Doug Hackleman earned his MA in psychology from Pepperdine University in 1973. After teaching for several years at La Sierra College and Loma Linda University, he founded and published Adventist Currents. From 1988 to 2009 he worked as a consultant to authors and publishers, did some contract teaching, and wrote articles on a variety of topics for both Adventist and secular journals. His most recent publication is Who Watches? Who Cares? Misadventures in Stewardship (MCA, 2008). He is married to Jan Ziebarth Hackleman, a registered nurse and practicing marriage and family therapist. They are parents of two adult daughters. As of January 2009 Hackleman has been employed by Loma Linda University School of Dentistry as its director of marketing and publications.

What part/s of the Seventh-day Adventist historical past is/are best left unknown? When is it appropriate NOT to tell the whole story – or even hint that a story exists? Who is responsible for keeping the laity informed? Whose role is it to decide what should, what should not, be reported?
“During the final two decades of the second millennium,” notes the March SDAF presenter, “the institutional Seventh-day Adventist Church was rocked by many scandalous administrative and financial disasters — unnecessary losses that reached well into nine figures.”

Seven of those stories have been elaborated by Doug Hackleman with copious documentation and strip-searched for causal clues in his recent book, Who Watches? Who Cares?—379 pages and 1,184 endnotes of investigative journalism:

The Pawtucket Nursing Villa, a 160-bed nursing home in Rhode Island, was funded in 1977 by Fuller Memorial Hospital in nearby Massachusetts, built through a limited partnership headed by the hospital’s administrator, and then sold to the very hospital that underwrote its construction.

During the 1960s and 1970s scores of Seventh-day Adventist union and local conference officers across North America loaned millions of dollars of church funds (primarily to construct post office buildings) to a 1940 graduate of the College of Medical Evangelists for very modest returns, while they simultaneously loaned him their own money for much higher — and sometimes exorbitant — returns. The millions of dollars lost, when the doctor’s Ponzi-like business collapsed in 1981, were more than matched by the crisis of confidence generated among church members by such widespread (and widely publicized), self serving, clerical conflicts of interest.

Harris Pine Mills was an integrated business that cured and milled lumber from its own Northwestern forests, and then cut the wood into pieces that were assembled mostly at Adventist academies into outdoor furniture that was then wholesaled to retail outlets. Donated by its founder to the Adventist Church in 1952, thirty-four years later it was driven into chapter 7 bankruptcy by its sole stockholder, the General Conference Corporation of Seventh-day Adventists.

• Which of the seven incidents cited, had you known about soon after they happened?
  
  Which of the incidents do you feel Adventist administrators or news sources should have considered to be newsworthy and, thus, reported in denominational publications?
  
  What are the risks involved in NOT publicly reporting such? Would a denominational publication, such as the Review, be likely to increase – or decrease – its number of subscriptions by reporting incidents which might not be complimentary of church leadership?
  
  When the denomination loses money because of litigation or through real estate purchases or sales, from what source(s) are such funds obtained?
  
  Does the SDA organizational structure have anyone charged with overseeing its finances – and reporting its findings to administrators and the membership? Should it? Why/Why not?