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In 2003, the UCLA Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) began surveying undergraduates and faculty in a multi-institutional, longitudinal study designed to identify patterns of spirituality and religiousness among college students. Initial results revealed a high level of student interest in spiritual values, but they also showed that most colleges and universities are “doing little either to help students explore such issues or to support their search in the sphere of values and beliefs.” Most college juniors, for example, report that their professors never provide opportunities for discussing the meaning or purpose of life, much less encourage discussion of spiritual or religious matters.
Faculty responses confirm the student data. Despite the fact that many of them describe themselves as religious (64 percent) or spiritual (81 percent), few faculty (30 percent) agree that “colleges should be concerned with facilitating students’ spiritual development.” Institutional context clearly plays a role: 18 percent of faculty in public universities and 23 percent in public colleges agree with the prior statement, compared to 62 percent of faculty in Catholic colleges and 68 percent of faculty in “other religious” colleges (http://www.spirituality.ucla.edu/). Given the legal and political context of public institutions, it’s not surprising that public-college faculty feel more constrained in introducing topics related to spiritual and religious values than private-college faculty. At a time when some public-college faculty are being accused of attempting to sway students politically, introducing issues of spirituality, faith, and values may be perceived as too controversial.
Nonetheless, both the HERI findings and new research trends in fields such as health care, psychology, social work, and business—where the study of spirituality is gaining greater prominence—have prompted a great deal of soul-searching about how best to deal with spirituality, values, and life purpose in higher education. For example, Chickering, Dalton, and Stamm’s Encouraging Authenticity and Spirituality in Higher Education (2006) examines a variety of ways in which spirituality is being addressed in higher education, situating the movement within a cultural and historical framework and arguing that current programs promoting spiritual educational experiences, even in public institutions, should be augmented and extended.
One way that some private colleges and universities have been encouraging their students to think “outside themselves” is through the concept of vocation. Since 2000, the Lilly
Endowment has awarded grants totaling just over $221 million to establish Programs for the Theological Exploration of Vocation (PTEV) at 88 four-year, church-related, accredited liberal-arts colleges and universities in the United States. That almost 400 institutions submitted applications for grants shows the level of interest in this question. The Lilly programs provide a variety of strategies on which any institution—either private or public—can draw in designing programs to address the issue of vocation.
Each institution that received an award from Lilly initially was given approximately $2 million to establish a five-year program. Most subsequently were awarded an additional $500,000 three-year grant to fund half the cost of sustaining the initiative, with matching funds coming from their own resources. Colleges began the transition to their sustaining grants in 2006, and teams from each of the participating colleges gathered in Indianapolis this February for a final conference celebrating the initiative and sharing the learning it has engendered. Because the mission of the religion division of the Lilly Endowment is “to encourage theological reflection and religious practices that recover the wisdom of the Christian tradition for our contemporary situation,” colleges involved in the program are all associated with the Christian faith. But within the Christian framework, they represent a wide variety of traditions and types of institutions. They are Roman Catholic (Boston College), Protestant (Pepperdine University),
Orthodox (Hellenic College), and non-denominational (Gordon College); they are large (Baylor University), medium (Calvin College), and small (Hendrix College); urban (Seton Hall University) and rural (Luther College); rich (Duke University) and poor (Katrina-ravaged Dillard University of Louisiana).
Similarly, although the colleges receiving Lilly grants are all church-related in some sense, they embody that relationship in different ways: Some require all their faculty to share a theological or denominational affiliation; others require a shared Christian commitment but are more ecumenical; others give preference to hiring Christians and ask non-Christian faculty to support the mission of the institution; others maintain their church connections through means other than faculty hiring, such as co-curricular programs, centers, and institutes; and still others are historically rooted in a religious tradition but emphasize religious pluralism. Such differences have resulted in a wide variety of campus programs, reflecting each institution’s unique history, context, and tradition.
At Seattle Pacific University, we are entering the sixth year of our Lilly initiative, which is called SERVE—Spiritual and Educational Resources for Vocational Exploration. Seattle Pacific hires faculty from a variety of Christian theological traditions, and our students are equally diverse, which is consonant both with our commitment to be “genuinely ecumenical” and with our Methodist heritage. Through the 16 separate programs that make up SERVE, we attempt to fulfill our mission to prepare people of competence and character who, with wisdom and grace, faithfully “engage the culture and change the world.”
