American Association of Higher Education
Seventh Annual Conference
on Faculty Roles and Rewards
San Diego, California
January 22, 1999

Diana Chapman Walsh
President
Wellesley College
Opening Keynote Address

The Academic Calling:
Changing Commitments and Complexities

I am honored and pleased to be the opening keynote speaker at this seventh AAHE conference on faculty roles and rewards. This has provided me a welcome excuse to carve out a little time from a demanding schedule to think about what of use I may know about this fascinating question on which the conference program generously credits me with a leadership role -- this question of how we might find greater coherence, meaning, and purpose in academic life -- or (less optimistically) what to make of "the sense of disconnection experienced by so many faculty," as the program asserts.

I don't actually know how widespread among the nation's faculty this sense of disconnection is -- an empirical question I myself have not explored. Others who have a longer view than mine -- Donald Kennedy for one -- do observe that morale is at a very low ebb. My view may be somewhat skewed by my good fortune to be leading a fortunate institution whose faculty are privileged and basically content, grateful to be rooted in a nurturing place of learning, well-supported in their own scholarly pursuits, and working with bright and inquisitive students. We have our differences, to be sure, and our doubts about the future, but we are engaged and thrashing them out -- most of us, most of the time.

I do know, however -- we all do -- that disaffected, dispirited and alienated faculty are unlikely to be teaching well, unlikely to be providing our students the inspiration and guidance they need at a time in world history when we need them to be inspired. That is why this ongoing AAHE project on faculty roles and rewards is so manifestly important -- for higher education and for the larger society, indeed for us all. I commend the leaders of it, and all who are working to advance it.

If the task of a college or university professor is, as I would submit, to inspire students with a love of learning that will companion (maybe even bedevil) them throughout their lives -- if we subscribe to Yeats's oft-quoted insight that true education is not the filling of a pail but the igniting of a flame -- then surely we want faculty who are themselves on fire with a passion for their work.

This is because, as Csikszentmihalyi has posited, the main purpose of higher education (as distinct from lower-level schooling) -- the significance of the act of professing, with its root sense of being bound by a vow, or expressing faith or allegiance to a subject matter) -- is that ...

"higher education succeeds or fails in terms of motivation not cognitive transfer of information. It succeeds if it instills in students a willingness to pursue knowledge for its own sake; it fails if students learn simply in order to get a degree."

You may bridle against that rather romantic and retrograde statement of purpose for our work -- instilling in students a willingness to pursue knowledge for its own sake -- and we may want to refine and elaborate it a bit. It certainly runs counter to today's strong tides of vocationalism, value for money, and higher education for instrumental gain: the student's or the society's.

This morning in La Jolla I saw a shirt in a shop window emblazoned with four words: "Justification for higher education." In a row separating the words were four logos: Lamborghini, Mercedes, Ferrari, Porsche. This is the strong tide against which we are swimming.

But if we can accept the premise that one desired result of higher education is an intrinsically-motivated learner (and implied in the shirt's defiantly cynical message is at least the vague memory of something along these lines), it should follow that the person producing that result -- the professor -- ought him- or herself to be palpably and fiercely an intrinsically-motivated learner, in the search for knowledge, and in the classroom, for the joy of it. As Robert Lewis Stevenson said, "if you miss the joy of it, you miss it all." Just as John Dewey believed that education for democracy ought itself to be democratically organized, so it seems obvious that education for intrinsic motivation ought to be embedded therein, and spring therefrom.

Helen Vendler, the literary critic, writing some years ago in background papers for Habits of the Heart, captured eloquently from the professor's vantage point the sanctity of this professor-to-student transmission of passion for a subject:

"We owe it to ourselves to teach what we love on our first, decisive encounter with our students," she wrote. ... "We owe it to ourselves to show our students, when they first meet us, what we are; we owe their dormant appetites, thwarted for so long in their previous schooling, that deep sustenance that will make them realize that they too, having been taught, love what we love."

Faculty owe to themselves to teach what they love, and in so doing they nourish their students. They owe to themselves to show their students what they are. And they need to know what they love, and what they are -- not a simple task but surely an anchor without which they'll drift.

