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Invoking the spiritual in campus life and leadership

Journal of College Student Development,  Nov/Dec 2001  by Rogers, Judy L,  Dantley, Michael E
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Dialogue is composed of four interacting processes: listening, respecting, suspending, and voicing (Isaacs, 1999). When people engage in active listening, they not only hear, but also recognize and then quiet their own inner chatter. They develop an inner silence that allows them to be truly present with another. Their own backgrounds, opinions, ideas, and assumptions are held in abeyance and they avoid drawing conclusions while fully hearing the other. In respecting others, one recognizes the other's legitimacy. People accept that others' points of view may be different from theirs and thus may teach them something new. People consider others as equals and as having important perspectives to offer. According to Isaacs, suspending requires the following:

[We must] suspend our opinion and the certainty that lies behind it. Suspension means that we neither suppress what we think nor advocate it with unilateral conviction. Rather, we display our thinking in a way that lets us and others see and understand it. (p. 134)

Suspending is about questions and exploration, "Who am I?," "Who are you?," "Why do you believe the way you do?" Voicing is expressing one's authentic self, one's inner life in spite of fears about the consequences of doing so. Voicing is about sharing one's whole self, one's ideas as well as doubts, one's hopes as well as fears, one's beliefs as well as uncertainties (Zohar, 1997).

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Participating in this kind of dialogue has the power and the potential to foment deep changes in all of us in the higher education community. It engages our multiple selves in the ways we come to understand and know our colleagues and their thinking on the complex issues of university life. Together we enact a larger pool of meaning that calls forth the full depth of people's experiences and thought and weaves it into a larger reality than one's individual views. It is a place of creativity and connection that cannot be achieved individually. It manifests the hidden wholeness that comprises our universe.

Soul leaders in student affairs are particularly vigilant in assessing who is invited to engage in dialogue and who is left out. A commitment to a caring, democratic community assumes that those who are to exercise responsibility must be able to critique the present order and recognize whose voices are privileged by it. Soul leaders then must believe that change is possible and work with those who are silenced so that these marginalized community members recognize that transformation of the current order can occur through their participation in the dialogue process (Quantz, Rogers, & Dantley, 1991). Enacting these dialogues of hope becomes possible when the process is inclusive.

The need for both kinds of conversations in higher education institutions, that is, (a) discussion or debate and (b) dialogue is clear; however, dialogue up to this point has not been widely understood, taught, or practiced. Soul leaders in student affairs recognize the power of this form of communication, especially its role in shaping community, and create the conditions for it to occur. They learn how to practice it and encourage it as a significant process in the fabric of campus life. Soul leaders in student affairs are facilitators "who hold the context" (Senge, 1990, p. 243) of dialogue and who teach others to do this too. Soul leaders in student affairs model interactions in which they suspend their own assumptions in order to be open to others' views. They demonstrate that they consider all institution members as colleagues with important insights to contribute to university purposes. Soul leaders in student affairs provide avenues where institution members can learn the dialogue process and promote its use in the decisionmaking and policy development work of the institution. If dialogue becomes an important and often-used means of conversation on our campuses, all of us in higher education will have the opportunity to engage our spiritual and emotional, as well as intellectual and physical selves in weaving the tapestry that is our university community.


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