As it searches for a new president to chart its direction, the low-profile Christian school on Sunset Cliffs is asking questions about its very identity
Can a small Christian university that is so publicity-shy many of its neighbors don’t know it exists become one of the most prominent schools in San Diego County?
Should it even try?
The questions are causing agita at Point Loma Nazarene University, which is debating whether to chase money and prestige to shore up its finances and better compete for the declining number of college-age people nationally.
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These issues have been simmering for years at PLNU’s secluded home above Sunset Cliffs. But it has intensified recently as the private liberal arts school has begun searching for a new president for the first time in nearly 30 years, leading to a lot of soul searching.
The San Diego Union-Tribune spoke with about three dozen faculty, staff, students and alumni, many of whom said that PLNU must quickly find a leader who can preserve its cherished Christian heritage and intimate vibe while raising lots of money. President Bob Brower, who is set to retire in June, says the school’s endowment needs to increase by hundreds of millions of dollars in the coming years.
Culturally, this is no small thing.
In the often boastful world of higher education, where San Diego’s top schools endlessly tout their academic bona fides, PLNU has kept a very low profile. The approach reflects the university’s 122-year-old affiliation with the Church of the Nazarene, a global denomination that, among other things, prizes humility. PLNU, until recently, didn’t see a need to be well-known.
That has limited PLNU’s exposure to potential donors, students and academic partners.
The university broke character recently, publicly announcing that the San Diego Padres will use PLNU’s new biomechanics lab to hone player skills, a story that brought favorable coverage.
It’s unclear whether this will represent a new direction. PLNU hasn’t decided if it should embrace the sort of lively marketing that’s common at the University of San Diego, a 75-year-old private Catholic school five miles away with about 9,000 students.
The upheaval comes at a time when many small, private schools with low brand recognition and few big donors are struggling to cope with myriad financial problems, according to the credit-rating agency Fitch Ratings, which closely follows institutions of higher education.
Fitch did not single out PLNU, which has been bringing in more money than it spends. But many faculty say the school needs to make some noise, and pronto.
“Our association with the church involves humility, which is a form of hiding,” said Dean Nelson, director of PLNU’s journalism program and himself a fourth-generation member of the Church of the Nazarene.
“That’s no longer an option. The world is desperate for thought leaders and role models. We can help with that. We also need to find a way to be sustainable culturally and financially.
“And we are tired of people not knowing who we are.”
A university that used to oppose the teaching of evolution also wants to become a training ground for the region’s huge biotech and health science industries.
Everything is being closely watched by students. Many recently began wearing prayer bracelets that express hope that a thoughtful new leader will be chosen.
PLNU’s anonymity hasn’t prevented it from growing. Enrollment has risen by about 1,000 over the past decade, hitting a record 4,654 undergraduate and graduate students. Most of the expansion has occurred at local satellite campuses, including one in Kearny Mesa that’s home to the new College of Health Sciences which, among other things, is training physician assistants.
But growth requires money, and PLNU doesn’t have a lot of it. The school, which hasn’t had a chief fundraiser in nearly a year, has a $68 million endowment — roughly one tenth the holdings of USD last year. Brower says PLNU should try to push its endowment toward $500 million over the next 15 years — an ambition beyond its experience.
Without citing a figure, PLNU noted that it gets very little money from the church. Like many small religious and secular schools nationwide, it is heavily dependent on tuition, which is soaring.
This fall, PLNU undergraduates will pay $43,550 — a figure that’s $7,150 higher than it was five years ago. Educators say big hikes are hard on everyone but can be particularly bad for students of color. It’s a sensitive matter at PLNU, which is trying to diversify an undergraduate student body that is 53 percent White.
The challenges that will face whoever succeeds Brower do not end there. The next leader will be expected to uphold the church’s belief that sex should only occur between a man and a woman, and that same-sex marriage is unacceptable. As recently as 2017, the church called homosexuality a perversion. The word is no longer in the church’s manual.
University policy prohibits the hiring of prospective faculty and staff who disclose that they are in a same-sex marriage. It also says any employee who marries someone of the same sex may be fired. The university said it has not faced that situation.
