Should colleges worry about students' spirituality?

Yes
We’re neglecting students’ interior lives
Alexander W. Astin

If we’re serious when we claim that we’re providing our students with a liberal education, then it makes little sense to ignore the internal aspects of their lives. If there’s one consistent message in the great books at the core of a liberal arts curriculum, it’s the admonition to know thyself. Self-awareness and self-understanding are prerequisites to understanding others and resolving conflicts. This basic truth—which lies at the heart of our difficulty in dealing effectively with problems that continue to plague our country and our world—was also tragically illustrated in the events of Sept. 11, 2001.

Even a cursory look at our higher education system makes it clear that the relative amount of attention we devote to the exterior and interior aspects of students’ lives has gotten way out of balance. Thus, while we are justifiably proud of our “outer” development in fields such as science, medicine, technology and commerce, we have increasingly come to neglect students’ “inner” development—values and beliefs, emotional maturity, moral development, spirituality and self-understanding.

Putting more emphasis on students’ interior development has enormous implications for how we approach learning and development. While we invest a good deal of our pedagogical effort in developing the student’s cognitive, technical and job skills, we pay little, if any, attention to developing affective skills such as empathy, cooperation, leadership, interpersonal understanding and self-understanding.

Some faculty feel uncomfortable with spirituality because they equate it with religion and assume it will lead to sectarian proselytizing. But encouraging students to explore their own spiritual issues in no way requires professors to impose their personal religious perspectives on students, any more than political science requires them to impose their own political views. In fact, with no religious affiliation, public institutions are more able than private ones to welcome the free exploration of spiritual matters.

Perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind about spirituality is that it touches directly on our sense of community. More than anything else, giving spirituality a more central place in our institutions will strengthen our sense of connectedness with each other, our students and our institutions.

Alexander W. Astin is founding director of the Higher Education Research Institute and is the Allan M. Cartter professor of higher education emeritus at UCLA. HERI’s most recent study, “Spirituality and the Professoriate,” can be found at www.spirituality.ucla.edu.

No
It’s a fine line between spirituality and dogma
Dan Georgianna

Spiritual life covers a lot of ground, including religion, morality, ideology and ethics. Using its broadest definition, self-awareness, much or even most of the standard college curriculum concerns developing the spiritual life of students. The humanities, fine arts, performing arts and much of the social sciences encourage introspection and self-awareness. Joan Robinson, one of the pioneers in macroeconomics, called economics, my discipline, a branch of theology. Even the hard sciences, such as astronomy, physics and biology, encounter deep questions about the origins of being, and difficult math problems are spiritual events for many students. Extracurricular activities, ranging from sports to religious and civic events, encourage students to develop their spiritual life in very practical ways.

One’s spirituality, however, is intensely personal. We develop our own spiritual lives from our experiences, good or bad, including college experiences. I worry about the effects of material culture and worse on my teenage children as much as any parent. And I worry about excessive drinking and drugs on campus as much as any faculty or staff member. A college education is a public good reaching far beyond job training and the dollar value of a college degree.

Teaching spirituality or otherwise directly developing students’ spiritual lives, however, is dogma, little different from developing students’ political or sexual orientation. I bring my experiences into the classroom, but they are not part of the course. How would I grade spirituality? What’s necessary for a passing grade?

This is not to say that spirituality doesn't relieve stress on college campuses. Modern students must cope with full-time jobs, heavy debt loads, and pressure from parents on one side and friends on the other. The strain on faculty and staff from corporate measures of success, especially quantitative assessments of everything from teaching and scholarship to library records, increases every day. Adding state budget cuts to this mix has made public universities places of alienation and isolation. Faculty mostly close their doors at all times except when they meet students. Yet, none of those concerns warrant teaching spirituality in my economics class.

I have made my peace, grudgingly, with substituting college experience for college education, and I recognize the importance of educating the whole person. But I want public universities to keep their hands off my and my students’ spiritual lives.