Hills of the North is on quite a roll—read the entire piece, since it gets even better after the below excerpted section:
Indeed. Like a straight razor on one’s wrist. But that’s the happy face that President and Dean Steven Charleston is trying to put on the sell-off of more than of a third of Episcopal Divinity School’s buildings—to a secular university that mainly trains teachers. Simply put, this act of desperation was necessary because the seminary couldn’t sustain itself financially. Lesley University gets buildings. And EDS gets $33.5 million to keep itself on life support for some years to come while the bleeding continues apace. And there’s more bad news to come, plainly. The ENS propaganda piece reports that plans for the future include further sales or leases of property. And Bishop Charleston acknowledges that some of the changes yet to come will be “discouraging.”
As with the earlier announcements about Seabury Western and Bexley’s Rochester campus, this one is entirely disingenous. The sell-out is called a “partnership,” which is risible given the absolute lack of any common mission between the schools (and somewhat embarrassing given Lesley’s stature). There is the obligatory reference to how tough life is for other seminaries, ignoring the fact that there are orthodox seminaries across the nation that are doing very well. Bishop Charleston says it’s time for the school to take this “big step forward.” But his richest line was the suggested delight that EDS can now “get out from under that burden of being property owners,” a line I last heard from a fellow whose car had just been repossessed.
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The ENS article reports that the partnership is a condominium arrangement, in which Lesley will own the buildings and presumably EDS will make some payment (condo fee) for its partial use.
I do not know what the EDS endowment is, but $33.5 million @ 5%/yr = $1.675 million/yr, which is not very much for an academic institution in an expensive location. They may be required to eat into the corpus.
Contrast this with TSM, with facilities that include an old A&P;grocery store located in the working town of Ambridge (American Bridge).