Bexley Hall to Close Rochester Campus

The class of seminary students graduating in May will be the last for Bexley Hall Seminary’s Rochester, N.Y., campus which will be closed. Bexley Hall remains committed to a three-year residential seminary program at its Columbus, Ohio campus, according to the Very Rev. John R. Kevern, dean of Bexley Hall.

The decision to close the Rochester campus was based in part on changing demographics, Dean Kevern told The Living Church. Another factor was the more stringent standards the Rochester campus would have to meet when its accreditation from the Association of Theological Schools came up for renewal in 2012.

“We are too thin on the ground there to meet the labyrinthine requirements of the state and the accrediting agency,” Dean Kevern said. “So with reluctance and no great pleasure, the board acquiesced to the analysis of both entities and decided to terminate the satellite M. Div. program as of this May.”

When Bexley Hall last received accreditation at the Rochester campus, it had a cooperative local partnership with Colgate Rochester, a Baptist seminary, which enabled it to share the administrative staff needed to process student loans and registration. In order to meet the standards for renewal, Dean Kevern said, Bexley Hall would have had to either hire more administrative staff or enter into a new partnership with another educational institution. The school would also have had to increase the compensation paid to its Rochester-based professors. Given the demographics of the region, he said, the additional investment of resources didn’t appear to be good stewardship.

There are already three seminaries near the Rochester campus and a fourth M. Div. program will be offered starting next fall. The supply of prospective Episcopal seminary students for three-year residential programs is decreasing, Dean Kevern said, due in part to increased use of Canon 7 (local) training of clergy and also to the needs of today’s typical seminary student.

“Too many ordinands can serve only within a circumscribed geographical radius, either because of age, family commitments, or mortgages,” he said. “What’s a seminary to do with a shrinking client base?”

There were 13 students enrolled at the Rochester campus for the 2007-2008 seminary term. Eleven of those students will be graduating. Of the two not graduating, one will transfer to the new M. Div. program to begin next fall at a Roman Catholic seminary in Buffalo. The other student will transfer to the Ohio campus of Bexley Hall.

Founded in the missionary district of Ohio in 1824, the seminary relocated in 1968 to Rochester. In 2000, Rochester became a satellite office and the seminary transferred its headquarters back to Ohio at the invitation of Trinity Lutheran Seminary in Columbus. Since moving to Ohio, Dean Kevern said Bexley Hall has balanced its budget and increased enrollment. Having started only with students from the Diocese of Southern Ohio, it now has aspirants from the dioceses of Chicago, Indianapolis, Ohio, Long Island, Michigan, Southeast Florida and West Virginia. There are 20 students enrolled at the Columbus campus of Bexley for the spring term.

“All this re-invention—light on property, grounded in doctrinal orthodoxy, transcendent in liturgy, with the explicit expectation of a personal rule of life, and progressive in social thought—has made for yet another rebirth of Bexley Hall, whose near-death experiences are too many to recount,” Dean Kevern said. Bexley Hall is “not only surviving, but growing.”

Steve Waring