Selling Concordia

In mid-December, when Concordia University Ann Arbor issued a press release announcing the school would consolidate its operations at its North Building on Plymouth Rd. and away from its sprawling, lush campus along Geddes, few were surprised.

That doesn’t mean CUAA loyalists, faculty, and alumni weren’t disappointed, angry, and confused. “This was exactly where this was always going all along,” one current faculty member says bitterly. “They just didn’t have the guts or the integrity to say so at the start. It’s all about selling off the land.”

Nobody has admitted that yet—the Concordia brass and the Lutheran Church– Missouri Synod has said nothing about the future of the property since the December announcement. Officials associated with the school, its board of regents, and the synod did not return several requests for comment.

But rumors are certainly flying.

One notion, that U-M or EMU might snap it up for expansion, came and went quickly when both schools denied they were interested. A small part of the campus could be transferred to the church’s Michigan District. But it seems more and more likely that developers will be invited to bid on most of the 152 acres. With direct access to US-23 and thousands of feet of Huron River frontage, its value is almost incalculable.

Linh Song, the former Ann Arbor city councilmember who represented Ward 2, which encompasses Concordia’s Geddes property, has heard all of that and more. “I think the city still might be interested and is working on something, but there’s an offer on the [football] stadium,” she says—Domino’s founder Tom Monaghan wants it for Father Gabriel Richard Catholic High School. “Before I left, I did talk to the city administrator to say that once that property was on the market, please look into this, because it would be great if we could [move it onto] our tax rolls.”

The generous expanse of property was a calling card for Concordia from the start. In 1961, the Missouri Synod paid $1 million for 234 acres, roughly half of the estate assembled in the 1910s by gas station magnate Harry Earhart. Other Earhart properties would become the Walden Woods subdivision, Earhart Village condos, and Greenhills School, but the church got the prime riverfront property, as well as Harry and Carrie Earhart’s thirty-five-room, French chateau–style mansion.

Architect Vincent Kling designed twenty-three academic buildings and dormitories in the 1960s modern style. Construction cost $6.5 million, according to an Associated Press article at the time. In September 1963, Concordia Lutheran Junior College greeted its first 236 students.

The new campus was a point of pride for Lutherans across the state; 300 churches and schools had collected $500,000 to fund the luminous Chapel of the Holy Trinity. They also had a practical reason to wish it well: the postwar baby boom had doubled America’s school-age population in just ten years, and the school’s mission was to prepare teachers for Lutheran schools.

When the AP returned for a follow-up article in 1966, Concordia’s enrollment had doubled, to almost 500. “The campus overlooks the Huron River on the eastern edge of Ann Arbor,” the writer observed. “Classrooms and dormitories sit on a bluff, offering students a wide view of the river and wooded countryside.”

But by the time Concordia became a college in 1976, Michigan’s school-age population was declining. It’s now almost back to where it was in 1950, and the Missouri Synod’s membership has fallen by a third since Concordia opened.

As schools around the country closed, there was less demand for Lutheran teachers. Concordia responded by adding new programs, including business, health, and sports management. It began offering graduate degrees and became a university in 2001.

But despite the school’s diversification and idyllic setting, there were signs that it was struggling financially. In the 1990s, it sold a piece of property around the historic Botsford Cemetery, where Harry and Carrie Earhart are buried, for a small subdivision called Pine Brae Estates.

“There were threats of the school being closed a couple of times,” recalls Charles Schulz, a former pastor at St. Thomas Lutheran Church who taught theology from 2001 until last year, when he moved to Concordia University Chicago. “One summer, the grass couldn’t even be mowed because we didn’t have money for that, and so the place kind of went to seed.”

That’s why CUAA’s merger in 2013 with Concordia University Wisconsin, located outside Milwaukee, came as a big relief, Schulz says. It “certainly was a deliverance of the school, and it led to the school’s greatest flourishing that it had ever seen.”

The combined entity plunged millions into CUAA, funding a football stadium and a sports complex for soccer and track and renovating its fieldhouse. It added a nursing school and other health sciences programs and bought the former Cooley Law School building on Plymouth Rd. to house them.

“A lot of money was invested in the Concordia campus, and I wondered if, just like in business, if you grow too fast it’s not sustainable,” says former Ann Arbor councilwoman Kathy Griswold, who represented the ward during these expansions.

Yet as recently as the merger’s tenth anniversary in 2023, it was being presented as a success. “Since the merger, CUAA has seen a 60 percent growth in total enrollment,” the alumni magazine reported then. “This year, total enrollment hit an all-time high at 1,201 students.”

In a discussion posted on the schools’ blog, those involved took a victory lap. “I look back at my career and that’s the thing I’m most proud of, the fact that Ann Arbor is still there and that Ann Arbor is doing well and providing workers for the Church, both professionally and in the broader sense,” said enrollment VP Ken Gaschk.

But again, a property sale hinted that finances were strained: in 2022, Concordia had sold a large parcel off Earhart for $4.9 million. National homebuilder Toll Bros. turned it into a luxury subdivision called Concord Pines.

