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Spirituality in the Academy

Students place a high priority on their spiritual development while in college. But their professors, despite high personal levels of spirituality, aren’t sure what their role is.

The nation’s professoriate is divided in its belief about the importance of contributing to the “spiritual” development of students, according to a survey by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at the University of California Los Angeles. The results are of interest to researchers because in another study, nearly half of the student respondents said it is “essential” or “very important” that their colleges encourage their personal expression of spirituality.

Spirituality and the Professoriate: A National Study of Faculty Beliefs, Attitudes, and Behaviors, which sought to illuminate how college professors view the intersections between spirituality and higher education and the role of spirituality and religion in their own lives, revealed that a substantial majority of faculty, nearly 80 percent, consider themselves spiritual beings, but only 30 percent agreed that “colleges should be concerned with facilitating students’ spiritual development.”

This is consistent with other findings in which more than half of college juniors report that their professors didn’t encourage discussion of spiritual or religious matters or provide opportunities for discussing the meaning or purpose of life. HERI researchers are concerned that colleges are neglecting an area of learning important to students. The survey defined spiritual development as making sense and meaning out of one’s life, not as religious development.

The highest levels of agreement with the idea of facilitating students’ spiritual development are found in the health sciences (41 percent) and humanities (40 percent), while the lowest levels are in the biological, physical, and social sciences. Faculty in religious colleges are the most interested in their students' spiritual development (over 60 percent), while faculty in public colleges (23 percent) and public universities (18 percent) are the least interested. Women are more likely than men to consider themselves as spiritual persons (87 percent to 78 percent). African-American faculty are most likely to characterize themselves as spiritual “to a great extent” while Asian-American faculty are the least likely (37 percent).

The researchers hope to collect follow-up data from the 2004 cohort of freshmen in 2007 when they are juniors, to use with data from faculty at overlapping institutions to examine how faculty beliefs and behaviors influence students’ spiritual development.

The report is available at www.spirituality.ucla.edu/
reports/spirit_professoriate.pdf.