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Service in a telephone interview shortly after the announcement. “I’m not leaving because my work is done. My work isn’t done.
“But the school needs change.”
That’s a typically Calian kind of line. He’s a fast talker, firing off words and ideas faster than a pen can jot them down. But certain cadences and particular words pop up frequently. He talks a lot about change and innovation. Pushing past conflict to get to new ideas, new questions. So that there can be even more change.
Retirement doesn’t mean he’ll be talking from a rocking chair. He’ll keep speaking. He’ll stay in consulting work, tied mostly to seminary education, drawing on his latest book, The Ideal Seminary. And he’d like to get involved somehow in mission work, either locally or abroad. He isn’t sure which.
“I’ve got one more year of work (before retirement),” he reckons. “Something will unfold.”
Calian says he’s going to keep writing, adding to the bibliography of 10 books and more than 200 articles and reviews he’s done over the years. He has a proposal pending with Westminister/John Knox Press, and this time he’ll write without any administrative burdens.
Calian, 72, came to Pittsburgh from the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary, where he taught from 1963 to 1981. Born in New York City and raised in Los Angeles, he earned his bachelor’s degree from Occidental College, his Bachelor of Divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary and his doctorate from the University of Basel.
He has studied at the Jung Institute of Analytical Psychology in Zurich, the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, the Ecumenical Institute at Bossey, Switzerland, and the Advanced Management Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Business. He was a visiting scholar at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, in 1995.
While it’s satisfying to be lauded for increasing the Seminary’s relatively insignificant endowment when he arrived to the seventh largest endowment of the nearly 250 institutions affiliated with the Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada, Calian is pragmatic about the surplus.
Fundraising, he says, is a means to an end, a matter of necessity. What he’s proud of is what the money made possible, most importantly:
- PTS now boasts the second highest enrollment of first-year students among the 10 Presbyterian theological schools — with nearly 40 percent of those students under age 25. (The national norm is 38–39.) “Before long,” he says, “its going to be under 30 here — and that’s nice.”
- A shift over the past 25 years from 300 to 3,000 folks — clergy and elders — who make use of the school’s wide assortment of continuing education courses.
- Establishing endowed chairs for 20 of the Seminary’s 22 professorships, with the faculty reflecting wide theological diversity. “Creative tension in theological education is necessary,” says Calian, shuddering at the denominational push for uniformity in thought. “People are enriched by differences of opinion.… It’s what makes theological education exciting.”
- A Summer Youth Institute for high school seniors who are rising church leaders. Its graduates come from 38 states, and the program has a waiting list to get in — as well as the establishment of the Metro-Urban Institute, the Center for Business, Religion and Public Life (“That’s where I plan to do future research”), and the World Mission Initiative, where seminarians and faculty are sent for summer cross-cultural experiences.
It’s the kind of list that tickles board presidents like Robert Harper, who chairs PTS’ Board and who is quick to add to the list major renovations to the physical plant — such as a new residence hall, an expanded museum, and renovations of the library and dining room. “Sam Calian has been one of the most innovative and successful presidents in the history of PTS.… The Seminary has grown and flourished under his leadership.…
“He has been a true leader in terms of his integrity, intelligence and energy, and the Seminary is a stronger, more vibrant place because of him. I have no doubt Sam Calian will be remembered as a major figure in the history of PTS,” said Harper, in a seminary press release.
Calian modestly replies, “It’s wonderful to see — to put it in pious language — how the grace of God is working at this school. It’s a sign of hope for our denomination. When you see how, in the last several years, enrollment has gone up. How the numbers of younger students has gone up.”
The picture at PTS wasn’t so rosy when Calian arrived.
PTS is the oldest seminary in the United States affiliated with the Presbyterian Church (USA). It was founded in 1794 to educate pastors on the frontier. Its current incarnation came about in 1959, when two seminaries consolidated, Western Theological Seminary of the Presbyterian Church in the United States and the Pittsburgh-Xenia Theological Seminary of the United Presbyterian Church in North America.
When Calian was named president the Seminary’s financial picture was so bleak that members of the board were talking about burying the place, hesitant only to set the date for the funeral.
Calian calls those first few years of his tenure “the politics of resurrection.” They were followed, he continues, by “the politics of excellence,” which was the shift from survival mode to quality. It meant hiring “outstanding people, … which still goes on,” he says, and moving from being a “B seminary” to an “A seminary.”
Now, he says, he’s been focusing on what it means to be centrist, or following “the politics of identity,” wherein old liberal/conservative labels get dropped because they block creative thinking and so that stereotyping may be transcended. It is the only way he sees to get the denomination past its longstanding ideological and theological impasses. Like his theological mentor, Karl Barth — who quipped that he couldn’t abide fawning followers ready to recite his own prose back to him — Calian thinks education means raising questions that might not necessarily get answered but will push faithful people into worthwhile thought, and perhaps better questions.
“Everything is open to question. You have to have convictions that you live by … but you have to have more questions than answers,” he says.
Louis Weeks, the president of Union Theological Seminary-Presbyterian School of Christian Education, praised Calian’s philosophy of education and his faith perspective. “As a mature Christian, he is interested in the whole church. He’s interested in all of the voices being heard, especially the voices of vulnerable people.”
Weeks said that Calian, more than any of his contemporaries, has “stretched” Presbyterians to be more attuned to Orthodox Christianity, both in academic and congregational circles.
Ordained in 1958, Calian served at the Calvary Presbyterian Church in Hawthorne, CA. He currently is the chair of the General Assembly’s Committee on Theological Education. He is a board member to the Commission on Ecumenical Missions and Relations and he travels extensively, both teaching and preaching.
Coming to Pittsburgh, he says, was certainly a call. “I had no idea I’d stay this long. When I step down — there’s nothing magical about 25 years, but it has been 25 years — I won’t feel like my work is over here by any means. But the Seminary is at a plateau. A younger successor with fresh ideas will take it to a higher plateau.”
As for Calian, there are other plateaus. “I’ve got a lot of energy ….
“I still like playing with ideas, seeing them implemented.”
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