Does any of us doubt that this dance of inspiration is the essential dynamic of great teaching? It's in our popular culture. "Good Will Hunting" and Tuesdays With Morri bear witness to the place of love in a learning partnership from which no one emerges quite the same.

For my part, it was a freshman English professor in the first semester of my first year of college -- and specifically his eccentric delight in the written word -- that drew me to major in English and to make the craft of writing central to my life's work.

Memorable Teaching

And that story is common. David Pillemer, a senior member of the Wellesley faculty, a professor of psychology and faculty director of our Learning and Teaching Center, has systematically studied salient memories that give shape and meaning to life. His recent book, Momentous Events, Vivid Memories, quotes many striking memories former students describe years after the encounter, memories that illustrate the specific and lasting impact a professor's manifest love of subject can have -- visual, visceral, sensory memories of life-transforming encounters:

The first meeting of an art history class ...

"I remember that I sat in the front row in the center section on the left half somewhere, next to my friend ... I don't remember the exact material, except that it was Egyptian art and was taught by [professor's name]. She was an amazing lecturer -- super excited about the subject, talking non-stop, and racing back and forth across the stage. The time went very quickly ... [The professor] had gotten me so excited about art history, that I left the auditorium absolutely positive that art history was my calling in life."

Another, this one philosophy ...

"In my first philosophy class ... I remember a discussion on a moral dilemma concerning a woman and two children. ... [The professor] was very eloquent on the subject, and it seemed like everyone in the class was talking. He ... looked very much like a 'philosopher.' ... The wind blew through the room. It was very much a sensory as well as intellectual experience and it was the class which made me become a philosophy major."

And a memory of her first Shakespeare class by a student who went on to graduate studies in Elizabethan literature:

"I have good feelings and good memories about the entire class (first semester of sophomore year), [but] I remember the first day best. I was fascinated by the easy way [the professor] roamed through Shakespeare ... He seemed to know everything. In fact, after class, I asked him if he could identify a quote I had found about fencing, "Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them." Immediately he said, "Othello, act 1, scene 2, I believe." Which turned out to be exactly right. I wanted to know a body of literature that well. I'm still working on it."

Such stories, and many others, illustrate that faculty morale matters, and not just because disgruntled faculty are difficult to have around. Morale, coherence, connection, meaning, purpose, hopefulness, love -- these qualities of mind and spirit matter ... desperately; for they are the very stuff of what -- when faculty are at their best -- they are inculcating in their students and transmitting to future generations.

And I know from a conference we sponsored at Wellesley College this past September that many in the academy are yearning to reconnect with the meaning dimension of the work that is consuming us, to find a greater sense of coherence in our work. We organized the conference to explore the role of spirituality in higher education; "Education as Transformation," we entitled it.

We thought it might attract perhaps 200 participants, if we publicized it very well. In the end, we closed off registrations at 800 and squeezed people into every nook and cranny of our campus for that two-day national gathering -- presidents, faculty, staff, students, chaplains, and trustees -- who came in teams representing 250 colleges and universities.

Organization of These Remarks

Before I go further, I want to take a minute to lay a context for your program for the next four days. Then I want to raise a few cautions about the change agenda for faculty work that is becoming fashionable, not because the changes being advocated are not worthwhile but to the extent they drive the inspiration out of faculty work. Finally, I will ask what it is that we can do to carve out spaces within which we can connect to the larger purpose and meaning of our work in the academy.

First, the context; it reflects, I believe, two different kinds of trends: factors likely to affect students' lives, and pressures buffeting the academic profession itself, and the higher education enterprise more generally.

Factors With Which Today's Students Will Have to Reckon

Among the forces with which our students will have to contend, at least the following five trends would be on the list that most of us would assemble, I suspect:

First, globalization: the rapidity with which ideas, people, capital and culture now move from place to place -- with the aid of technology -- has telescoped time, collapsed space, and erased national borders for international commerce. The graduates who will effectively manage the new global realities will be those who can move from culture to culture -- who can collaborate and communicate with fluency across national, racial, religions, and socieoeconomic lines -- with knowledge, sophistication, sensitivity, and ease.

