on Jul 8, 2020 14:26:27 GMT -6
IMHO, this is all ridiculous. The danger is for older people (me) not fit athletes in college (am I right that in Texas, 80% of fatalities due to Covid are 65+ with preexisting conditions and 0% fatalities under 25?). There is almost -0- chance of a college athlete who gets the virus having a severe case. Are college administrators and boards subscribing to "the sky is falling, the sky is falling" syndrome? What am I missing? Test, isolate positive results, test again. Let 'em play.
P.S. Currently the CDC estimates upwards of 99.75% of Covid 19 positives recover and 80%+ of those who don't fall into the 65+ range with preexisting conditions.
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Post by mavsman53 on Jul 8, 2020 14:34:44 GMT -6
The Ivy League just canceled all sports until Jan. 1
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