For the nearly 200-year-old General Theological Seminary, which has the bulk of its campus between Ninth and Tenth Avenues and 20th and 21st Streets, the deal was a matter of survival, spokesman Bruce Parker said Thursday.
The institution carries $41 million in debts, a quantity that nearly prevented it from opening for classes this fall, according to Parker. The sale, to the Brodsky Organization, would fully cover those debts, said Parker, who could not provide the total price tag for the deal.
The properties the Seminary is selling off include a residential building known as Chelsea 2, 3, 4, a portion of the schoolyard currently used as a tennis court, and 422 W. 20th Street. The school currently fills the buildings with a mix of dormitories and offices.
What the story unaccountably misses — this land that is being sold? It was given to General by one of their own professors, none other than Clement Clarke Moore.
Yes, that fellow. “A Visit From St. Nicholas” himself.
Very sad. My daughter was born there. It feels like a part of our family history is being lost.
Is this unique to GTS?
Are the orthodox seminaries facing similar financial challenges?
What about the other liberal seminaries?
Seabury-Western, effectively closed. Lexington Theological Seminary, declared financial exigency last year, released most of the faculty, trying to reboot as a distance-learning “virtual” seminary. Methodists tried to close United-Dayton to force a merger with Methesco in Delaware OH. Other mainline/oldline seminaries releasing all “unnecessary” staff, pitching Lilly Endowment for massive, fast recruitment drives, due to incoming classes of 5 or 6 where just a decade or two ago the annual incoming MDiv head count was 25 to 50.
And that’s off the top of my head. Oh, and the other NYC monument, Union Theological, has been making major land sale noises in the last year. Orthodox seminaries I confess to knowing less about, but to be fair, they tend to be smaller and are not as bloated to start with, so can weather brief downturns more readily.
Evangelical & fundamentalist schools are reporting strains, but only obliquely. They are often even less transparent than mainline/oldline Protestant institutions, so we may not know for sure until it’s over, good or bad, for them.
Ralph,
In addition to the more liberal seminaries, both ETSS and Nashotah appear to be affected.
Trinity School for Ministry appears to be doing better.
[url=http://catholicandreformed.blogspot.com]Catholic and Reformed[/url]
Old story, but outlines what I thought I’d heard, which was that even Southern Baptist seminaries were in the tank financially:
http://www.ethicsdaily.com/american-theological-education-is-in-financial-trouble-cms-11530
Even many traditional/conservative seminaries had drunk deeply at the tainted wells of academic bloat and endowment draws, which blew up on them with the market drops of ’07/’08 — and when you’d been increasing the percentage of your operating budget that came from the endowment for thirty years, as most mainline seminaries had, you are really in the soup when the board and/or fiscal officers tell you that a 6 to 8% draw on your endowment is actually eating into the seed corn, and it must be halved. Half of 10% of your budget is a challenge; cutting half of 40+% of your budget is crisis time. And a few were beyond even that.
The big difference is this has been going on for a long time at GTS. The 2008 recession has very little to do with their plight. Back in 2001 they were trying to get TEC/ECUSA to move the headquarters from 815 2d Ave. to GTS, and buy or rent space from the seminary plus remodle space into a “hotel” for visitors to TEC HQ. This was being done to save them financially. There have been several “quick fixes” and bailouts since then but nothing has really changed for them in the last 10 + years. My personal opinion is it has a lot to do with theology, but admittedly, they have also been financially mismanaged for a long time.