Each generation of students inevitably must
confront anew the fundamental questions of
meaning and value that have vexed human
beings down through the ages. What does it
mean to be human? How ought a human
being to live? What makes a meaningful and
satisfying life? What
are my values? What
are my obligations to others? How can I understand
suffering and death?
As students have struggled with such "Big
Questions," individually and collectively,
liberal education has traditionally sought to
provide them with a variety of cultural and
historical perspectives, as well as to foster
their analytical ability to confront and explore
answers, necessarily provisional and often
competing, for themselves. In practice, however,
there are significant challenges, from
lack of student interest and faculty expertise
to the persistence of inadequate professional
paradigms and reward structures.
What are the Big Questions that engage
today's students? Is exploring those questions a
legitimate part of liberal education as we understand
it today? If so, how adequately are they
being dealt with? How could we do better?
Following are four responses. Readers are
strongly encouraged to contribute additional responses
online at www.aacu.org/liberaleducation,
where they will be published as they are
received.
Alexander W. Astin and Helen S. Astin
Given that most of the great literary and
philosophical traditions that constitute the core
of a liberal education are grounded in the
maxim "know thyself," we believe that the Big
Questions are fundamental to the ideals and
values of liberal learning. Self-understanding,
of course, is a necessary prerequisite to our
ability to understand others and to resolve
conflicts. This basic truth--which lies at the
heart of our difficulty in dealing effectively
with problems of violence, poverty, crime,
divorce, substance abuse, and religious and
ethnic conflict that continue to plague our
country and our world--was also dramatically
and tragically illustrated by the events of
September 11, 2001.
Such considerations led us in 2003 to undertake
a six-year national study of students'
spiritual development in American higher
education. Funded by grants to the University
of California–Los Angeles' Higher Education
Research Institute from the John Templeton
Foundation, this longitudinal project has already
revealed a high level of interest in spiritual
issues and spiritual questions on the part
of undergraduates. Our surveys show that twothirds
of the students express a strong interest
in spiritual matters, and that similar numbers
demonstrate a substantial level of religious
commitment and engagement. But their existential
search can be rocky at times, and theirspiritual struggles can distress them psychologically
and cause them to have doubts about
the self and its worth. As one student told us
in a focus group interview, "a question I've
been dealing with is…what is the point of
college? [What does] the fact that we're paying
for this education so that we can make money
later in life…have to do with the grand
scheme of things?"
How are colleges responding to such challenges?
Well over half of the students report
that their professors never encourage discussions
of religious or spiritual matters, and about
the same proportion reports that professors
never provide opportunities to discuss the purpose
or meaning of life. The faculty themselves
show a considerable division of opinion when
it comes to the role of spiritual issues in higher
education. While majorities of faculty believe
that enhancing self-understanding, developing
moral character, and helping students develop
their personal values should be either essential
or very important goals of undergraduate education,
only about a third say the same for "facilitating
students' spiritual development." On
the other hand, four in five faculty members
consider themselves to be "spiritual persons,"
and more than two-thirds are "seeking out opportunities
to grow spiritually."
By raising public awareness of the important
role that spirituality plays in student
learning and development, by alerting academic
administrators, faculty, and curriculum
committees to the importance of spiritual development,
and by identifying possible strategies
for enhancing that development, it is our
hope to encourage institutions to give greater
priority to these spiritual aspects of students'
educational and personal development. As
Wellesley College President Diana Chapman
Walsh, a member of the national advisory
board for the project, expresses it, "we can
create time and space…for faculty, students,
and staff to honor their inner lives, when, if,
and how they choose….The freedoms we
scholars treasure 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 heart and soul. These forms of
knowing should be sought not instead of the
intellect but in partnership with the intellect,
in all its beauty and power."
Rebecca Chopp
Education, in its most basic sense , prepares
students to understand the self and the world.
Traditionally, the college years offer students
the time and resources necessary to learn how
to understand one's self on the journey into responsible
adulthood. As we provide students
opportunities to explore the Big Questions in
their lives, we should be sure that religion is
a part of that exploration. As the Western tradition
teaches, we hope for our students a life
well lived and a life worth reflecting upon.
