Uncovering the Heart of Higher Education

Session Leaders: Alexander W. Astin and Helen S. Astin

This morning we’d like to talk about a six-year national project that we’ve been conducting at UCLA under a major grant from the John Templeton Foundation to. The study is entitled “Spirituality in Higher Education: A National Study of Students’ Search for Meaning and Purpose.” The two of us are the co-principal investigators on this project and Jennifer Lindholm is the project director.

I must admit that when we mention the tile of the study to academic colleagues, we get highly varied reactions: everything from raised eyebrows and blank stares to an enthusiastic “Wow, it’s about time!” So before getting to the specifics of the study, it would probably be a good idea first to clarify what we mean by “spirituality.”

To begin with, spirituality points to our interiors, by which we mean our subjective life, as contrasted to the objective domain of observable behavior and material objects that you can point to and measure directly. In other words, the spiritual domain has to do with human consciousness—what we experience privately in our subjective awareness. Second, spirituality involves our qualitative or affective experiences at least as much as it does our reasoning or logic. More specifically, spirituality has to do with the values that we hold most dear, our sense of who we are and where we come from, our beliefs about why we are here—the meaning and purpose that we see in our work and our life—and our sense of connectedness to each other and to the world around us. Spirituality can also have to do with aspects of our experience that are not easy to define or talk about, such things as intuition, inspiration, the mysterious, and the mystical. Spirituality, it seems to us, is thus at the heart of “The Heart of Education.” It also seems to us that, within this very broad umbrella, virtually everyone qualifies as a spiritual being, and it’s our hope that everyone—regardless of their belief systems—can find some personal value and educational relevance in the concept.

Even a cursory look at our educational system makes it clear that the relative amount of attention that higher education devotes to the exterior and interior aspects of our 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 our “inner” development—the sphere of values and beliefs, emotional maturity, moral development, spirituality, and self-understanding.
What is most ironic about all of this is that while many of the great literary and philosophical traditions that constitute the core of a liberal education are grounded in the maxim, “know thyself,” the development of self-awareness receives very little attention in our schools and colleges, and almost no attention in public discourse in general or in the media in particular.

Today’s Students
In exploring the connection between spirituality and higher education, a good way to start is to take a look at the interior lives of our students. If we look at how our students’ values have been changing during recent decades, the good news is they have become strong supporters of both gender and racial equality and of students’ rights in general, and most recently they have become much stronger supporters of gay rights. The bad news is that they have become much less engaged both academically and politically, much more focused on making a lot of money, and much less likely to concern themselves with “developing a meaningful philosophy of life.” These contrasting values—the material and the existential—have literally traded places since the early 1970s, a time when developing a meaningful philosophy of life was a very important concern for students. And this finding was in large measure what prompted us to do the study.

Another interesting trend is in students’ religious preferences. During the past 15 years there’s been a steady increase in the number of students expressing “other Christian” choices—which are primarily nondenominational/fundamentalist groups—and a concomitant decline in the number choosing mainline Protestant denominations. At the same time there’s been a substantial increase in the percent of students who say they have no religious preference. What this looks like to us is that there has been an increasing polarization in students’ religious orientation—with more fundamentalists together with more nonbelievers.

Putting more emphasis on students’ inner life has enormous implications for how we approach student learning and development. In most institutions today the primary focus is on what students do: how well they perform on classroom exercises and examinations, whether they follow the rules and regulations, how many credits they receive, and so on. And 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 the development of “affective” skills such as empathy, cooperation, leadership, interpersonal understanding, and self-understanding. The reality of human consciousness, of course, is not simply that we can think and reason; on the contrary, the essence of being a sentient human is that we can feel, that we can experience joy and contentment, frustration and excitement, curiosity and love.

For many years now the two of us have been interested in educational transformation and reform, and nowhere is the importance of this issue of “the inner versus the outer” more obvious than in the case of our attempts to change institutions. When we talk about educational reform in the academy, for example, we usually focus heavily on exterior “structures” such as programs, policies, curricula, requirements, resources and facilities. As a consequence, we ordinarily give little attention to the “interior” of the institution, by which we mean the collective or shared beliefs and values of the faculty that constitute the “culture” of the institution. Our research on institutional change and transformation suggests strongly that any effort to change structures has little chance of success if it ignores our collective interiors or culture. In other words, changing our institutions and programs necessarily requires us to change the academic culture as well.