Some faculty told the Union-Tribune privately that they do not agree with the university’s position and believe the church, whose membership appears to have plateaued in the U.S., has an outsized influence on such matters. Fewer than 6 percent of the school’s undergraduates are Nazarenes. Most others are Christians of other denominations. But 10 to 20 percent of undergraduates are not religious, the school says.
It’s a volatile topic that has created strained relations not just with some students and faculty but also with San Diego’s LGBTQ+ community. And the subject will intensify this year as California voters are asked to enshrine the right to same-sex marriage in the state constitution.
Last year, Mark Maddix, PLNU’s dean of theology, was fired in a complicated dispute that involved his support of a former adjunct teacher who had publicly expressed support for LGBTQ+ people. Separately, Seldon “Dee” Kelley III, a senior pastor at a Nazarene church on campus, lost his job for publicly disagreeing with the church’s opposition to same-sex marriage.
Selden “Dee” Kelley led the Point Loma ministry for 17 years. ‘We need open dialogue.’
Some faculty and students say the incidents have had a chilling effect on open dialogue at PLNU.
Staffers at The Point, the school’s feisty student newspaper, declined to talk publicly about these controversies. So did Voices of Love, an LGBTQ+ student group.
“We’re anxious about how the new president will deal with this,” said Karl Martin, a PLNU American literature professor and lifelong member of the church. “If the new president is really conservative, one group is going to be alienated. If the president tries to push greater openness, it could result in the college disassociating with the Church of the Nazarene.”
Brower said he does not foresee such a break, and he emphasized that PLNU is not trying to muzzle anyone. “I don’t have any evidence of retribution or going after individuals at Point Loma,” said Brower, who is 73. “That’s not the way we conduct business.”
The school’s trustees have indicated they are searching for a conservative leader like Brower, telling prospective candidates in an email that they want someone with “an unwavering dedication to Nazarene principles.”
Church influence
PLNU is not accustomed to such drama.
The school moved to San Diego from Pasadena a half-century ago, quietly settling on a 90-acre piece of coastline whose seclusion fit the Nazarenes’ meditative nature. It focused on teaching the liberal arts through a Christian perspective, shielding students from racy distractions like dancing, which wasn’t permitted on campus until the 1990s.
The church, which is based in Kansas, is an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit. But it is governed by a board of trustees, most of whom are Nazarenes who advance the belief that the Old and New Testament contain all the truth necessary to faith and Christian living. The Rev. Doug Pierce, its chair, did not respond to an interview request.
Brower, who was named president in 1997, has closely followed the board’s guidance, notably on high-profile issues like same-sex marriage.
In 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples have the same right to marry — a decision that effectively ended a legal battle over California’s 2008 voter-approved ban on same-sex marriages.
Days after the ruling, PLNU stopped hosting marriages, wedding receptions and vow renewals on school property.
Such controversies obscure the fact that PLNU has been becoming more secular in its program offerings to better prepare students for the job market.
Its new health sciences campus in Kearny Mesa — which focuses on graduate-level training in areas like exercise science, kinesiology, occupational therapy and sports performance — has about 750 students and is expected to grow, eventually helping push overall enrollment to about 6,000. Brower also has been enhancing the school’s offerings in areas like criminal justice and child development.
The university also has invested deeply in science, technology, engineering and math, opening a major science center in 2017 that has energized much of the faculty.
“The equipment we have here is every bit as good as what you’ll find in industry,” said Heidi Woelbern, a biology professor who came to PLNU from San Diego’s Ligand Pharmaceuticals. “Students get good training.”
The university says many chemistry and biology majors get more than 1,000 hours of lab experience by the time they graduate, through a combination of basic coursework and long, intensive summer research programs.
PLNU is using this as a selling point to industry, especially to alumni who work in biotech.
But there are limits. The school does not have a deep database of its 53,000 alumni, which hampers fundraising. And unlike UC San Diego and San Diego State University, PLNU does not have many famous alumni it can turn to for help in promoting the school.
Despite this, current faculty are hustling to bring about change.
“We could become a talent pipeline for biotech,” said Matthieu Rouffet, chair of the chemistry department. “Some people don’t even know we do science. In many ways, that’s shocking.”