Teaching about religion should not be confused
with handing out eternal dictates or requiring
conversion. The language of theology,
the aesthetics of religious experience, the
power of community, and the morality of religious
performance can all be explored in
many ways through different departments and
courses. At Colgate, a residential liberal arts
institution, our students explore the making
of meaning through our core curriculum butalso through courses in areas such as ethics,
religion, the arts, history, literature, philosophy,
sociology, and anthropology.
A large and diverse campus ministries program
and our Center for Outreach, Volunteerism,
and Education help students shape
habits of meaning for themselves and their
communities. Chapel House, a non-sectarian
spiritual center and retreat, offers students
and others a place for peaceful contemplation.
Our approach in teaching about meaning is
not about giving answers, but about providing
a variety of approaches to how human beings
make meaning and offering a variety of opportunities
to create habits of meaning making.
Education teaches one how to understand
the world as well as the self. For the last fifty
years, higher education has been dominated
by a naive belief that the educated world is
leaving religion behind and that the secular
world will trump all. Wrong on both counts.
In the contemporary study of religion in the
world and the world of religion, we need to
understand that religion can be a powerful force
for good and for bad. Religion in its many forms
is taught across the curriculum and in special
campus-wide programs.
Serious exploration of religion as a force in
the world is part of our programs in peace and
conflict studies as well as departments such as
international relations and political science.
Several years ago, our Center for Ethics and
World Societies sponsored a campus-wide series
of programs on politics and religion. And our
religion department today offers courses in
Hinduism, Native American religions, Buddhism,
Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. An
active off-campus study program in which 68
percent of our students participate provides
opportunities to explore religion in the world
in a variety of local contexts.
Though Baptist in origin, Colgate is now a
non-sectarian community in which humanists,
Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and
agnostics live together--quite parallel to the
twenty-first-century world in which our students
will live and lead. No questions can be "off-bounds" in the critical thinking of the
liberal arts. All questions of self and world
most certainly belong in the liberal arts curriculum
of the twenty-first century.
Andrew Delbanco
"Why are we here gentlemen? " was the
rhetorical question with which Samuel Eliot
Morison liked to begin his American history
seminar at Harvard in the 1950s. I've been
told by a witness that on one occasion a mischievous
student asked him to clarify whether
he was asking about their place in the university
or in the cosmos. "Professor Morison," he
said, with a glance around the room, "do you
mean, why are we here"--and then, with a
papal gesture of upturned palms and a heavenward
roll of his eyes--"or, why are we here?"
As this student well knew, in the modern
academy this latter kind of Big Question
tends, as we would say today, to be "checked
at the door." It is a question unanswerable
by objective inquiry; it throws us back on
traditions or intuitions or articles of faith, all
of which have a place in the secular university
as objects of study but not as sources of
knowledge.
Yet students are still asking such questions,
and always will. What does that mean for
people trying to be responsible educators?
One approach is to leave the students to
their own devices--to dorm-room colloquies
with one another, or, perhaps, to organizations
sponsored by the campus ministry. That
is pretty much what most institutions have
chosen to do--a choice based on a sound
awareness, confirmed over centuries, of how
quick adults can be to indoctrinate young
people if given half a chance. The laissez-faire norm of the modern university is a great
achievement and should not be lightly discarded
or even slightly modified.
So what to do for our students while defending
their freedom to answer such questions
on their own? It's actually pretty simple,
I think. Put in front of them some sample of
great texts (we can argue forever over exactly
which ones--so we should put aside that
temptation and get on with it) that place the
Big Questions front and center, and let the
discussion begin. In small groups. Led by sympathetic
but rigorous teachers who know
something about the texts and their genealogies
and applications. An occasional lecture from
someone who knows a lot about the texts can
be helpful too.
A college may require such engagement
from every student and encourage participation
by a sufficient number of faculty to serve
all students every year. Or it may make such a
curriculum optional, thereby at least serving
those who are inclined to take advantage of it.
I prefer the former because students who
think they already know the answers, or that
the answers are unknowable and therefore not
worth pursuing, might change their minds.
