Sarah B. Drummond’s first year as Founding Dean

Sarah Birmingham Drummond’s first year as Founding Dean of Andover Newton Seminary at Yale Divinity School hasn’t exactly been smooth sailing. But the pandemic, economic uncertainty, ongoing systemic racism, and all the other concerns of 2020 were challenges to which she came unusually prepared. After helping to lead Andover Newton’s move from Massachusetts to Connecticut in order to affiliate with YDS, a task like responding to the pandemic with revised programs “wasn’t the hardest thing we’ve been through in the past five years,” Drummond says.

It’s September, more than six months since COVID-19 shuttered Yale’s campus. Drummond sips her morning coffee as she talks about surviving and even thriving. A new school year has begun. She’s teaching the course Intentional Leadership “mask-to-mask” in a hybrid classroom. The previous week’s Emmaus Reboot on Zoom drew 50 worshipers on a Thursday night, a time when many are “Zoomed out.” Students really want to be together, Drummond says, and that desire overpowers their screen fatigue.

As befits a seminary not far from Long Island Sound’s salty waters, the dean draws on seafaring imagery to describe the journey from Newton to New Haven. “We needed a bigger boat,” she says. “The seas were churning, and as much as we were able to hold the hull together with duct tape and bare hands and baling wire, we had a sense that the next big cultural setback would have set us flying in splinters.” Today, she feels both relief and “the sinking dread of, ‘What would this have been like if we were having to go it alone, be in this not quite seaworthy vessel?’ I don’t know if we could have made it.”

Linda Campanella, Chair of the Board of Trustees, echoes that sense of a narrow escape, and affirms Drummond’s optimism. The dean has “navigated this tricky terrain with skill, with sensitivity, with positivity, and with a collaborative spirit,” Campanella says. She praises Drummond as well for being “absolutely and authentically, genuinely dedicated to all of our students.” It doesn’t hurt that she’s funny, too. “She takes the work very seriously,” Campanella says, “but she does not take herself too seriously.”

Drummond’s dedication and hard work has gained notice on a national stage as well. She recently completed a six-year stint on the Board of Commissioners of the Association of Theological Schools (ATS), including two years overseeing the redevelopment of its standards of accreditation. The goal, she says, was to streamline the standards and make them more flexible and principles-based, decentering the habits of Whiteness and mainline Protestantism privileged in previous standards. Succeeding required her to “get a really big mixture of people to ‘yes’ around a really dramatic change that was going to be more life-giving, but was completely unrecognizable to what had been done in the past” -- something she’d already done for Andover Newton. In June, the new ATS standards were approved.

A vision of Andover Newton as “the go-to school for the faith community leaders of the future” is already a reality today, Drummond says, thanks to both the seminary’s unique strengths and Yale’s safe harbor. “Andover Newton has been through a lot, we’ve learned a lot, and we can do hard things,” she says, with a nod to Glennon Doyle’s Untamed, literally flexing her muscles for emphasis: one of those go-for-a-laugh moments Campanella alluded to. The coming year promises “hard things” of its own, but Dean Drummond is ready to meet it with optimism, dedication, lots of experience, and possibly a little bit of baling wire.