Second, the nature of work has changed with these new global alignments, and with the shift from an industrial to a knowledge economy. This means a shift in the competencies that will be most prized. Work in the knowledge economy will draw on the traditional intellectual competencies, the ones, I would argue, that are learned nowhere better then in a fine liberal arts curriculum -- the ability to read critically, write persuasively, speak cogently, reason quantitatively; facility in sorting through a vast and ever growing mountain of diffuse information, the ability to cut through the nonsense, propaganda, and false claims, to synthesize, integrate, and make sense of it all; a knowledge base from which to think historically, spatially, cross-culturally, comparatively, and (not least) with empathy ...

These traditional liberal arts competencies will be needed as never before, and also (importantly) newer social competencies: the ability to work in teams, to process and integrate information from many different disciplines, media, and sources, to keep up with rapid changes in computer technologies, to go on adapting and learning.

Third, demographic changes (reflecting differential birth rates and changing immigration policies and patterns) are converting us into a much more diverse and multicultural nation, one in which the Euro-American majority will become the minority soon. As a result, diversity and multiculturalism are powerful new challenges on most college and university campuses, challenges we are confronting with mixed success, but confronting with more intentionality, and I would argue honesty, than is evident in other sectors of civilian society.

Fourth, all these other changes are straining the traditional values and mores that used to be the glue binding American society together. We are called now to redefine who we are and what we value in an increasingly high-tech, fast-paced, fragmented, and fractious society of multiple, contested, and shifting identities and truth claims. That call is especially resonant on our college and university campuses, which have always been settings for larger social dramas. And the academic community itself continues to fracture into subcommunities, each with its own notions of what counts as truth, and what constitutes success.

Finally -- fifth -- is the reality that change, itself, is now a fact of life, accelerating change, from which there is no turning back. Today's students are going to need, even more than earlier generations did, the ability to learn new things, to take the initiative, to be enterprising, and to take charge of their own learning throughout their lives.

We can plainly see that these trends are the backdrop for this conference. They lie behind much of the change agenda emanating from AAHE and kindred groups -- a focus on technology in the classroom, on experiential education, multiculturalism, global education, on self-directed learning, peer collaboration, case studies and other processes of inquiry and discovery -- important new adaptations to rapidly changing times. These adaptations are designed to ensure that today's students develop the knowledge base, learning habits, and flexible skills they will need and they are certainly important.

Pressures on the Higher Education Enterprise

In addition, economic and social pressures on the professoriate and on institutions of higher learning are affecting our priorities. Most worrisome is the rising cost of higher education -- itself a product of changing demographics, new competitive dynamics, increased regulation and litigation, the breakdown of the family, a new in loco parentis, and other factors identified by the National Cost Commission, among others.

Rising costs are both cause and effect of what has been termed "the market-model university," a place where decisions and resources "increasingly follow the voting feet of students from class to class." Consumers want value for money and this creates pressure for accountability and the documentation of outcomes. AAHE's emphasis on learning rather than teaching, on measurable outcomes and the evaluation of impact, speaks directly to those concerns.

Our Emerging Change Agenda

So we have an evolving and an urgent agenda -- reflected in the program for the conference this week -- very much attuned to major forces in the larger society. And that is as it should be; these programmatic innovations are important. But what is especially exciting about this particular conference -- exciting and unusual -- is its refusal to stop at the programmatic level, its attention to the larger questions before us now: questions of coherence, meaning, and overarching purpose, questions we too seldom pause to ask.

Take instructional technology as a case in point. It is clear to me that the revolution in communication technology is going to bring such fundamental change in the way we live our lives -- all of us -- that it will infiltrate all of academic instruction, in different ways for different levels and styles of teaching and for different subject matter, in ways we can hardly imagine now. It will happen fast and those who fail to keep up will be left behind. Just look at the way the average 13-year old is spending his and her time.