He did catch the attention of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, which gave him a $250,000 mass spectrometer that it no longer needed.
Rouffet mentioned the gift during an interview while preparing to rush off to raise scholarship money from a local company.
Faculty also say the school needs to establish a clear, public identity.
Maria Zack, the chair of math, computer science and other programs, says she has encountered members of the public who have said things like, “You’re a church-affiliated school. So the people working in the departments must not have real Ph.Ds. What you must be doing is inferior.”
The efforts that Brower and the faculty have been making to improve PLNU haven’t gone overlooked by Mary Walshok, the prominent sociologist who grew UC San Diego’s Extension program into a massive training ground for the local labor market.
“The university is trying to blend ethics and faith into a curriculum that prepares students not only to get a good job but to succeed in life, to be leaders of a civil society,” she said.
“They are poised to be successful because they benefit enormously from the dynamism and quality of life in San Diego, excellent leadership, and a compelling integrated vision of the role and meaning of higher education.”
The ‘Loma bubble’
PLNU sits on a seaside bluff partly shrouded by handsome palm and pepper trees. It’s off-white and sandstone-colored buildings blend into the landscape.
It’s often so quiet you can hear footsteps as groups of students cross the main plaza. Many live in dorms so close to the ocean they fall asleep to the sound of breaking waves.
Pampering is common. On a recent afternoon, some students took advantage of the school’s free valet parking, then walked by the dining hall, where a chef stood out front, offering them strawberries dipped in chocolate.
Students call campus the “Loma bubble” — its reclusiveness and creature comforts can make the outside world feel far away. Many mention their love of the university’s 14-to-1 student-faculty ratio.
“I know all of the professors by name, even if I haven’t had a class with them,” said Ava Maeyama, a senior.
The emotional heart of campus is Brown Chapel, which looks small from the outside but seats 1,700 — bigger than some megachurches.
Students are required to attend chapel a certain number of times each semester. The school fines them $5 if they fall short. It’s a “super chill” environment, said one student, a place where people refrain from citing Scripture to outsiders.
The atmosphere helped “reignite my faith in a way that I had lost in high school,” said Grace Halcomb, a senior who grew up Catholic.
The tranquil atmosphere is widely prized on campus. Faculty are especially eager to avoid the sort of publicity that Seattle Pacific University got in 2022 after some of its students and staff sued the school’s board of trustees for refusing to hire people in same-sex marriages.
PLNU’s own employment rules will come under even greater scrutiny if the university decides to more aggressively seek money and support from the public and alumni.
The issue has already caused a stir. Nelson, the journalism dean, said some of the companies who’ve sponsored the writers symposium he holds on campus each year have said they no longer wanted to be involved because of PLNU‘s firing of theology dean Maddix.
“I had to go to those people individually and say, ‘You can’t judge the writer’s symposium by what I consider to be (the school’s) backward and hateful position on human sexuality,’” Nelson said.
Martin sees a reckoning on the horizon.
“The tension between the church and the prevailing attitudes of the American public will be an issue the university needs to address in coming years,” he said.
Students have tried to speed that process along. Lauren Cazares of La Mesa, who graduated in 2019, forced the issue her senior year when she wore a T-shirt that said “This is what a lesbian looks like.”
“That got a lot of dirty looks from other students,” she recalled.
But PLNU’s trustees could buy a lot of good will, she added, simply by striking one sentence from the student code of conduct: “Students are expected to abstain from sexual intimacy outside of heterosexual marriage.”
Others make a related point, saying that this is an ideal moment for PLNU to prove it is what it claims to be — a big tent that warmly welcomes everyone, even if their beliefs do not align with those of the church.
“I know that we can become prestigious; we’ve got the right people,” said Heather Ross, a philosophy professor in PLNU’s School of Theology and Christian Ministry.
“But we can only be faithful if we remember that the Church of the Nazarene was founded more than a century ago to help the poor and the disenfranchised. We have to do the same today, which will have to mean being in solidarity with LGBTQ+ students, and people of color, and the disabled.
“The next president has to be the kind of person who makes that a priority every day.”
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