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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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The yearning for community in US society and in organizations is born out of this need for connection and interdependence (Peck, 1987). Through the new science people in Western culture now see the physical world comprised of "wholeness incorporating diversity" (Mossburg, 1994, p. 4). That is what people seek in community, a place where they connect across difference and where they experience their relationship with all humanity.

As we in the US seek to transform our organizations to incorporate the principles of holism, relationship, and integration, we are asking people to transform themselves to behave in new ways. Fundamental transformation such as this occurs at the spiritual level (Palmer, 1998; Quinn, 1996; Zohar, 1997). Therefore if the hope is to create quantum organizations (i.e., organizations inclusive of the values of the new science), organization leaders need to attend to infrastructures that bring people's public and private lives together, that attend to the spiritual dimension of organization members. Wholeness and Relationship in

Higher Education Organizations

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The literature contains compelling evidence that a focus on the spiritual is relevant in the workplace. What are the particular implications for higher education? Are the principles of wholeness, connection, and meaning lived out in colleges and universities? Higher education professionals have made some strides in that direction, but there is much to overcome. Faculty and staff in colleges and universities tend to demarcate their public and private lives. This is the arena of the intellect. Emotion and spirit are aspects of the nonrational world and thus are held suspect. Typically, higher education professionals do not speak of their inner lives in their university work. Teaching is often marked with the separation of the knower and the known (Palmer, 1998). Faculty distribution into distinct fields and narrow areas of research provide few avenues of connection. Bureaucracy creates the world of the administrator, the world of the faculty member, the world of the support staff, and the world of the student with few bridges to reinforce their interdependence. Given these formidable obstacles, a legacy of the Newtonian paradigm, how do we in higher education incorporate wholeness and connection in our lives in the university? The following two examples demonstrate higher education's gradual move in this direction.

Building community. Since the publication of the Carnegie foundation report, Campus Life: In Search of Community (Boyer, 1990), the community building movement in higher education has caught fire. The report proposed six principles that taken together "define the kind of community every college and university should strive to be" (p. 7). These principles stated that a campus community should be purposeful, open, just, disciplined, caring, and celebratory. These principles struck a chord with many faculty and staff, and the push for community began in earnest on a number of campuses. At the root of the community building movement, which encompasses such concepts as learning communities and community standards in the residence halls, is a value for collaboration and connecting with others (Boyer; Brower & Dettinger, 1998; Cross, 1998; Piper, 1997; St. Onge & Crawford, 1999; Shapiro & Levine, 1999).


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