Concept Paper
I. Background
As humanity moves into a new century and a new millennium, educational institutions are asking how best to prepare students for life and leadership in an increasingly interdependent world. The effects of globalization, particularly the rapidly increasing ethnic, cultural and religious diversity within American society, are nowhere more prevalent than on college and university campuses. An article in the New York Times entitled "Colleges Setting Moral Compasses: Educators go from Mind to Soul", posits that one of the central questions facing educators is the role of the college and university in shaping the moral and spiritual character of its students in the context of a pluralistic society.
For much of American history, colleges and universities included in their mission the shaping of an undergraduate's moral character. Many private institutions, beginning with Harvard in 1636, were founded by religious men and women who expected that chapel attendance and religious instruction would be woven into the fabric of student life. As these schools became secularized, such requirements fell by the wayside. But now, in a time of outward tension and inner searching, when many Americans worry about social decay and also show a growing interest in spirituality, students, teachers and administrators on campuses are asking whether colleges ought to try once again to build moral and spiritual character as well as intellect.
Gustav Niebuhr
The New York Times - Education Life
August 4, 1996
As Niebuhr points out, America's institutions of higher learning were originally founded on religious (essentially Protestant Christian) roots, providing a value system based on the assumption that the religion of the majority was the religion of the nation. As the movement toward religious liberty grew in this country, and the demand for separation of church and state increased, religion began to disappear from the educational process and our colleges and universities gradually became secular institutions.
In his book, The Soul of the American University, George Marsden chronicles the role of religion in the history of American colleges and universities. He particularly focuses on "how the prevailing dimensions of American intellectual life took their shape in the construction of universities."
Unlike some other Western countries which addressed the problems of pluralism by encouraging multiple educational systems, the American tendency was to build what amounted to a monolithic and homogeneous educational establishment and to force the alternatives to marginal existence on the periphery. Almost from the outset of the rise of American universities, such universality was attained by defining the intellectual aspects of the enterprise as excluding all but liberal Protestant or "nonsectarian" perspectives... The result was an "inclusive" higher education that resolved the problems of pluralism by virtually excluding all religious perspectives from the nation's highest academic life.
George M. Marsden
The Soul of the American University
For many colleges and universities today, this collision of past practices with present multi-religious realities has precipitated a crisis of institutional identity and educational priorities. Neither the original homogeneous religious orientation nor the secular model will adequately serve the current situation. Two elements have had a significant impact on the state of higher education. One is the rapidly growing religious diversity among students, and the other is a trend away from secularism, and toward the search for a new sense of values and spirituality. Our institutions of higher education need to find new ways to relate to these demands.
II. Religious Diversity and Higher Education
Today's student communities are rapidly becoming more religiously and culturally diverse. Such diversity presents both a challenge and an opportunity for America's colleges and universities. Diana Eck describes this phenomenon as it has emerged at Harvard University and elsewhere:
What has happened at Harvard has happened at major universities throughout the country. In the 1990's, universities have become microcosms and laboratories of a new multicultural and multireligious America. It is not uncommon to have a Hindu and Jew, Muslim and Christian in a single rooming group. These changes in university demographics have come not from abroad, but from the rapidly changing cultural and religious landscape of the United States. Harvard's issues, America's issues, have become increasingly, a fresh recasting of many of India's issues, the world's issues: race, culture, difference, diversity, and whether it is possible to move from diversity to pluralism.
Diana L. Eck
Harvard Magazine, September-October 1996
It is important to define the distinction between diversity and pluralism. Diversity refers to the presence of many races, cultures and religions. Pluralism is an attitude. It is the willingness to see the community as composed of diverse elements, each worthy of consideration and respect, and to actively engage that diversity in order to promote understanding and cooperation. While diversity is a fact in the educational community, the creation of programs and structures within institutions of higher education that fully address such diversity remains a challenge.
Despite the challenges, the college or university campus is America's most promising experiment in religious pluralism. Students are in the process of discovering what it means to be in community while developing their own respective spiritualities and world views. Students who develop a sense of pluralism during this critical time of their development can later play a key role in the building of a more stable and inclusive civil society.
III. Spirituality and Higher Education
For decades, there has been a noticeable awkwardness in conversations about spirituality and its role in the educational mission of secular institutions. However, intellectual pursuits that exclude spirituality fail to adequately address today's search for relationship, ethics and values -- primary concerns in American cultural and political life. Educator and author Parker Palmer speaks of education as a spiritual as well as an intellectual process:
We have an opportunity to revision education...(in a way that) would result in a deeply ethical education, an education that would help students develop the capacity for connectedness that is at the heart of an ethical life. Such an education would root ethics in its true and only ground, in the spiritual insight that beyond the broken surface of our lives there is a "hidden wholeness" on which all life depends....In this education we come to know the world not simply as an objectified system of empirical objects in logical connection with each other, but as an organic body of personal relations and responses, a living and evolving community of creativity and compassion. Education of this sort means more than teaching the facts and learning the reasons so we can manipulate life towards our ends. It means being drawn into personal responsiveness and accountability to each other and the world of which we are a part.
Parker J. Palmer
To Know as We are Known: Education as a Spiritual Journey
In Palmer's vision of education, learning is no longer simply an amassing of information to gain mastery over some aspect of the world, but an attempt to understand one's intimate connection in the world. In this kind of a learning community, spirituality might be thought of as that which animates our minds and our bodies, giving meaning and purpose to thought, word and action.
If spirituality creates openness, then rediscovering the spiritual dimension of education offers students, and consequently American society, the possibility of embracing diversity as a necessary step to the actualization of a global community.
IV. The EDUCATION as Transformation Process
The extraordinary response to our initial National Gathering was impressive. An attendance of over 800 included 210 faculty, 28 presidents, 170 administrators (including chancellors, provosts, vice presidents, deans, etc.), 205 students (graduate and undergraduate), 112 religious life staff and advisors, 56 representatives from related organizations, 15 alumni and 12 trustees. The presence of people from all parts of the country indicated that a national dialogue about these issues had begun. Clearly we have tapped into wide-spread interest in exploring the issues of religious pluralism and spirituality in higher education.
But new approaches to religious pluralism and spirituality in higher education cannot be developed within a small segment of the educational community. They require systemic changes that affect everyone. Consequently, institutional teams have been formed in a growing number of participating colleges and universities to begin the process of exploration on their campuses. These teams ideally include representatives from at least five different constituencies within the institutions -- administrators, faculty, religious life staff, students, and trustees/alumni.
Materials to help institutions set up and maintain constituency teams are available on or through this website. EDUCATION as Transformation staff and associates will provide direct consultation as outlined in the section under that heading. We invite you to contact us to work together toward this important and exciting new vision.
Get in touch with EDUCATION as Transformation
Peter Laurence, Ed.D., EasT Executive Director
5 Trading Post Lane
Putnam Valley, NY 10579
Phone & Fax: (845) 528-3490
E-mail: peterll@concentric.net
Web Site: www.educationastransformation.org
