unfortunately

Earlham College’s woes

Martin Kelley — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 19:14:37 +0000

Chris Hardie has written a very informative piece about what’s happening at Earlham College, the beloved Quaker school out in Richmond, Indiana. The news is pretty grim. Take this devastating detail: “In 2007, Earlham had over 1,200 undergraduate students. This fall, that number was 671. The college has mostly retained the same number of teaching faculty in that time…”

This has been happening for awhile. Then-dean of Earlham School of Religion Matt Hisrich warned us about some of this back in late 2020 when he revealed that Earlham College was raiding what had always been treated as ESR’s endowment. By all accounts the current EC president is doing his best after inheriting a mess but cutting programs and reducing staff isn’t goin to help turn it around.

Unfortunately, this spiral is becoming ever more common with small liberal arts colleges. The pandemic hit hard and a current drop in students (a baby bust that started in the 2008 recession) is just going to make things that much harder for these kinds of schools.

I appreciate Hardie writing this. Back in 2013 I got to know him as a fellow panelist at an ESR leadership conference and we’ve kept in touch over the years. In recent years he’s been on a task almost as quixotic as saving small colleges: he bought a paper, the Western Wayne News (publisher of this article), and has been trying to build a model of a sustainable local paper. I shared his great manifesto in defense of the open internet a few years ago and try to keep up with his blog. I’m glad to see Friends are sharing today’s article pretty widely on Facebook.

Earlham College has long been an invaluable part of the Quaker institutional landscape and Earlham School of Religion fills a need that no other school comes close to. Seeing these on the edge is worrisome for the whole Society of Friends. Guilford College in North Carolina has been having a rough go of it as well, though champions like my friend Wess Daniels have been passionate at drumming up support.

Earlham hopes big cuts foster long-term survival — Western Wayne News

Hoping to continue its acclaimed liberal arts education offerings well into the future, Earlham College in Richmond is…

Western Wayne News

Wait, a new Quaker blog, what retroness is this?

Martin Kelley — Wed, 14 Feb 2018 23:54:23 +0000

And just as we’re talking about the continued downward entropy of blogging, here’s a new Quaker blog. Isaac Smith of Frederick (Md.) Meeting (and Twitter) has the first post in a time-limited, “pop-up” blog. He’s calling it “The Anarchy of the Ranters.” I’ll overlook the similarity to this blog’s name in the hope that the people who have been dropping comments on mine since 2004 asking about the difference between Quakers and Ranters will start bothering him now.

The first post is “Defensiveness as a Theological Problem for Friends,” a good blogging debut.

The question of who belongs in the church, which has always been of central importance, is what’s at stake here, and unfortunately, it is often being answered in ways that are hurtful and alienating—the opposite of what the gospel promises.

Collaring the Peacniks in Iowa

Martin Kelley — Wed, 11 Feb 2004 17:43:47 +0000

It’s getting “scary in Amerikkka when they start rounding up peaceniks in Iowa”:www.nytimes.com/2004/02/10/national/10PROT.html
bq. To hear the antiwar protesters describe it, their forum at a local university last fall was like so many others they had held over the years. They talked about the nonviolent philosophies of Mahatma Gandhi and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., they said, and how best to convey their feelings about iraq into acts of civil disobedience. But last week, subpoenas began arriving seeking details about the forum’s sponsor — its leadership list, its annual reports, its office location –and the event itself.
Mild-mannered protesters wearing 1980s-style Guatemalan clothing, talking about Gandhi and climbing the fences of National Guard bases are not a threat to state of Iowa. But this kind of strong-arm tactic is a clear threat free speech and a clear act of intimidation to those who might join the peace movement. How sad. Unfortunately I know lots of people who are already afraid to speak out to loudly–this will silence at least some of them.
Of course, it’s hard to get too worked up about Iowa subpoenas, when much more serious civil rights violations have been going on since the start of the Afghanistan War. The “prisoners of war” down in the American base at “Guantanamo Bay have been held without charge or trial for two years now”:http://web.amnesty.org/pages/guantanamobay-index-eng.