We must pay attention to technology, no question about that. But so often, at meetings like this, we ask how we can bring technology into the classroom as quickly as possible, or how we can measure the impact of multimedia on learning outcomes. Useful as these questions may be, they threaten to divert our attention from less measurable questions of far greater import. How can technology improve intellectual engagement in the classroom? What effect do new instructional technologies have on the quality of the interaction between faculty and students, on moments of inspiration, insight, and awe in the learning encounter? Will students be permanently inspired by a virtuoso multimedia performance? Maybe; maybe not. We don't know and should be asking.

Or experiential learning ... When students venture off campus to engage in real-world encounters, we should have explicit learning contracts, to be sure, and clearly-defined objectives. But in addition -- and of far greater importance -- we need to be asking how this work affects students' quality of mind, their love of ideas, their power of argument. Will it turn them into the people we need for a challenging future: people, described in the article on the market-model university, "who have mastered language, who can put together a sound argument and blow a specious one to bits, who have learned from the past, and who have witnessed the treacheries and glories of human experience profoundly revealed by writers and artists."

And will we remember these aspirations if we turn our energies to the single-minded pursuit of narrowly measured learning outcomes? If we want to assess a chemistry class, for example, using readily-defined and quantifiable outcomes, will we also find ways to gauge the levels of intellectual energy in that classroom, and attend to when and how that chemistry professor is catalyzing active and questioning minds?

The point is that technology, experiential learning, global education, multiculturalism -- these innovations on the new agenda -- need to be understood as secondary, not primary. They are valuable not as ends in themselves, but as pathways to a larger end -- developing students who are lifelong critical thinkers and learners. The innovations on our new agenda may help us achieve this larger goal of carving out spaces for inspired and inspiring encounters between faculty and students, but we need to articulate how, and under what conditions, and we need to be alert to ways in which rigid notions about what constitutes good teaching may actually get in our way.

Finding Coherence, Meaning, and Purpose in Academic Life

If so many of our faculty are in fact feeling a sense of disconnection, a large part of the malaise I believe, reflects the accelerating and pervasive socioeconomic pressures on higher education -- the pressures of the market -- which are deflecting us from the central source of meaning and purpose in our work.

My own faculty say that while our values as an institution have always emphasized hard work, high standards, serious scholarship, their worst fear, as one said, is that "we can't inculcate those ideals any more," they have gone hopelessly out of fashion in today's era of markets, consumers, careerism. She finds it especially distressing -- depressing even -- to watch economic forces drive students and their parents to look-- quite understandably -- for an immediate pay-out for college at a time when the "old core values of a broad liberal arts education" are more important to society than ever before.

The ideals of higher education, going back to the Greeks -- the values to which we subscribe in our rhetoric even now -- have everything to do with taking time to foster the critical abilities of students, to guide them in developing not only knowledge and skill but also qualities of mind and spirit that will carry them through their lives: wide-ranging curiosity, a taste for scholarship, for ideas, for intellectual challenge and exchange, a willingness to take responsibility for what they count as truth -- and why -- an openness to multiple viewpoints, and a commitment to self-critique.

And never have these qualities been more vital than today. As we look to the next millennium, we know we are going to need a new generation committed to living in ways that will ensure a sustainable future, dedicated to the common good, to bringing diverse communities together, to inspiring a shared sense of participation and mutual accountability, to igniting hope. Cheryl and Jim Keen and their colleagues describe such people in their recent book, Common Fire.

At Wellesley we say we exist "to provide an excellent liberal arts education for women who will make a difference in a world." And if we were to do a content analysis of mission statements of colleges and universities across the country, we would find different wording but claims in many of them, I suspect, that what we in higher education are about is providing education for citizenship, for leadership, for stewardship -- education that will inspire our students to work to create a sustainable, equitable, and hopeful future. Less evident in those same materials is any kind of cogent description of how any of us actually purports to implement that vision. Is it nothing more than lip service then?

From one perspective, higher education right now is rife with fragmentation, relativism, skepticism, hollow rhetoric, disillusionment and confusion. From another, though, I think we can see the contours of a new and creative synthesis, on beyond chaos to a fundamental reordering of priorities and preoccupations. This conference can be part of that process of higher-order synthesis if we keep our wits about us.

