JILLIAN COLLETT | editor-in-chief

Director Vicki Becker defends the cancellation in light of APU's 'God First' motto.

In the fall of 2007 APUs Murrieta Regional Center stopped offering any programs or degrees from the School of Theology due to a lack of student numbers.

“We had [the Master of Arts and Pastoral Studies] and they pulled it out. We are now teaching them out, meaning that those who started the program can finish their degree with us but we are not taking any new students for this program. I hope someone decides to re-implement the program. It is such a huge disappointment that we no longer offer it,” Murrieta Regional Center Executive Director Vicki Becker said.

This is not the first center to fail to offer these programs. Besides Murrieta, the Inland Empire, Ventura and High Desert Regional Centers do not offer them as well.

“We don’t really decide what programs we offer,” Inland Empire Regional Center Director Andreé Robinson-Neal said. “We work with the different schools and departments at APU. We have to express that, in our communities, there is a need. The particular school [at APU] has to look at the budget to determine what programs get put where.”

Each regional center offers degrees from the different schools at APU. While some centers offer a wide range of options, others are narrower with what is available. The Ventura Regional Center, for example, is associated mainly with the School of Education.

“The centers are established to help facilitate the extension of various schools,” Ventura Regional Center Director Dennis Zuber said. “It is up to the deans to decide where the programs would be a good fit by looking at the demographics and at what the quality of the program would be with it being an extension as opposed to being on the main campus.”

The decision to remove the Master of Arts and Pastoral Studies at the Murrieta campus came from the Dean of the School of Theology, David Wright.

“In the future, if we have enough students to make it viable for us to have a group to take through the degree program, we will offer it again,” Wright said. “The problem we were having is that we would recruit students and if you don’t get enough of them you get classes of two to five students. That is sustainable if you are talking about a class or two, but to do a whole degree program that way, you just can’t do it.”

In order to offer a full degree program, the amount of students that take the classes need to be enough to pay the professors to teach the classes, Wright said.

Assurances have been made that the removal of graduate degrees by the school of theology in no way takes away from the APU motto.

“The university offers all of their programs in a ‘God First’ way. So, if we are true to our mission, any program that we offer there is going to have the ‘God First’ element in it,” Wright said.

Zuber emphasized that faith integration into the curriculum that is offered is the key, and that the focus should not be on whether or not a full degree program is being offered.

“I don’t think [not having the programs] takes anything away. I know Dean Williams is committed to faith integration into our curriculum and to working with faculty and adjunct faculty to make sure they embrace ‘God First.’ So when they are in the classroom that integration of faith and ‘God First’ mission is ever present,” Zuber said.

Wright stressed that the importance is not on the courses that are taught, but on the way in which those courses are presented and offered to the students that are enrolled in them.

“The mission, the legitimacy of what we do, is that we have faith integrated into all of the programs that we offer,” Wright said. “It doesn’t necessarily make a location legitimate by offering a graduate theology degree. You make it legitimate by making sure that any course APU offers has the Christian content, the God First element.”

Robinson-Neal feels that these programs are important considering what APU stands for, and not offering graduate degrees in this area does a disservice to the community.

“I think that because we are a Christian institution, it just makes sense that there should be something that makes it obvious what we are offering,” Robinson-Neal said. “There should be some sort of certification or credential, even if it just for personal enrichment. There should just be something.”