Yale University’s Sharon Kugler just hired a coordinator for Muslim life. Another of her program coordinators recently searched out a kosher-Chinese food restaurant in surrounding New Haven. One might expect tasks like those to fall under the job description of many a modern university administrator, but not necessarily for the holder of one of the oldest university chaplaincies in the country.
Welcome to the modern college chaplaincy. “We look different and the student population looks different,” Kugler says, reflecting on the changing criteria for choosing leaders of religious life at universities where the posts used to be formal, remote, male, and intensely Protestant. Kugler, a lay Catholic, came to her job as Yale’s chaplain last year after serving in the same capacity at Johns Hopkins University (Md.) since 1993. “People ask me, ‘Was it hard to be the first Catholic, the first layperson, the first woman?’” she says. “I call myself the ‘Nike chaplain.’ I just did it.”
Kugler and a new generation of university chaplains are answering the call for increased religious expression and spirituality on campus, a cultural turnabout highlighted in the results of a 2004 survey of 112,000 college freshmen nationwide. The study, entitled “The Spiritual Life of College Students” and carried out by the University of California, Los Angeles’s Higher Education Research Institute, found that 80 percent of those interviewed believed in God and had an interest in spirituality. A 2007 follow-up discovered that, as juniors, 55 percent of those students placed a premium on developing a meaningful philosophy of life and on attaining inner harmony, an almost 15 percent increase in both areas since freshman year. Sixty-seven percent added that they prayed daily.
Religion Returns
Those numbers come as no surprise to Douglas and Rhonda Jacobsen, professors and researchers at Messiah College (Pa.), who earlier this year authored The American University in the Postsecular Age (Oxford University Press). “Religion is not disappearing in the way social theorists thought it would disappear. People are bringing their religion to campus,” says Douglas Jacobsen. “For a couple of decades, in the 1970s and ’80s, religion suffered from benign neglect. Schools are saying, ‘We need to start thinking about this again.’”
Jennifer Lindholm, the project manager of the UCLA studies, agrees. “There’s been a relatively strong disconnect between matters of the mind and the heart in higher education,” she says.
'People have realized in the past few years that religion provides meaning and sustenance, and that it has become an engine for a lot of really good things happening on campus.' -Mark Shiner, Colgate University
Mark Shiner, chaplain at Colgate University (N.Y.), says he’s seeing a different religious landscape than what existed for his predecessors for decades. “The faculty and staff tell me that religious life was really in a period of eclipse,” he says. “It was marginalized, and respectable people on the faculty didn’t talk about such things.”
Shiner adds that the UCLA findings surprised many of them. “A lot of the professors were just completely baffled. You could see the ground shaking under their feet,” he recalls. “But people have realized in the past few years that religion provides meaning and sustenance, and that it has become an engine for a lot of really good things happening on campus.”
A New Diversity
The movement that is returning to campus, though, is a far cry from that old-time religion. For starters, a diverse set of beliefs is blossoming on today’s campuses, from Jewish and Christian to Muslim and Buddhist. The New York-based Social Science Research Council has done its own studies of religion on campus and has paid particular attention to the emergence of evangelical Christian groups. “The single most striking thing to me was the prominence of these groups at elite universities,” says SSRC president Craig Calhoun.
Calling All Faculty Those who have been researching the rise of religion and spirituality on campus have focused on the potential role that professors could play. "There are a lot of faculty and student life people who think it's the right place to ask the 'big questions,'" says Douglas Jacobsen, professor at Messiah College (Pa.). "The research we're doing now is trying to discover ways in which spirituality and religion can enhance rather than undermine intellectual learning." "There's a growing recognition that chaplains and deans of religious life shouldn't be the sole people for dealing with students' spiritual side," adds Jennifer Lindholm of UCLA, who is a project manager for a nationwide student survey. "These are issues that cut across the curriculum and co-curriculum." Along those lines, the Social Science Research Council's Craig Calhoun recommends more active effort from administrators and faculty leaders. "Colleges can work to nurture more conversations with professors and get more information to faculty so that they know the students they're talking to," he suggests. "Get them to overcome their inhibitions." At Colgate University (N.Y.), Chaplain Mark Shiner provides a table at lunch for faculty willing to talk about religion on campus and counts 35 faculty collaborations with his office, from the spiritual dimensions of literature to an examination of a book on the Abu Ghraib photos of prisoner abuse in Iraq.
New York University, meanwhile, appointed Khalid Latif as its first resident Muslim chaplain last year, following schools such as Duke and many of those in the Ivy League in creating similar positions. Latif, who also served at Princeton, counts more than 2,000 members in NYU’s Muslim community, mostly American-born and largely African-American, along with those from Pakistan, India, and the Persian Gulf States. And he notes a growing tendency for these students to identify with their common religion above their national origins. Part of Latif’s mission has involved dealing with the perception of Muslims in the post-9/11 era. “There’s a lot of public relations involved because Islam is unique in how it might be covered by the media in this day and age,” says Latif, who regularly issues press releases on campus events and works with newspapers and TV stations.