The specialized professionalism of the faculty
and the cost of small-group education
make mounting such a curriculum very difficult
today. Still, it may be worth trying harder
than most institutions have done over the last
fifty years or so. For one thing, this kind of
teaching has benefits for faculty too, since it
can save them from creeping anxiety about the
value of writing books that other faculty will
have to read in order to write their own books.
Of course, research and writing have their
own rewards, but nothing like having a student
come to you and say, "I feel I'm starting
to figure out what to do with my life, and your
class made a difference."
Samuel Speers
The Big Questions I see students asking have
to do with the integrative work of the liberal
arts: how are students to link their learning
and their evolving sense of what matters to
them? As director of an office of religious and
spiritual life, I've come to see unexamined
secular assumptions as an unexpected site for
engaging such questions. Secular traditions
freed us from privileging any single worldview
(religious or otherwise) in pursuing a just and
open society, even as the secular privileging of
neutral reason is lurking in the background of
our present difficulty seeing wonder as integral
to the intellectual life. In this brief response,
I want to suggest that the secular ethos at a
number of our campuses provides a way of seeing
some of the obstacles to engaging students'
Big Questions.
While defining the secular in its multiple
and changing forms could itself qualify as a
Big Question, secularity in my context generally
refers to the understanding that religious
commitments are private matters of
personal choice and that most public campus
discussions (in the classroom and beyond it)
are best run without reference to particular
religious commitments or visions of ultimate
reality. Yet now leading scholars wonder if our
commitments to secularity really guarantee
more critical thought, more democratic institutions,
more flourishing community life; do
the liberating intentions of Western secularity
strip some students and faculty of fundamental
aspects of their identity? Is secularity
truly neutral?
These questions are important to our renewed
attention to engaging students' Big Questions--
and not only because they point at our
limited understanding of the transformations
of the religious in modernity. Even more, these
questions reveal the need to look critically at
whether our secular frameworks are ample
enough. Writing about U.S. civic life more
generally, political scientist (and atheist)
William Connolly (1999, 6) turns to visceral
language to describe our dilemma, arguing that
our "secular models of thinking, discourse, and
ethics are too constipated to sustain the diversity
they seek to admire." For Connolly and
others, our notions of the secular pay insufficient
attention to how important the affective
dimensions of our experience are to critical
thought and the wonder that nourishes it.
Yet it's the integration of these elements--the
affective and the analytical--that is so crucial
for the development of sustaining commitments
to the urgent questions our students are
asking. Too often, these aspects of students'
identity and formation are uncoupled from
our campus' intellectual life and made largely
private in student life.
Thanks to a grant from the Teagle Foundation's "Fresh Thinking" initiatives, I'm part of
a consortium of campuses that seeks to bring
these developing discussions about secularisms
and the public sphere to bear upon the
mission of the liberal arts college. We believe
that one way students' Big Questions can be
more effectively engaged is by addressing the
separations constructed by secularity's organizing
force. Students struggle to integrate
their own commitments with their learning in
part because of secularism's legacies--including
the professionalization and specialization
of academic disciplines, and the emergence of
student life programming and services as its
own non-curricular field. By bringing together
faculty and chaplains, we are trying to address
the separation faculty and student-life administrators
themselves feel between their personal
and professional lives (or aspects of
them), and between their campus specialty
and the rest of college life. Through a range of
initiatives, including qualitative research,
curricular development, seminars and discussions,
and a public conference, we hope to
open up wider conversation nationally about
whether and how the secular container for
the liberal arts compartmentalizes the experiences
our students are trying to integrate.
Alexander W. Astin is the Allan M. Cartter
Professor Emeritus of Higher Education and
the founding director of the Higher Education
Research Institute, and Helen S. Astin is professor
emeritus of higher education and senior
scholar of the Higher Education Researc h
Institute, both at the University of California,
Los Angeles.
Rebecca Chopp is president of Colgate University.
Andrew Delbanco is Julian Clarence Levi
Professor in the Humanities and Director of
American Studies at Columbia University.
Samual Speers is director of the Office of
Religious and Spiritual Life at Vassar College.
REFERENCE
Connolly, W. E. 1999. Why I am not a secularist. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota.
To respond to this article, e-mail liberaled@aacu.org, with the author’s name on the subject line.
|
