Who Is the Master at Master’s University and Seminary?

Over the summer, students at Master’s University and Seminary found out their institution had been placed on probation by its accreditor. To quell the controversy, the college’s president did what he does best. He preached to them.

During an hourlong address, the Rev. John F. MacArthur warned seminarians that the accreditor’s action was the result of an attack “orchestrated, if not by any humans, by Satan himself.” The Chronicle has obtained a recording of the speech, which was delivered in late August.

MacArthur downplayed accreditors’ concerns and alluded to unnamed enemies who coveted his authority. “If somebody wants your position, somebody wants to make the decisions that you’re making, it’s not the ground troops that start those things,” he said. “It’s people with ambition.”

As he spoke, he railed against social justice and compared those who complained about the university to NFL players kneeling during the national anthem. And he told students that the accreditor, the WASC Senior College and University Commission, didn’t understand places like Master’s.

Plenty of small private colleges have religious affiliations, usually through a Christian denomination. Those colleges can present a particular challenge for accrediting agencies, which must apply a broad set of secular standards to the institutions while respecting their religious missions. That challenge is raised to a whole new level at Master’s. The college is linked to a single, independent church and its pastor, MacArthur, whose strong personality and influence have benefited the college — but have now put it at risk.

In a report to the accrediting agency, a group of reviewers acknowledged that Master’s is doing some important things right. Under MacArthur, they said, the institution has engendered deep loyalty from faculty, students, and donors. At the same time, the report depicted Master’s as an accreditor’s nightmare: an insular and oppressive institution where loyalty to the president and his church has sometimes trumped both academic and financial concerns.

Officials at the accrediting agency declined to comment. But using the kind of blunt language rarely found in an accreditation report, the reviewers wrote that Master’s has “a pervasive climate of fear, intimidation, bullying and uncertainty.”

“The related reports of lack of leadership ethics and accountability that emerged was unmatched for members of this review team,” the report said. “It seems this has been part of the operation for so long that it is practiced without question.”

Master’s is unlikely to lose its accreditation, which it must maintain to be eligible for federal financial aid dollars. Very few colleges do. But the situation is an uncommonly acute test for both the accreditor and the college. How far can the accreditor push a singular college to change to meet its standards? And how much will that college be willing to change?

‘Closest Friends in the World’

Presidents often worry about governing boards with an activist bent. But accreditors are just as likely to scrutinize boards that appear to have let go of the reins of an institution. At Master’s the accreditation reviewers found a governing board unwilling or unable to provide oversight of a president with whom they professed to be the “closest friends in the world,” according to the reviewers’ report.

“Virtually all board members have long-term relationships with the President and come from within his specific circle of influence,” the review team wrote.

The ties that the review team described go far beyond personal friendships with the president and present at least the appearance of conflicts of interest. Some board members are business partners; one is MacArthur’s former dentist. Others collect an income directly from organizations that MacArthur runs, such as a nonprofit business that provides tax and financial advice to other clergy members.

Just as troubling, the accreditor reported, several board directors have collected compensation from Master’s while overseeing the institution and its chief executive. That’s a problem because those board members might be persuaded to make decisions that are good for their own financial gain but not necessarily good for Master’s.

One specific cause of concern for the accreditation team was the dual role one board member held as an associate dean, overseeing a distance-learning site for the seminary. In fact, according to pages on the Master’s website, a total of four board members simultaneously serve as associate deans at distance-education locations across the country — at churches where the board members are pastors. It’s not clear if the board members or their churches received compensation for hosting the distance-education programs, which also were not appropriately reported to the accreditor.

Another problem the accreditors identified is the overlap between leadership of the university and that of Grace Community Church. At least three board members have held the title of elder within the church, working under the direction of MacArthur, who has been head pastor since 1969.

That’s not unusual at Master’s, where many faculty and staff members are also congregants of the church. But those close relationships can create a problem for both board members and employees, the reviewers wrote: “Should they be dismissed or leave TMU over a substantial difference of opinion, they lose their entire support community,” the site reviewers explained in their report, “as a TMUS alumnus and employee as well as a congregant in Grace.”

When interviewed by the visiting reviewers, board members stated unequivocally that they could say no to MacArthur, but none could recall an occasion when they had actually done so. Such “extraordinary confidence in President MacArthur,” the reviewers posited, may have resulted in less oversight of TMUS’s administration than was to be expected.

The accreditors chalked at least some of that confidence up to the interwoven personal and financial relationships. “With many board members being so integrally tied to the President,” the reviewers wrote, “the ability to independently evaluate the Chief Executive Officer/President’s performance is hindered.”

Board members who were contacted by The Chronicle did not respond to requests for comment. A university spokesman also said that board members would not be available to discuss the accreditation report.