A similar imbalance can be seen in the way we approach faculty development, where we typically think in terms of external matters such as scholarly activities, teaching techniques, and service to the institution and to the community. The internal aspects of the faculty member’s development—values, beliefs, hopes, fears and frustrations—get relatively little attention.

Design of the Study

The project began four years ago with a pilot survey of 3700 college juniors at 46 diverse institutions that we used to develop our various measures of students’ spirituality and religiousness. These measures are now being used in the large-scale longitudinal study which began with a survey of 112,000 entering freshmen at 236 institutions in the Fall of 2004. A survey of faculty in these same institutions was completed in 2005, and we will repeat many of the entering freshman measures when we follow up these same students this coming April, which would be the end of their junior year. The longitudinal data from this follow up, together with the faculty data, will provide a rich resource to study how students’ spiritual development is affected by their undergraduate experience. Finally, we plan to do a repeat of the entering freshman survey in the fall of 2008.

The project is addressing a number of questions. How many students are actively searching and concerned about issues of meaning and purpose? What are colleges currently doing that facilitates or inhibits students’ spiritual quest? What is the relationship between traditional religious practices and spiritual development? How do spiritual/religious practices affect students’ academic and personal development?

MEASURING SPIRITUALITY & RELIGIOUSNESS

The first major challenge for our project team was to devise measures of students’ spirituality and religiousness. To this end, as mentioned earlier, we initially developed a four-page questionnaire—the College Students’ Beliefs and Values Survey (CSBV)—that was administered to 3,700 college juniors in the spring of 2003.

In approaching the task of developing scales to measure spirituality and religiousness, our first guiding principal was that spirituality is a multi-dimensional concept, and that no single measure can adequately capture all that we mean when we use the term. A second guiding principal had to do with religiousness: while many students no doubt express their spirituality in terms of some form of organized religion, the fact that we view religiousness and spirituality as separate qualities required that we develop separate measures of each.

From the beginning of our project we had the good fortune to be working with a Technical Advisory Panel composed of expert scholars and practitioners in the area of spirituality. The Panel, many of whom are in attendance here at the conference, includes John Astin, Art Chickering, Peter Hill, Ellen Idler, Cynthia Johnson, Mike McCullough, Scotty McLennan, Ken Pargament, and Christian Smith.

Development of “Scales” to Measure Spiritual/Religious Development

In order to develop scales to measure various dimensions of spirituality and religiousness, the students’ responses to the 200 items in the pilot survey were subjected to a series of factor analyses and item analyses. These scales were replicated and further refined using data from our national sample of 112,000 entering freshmen in the fall of 2004.

It has taken us nearly three years to develop these measures, and we are so far very pleased and excited by what we have found. In our presentation this morning we shall focus on 12 of these measures, three having directly to do with spirituality, five having directly to do with religiousness, and four having to do with related qualities. Here are the three measures of spirituality:
Spirituality reflects the degree to which student believes in the sacredness of life, seeks out opportunities to grow spiritually; and believes that we are all spiritual beings.

Spiritual Quest assesses the student’s interest in searching for meaning/purpose in life, finding answers to the mysteries of life, and developing a meaningful philosophy of life.

Equanimity indicates the extent to which the student feels at peace/centered, is able to find meaning in times of hardship, and feels a strong connection to all of humanity. Together with our friend and colleague Jim Keen. we have recently written a paper in which we argue that equanimity may well be the prototypic defining quality of a spiritual person.

Our five measures of religiousness include:

1. Religious Commitment reflects to degree to which the student seeks to follow religious teachings in everyday life, finds religion to be personally helpful, and gains personal strength by trusting in a higher power.
2. Religious Engagement involves behaviors such as attending religious services, praying, and reading sacred texts.
3. Religious/social Conservatism reflects the student’s degree of opposition to such things as casual sex and abortion, the use of prayer to receive forgiveness, and the belief that people who don’t believe in God will be punished.
4. Religious Skepticism reflects beliefs such as “the universe arose by chance” and “in the future, science will be able to explain everything” and disbelief in the notion of life after death.
5. Religious Struggle reflects the extent to which the student feels unsettled about religious matters, feels distant from God, or has questioned his or religious beliefs.