In 2023, Concordia got a new president. Erik Ankerberg took over in January after serving as provost at Concordia University Chicago. Though he’d once taught English at CUAA, he would mastermind its undoing.

Early last year, Ankerberg told the universities’ board of regents that the Michigan campus faced an “ongoing structural deficit” and would have to “significantly reduce operations.” By year’s end, he’d be the subject of countless attacks from CUAA loyalists who blamed him for abandoning the Geddes campus.

Alumni formed a very active Facebook group called Concordia Matters, and the Missouri Synod’s Michigan District quickly raised more than $5 million in pledges to reestablish the Ann Arbor campus as an independent entity. But by May, more than 700 employees, including faculty, staff, and athletic personnel, had been laid off. In June, Ankerberg announced that all athletic programs would cease at the end of the 2024–25 school year.

Days after that came word that most in-person academic programs would also end this year, leaving only the health sciences taught in the new North Building. The final nail in the coffin was driven days later, when the regents announced that supporters’ efforts weren’t enough to make the Ann Arbor campus self-sustaining.

This sequence of events confounded and angered many. Ankerberg refused to go into much detail about the deficits and which parts of it were from Ann Arbor versus the Wisconsin campus. The finances of the two schools are inextricably intertwined in most publicly reported data, and the numbers that were shared shifted over the course of the process.

In February, for instance, Ankerberg said the Wisconsin campus covered about $5 million of Ann Arbor’s operating costs; in December, Concordia University System president Jamison Hardy said on the Christian Lead Time podcast that the Ann Arbor campus was on track for a $1.95 million operating deficit this school year.

Previous presidents, Hardy said, felt deficits could be covered by endowment money. Ankerberg disagreed, the synod official said, and made the cuts needed to make Ann Arbor self-sustaining.

In a statement startling in its pointedness, the Michigan District’s board of directors responded: “While some things are unclear, what is clear is that the leadership of CUWAA is intent on dramatically diminishing the scope and therefore impact of CUAA. The leadership is focusing on fewer but ‘more Lutheran’ students at the school.”

That question—whether CUAA was “Lutheran enough”—has been a central theme throughout the saga. Evan Wood, the father of a CUAA volleyball player, told the Lead Time podcast in November that a board report noted that his daughter had prayed before a match. That apparently was a problem because, while devoutly Christian, she is not Lutheran.

The other central theme is a widespread suspicion that Ankerberg is less concerned with Ann Arbor’s operating deficit than the windfall Wisconsin would reap from selling the Geddes property.

“It just seemed like our fate was sealed and that a thriving mission, producing quality humans and Christians and servants, was being decimated, and for what?” longtime CUAA football coach Chance Childers says. “I think they thought they could sell CUAA to make Concordia, Wisconsin all the more viable—and then were trying to like, weasel—to tell the financial story, to make it seem like our hands are tied. It’s just a yucky leadership story.”

In the December podcast, Hardy expressed anger over the criticism. While the school’s leaders “could have done a better job communicating,” he said, “they’re good people who want what’s best for the church and the gospel and yet they’re being maligned, they’re being raked over the coals, Ankerberg is being totally and completely destroyed publicly.”

Though Hardy said he doesn’t want “to liquidate the South Campus,” all eyes now are turned northward. “Beginning in the summer of 2025, we will migrate all existing Ann Arbor–based university operations to the campus located at 3475 Plymouth Road in Ann Arbor,” Ankerberg wrote in a December Facebook post. “Looking ahead, we envision developing this campus into a vibrant, state-of-the-art space to meet the needs of our students, faculty, and community,” including more classrooms and student housing.

Ankerberg described the curriculum as “a robust slate of healthcare programs and online education degrees.” That sounds more vocational than religious, but Ankerberg promised that they would soon add “an innovative Liberal Arts bachelor’s degree that will serve as the foundation upon which we will build out church work training programs. These adjustments will allow us to right-size our programs to steward our resources for the future,” he wrote, while continuing “a vibrant Lutheran higher education presence in Ann Arbor.”

If it succeeds, the downsized Concordia could win over the dispirited CUAA supporters who have watched their beloved campus be—unnecessarily, to them—diminished and broken up. But it won’t be easy.

“You’re seeing a lot of impassioned reactions about the possible loss of that property,” says Schulz, the theology professor. “The stained glass of the chapel and the power of the organ and the wonderful landscaping created a place of peace for students to reflect on the truths of God and the bigger questions of life.”

Nature’s beauty, he says, “is an aspect that can, rightly understood, draw people toward God and toward the beauty that He is and that He would work in our lives. … It would be a real loss for the mission of the church if we didn’t have that asset anymore.”

On Facebook, he posted an image of the industrial-looking North Building side by side with one of the pastoral Geddes landscape. “The exterior has all the charm of a parking lot,” he wrote, while “the interior has the vibe of a modern office building. Maybe this is the wave of cheaper, more efficient university education for the future, but our society will be poorer for it.”

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This article has been edited since it was published in the February 2025 Ann Arbor Observer. The spelling of Jamison Hardy’s name has been corrected.