Facing Six-Figure Deficit, CDSP Cuts Staff

From The Living Church via TitusOneNine:

Posted on: June 2, 2009

Church Divinity School of the Pacific (CDSP) has announced that five full-time staff positions would be eliminated as part of “a response to mounting financial pressures and changes in the educational needs of The Episcopal Church.” The restructuring does not affect the number of faculty positions at the Berkeley, Calif., seminary.

“In the past two days CDSP has said goodbye to five good and faithful staff members,” said Donn Morgan, president and dean, on May 29. “They are leaving not of their own volition, nor because of performance issues, but because of our school’s need to bring its budget into a more realistic place, to try to get closer to matching revenues with expenses.”

Elizabeth Drescher, CDSP’s director of the Center for Anglican Learning and Leadership (CALL), said the seminary does not usually make public its financial statements, but that prior to the staff cuts the budget, which begins July 1, had a six-figure deficit. Enrollment during the past year also declined about 10 percent, she noted.

Ms. Drescher said the staff reductions were part of a restructuring which involves reorganizing faculty and staff into a number of cross-functional teams that will encourage greater sharing of expertise and broader involvement in the full range of work performed by all seminary faculty and staff members.

“On the one hand, this was a difficult and painful process because there was tremendous pressure to balance the budget,” she said. “The good news is that we continue to prepare for the future. We see this as part of an overall repositioning of the seminary to serve the church better.”

CDSP announced two new faculty hires. The Rev. Ruth Meyers will replace the Rev. Louis Weil as professor of liturgics for the fall 2009 term, and the Rev. Flora Keshgegian will become the new professor of pastoral theology and women in ministry beginning with the spring 2010 term.

CDSP is also actively pursuing new partnerships and programs, Ms. Drescher said. One of those new partnerships involves collaboration with Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary to adapt an already well-established program for training ministers who are called from a local context. Ms. Drescher said that an adapted version of the Lutheran seminary program will offer both “consistency of training and responsiveness to the local context” as an increasing number of Episcopal dioceses explore the ministry of all the baptized. She said CDSP will also continue to seek out ways to “leverage its relationship with the other eight seminaries in the theological consortium” of seminaries in Berkeley.