Indeed, some of the most exciting contemporary writings on higher education are forging new syntheses. Ronald Barnett's elegant philosophical essay on the idea of higher education, Robert Orrill's edited collections for the College Board on education and democracy, Bruce Kimball's distinction between orators and philosophers, Donald Kennedy's writings on academic duty, Lawrence Levine's on multiculturalism, Charles Anderson's on practical reason, Bliss Carnochan's historical grounding of contemporary curricular debates, Stephen Brookfield's cogent case for critically-reflective teaching ... others as well.

Each of these works is a very different analysis; each has its own distinct perspective, its own point of departure, sets its own intellectual task. Yet, when they are taken together, what is striking is that each in its own way is doing one of two things, sometimes both: either arguing back to first principles -- digging under the surface of convocation rhetoric to deeper questions of purpose and meaning -- and/or rediscovering how profoundly the professor's inner life -- the professor's identity, integrity, and engagement -- color and shape the learning encounter.

Parker Palmer writes eloquently about what he calls "the teaching self" ... "How does the quality of my selfhood form -- and deform -- the way I relate to my students, my subject, my colleagues, my world," he asks? "How can educational institutions sustain and deepen the selfhood from which good teaching comes?" There, at the heart of the enterprise, is the love of subject from which Helen Vendler suggests we owe it to ourselves to begin.

Great professors -- as we have heard from students' memories -- are the ones who weave webs of life-affirming connection for their students. Proficiency with technology, tightly-framed learning outcomes, even multicultural awareness are secondary to the passion professors bring to their subject matter, the compassion, awe, and joy they embody and communicate. Great teaching comes from spirit, not from technique, a truth we are rediscovering as we sense that our center is ceasing to hold.

Carving Out Spaces for Spirit in the Academy

What can we do, then, to foster the expression and expansion of spirit in the academy -- in teaching, scholarship, and service? What can institutions do to support faculty who want to continue to grow? Let me suggest five possible approaches; you can probably think of others.

First, we can reconnect faculty work to the fundamental purposes of a liberal education. As Donald Kennedy writes in the preface to Academic Duty:

"The university is above all else about opportunity: the opportunity to give others the personal and intellectual platform they need to advance the culture, to preserve life, and to guarantee a sustainable human future. Could anything possibly matter more than that?"

Or, more poetically, a high point of our September conference was a multifaith service the students led. The Unitarian-Universalist prayer they read stuck in my mind; it describes our campuses at their best it seems to me:

Come into this place of peace and let its silence heal your spirit

Come into this place of memory and let its history warm your soul

Come into this place of prophesy and power and let its vision change your heart.

Now there's an image to hold in opposition to the luxury car logos. We can focus on our purpose.

Second (a corollary and a crucial one) we can hew to our primary goal -- inspiring lifelong learning -- and not allow the demands, the lures, the metaphors of the market to impel us to move lesser concerns to center stage. We have seen that the stories students tell about teaching that changed their lives pivot around low-tech interpersonal connections, subtle transfers of commitment that would be difficult to measure objectively or codify formalistically.

The key to inspiring teaching (as opposed, say, to efficient or entertaining teaching or even teaching that promotes learning of specific course content) is sustaining an intellectually alive and engaged classroom. This, in turn, requires nourishing the inner lives of the professoriate. By promoting other agendas for faculty -- mastering technology, evaluating outcomes, developing learning contracts -- we risk reducing the profession to a set of skills or sensitivities. We must take care that these skills and sensitivities enliven the academic agenda, rather than deflecting the attention and sapping the spirits of teachers who are also scholars and whose scholarly excursions infuse their teaching with deeper meaning.

Third, we can reward a range of gifts and contributions, instead of being rigid or doctrinaire about faculty roles and responsibilities. Gary Krahenbuhl's article in the November-December issue of Change makes a cogent case that the learning environment is impoverished by inflexible faculty workload practices that ignore the full complement of faculty activities, and overlook the variety of ways -- in and out of the classroom -- for faculty to ignite student learning over the course of an evolving career. Faculty go through cycles in which generating, applying, and transmitting knowledge come in and out of focus.

