CLU interim president says ‘hard decisions’ likely coming
While California Lutheran University’s finances remain strong, some “hard decisions” are likely coming, John Nunes, the institution’s new interim president, told the Business Times Aug. 29.
“We’re looking at some of the numbers and we see that the numbers in some cases are not heading in the direction that we want,” Nunes, who started his two-year term June 1, said.
“Our enrollment numbers, for instance, are not what they were,” he said.
Current enrollment is about 3,400 students, significantly down from fall 2018 prior to the pandemic.
But rather than necessarily trying to boost enrollment back up, Nunes said the university might try to “adjust the institution so that there’s a new norm.”
Before any such decisions can be made, however, the university needs to complete an ongoing analysis, Nunes said.
“We’re evaluating programs,” he said. “We’re paying attention to the temperature of the climate of the market.
“What are high school graduates looking for? What fields do they want to go into?” Nunes said.
He said the university is also examining job markets to determine where the needs will be.
“And where those needs, and where those interests overlap with our mission, there might be opportunities for us to differentiate ourselves in the market,” Nunes said.
“We expect there will be such opportunities for us,” he said.
All universities, he said, “are either evaluating their mission or they’re going out of business.”
Nunes, most recently pastor at Pilgrim Lutheran Church in Santa Monica, is a senior fellow at the Center for Religion, Culture and Democracy and was ordained as a Lutheran minister in 1991.
He is also the former president of Concordia College New York and has served since 2020 on the Academic Leaders Task Force on Campus Free Expression at the Bipartisan Policy Center.
He succeeds former president Lori Varlotta who stepped down May 31, about four months after Cal Lutheran’s faculty overwhelmingly passed a no-confidence resolution in her.
The resolution said in part that the educators had no confidence in Varlotta’s “ability to be an effective steward of the university budget and her ability to maintain the financial health of the institution.”
Varlotta was Cal Lutheran’s president since September 2020.
She succeeded Chris Kimball, who was the university’s president for 12 years.
email: [email protected]
