Southern Seminary has dropped its music school. Southwestern Seminary has dropped its counseling licensing program. Both institutions cite financial issues as the reason for their actions.
Having been a trustee at an educational institution, I can understand financial difficulties and can understand the need to cut back in places. What I cannot understand is the total lack of information regarding administrative salaries being cut back in order to try to save the programs that have made our seminaries what they are.
My own sense is that any seminary president worth his salt would begin any cutbacks by announcing a reduction of his own salary, as well as the salaries of other top administrators.
The lack of that kind of information tells me that there has been no such reduction of seminary expenditures. There have been layoffs, program elimination, and a myriad of other cutbacks. However, unless I missed it, I have seen no indication that top level salaries have been cut. If they have, and I just missed it, then I will apologize.
I am a great believer in top-down spending cuts. In any corporate structure or institution, when financial hard times come, the top management needs to set the example by announcing that they will cut their own income first. That is what leaders do. They set the example.
I have been in churches and worked in places where finances became an issue occasionally. In some of those places I have even seen salaries increased, even though programs and ministries are being cut. Leaders simply need to ask themselves how they think that looks to the average Joe out there who is struggling to make ends meet in his own home.
Whether it is a church or a government, when you run out of money, you need to quit expending the salary base. When cuts in program and ministry are being contemplated, the wise thing t do is to set the stage by recommending cuts in top salaries as a beginning point.
1 comments:
The irony is that in the years immediately following the Civil War when the Southern Baptist Convention was struggling to survive, it was the ministry and fundraising efforts of women that kept the SBC afloat. Today, I'm sure many Southern Baptist women would rise to the occasion again and help these struggling institutions where they wouldn't have to eliminate any programs. But these "powers that be," who won't sacrifice anything themselves, have spent much of their lives alienating and making women feel superfluous that there probably won't be the efforts of SBC women's organizations that we've seen in the past.
This is kind of beside the point of your blog post, but something that came to mind after reading it.
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