The Meaning of Vocation
In today’s educational parlance, “vocation” is often understood to refer to a trade, profession, or occupation. “Vocational training” prepares one to be an auto mechanic or hair stylist; it doesn’t involve exploring the meaning of life. The Lilly initiative directs our attention back to the original sense of the word. The Latin root, vocatio, means a calling; in medieval Europe, certain practices, such as entering the priesthood or joining a religious order, were deemed “vocations” or holy callings from God.
During the Reformation, Martin Luther and John Calvin expanded the notion of vocation. Luther held that all Christians share a common “vocation” to love and serve others, but that they carry it out through a variety of specific “vocations” that could range from being a missionary to milking cows to teaching grammar to recalcitrant college students. (The only occupations that the ever-irascible Luther ruled out were usury, prostitution, and being a monk.) Although some Roman Catholics still understand vocation as referring solely to a calling to the priesthood or a religious order, the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council endorsed a wider sense of vocation, including lay people’s participation in the creative work of God in a variety of ways.
A theological approach to vocation involves a sense of the transcendent, of purpose, and of community. To receive a call means someone or something outside the self is calling; what an individual is to do in response to that call provides the person with purpose; and this call and response occurs within, and is guided by, the larger community. In the fullest sense of the word, a vocation includes an occupation (whether in church or parish ministry or as a gardener or physician), but it also involves civic responsibilities, family life, church participation, leisure practices, and consumer habits. These are all pivotal issues with which students wrestle during their college years and about which they make life-defining decisions. Discerning one’s vocation involves identifying one’s gifts and abilities, listening to the reflective wisdom of one’s community, and recognizing the needs of the world. The Lilly project’s publications are fond of quoting the Presbyterian pastor and novelist Frederick Buechner to the effect that “the place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” Someone living a vocation-driven life strives to discover ways to serve the common good rather than to be driven by status and salary.
In addition to using this broader meaning of vocation to assist students in examining the relationship between their faith and vocational choice, all 88 colleges in the Lilly project also address the concern of the Endowment’s religion division for the future of American Christianity by providing opportunities for students to explore a specific call to Christian ministry in a church or para-church organization, such as Habitat for Humanity. Nationally, in both the Roman Catholic Church and mainline Protestant denominations, fewer young people are going into the ministry at a time when many priests and pastors are approaching retirement. This is a central concern of the Lilly Endowment, which “believes that vital religious communities are essential for a flourishing and humane society. ... In order to keep these important religious communities strong and vibrant, a new generation of talented, energetic, creative, and committed pastors and religiously informed lay leaders is needed” (http://www.ptev.org).
Whether encouraging students to think more broadly about the purpose and shape of their lives or by exposing them to opportunities to serve others through parish, church, denominational, mission, or social-agency positions, the Lilly initiative strives to make spirituality more concrete by situating it within the Christian theological tradition. Yet given the variety within that broader theological umbrella—including Roman Catholic, Mennonite, Wesleyan, Reformed (Calvinistic and Lutheran), Pentecostal, Baptist, and Evangelical traditions—the Lilly initiative has produced many different strategies to help students in discerning their vocations.
A Plethora of Programs
Most colleges house anywhere from 10 to 20 initiatives under their project’s umbrella, with programs for students, faculty, staff, alumni, parents, and even high-school students. The call to be faithful in the use of time and talents has been understood as having implications for all of college life, facilitating a holistic approach to student learning and prompting innovative collaborations among various campus units. Thus project activities appear in many campus venues—classrooms and residence halls, academic advising and career counseling, volunteer work and community service, chapel and convocation programs.
The history of American higher education reveals that one of the most effective, but also difficult, places to effect substantial change is in the classroom. Infusing a concept or practice into the curriculum can have widespread and longstanding results—hence the often-nasty faculty battles over curricular reform. At several institutions with Lilly grants, students are not able to graduate without exploring vocation in one or more required general-education courses.
First-year or freshman seminar programs have proven to be especially suitable for vocational discussions. For example, with the assistance of its grant, Milligan College in Tennessee (Christian Churches/Church of Christ) added a new required first-year course, “Introduction to College and Calling,” which encourages students to discover who they are and what their role in the world might be. Including a personality assessment and “gift inventory” (a list of personal strengths), a week of service projects, and small-group discussions about vocation led by student mentors, this course gives students tools to identify the talents that will guide them through college and into life beyond school.