Finally, there are four measures of related qualities:

1. Charitable Involvement assesses behaviors such as participating in community service, donating money to charity, and helping friends with personal problems.
2. Compassionate Self-concept reflects the student’s self-ratings on qualities such as compassion, kindness, generosity, and forgiveness.
3. Ethic of Caring assesses the student’s degree of commitment to values such as helping others in difficulty, reducing pain and suffering in the world, and making the world a better place.
4. Ecumenical Worldview indicates the extent to which the student is interested in different religious traditions, seeks to understand other countries and cultures, and believes that love is at the root of all the great religions.

Selected Findings

Interest in Spirituality and Religion

Let’s turn now to examine some selected findings from the freshman survey. We find that today’s entering college students report high levels of spiritual interest and involvement. For example, four in five students tell us that they “have an interest in spirituality” and that they “believe in the sacredness of life,” and two-thirds say that “my spirituality is a source of joy.” Many students are also actively engaged in a spiritual quest, with three in four reporting that they consider it “essential” or “very important” to “obtain wisdom,” and with similar numbers saying that they are “searching for meaning/purpose in life,” and having “discussions about the meaning of life” with friends. Nearly half say that it is essential or very important for them to “seek opportunities to grow spiritually.

The entering freshmen also show a high degree of involvement in religion. About four in five report that they attended religious services in the past year and that they discussed religion/spirituality with friends and family. Two in three say that they pray and that their religious beliefs “provide me with strength, support, and guidance.”

Nearly four students in five say they believe in God, 15% say they are “not sure,” while 7 percent say they don’t believe in God. Belief in God is nearly universal among Muslims, Seventh-Day Adventists, and Baptists, and, not surprisingly, lowest among students with no religious preference.

To further explore students’ notions about God, our project team analyzed students’ responses to several dozen questions from the 2004 survey regarding the concept of “God.” . Students appear to hold three distinctly different conceptions of God: Personal: Feel a “sense of connection with God/Higher Power,” feel “loved by God,” “gain spiritual strength by trusting in a Higher Power; All Powerful: View God in terms such as “Creator,” “Judge,” “Supreme Being,” or “Protector; and Mystical: Describe God in terms such as “Universal Spirit,” “Divine Mystery,” “Nature,” “Enlightenment,” and “Part of me”.

Students who are most likely to embrace the concept of a Personal God are Baptists, 7th Day Adventists, Mormons, Muslims, and Other Christians. Those most likely to see God as All Powerful include Mormons, Baptists and “Other Christians”. The groups most likely to see God in Mystical terms are Hindus, Roman Catholics, Baptists, 7th Day Adventists, and Other Christians.

Rejection of all three conceptions of God is, as expected, highest among students with no religious preference.
A very welcoming finding, given today’s religious strife globally, is that students show a high level of religious tolerance and acceptance. For example, most students believe that “non-religious people can lead lives that are just as moral as those of religious believers” and that “most people can grow spiritually without being religious”. Also, the majority of the students disagree with the statement that “people who don’t believe in God will be punished.”

Given what appears to be such a high level of religious conviction among students, a finding of special interest is that many students also express doubts and reservations. Fewer than half of all students say they are “secure” in their religious views. About one in four reports that they are “seeking,” another fourth say they are either “doubting” or “conflicted,” and 15% say they are “not interested.”

At the same time, well over half of the students say they do not feel obliged to follow their parents’ religious practices. (pause)

And, in the same vein, nearly two in three students report that they have “felt distant from God,” over half tell us that they have questioned their religious beliefs, and almost half say they have “felt angry with God”.

To explore these last findings in more depth, we have recently completed a study of students’ spiritual struggles, where we try to understand what characterizes students with spiritual struggles and what the consequences of such struggles might be with respect to their well being and over all growth and development.

We find that students’ spiritual struggles are negatively related to their psychological well being, physical health, self-esteem, and spiritual and religious growth. However, we also find that spiritual struggle is positively associated with growth in acceptance of individuals belonging to different faith traditions than their own. Perhaps it is their own spiritual struggle that brings understanding and empathy toward the “other,” the “different”.

Psychological and Physical Well Being

Other areas that we have been recently exploring in some greater depth include how students’ religiousness and spirituality relate to their physical and psychological well being, as well as to their views on political and social issues.

Similar to what other investigators have found, our data show that religious involvement is positively associated with both emotional and physical health. For example, students who frequently participate in religious services, compared to non-participants, are less likely to feel overwhelmed during college, and only half as likely to report feeling depressed frequently. They also rate themselves higher on emotional health.