What a different place the academy would be if all of us with authority and power (all of us in leadership roles to be sure, and many others too) were to define our essential task as discerning our colleagues' and students' particular abilities to contribute to the good of the whole, helping them connect their unique and evolving commitments at a given point in time with special and evolving needs of the institution and the larger world.

What a different place the academy would be if we were to shake loose of Procrustean notions about teaching effectiveness. Csikszentmihalyi describes a university professor with whom he studied design, a man who made an indelible mark on many lives. This professor was a "terrible teacher."

"He could not explain what he wanted from us, nor did he try to; he did not demonstrate how to do things; his feedback to students was erratic and arbitrary. We were in a constant state of uncertainty and confusion in his classes. He violated all the rules of rational transmission of information; he was the exact antithesis of a well-designed teaching machine. Yet what a great professor he was! His concern for good design, for the integrity of vision and execution, was clear to everybody; it was etched in the lines of pain on his face when confronted with a facile drawing, or the look of exultation that -- alas, much more rarely -- passed over his features when someone broke away from a conventional cliché. It was clear that he enjoyed every minute of his work, even though most of it was painful. He could not fake enthusiasm, conviction, or belief either for our sake or for his own, but this very submission to the rules of art generated enthusiasm, conviction, and belief on our parts."

We can guard a place in the academy -- always -- for terrible teachers like that.

Fourth, we can fight deadening perfectionism, which kills off the spirit, and welcome into the academy the messiness of real life. We can be light and accepting about our human fallibility, open to learning from our mistakes and from what others have to teach us. If we want students to enter the world with a commitment to understanding, self-reflection and self-appraisal, as Ronald Barnett observes, "they have to be able to give an account of what [they are] doing, and why ... willing to enter into a dialogue." And, as Steven Brookfield argues, a culture of trust and openness in which students will make themselves vulnerable in these ways is one in which everyone is willing to "go public with their learning." If we are all willing to risk being public learners, we will suspend our harsh critical judgments more of the time and listen with empathy, listen deeply in the ways that encourage the timid spirit to expand.

Please don't misunderstand. I am emphatically not arguing for a Lake Wobegan retreat from standards. Nothing is more corrosive of faculty morale, it seems to me, than the sense that someone is asking them to lower their standards, inflate their grades, dilute their syllabi, spoon feed their students, and dumb down the curriculum to make sure that students are always feeling chipper and having fun. If we keep our eye on our essential purpose, as I am arguing we should do, we'll tighten, not loosen our standards, be clear about our expectations, and respectful of the very best of which each of our students is capable.

Fifth, and finally, we can create time and space -- as we did at our conference last fall -- for faculty, students, and staff to honor their inner lives, when, if, and how they choose -- not on command, not invasively, and ever respectful that professional scholars must be autonomous and free to pursue their causal chains where they may lead, to seek truth through confirmation rather than revelation. The freedoms we scholars treasure from institutional religious constraint need not be threatened by opening ourselves to the spiritual dimensions of teaching, learning, and knowing, need not deny the possibility of a kind of knowing that comes from the heart and soul -- not instead of the intellect; we exist to celebrate that -- but in addition to the intellect, in all its beauty and power.

We know what it feels like when we are engaged in helping our students discover places of deep knowing within themselves. We are alert to their intellectual travails and attuned to their inner conditions. We listen intently for what's being said, and for what's still unsayable, ask gently probing questions that open avenues to self-awareness, strike a careful balance between nurturing and challenging, encourage and support thoughtful reflection on experience. What I'm suggesting here is that we can make an effort to create opportunities -- and a cultural ethos -- to be those kinds of good teachers to ourselves and to one another within the academy.

For if those of us who are called to be educators in these times of great ferment and change can support one another in our efforts to cultivate our own inner resources, then we can create healthy learning environments. Our students will benefit in two ways -- directly from the effects of the healthier environments we create, indirectly from the influence of the healthier, more balanced role models we project -- models of adults who have their priorities straight, who know who they are and what they love, and who find the deep meaning that animates their work.

