The Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA recently released the results of a large-scale national survey of college and university faculty that explores the role of spirituality and religion in the life and work of college professors. Funded by the John Templeton Foundation, the UCLA study is part of a multi-year project examining how college students think of spirituality, its role in their lives, and how postsecondary institutions and their faculties can better facilitate students’ spiritual development.

The new national survey of faculty attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors explores how college professors perceive the intersection between spirituality and higher education and how they view the role of spirituality and religion in their own lives. Completed by 40,670 faculty members at 421 colleges and universities, the survey addresses the following types of questions:

What role do faculty believe spirituality should play in the undergraduate experience? Do such beliefs vary by the faculty member’s race, gender, and academic discipline?
To what extent do faculty view themselves as potential facilitators of students’ spiritual/religious development? Do they feel responsible for helping students achieve a greater sense of meaning and purpose in their professional and personal lives?
To what extent do faculty engage their students in curricular activities that can promote inner development such as reflective learning, journaling, and community service?
How many faculty perceive themselves as spiritual beings? How many are actively seeking opportunities for spiritual growth?
Are faculty able to effect a sense of balance between their personal and professional lives? To what extent do they perceive a congruence or a divergence between their own values and institutional values?

The faculty survey comes on the heels of another Templeton-funded national survey of 112,000 new college freshmen conducted by HERI in fall 2004. Results of that survey showed that students are very interested in spiritual and religious matters and have high expectations for the role their institutions will play in their emotional and spiritual development.

However, despite students’ high level of interest in spirituality, pilot data collected from third-year undergraduates suggests that colleges and universities may be 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 said 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.

The new faculty survey shows that a substantial majority of college and university faculty (81%) consider themselves to be spiritual beings, and more than two thirds are actively seeking opportunities to grow spiritually and view “developing a meaningful philosophy of life” as a very important or essential goal in life. Almost two-thirds consider themselves “to be a religious person.”

Faculty are divided, however, on the role that spirituality should play in our colleges and universities, on the question of whether undergraduate education should put a priority on students’ spiritual development, and on what priority should be given to the spiritual dimension of faculty members’ lives. Thus, while a majority of faculty believe that their own spiritual lives do have a place in the academy—57% disagree with the notion that “the spiritual dimension of faculty members’ lives has no place in the academy” only 30% agree that “colleges should be concerned with facilitating students’ spiritual development.” At the same time, more than half believe that each of the following should be among the “essential” or “very important” goals of an undergraduate education: Enhancing students’ self-understanding (60%), developing moral character (59%), and helping students develop personal values (53%).

Faculty members’ academic fields play a significant role in their views on facilitating students’ spiritual development. The highest levels of agreement with the statement that “colleges should be concerned with facilitating students’ spiritual development” (40-41%) are found among professors in the health sciences and humanities, while the lowest levels (22-25%) are found among professors in the natural and social sciences. Institutional type also plays a role, with faculty in Catholic colleges (62%) and other religious college (68%) showing the highest levels of agreement, and faculty in public universities (18%) and public colleges (23%) showing the lowest levels.

Differences among academic fields are also seen when responses to the statement “the spiritual dimension of faculty members’ lives has no place in the academy” are examined. At least half of faculty in all academic disciplines disagree with this view, with the highest levels (60-67%) occurring in the health sciences, education, and business, and the lowest levels (49-51%) occurring in the social sciences, physical sciences, and biological sciences. Differences by type of institution are even larger, with the highest levels of disagreement in Catholic (71%) and other religious (79%) colleges, while the lowest level is found in the public universities (49%).

One of the greatest challenges in this kind of survey research is to develop valid measures of personal qualities that relate to the central concept under study - in this case, spirituality. The HERI research team has succeeded in developing a faculty spirituality “scale,” along with a number of additional scales that measure related qualities such as Positive Outlook in Work and Life. Highly “spiritual” faculty members, for example, are seeking out opportunities to grow spiritually, consider themselves to be spiritual persons, and want to integrate spirituality into their lives. Similarly, faculty who have a Positive Outlook in Work and Life say that they experience joy in their work, experience close alignment between their work values and personal values, and feel good about the direction their life is heading.

One of our most interesting findings is that highly spiritual faculty are much more likely than their least spiritual colleagues (59% vs. 36%) to display a Positive Outlook in Work and Life. Similar differences are observed on the other qualities. For example, highly spiritual faculty are eight times more likely than their least spiritual colleagues (43% versus 5%) to be highly focused on students’ personal development, and more than twice as likely to score high on three of the other scales: Student-Centered Pedagogy, Civic-Minded Practice, and Civic-Minded Values.

It is of particular interest that highly spiritual faculty support the use of “student centered” pedagogical approaches (cooperative learning, group projects, and reflective writing) and that they also place a premium on enhancing students’ Civic-Minded Values (community service, citizenship), given the growing body of research showing that reflective writing is one of the key ingredients in an effective service-learning course and that service-learning, in turn, promotes the development of civic values.

The fact that highly spiritual faculty report a Positive Outlook on Work and Life suggests that institutions might want to consider giving greater priority to their faculty’s personal and “spiritual” development. Such a conclusion is consistent with the finding that most faculty disagree with the statement that “The spiritual dimension of faculty members’ lives has no place in the academy.”

The next major phase in this project will be a Spring 2007 follow up of the students who started college as new freshmen in the Fall of 2004. By comparing their responses at these two points in time, we will be able to determine how each student’s spiritual qualities have changed during the first three years of college. Combining these data with data from the faculty survey will thus enable us to determine how students’ spiritual development is affected by the values, beliefs, and pedagogical practices of their professors.

Links of Interest
For more information on Spirituality in Higher Education, please go to:: www.spirituality.ucla.edu.

Alexander W. Astin is Allan M. Cartter Professor Emeritus of Higher Education and Founding Director of HERI at UCLA.

To receive a free monthly copy of Milestones by direct mail, please forward your request and address to milestoneseditor@templeton.org. To subscribe to any of the Foundation’s various free e-mail newsletters, including Milestones, go to our JTF Newsletter Subscriptions page.

Milestones is a publication of the John Templeton Foundation.