An open letter from the board about the accreditor’s findings contested the idea that its members are not independent from the influence of MacArthur and Grace Community Church. “We do not believe that every assertion in the Commission’s report will eventually prove to be correct at the level initially assessed,” the board’s letter said.

For his part, MacArthur denies that he has any undue influence over the board. “No board member is beholden to me for their jobs or church positions,” he wrote in an email response to questions from The Chronicle.

At the same time, he suggested that despite the significant problems identified by the accreditor, he was still fully in charge. “The board of directors fully supports the current direction of the institution under the leadership of the President,” MacArthur added.

All in the Family

The insularity of the institution’s governance and financial arrangements has spilled over into the administration, the accreditors found.

Several key administrators were replaced in the months leading up to the site visit, the reviewers reported, and there was a feeling among some on campus that the staff members had been replaced for speaking out against leadership.

When those positions were filled, they “were simply appointed rather than advertised,” the report said. “A number of those appointed to cabinet-level roles had no prior experience in the area represented by their new assignments.”

Key among those appointments was MacArthur’s son-in-law, Kory Welch, who worked for several years with MacArthur’s nonprofit radio ministry, called Grace to You. From the 2009 to 2015 fiscal years, companies owned by Welch were paid more than $5 million by Grace to You for graphic design and post-production work.

More recently, Master’s contracted with companies owned by Welch to provide public relations and marketing services, according to the university’s financial statements. Master’s paid these companies $392,900 in the 2017 fiscal year, and $137,071 in 2016.

When the visiting team from WASC inquired about these appearances of conflicts of interest, as well as “significant deficiency” in payment and contract controls, it found “no evidence at the time of the visit that these concerns had been addressed in more than a cursory manner.”

But Welch’s ascendance at Master’s had only just begun. In March, the board offered Welch the job of chief operating officer of the institutions, which he accepted. Welch has a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Master’s in 1998, according to his LinkedIn profile, and no experience in higher-education administration. He did not respond to a request for comment.

Despite his lack of experience, Welch was given authority over a broad range of the university’s operations, including student services, human resources, plant operations, information technology, enrollment, church relations, creative and marketing, and athletics, according to the accreditation visiting team.

Not surprisingly, the team found Welch’s competency on issues of higher education to be lacking. The reviewers wrote that there was “a concerning lack of familiarity” with the data and reporting requirements of several federal laws, such as those that deal with crime on campus, student privacy, and people with disabilities.

Welch no longer serves as chief operating officer, having been moved to a role as “special assistant” to MacArthur, according to a September post on the Master’s website.

The university now admits that it wasn’t clear about the reason for Welch’s hiring or the scope of his duties — which, college officials say, was meant to fill the leadership of various departments that had been overhauled, including online education and admissions.

“We could have done a better job communicating the severity of the issues we were facing two years ago and communicated more clearly the path we were on to address those issues,” Welch said in the blog post. “Withholding some of the information was done to protect some of those involved.”

In his email to The Chronicle, MacArthur said that Welch “has been and still is a valued member of the university leadership team.”

Academic Insularity

At its core, Master’s is a place that attracts students primarily for its religious tenets, which include the belief that the Bible is “an objective, propositional revelation, verbally inspired in every word, absolutely inerrant in the original documents, infallible, and God-breathed.”

Students applying as undergraduates must include a personal recommendation from their pastor. And they must agree to “submit to the leadership of The Master’s University as an expression of our commitment to the Lordship of Christ.”

For all the faults the accreditors found, Master’s remains very popular with most of its students and alumni. In 2016 and 2017, for instance, Master’s received the Wall Street Journal’s top ranking for student satisfaction, based on responses to student surveys. The accreditation team noted that “faculty, staff, and students are deeply invested in the institution and its missional values.”

But the university has also created a sort of academic bubble, the accreditors reported. The university and seminary have “a lack of diversity of experience and thought,” and “limited engagement with professional development and professional organizations,” the reviewers wrote.

Of the 20 full-time faculty listed on the seminary’s website, not including MacArthur, 13 have received one or more of their degrees from Master’s; 11 have received two or more degrees from that institution; and eight have held positions within Grace Church. The dean of the seminary faculty, Nathan Busenitz, earned all of his degrees from Master’s, and has served in the past as MacArthur’s personal assistant.

Previous reviews had cited concerns about lack of faculty scholarship outside the seminary’s own journal, and the exclusion of female faculty and perspectives from the curriculum, the 2018 site visit team noted. But there has been little improvement, the reviewers said. The seminary enrolls only men, under the belief that women are not allowed in the ministry and leadership of the church.

The accreditors chronicled some unusual and troubling reports of graduate degrees being awarded outside the usual academic process — a student being awarded a Ph.D. despite completing no coursework at the institution, for example — but the broader concerns about academic insularity are what speak to former students like Sameer Yadav.