Inspired faculty are indispensable in that meaning making. They can build the relationships, forge the connections, bind the pluralistic global learning communities that will provide undergraduates with models to carry throughout their lives, models of communities that inspire lives of purpose and commitment to causes larger than themselves.

To make that claim more than an abstraction, as I close, let me leave you with a concrete example of some conversations our Dean of Religious and Spiritual Life, Victor Kazanjian, facilitated on our campus last year in anticipation of the conference on spirituality and education we sponsored this past September. I participated in several of them, so I speak from first-hand knowledge.

When Dean Kazanjian first set out to bring faculty into dialogue about the spiritual dimensions of their work, he was stymied by what felt like an insurmountable gulf between the language of the academy -- cool, distancing, objectifying, critical, assertive, authoritative -- loud often -- and the personal often tentative and halting, inchoate quiet language of the spirit.

A crucial breakthrough occurred when Victor came up with the idea of asking students to identify specific moments of meaning in their learning process. He assembled small groups of students and asked them to speak of moments they had experienced, in the classroom or beyond -- moments of meaning, or inspiration, or wonder, or awe, critical incidents that seemed to them to speak to the spiritual dimension of their learning. And the response was extraordinary. Students reported story after story of experiences of these moments of meaning -- in a lecture, in a science lab, reading a text, watching a film, in discussion with other students -- the kinds of stories we've seen from David Pillemer's research on memories students carry through their lives.

So Victor then wrote to each of the faculty members in whose classes these reported incidences had occurred, saying, in essence, a student reported having had such an experience in your class, would you be willing to join a small group of colleagues to discuss these moments of meaning in the learning and teaching process. Who could resist and invitation like that?

Sure enough, few could. Of 59 faculty invited 55 attended these discussions in small groups over a period of months. They spoke freely and often movingly of the meaning-making dimension of their teaching and learning and of their own perceptions of the spiritual aspect of their work, what had drawn them to it, their sense of vocation, as Frederick Buechner defines it -- the place where the heart's deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.

And we are speaking of hunger. For a very long time now, our institutions of higher learning, many of which grew from religious and spiritual roots, have been disconnected from the sustenance of those roots because of the twin fear of imposing received wisdom on the pure pursuit of knowledge and monoreligious traditions on our increasingly multireligious communities. Our secularism has confused freedom of religion with freedom from religion.

But as we are gradually coming to appreciate the importance of viewpoint diversity in the academy and of an integrated, holistic educational experience to prepare today's students for the world they will encounter, it is becoming clear that religious diversity is an integral part of the story. Creating a new vision for spirituality in higher education is only one component, but an essential one, of the effort to invent a new educational process that will respond more fully to the challenges the world presents us now -- challenges to our teaching, our learning, our lives.

In closing, I want to read you some words from Mary Rose O'Reilley's evocative and wise essay entitled, Radical Presence: Teaching as Contemplative Practice:

"When we talk about teaching within a contemplative frame of reference," she writes, "I think we should keep our prescriptions to a minimum. ... Follow the deepest leadings of your own heart and your own tradition. Let methodology follow from the particular (this student, this hour, this blue spruce) rather than from the world of theory. ... Respect the blocks, respect the stutter. We know so little about what's really going on. What seem to be mistakes are often gifts of the spirit. ... All of us long to create an inner world big enough to comprehend our whole selves."

So ... in the spirit of limiting our prescriptions I will stop at five. I hope we will remember, first, how much is at stake in our work, second, that what we are providing is inspiration, third, that inspiration comes in many forms, fourth, that it is messy and unpredictable, and fifth, that this work calls on us to open our minds and our hearts.

That said, I want to end now with a hopeful thought. It is on our college and university campuses in the company of young people -- more than any place I know -- that we have the possibility of creating environments in which each of us can follow our yearning -- as far as it will take us -- to create an inner world that does comprehend ourself in all its magnificent complexity. What a thought.

Thanks so much for your attention and the chance to be here with you.

Betsy Lawson elawson@wellesley.edu
Office for Public Information
Date Created: January 26, 1999
Last Modified: March 17, 1999