The Board of Trustees at Birmingham-Southern College voted to close the 168-year-old school at the end of May after the state legislature failed to secure access for a loan program. “Without that funding, the College does not have the resources to continue,” said Rev. Keith D. Thompson chair of the BSC Board of Trustees.
Mark Tooley is president of The Institute on Religion & Democracy in Washington, DC. He tells AFN that the college was also a victim of the split in the United Methodist Church.
"It is interesting that this Methodist-affiliated college that is closing effectively denounced the United Methodist Church in 2019 when [the UMC] reaffirmed its traditional biblical teachings about marriage and sexuality," he shares.
"Clearly, [BSC] did not want to be associated with the traditional, official stance of the United Methodist Church, and wanted to retain a wider, more progressive constituency. So, it's noteworthy that that ploy did not work and the college is now shutting down – and obviously [that move] was not very effective at creating a wider constituency. And of course, the United Methodist Church itself is now divided."
According to Tooley, there are about 100 United Methodist-related colleges – "very, very few of which are strongly Christian in their curriculum or in their campus life,” he adds.
“The church-affiliation [of these schools] is almost entirely historical. Most of them are small – and the United Methodist Church, as it divides and shrinks, can't really provide many students anymore.”
Tooley predicts BSC will be “just the first of many, many of those 100 schools that sadly will be closing in the coming years."
Current enrollment at Birmingham-Southern is just under 1,300.