Yadav earned an M.Div. at Master’s before going to Yale for a master’s in sacred theology and Duke Divinity School for a doctorate in theology and ethics. In an interview with The Chronicle, Yadav said he was initially drawn to the Master’s Seminary because of its affiliation with MacArthur.

But once there, he found an academic culture that was purposely narrow and self-referential. “Most theologians would not take it seriously as an academic institution,” said Yadav.

Yadav said he was penalized for not agreeing with the theology of a particular professor just as he was finishing the final stages of writing a thesis for his master’s degree in theology, usually earned after a master’s in divinity. That disagreement cost him an extra year of tuition just to take one course from the faculty member who gave him a failing grade, said Yadav, who is now an assistant professor of theology at Westmont College. Yadav left Master’s disillusioned and without completing the degree, he said.

“The ideological perspective you are allowed to engage is very curated,” Yadav said, “and if you step outside the boundaries, then you’re put back in line.”

The university, the reviewers said, leaves “no place where faculty feel safe to report being required to award degrees outside usual boundaries” or “for a student to share having developed an exit strategy should their supervisor continue to bully and yell at them.”

‘Don’t Stir Up Strife’

At the crux of Master’s accreditation woes is an existential dilemma. The college seems sure to struggle to remain accredited under MacArthur’s leadership. But can it survive financially without its president?

Full-time enrollment fell by nearly 90 students, about 7 percent, from 2014 to 2017, according to federal data. The university has also had to spend more money because of a tuition reset and a decline in auxiliary revenues, the accreditation report said. Master’s is planning to spend more than $4 million a year from its endowment for three years just to cover those losses, the report said.

Amid those struggles, MacArthur’s ability to raise money has been one of the few positive developments. The university receives between $3 million and $4 million a year in donations for operational expenses, the accreditation review said, and the university is projecting annual gifts totaling $5 million a year for the next three years — money that might not materialize without the fund-raising prowess of the president.

“While the development efforts of TMUS and, specifically, President MacArthur, are remarkable, there are significant concerns about the capacity to raise funds after a leadership succession,” the reviewers wrote.

The probation from the accreditor has, at the least, gotten the attention of MacArthur and the Board of Directors. College leaders met with the accreditors shortly after the probation was announced, and they have begun the process of trying to explain what the reviewers found and navigating what changes may be necessary. A second site visit was scheduled for November, and the commission will discuss the findings of that visit at its February meeting. That timeline — relatively short in the world of accreditation — reflects the seriousness of the initial findings.

Now both the accreditor and the institution face hard choices. The accreditor has a full range of options, including immediately withdrawing accreditation or issuing a “show cause” order that could lead to withdrawing accreditation within a year. It could leave Master’s on probation for up to two years, possibly requiring more site visits and reports from the college, or reduce the sanction to a “warning” that requires less scrutiny from the agency.

Master’s, meanwhile, has to determine how its powerful president fits into the changes the accreditors seek. The board has already announced a leadership transition: In 2020, MacArthur will become “chancellor” of the university and remain president of the seminary, though it is far from clear what that change will mean for his authority and responsibilities.

In his email, MacArthur said that “many inaccuracies” were presented in the site-visit report, but he declined to provide any specifics, writing that “it’s premature to get into the details and inappropriate to disclose them” before the November accreditation visit. “Following that visit the details you seek will be available,” he added.

But Brian Harr, director of communications at Master’s, declined to provide any more details. “Any further comment at this time would be premature,” Harr said in an email two weeks after the most recent visit from the accreditor.

Even if MacArthur leaves, will Master’s be able to change a culture that has long defied the accreditor’s calls for changes and squelched criticism from within?

If MacArthur’s comments to the seminarians in August are any indication, the institution has a long way to go. The university and seminary are required by the accreditor to give notice if placed on probation. But MacArthur told students that the university’s accreditation struggles were, essentially, none of their business.

“I’m gonna be real honest with you,” he said. “You didn’t have any right to find out about anything. That’s not your responsibility.”

In his remarks he referred to a Bible passage from the Book of Proverbs.

“There are things that God hates, right?” MacArthur said. “One of them is the one who stirs up strife,” he said, urging students to keep their complaints within the university and seminary.

“Keep your mouth shut,” he said. “Don’t stir up strife. You don’t know the whole story.”

Eric Kelderman writes about money and accountability in higher education, including such areas as state policy, accreditation, and legal affairs. You can find him on Twitter @etkeld, or email him at eric.kelderman@chronicle.com.

Dan Bauman is a reporter who investigates and writes about all things data in higher education. Tweet him at @danbauman77 or email him at dan.bauman@chronicle.com.