Crisis at The King's College
A tremendous innovator finds itself in trouble
In the late 1990s, I was serving as Chief Academic Officer for Warner Pacific in Portland when the then VP for Advancement showed me an early 20th century promotional piece from Asbury College. I don’t have it anymore, but what I remember is that it claimed that Asbury was “75 miles from the nearest known sin”.1 I remember commenting that such a claim required a very specific notion of sin (ignoring gossip and gluttony and a bunch of other things).
If memory serves, he shared this because I’d been talking about the uniqueness of Warner as a distinctly urban institution. A scan of the horizon of CCCU schools finds many of them some distance from urban areas.2 This is likely a reflection of anti-urbanism at the time of their foundings.
So I was intrigued when I heard in 1999 that The King’s College (TKC) had established itself right in the middle of the financial district in Manhattan. That’s about as urban-centric as you can get. The institution had been around in various iterations since 1938 and closed in 1994 while leaving its state charter active. Under that charter, and in collaboration with Campus Crusade for Christ (now CRU), it reopened in the Manhattan location (with a subsequent shift of buildings).
TKC maintains a Great Books curriculum, a low student-faculty ratio, and lots of interdisciplinary instruction. Between its location, its curriculum, and its committed faculty, TKC was well poised to address many of the critical issues of contemporary Christian Higher Education.
A New York Times story about TKC over the weekend demonstrated the opportunities the college offered to its students:
Most of its students are white, and many come from conservative households far from New York City. For them, King’s has been a pathway to a world beyond their lives back home, where roughly half were home-schooled or attended private, often Christian, academies.
Many people may assume that students from such backgrounds don’t have an interest in someplace like New York City. That might be generally true but misses the subset of those who desire a sense of balance to their more localized upbringing.3
I began with my apocryphal Asbury quote because I think there were factors mitigating against my hopes for TKC from the beginning. Central among those were funders who would have a much more politically conservative view of the social changes present at the turn of the 20th Century. Not only was there the CRU connection, but the DeVos family was a major source of funding. In 2010, Dinesh D’Souza (of 2000 Mules fame) became president.4
While the conservative political views of administration and funders may be clear, it’s not what students are generally looking for.5 Another quote from the New York Times story:
Some students recoil at comparisons of their school with other Christian colleges that have become associated with political conservatism, like Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia.
“A lot of institutions subscribe to the label ‘Christian,’ but it comes along with a lot of political baggage that I know people here at King’s find to be unhelpful,” said Eli Johnson, 18. “The term ‘Christian’ for us does not mean Republican or Democrat or conservative or liberal, it is about Christ.”
After D’Souza resigned in crisis (which he seems to have glossed over), he was replaced by a true academic president, Greg Thornbury. Thornbury, who I’ve mentioned in previous pieces, was a theologian and philosopher at Union University. I think I would have loved having Greg as my college president. But he was gone from TKC after five years, being pretty much forced out for critiquing Donald Trump.
Retired general Tim Gibson became president in 2018. He was replaced by Interim president Stockwell Day in 2021. In January of this year, the executive team announced6 a series of budget cuts designed to make sure the TKC could survive until the end of the semester. The story got picked up at the end of February by Inside Higher Ed, describing the fundraising challenges facing TKC. A week later, the Empire State Tribune reported that a loan had been confirmed that would allow the college to make it to the end of the academic year.
Nevertheless, TKC’s future is murky at best. Faculty members on multi-year contracts were notified that there was no guarantee beyond the current fiscal year. Issues remain with payments for student housing.
Last week, Inside Higher Ed had a follow-up story that raised alarm bells. It describes how a Canadian billionaire, Peter Chung,7 who owns an online education company had overpromised on an online launch for TKC. The potential profit share between his company, Primacorp, and the college is woefully lopsided in the company’s favor. The IHE story includes a description of the impact the relationship has had on the trustees at TKC.
Primacorp, for example, “has the ability to nominate for election a non-majority four of the nine trustees” on the board of the King’s College, according to details in its most recent tax filings. Among those trustees is Stockwell Day, a former Canadian politician who worked as a consultant for Chung before being appointed to the board. Fellow trustees later selected him as interim president.
It seems to me that TKC has been seriously compromised by the relationship with Chung and Primacorp. Having spent a lot of my career in relatively small institutions, I can understand how these decisions get made. Enrollment isn’t living up to budgetary needs and someone offers a quick fix. Even though strings are attached and the long term risk is significant, administrators believe they have little choice.
When I was an administrator at a Christian college in Kansas before moving to Oregon, I heard that a nearby liberal arts college was closing down because of huge financial aid irregularities. The Department of Education basically made them an example. But the irregularities weren’t on the campus. They were at a truck driving school in Texas the college had affiliated with in order to shore up the college finances. I always wondered what logical arguments the executive team made to justify such a move. “Here’s an out-of-the box idea….”.
For that matter, a decade before I got to Warner the institution had entered into a land lease with a foreign company. The argument was that it would bring in scores of international students which would solve the institution’s financial problems (it didn’t). In reality, it caused problems with the alumni, the donor base, and the accrediting body. Again, when things look hopeless schools will take any deal that looks like a possibility. It took us another decade to get out from under that deal.
While I understand how these things happen, I’m still saddened by the situation at TKC. If I wasn’t retired (and maybe even now that I am), I would love to teach in that environment. It sounds like the best possible learning and teaching environment I can imagine. My sentiment is stated well by a faculty member quoted at the end of yesterday’s IHE story:
“We have a gem here, and I think people know that. We also know we’ve had some financial difficulties, and we just want to protect the gem and try to find a new owner who will protect the gem as best as possible to maintain a Christian liberal arts college in New York City. I think that’s all we care about personally. I care about that even more than my own job,” the anonymous faculty member told Inside Higher Ed. “To me, it will be a tragedy if that gem disappears.”
A tragedy indeed.
If only a group of Christian philanthropists recognized the value of that gem, freed it from its past political shackles, and recognized the true value of Christian liberal arts in New York City.
I need Asbury historian David Schwartz to confirm that I didn’t just make this up.
Of course, there are others in addition to Warner, but they are still in a distinct minority. And those that embrace that urban location are even fewer.
This is a good time for a shout-out to Saved By The City, a Religion News Service podcast by Kaitlyn Beaty and Roxanne Stone. It chronicles major issues in the religious world from the perspective of two single Christian women.
I first heard of D’Souza when I read his 1991 book, Illiberal Education (I’m not linking). It was badly argued and makes the same anti-woke argument now exploding in our midst.
In my own writing, I’ve characterized this as a choice between administrators and donors on one hand and the potential student market on the other. I think the market wins every time.
This is from the TKC student newspaper, the Empire State Tribune, which like many other Christian College newspapers is doing some absolutely outstanding reporting.
Who was also the source of the earlier mentioned loan.
I'll ask around, but I totally believe that this would have come out of Asbury in the early nineteenth century.
In the sin distance contest, there is an urban legend that Spring Arbor was advertised as "7 miles from the nearest sin." Sounds a bit more worldly to me, but I've yet to put eyes on the printed statement.