Students’ scores on spirituality were also found to be positively related to self-esteem and to feelings of equanimity.
With respect to health practices, highly religious students are much less likely than nonreligious students are to consume alcohol, and somewhat less likely to smoke or to stay up all night..

Political Views

As to political ideology and attitudes regarding social issues, we find, as expected, that highly religious college students are much more likely than their less religious classmates to identify themselves as politically conservative. Among conservatives and those on the far right politically, 9 in 10 say they believe in God, compared to 8 IN 10 among students who say their politics are “middle-of-the-road” and 64% among those who describe themselves as either liberal or far left. While these differences are consistent with expectation, the data also show that liberals are not, as claimed by some pundits, primarily secular non-believers, since nearly 2 in 3 say they believe in God.

Consistent with nation-wide trends in the general population, there are a number of social issues that divide students who fall high and low on spirituality and religiousness.

Being highly engaged religiously is strongly associated with opposition to keeping abortion legal, engaging in casual sex, allowing same-sex couples to have legal marital status, and legalizing marijuana. Similar but somewhat smaller differences are seen when we compare students at the high and low ends of spirituality.

However, when we examine the students’ views on other social issues the findings are somewhat surprising.

For example, when it comes to views about capital punishment, slightly more of the highly religious and highly spiritual students support the abolition of the death penalty. The same holds true for affirmative action and gun control, where highly spiritual and highly religious students are slightly more supportive than are nonreligious students. In other words, despite their strongly conservative views on issues such as abortion, casual sex, and homosexuality, strongly spiritual and religious students do not take conservative positions on a number of other social issues.

Expectations about College

What about students’ expectations about college? About two-thirds of the freshmen consider it “essential” or “very important” that their college enhance their self-understanding, prepare them for responsible citizenship, develop their personal values, and provide for their emotional development. Moreover, nearly half say that it is “essential” or “very important” that college encourages their personal expression of spirituality. Clearly, students have high expectations that college will focus and help them with their personal growth and development.

However, data from our pilot study of college juniors suggest that colleges and universities are doing little either to help students explore such issues or to support their search in the sphere of values and beliefs. For example, more than half of the college juniors told us that their professors never provided opportunities to discuss the meaning and purpose of life, and nearly two-thirds said that professors never encouraged discussion of spiritual or religious matters.

Faculty Findings

What Have We Learned So Far From Faculty? One of the most significant findings from OUR national faculty survey conducted in 2005 is that they appear to put a high value on their own spirituality. For example, a substantial majority of faculty consider themselves to be “spiritual beings.” At the same time, two-thirds consider themselves “to be a religious person.” Similarly, two-thirds are actively seeking opportunities to grow spiritually, and a similar proportion view “developing a meaningful philosophy of life” as a very important or essential goal in their life.

Faculty are divided, however, on the role that spirituality should play in our colleges and universities and on whether undergraduate education should put a priority either on students’ spiritual development or on the spiritual dimension of faculty members’ lives. When faculty are asked what they consider to be essential or very important educational goals for undergraduates, clear majorities embrace goals that are highly consistent with our view of “spirituality”:encourage participation in community service, enhancing students’ self-understanding, developing moral character, and helping students develop personal values. But only three faculty in ten agree that “colleges should be concerned with facilitating students’ spiritual development.” We believe that this apparent discrepancy reflects a certain level of faculty discomfort with the word “spiritual.”

Faculty “scales”

As with the student data, we also developed a faculty Spirituality “scale” comprising items such as seeking out opportunities to grow spiritually, considering myself to be a spiritual person, and wanting to integrate spirituality into my life. In addition we developed a number of other scales that measure related qualities. One such scale is having a Positive Outlook in Work and Life (items in this scale include experiencing joy in my work, experiencing close alignment between my work values and personal values, and feeling good about the direction of my life).

We find that highly spiritual faculty are much more likely than their less spiritual colleagues to display a Positive Outlook in Work and Life. We believe that this finding points to the potential value of giving greater priority to the faculty’s personal and “spiritual” life.

The potential importance of spirituality in the lives of college faculty is further underscored by findings from several other scales measuring faculty characteristics. Highly spiritual faculty, for example, are eight times more likely than their least spiritual colleagues to place great importance on Students’ Personal Development, to use Student-Centered Pedagogy, and to be Civic-Minded. In other words, spiritual faculty tend to be more student centered and more civically interested and engaged. These relationships hold up regardless of the type of institution or the faculty member’s field of specialization. Our colleague Jennifer Lindholm will present more details on the faculty data tomorrow morning.

