Trevecca's president on growth, immigration and the challenges facing Christian higher ed
Dan Boone, president of Trevecca Nazarene University in Nashville, transitioned off leadership role with Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU) as board chairman over two years.
At least five CCCU-member institutions closed or merged in past couple years amid enrollment and revenue decline. Meanwhile, Trevecca enrollment losses stabilized.
Boone discusses Trevecca's approach to holding in tension different opinions amid broader divisions in Christian higher ed over LGBTQ+ rights, diversity in hiring and admissions, and immigration.
Dan Boone, who leads Nashville's Trevecca Nazarene University, just transitioned off his leadership role with the nation's top consortium for evangelical Christian colleges during an especially tumultuous season.
For the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities – a nonprofit for which Boone served as the board chair for the past two years – at least five governing member institutions closed or merged due to enrollment losses and revenue declines, according to an analysis of news reports.
Meanwhile, a federal lawsuit and a congressional fight over legislation sparked renewed debate about Christian colleges' treatment of LGBTQ+ students, faculty and staff versus those institution's religious freedoms. That fight is part of a broader trend in which social issues on these religiously conservative campuses are increasingly politicized as many evangelicals deepen their loyalty to the Republican Party and President Donald Trump.
But Boone's job as Trevecca's president is less black-and-white. For one, he said he has sought for the university to balance different opinions on these highly charged social disputes.
'We (Trevecca) live more in a messy middle where people on both sides of an issue might be a part of the same community, and we think it's quite healthy to come together in our covenant communities and work on these things together,' Boone said in an interview.
Also, Trevecca's enrollment has meant the university hasn't faced the type of financial challenges that some peer schools have. The university has repeatedly touted record new student enrollment. Its full-time undergraduate fall enrollment, despite steadily declining year-over-year between 2019-2023 from 1,679 students to 1,328, according to most recently available data reported by the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. But the rate of those enrollment losses have lessened in the years after the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to precipitous rates of enrollment decline across higher education.
In a Q&A, Boone shared more about his observations about Christian higher education broadly and how it compares to Trevecca's own experience.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Other recent Trevecca news:Trevecca Nazarene University is taking students from a closed sister school. Here's why.
What has the past couple years of leadership with the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities taught you about the present state of Christian higher education?
Dan Boone: It's how critically necessary Christian higher education is for the kind of citizenship we will have in the future. It is in the Christian universities that the community rooted in Jesus Christ gives us the greatest possibility to have the most difficult conversations between people who disagree vehemently with each other. So, I believe the Christian university may be succeeding at raising up a generation of students who know how to enter the public dialogue on very divisive issues but do so with levels of educational training, rationality, human respect and regard, kindness, neighborliness.
Boone related:How a new effort aims to reclaim evangelical Christian label and bridge partisan divides
The CCCU and its member institutions have been front and center on a series of politically charged debates within higher education, whether that's about LGBTQ+ rights, diversity in hiring and admissions, and serving students from immigrant families. How have you seen these divisions play out within Christian higher education broadly and how has Trevecca specifically approached it?
Boone: I think there are two movements that are colliding. One of those movements is among parents who want their children to have moral footing. At the same time, there's a turn toward a more conservative bent in our nation. Both of those groups come to a college, and you take an issue like human sexuality, and you've got folk over here and over there.
At CCCU schools, different faith tribes approach the divisive social issues differently from each other. For us, it's these covenant relationships so the community becomes more important so the way that God guides the community to reconcile it and help it to be a witness and servant in the middle of the world. We believe we have something significant to offer in Christian higher education and we really want our Christian faith to determine how we carry out our mission, instead of a political party.
Neighboring faith-based higher ed:Why Nashville's Belmont University is hiring non-Christian faculty and staff
Immigration is among the highly contentious and politicized issues facing Christian colleges. Talk more about Trevecca's efforts to serve students from immigrant families and how other Christian colleges have struggled with this question.
Boone: We try to serve a lot of different groups. But for a lot of universities, serving DACA students or even undocumented students is a political issue. We are part of a denomination that is global.
The DACA students have been the most hardworking and the most serious about their education as any group of students that I've seen come through. For someone to try to lead away to expel them from the country and have something of a federal government mandate behind them, that's a very hard context in which to lead a university. The minute Christian colleges and churches and schools start getting raided (by immigration enforcement), that's going to be a really sad day in America.
Amid these social and political debates, Christian colleges are wrestling with a concurrent crisis of decreasing enrollment and revenue loss. In which ways has Trevecca struggled and how does that differ from other struggling CCCU-member institutions?
Boone: COVID separated the pack of CCCU schools into ones that were on solid financial footing and the ones that were not. Some of our small and struggling schools received enough federal money through COVID that they were functioning at a better financial level than they were normally. But it kicked the can down the road of whether they could make it. Once the federal cap closed, you began to see that domino effect of a lot closing. The ones that were strong before COVID came through COVID and we took it on the chin. We lost revenue in some of those years. Especially those that have significant adult student pipelines. Trevecca lost 800 adult students during COVID and that's a $6 million revenue line.
The reason we're doing better than the average CCCU school is Nashville is growing, it is a buckle of the Bible belt, we have been able to get beyond the denomination that we serve to be the servant of broader Christianity. We've moved from about a 7% diversity to 44% diversity in our student body. So, we've learned to pay attention to the students that are graduating, and we've done well with growing Hispanic, African American, and Coptic Christian student populations.
During your tenure as CCCU board chairman, the consortium hired a new chief executive, David Hoag, to succeed longtime CCCU President Shirley Hoogstra. What's Hoag's vision for helping CCCU member institutions in this financially difficult season – especially with an encroaching demographic cliff?
Boone: For the new CCCU president, David Hoag, one of the four pillars he's establishing is we really need to create wiser business models for our schools that are failing. We need to have metrics a whole lot earlier to show the trajectory is headed in the wrong way. We need to enhance the possibilities of mergers for them. Maybe as an association we need to create services that are very expensive for colleges that the cost might be shared instead of born with an individual vendor. So, he is really paying attention to the business models to try and help strengthen the weaker among our schools.
Liam Adams covers religion for The Tennessean, part of the USA TODAY Network. Reach him at ladams@tennessean.com or on social media @liamsadams.
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