[Richmond Indiana, December 19, 2025] This is an Inside Quaker report; non-Quakers might be missing some background.]
Gretchen Castle, Dean of the Earlham School of Religion (the main U. S. Quaker seminary), is leaving. She’ll retire officially on June 30, 2026. This change has not been made public by ESR, but Castle confirmed it to this reporter on December 19. A search for her successor has not yet begun.
“It’s been great to be at ESR,” she said. “But I’m ready to retire.”
Indeed. Castle is now almost — um, near full Social Security eligibility. Further, she’s been working for and leading Quaker groups for several decades, in Geneva, New York, Philadelphia, and now in her hometown of Richmond.
Others of us being a certain age can relate to the spirit of retirement readiness.
Further, though, her timing is astute: ESR and its mother ship Earlham are about to face another round of big budget and staff cuts; but calls to relevant offices at the college have gone unanswered, so hard numbers aren’t available; those cited here are plausible estimates.
But the key members of the AC Board have recently met: the axes are being sharpened, the pink slips filled in.
Rumors are swirling about the impending
cuts. It’s a movie long-timers have seen before. A rerun (or rather prequel) ran at Earlham this time in 2018, facing a big deficit, yielded numerous staff cuts and a presidential resignation. It’s described in these two blog posts here and here from that time.
But the deficit is back, bigger than ever, and on its heels is a genuine crisis. As Ferit Güven, an EC philosophy professor who started a Substack to track the experience baldly put it:
At the beginning of the Fall semester 2025, the president of Earlham College [Paul Sniegowski] announced that there would be faculty and staff cuts that would amount to a 40% cut in personnel and $18 million in expenses reductions over the next few years.
Subsequently the president announced formation of the CWG (Consultative Working Group).
On September 2nd, 2025 the president reported by email on the first meeting of the CWG:
After introductions, the CWG discussed the importance of confidentiality in its internal deliberations so that opinions can be freely expressed and options freely explored. All members present signed an agreement stipulating that the CWG’s deliberations are confidential until the group has agreed it is ready to communicate more broadly.
The CWG is charged with two main tasks: 1) Between now and next academic year, take the lead in drafting a new Strategic Plan for Earlham, using as the starting point the draft pillars distributed to the community and presented in Faculty Meeting last week. 2) Consistent with the evolving Strategic Plan, develop criteria and priorities for personnel and non-personnel budget cuts and revenue initiatives to meet the schedule of deficit reductions approved by the Board of Trustees in June and presented to the All-Employee Retreat in August. (president Paul Sniegowski’s email to ec-employees on September 2nd @4:45 pm EST)
Ferit Güven followed up weeks later:
I have been working at Earlham College for the last 26 years, and I have never experienced such a sense of urgency, anxiety, and fear on campus. As I approach the end of my career at Earlham College, I must sadly state that I have never felt more disappointed with the attitude of the administration at Earlham. It is clear my work in the classroom is not appreciated, let alone valued by the administration (This is not just a feeling, but a response to the administration’s assessment of our value.)
Some others feel differently.
Lianne Warner, the College Controller, replied that:
The work to restructure and cut positions is difficult for everyone here at Earlham, including Paul and the Board of Trustees. In my eight years at Earlham and 17+ years at other non-profit organizations, I have never observed a president or a Board of Trustees with so much care, compassion, and dedication to the employees and the non-profit’s mission.
This restructuring is unfortunate but necessary to right-size Earlham’s budget. To get Earlham to a break-even or positive budget, changes should have been planned and implemented well before Paul started as President. . . .
We are living in tough times at Earlham and throughout the world! Now more than ever, we need to all show kindness.
At ESR, Gretchen Castle is a member of the CWG, so she’s been in all the high-stakes meetings. I hadn’t run down that fact when she returned my call, or I would have probed about what impact the cuts may have on ESR.
She likely would not have answered. NDAs are serious matters.
But my previously unasked question still matters: The Earlham School of Religion is a semi-autonomous subsidiary of Earlham College. Its budget and small staff is under the same microscope as everybody else, and the buck ultimately stops (and the pink slips start) for ESR from President Sniegowski’s desk, like all the rest of the college.
And today is D-Day: Sniegowski and/or selected associates will begin making known to those on the list, who is to lose their job.
So as I hurry to wrap up this post to get it online today, Sniegowski and/or selected minions are likely working the phones, or knocking on doors like Dominos drivers, but delivering only big slices of steaming bad news, no pepperoni.
Even if Castle is not doing delivery runs today, she’ll likely be called on to “minister” to some of the recipients. After all, forty (some reports say forty-five) percent of job cuts would be a third of EC’s entire workforce.
Well — that’s the kind of work a lot of ESR grads came to learn how to do (but decent-paying gigs doing it are also scarce these days).
The College may not want to pay them for it now; but the need will soon be there. In spades.