National Institute on Spirituality in Higher Education

In addition to the research we’ve been describing, a parallel activity of our Templeton Project is to explore ways in which institutions can begin to focus more of their programmatic efforts on students’ spiritual development. To this end, this past November we hosted a National Institute on Spirituality in Higher Education at UCLA. Participants included four-person teams of faculty and administrators from ten selective, nonsectarian institutions together with expert consultants and HERI project staff.
The immediate goal of the Institute was to assist each college or university team in devising a plan of action which they would attempt to implement when they returned to their home campuses. The research team and Institute consultants are also preparing to do periodic follow-ups with the 10 campuses to learn about their progress and to continue to provide assistance in reviewing and implementing their action plans.

Although it has been only a relatively short time since the teams returned to their campuses, a follow up just completed by our project team reveals that remarkable progress has already been made by some of the teams.

One public research university told us that they already have underway three components of their action plan: They are forming a campus-wide committee on faith traditions and spirituality, conducting an audit of existing programs that are relevant to concerns about spirituality, and preparing models to be used by faculty, staff, and peer leaders in leading discussions about spiritual development on campus.

Another public research university has been targeting its efforts on different classes within the student population: they are adding questions about spirituality to their senior survey, redesigning the capstone experience in ways that will attend more to students’ personal development, and developing plans to think more creatively about the sophomore year experience. In addition, the academic unit that is concerned with undergraduate education is collaborating with student affairs in redesigning the freshman year experience to include discussions of issues such as life skills and reflection activities.

A third institution, a private research university, is working toward developing stronger links between student affairs and academic affairs. One immediate consequence of these efforts has been the formation of teams of faculty, graduate students, undergraduates, and a student affairs advisor that will hold discussions in the residence halls about students’ “big questions.” They are also planning a workshop where members of the campus community will review the student and faculty survey data from our project. They have asked one of our project staff to come to campus to make a presentation of the data, after which faculty and students will engage in an extended discussion of the implications for institutional policy and practice.

Other ideas that emerged at the Institute include the importance of building on efforts that are already underway. For example, several of the campuses that participated spoke of expanding on the work begun with grants such as the Ford “difficult dialogues” project or the Lilly project on vocations to include spirituality perspectives. Some team members also spoke of their plans to revisit and revise their mission statements as a means of creating greater campus awareness of the importance of issues relating to students’ spiritual development.

Questions to be Explored in the Future

In a few more months we’ll be able to begin our analysis of the longitudinal student data at some 150 institutions that are participating in the follow up this Spring. Basically what these data will tell us is how students’ spiritual, religious, and related qualities change during the first three years of college. These data will thus enable us to identify institutional and faculty characteristics that are associated with particular kinds of changes in students’ spiritual development. Among the many questions that we will explore are the following:

• What overall changes in students’ spirituality, religiousness, and related qualities do we observe during the first three years of college? Do they become more or less spiritual or religious? Does college attendance strengthen their ecumenical worldview, equanimity, charitable involvement, or ethic or caring?
• Are particular types of changes more or less likely to occur in particular types of college, e.g., Roman Catholic, Evangelical, public, or elite private?
• How are students’ spiritual qualities affected by the kinds of curricular and co-curricular programs to which they are exposed?
• How is spiritual and religious development affected by various devotional practices such as prayer, meditation, worship, and reflection?
• How do various faculty values and educational practices influence students’ spiritual development? In particular, how are students affected by faculty qualities such as Spirituality and Positive Outlook on Work and Life?

These are only a small sampling of the questions that we will be exploring once we have our longitudinal follow-up data in hand.

Conclusion

In closing:
College students today are a diverse group socio-economically, ethnically, and politically, and our project data so far make it clear that they are also highly diverse when it comes to spirituality and religiousness. While most students have high ambitions and aspirations for educational and occupational success, they are also actively dealing with existential questions. They are searching for deeper meaning in their lives, looking for ways to cultivate their inner selves, seeking to be compassionate and charitable, and determining what they think and feel about the many issues confronting our society and the global community.

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, we hope to encourage institutions to give the “heart” of education a more central place in the education of our young people.

Thank you.