2025 Roundup
This website started five years ago as a writing and publishing experiment to share information about closures in the Concordia University system. Its practical goal was to prevent further closures where alternative outcomes might prevail.
Where do things stand at the end of 2025? Concordia Portland, Selma, and Bronxville have all closed and their campus properties turned over to new owners. Concordia Texas remains embroiled in a legal dispute with the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod that is now in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Concordia Ann Arbor is ‘downsizing’ and preparing for a sale of its riverfront campus. And in September, the LCMS sued an elite private school in Hong Kong to turn over its campus property, which is valued at $83 million.
The most significant development in 2025 for this website was the settlement of Hotchalk’s $302 million lawsuit against the LCMS just before going to trial in September. The three-week trial should have helped to clarify many lingering questions, such as:
- Through what process did the University of Oregon decide to send $12.35 million to the LCMS after its Board of Trustees approved a $60.5 million purchase of the Portland campus property from the Lutheran Church Extension Fund?
- What did LCMS President Matthew Harrison know about the ownership of securities related to the Portland campus property when he had this text exchange with a Concordia Publishing House executive on February 10, 2020?
- CPH Executive: “Tom Riess (sic) …. announcing Portland is closing its doors after Spring semester 2020. Excellent.”
- Harrison: “Yup”
- CPH Executive: “Th[a]t property is worth a fortune in that part of Portland”
- Harrison: “All mortgaged.”
- What “force” was CUS President Dean Wenthe referring to in this video “to deal with the one case in Portland”?
Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more in 2026.
CUS Facts 