A different kind of first-year program is found at evangelical Gordon College in Massachusetts. “Christianity, Character and Culture” introduces the concepts of calling and vocation through books such as Chaim Potok’s The Chosen and Stephen Carter’s God’s Name in Vain or movies such as Dead Man Walking and The Insider. Other institutions have added discussions of vocation and calling to their senior courses. At Seattle Pacific, all students are required to take a discipline-specific capstone course, in which, among other activities, they write a reflective paper that examines their college experience and describes the kind of life they hope to live upon graduation. Reprising the old moral-philosophy courses of the 19th century, Wesleyan Asbury College in Kentucky offers a senior honors seminar called “Leading Lives of Significance,” led by the college president.
The concept of vocation also provides a natural way for curricular and co-curricular partnerships to develop. At Geneva College—a Reformed institution in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania—“The Crossroads Program” is a joint project of academic and student affairs. It serves as the launching pad from which students pursue off-campus study, participate in summer mission trips, volunteer for local community service, and sign up for spring-break service/mission excursions.
At Seattle Pacific, one of our 16 initiatives brought together the Career Development Center and the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) to increase the number of CAS students who participate in internships and to provide resources to faculty supervising internships. At the halfway point of the program, the number of students completing internships had increased by 65 percent, 17 professors had begun using a vocational-internship workbook, and the number of students taking career/vocation classes had increased by 83 percent. All these efforts were coordinated through a new online job and internship-posting system made possible by SERVE.
Residential learning communities, vocational peer mentors in residence halls, and off-campus retreats provide other ways of encouraging vocational reflection. Creighton University, a Jesuit institution in Nebraska, has created Cortina Community, an experimental residential community of 55 sophomores with a focus on the development of a sense of vocation through events, service study, prayer, and dialogue. At Boston College (Jesuit), the popular “Halftime” program, endorsed by none other than pro-football great Doug Flutie, offers students the opportunity to spend three days, free of charge, at a retreat center in the mountains of New Hampshire or Vermont engaging in guided reflection. A Halftime participant says, “Sophomore year is hard, college is hard, life is hard. And no one ever says to you, ‘Sit down and just think about what you want to do, what you have done. Just think about these things for a while.’ No one gives you that chance. This [weekend] gave me that chance.”
Another kind of retreat is sponsored by Iowa’s Luther College, which brings recent alumni who are involved in church ministries back to campus to reflect on their college experience and subsequent vocational journeys. Alumni groups met in June of 2004, 2005, and 2006 to discuss what features of the Luther experience helped them to reflect about careers, work, the church and church ministry, and to consider what changes could be made to help current students reflect in a serious way on vocation.
The World Beyond the Campus
Several Lilly initiatives support numerous service-learning courses, local and global internships, and apprentice programs. For example, one aspect of the DISCOVER project at the Jesuit Santa Clara University in California is the Peter Hans Kolvenbach, S.J., Solidarity Program, which offers students, faculty, staff, and alumni immersion experiences in “the gritty reality of our globalizing world.” The Jesuits are intent on forming people who are both well educated and stand in solidarity with the poor. Through experiences in El Salvador, Peru, Ecuador, Mexico, and parts of the U.S., participants are encouraged “to see the world with new eyes, to recognize the unjust suffering of marginalized communities and individuals, and to allow those experiences to inform their vocational discernment.”
At Eastern Mennonite University in Virginia, a key purpose of community learning is to help students connect with the surrounding community and cultivate a life-long commitment to civic engagement, which is central to the Mennonite tradition. At EMU nearly 360 students participated in courses that required community-learning experiences in 61 agencies during one year of the grant program. A student who conversed with an non-native English speaker as part of her community learning indicated that she hopes “to continue to dedicate some of my time to others not just by conversing in English but perhaps to give English lessons. This service-learning experience reminded me so much of my personal story because I did not speak any English at one point in my life.”
In their programs to cultivate future church pastors, priests, and leaders, some schools work closely with a sponsoring denomination or adjacent seminary. At Evangel University in Springfield, Missouri, student mission activities are planned and carried out in consultation with leaders of the Assemblies of God denomination. Valparaiso University in Indiana is an independent Lutheran university, so its Church Vocations Program serves in fairly equal numbers Lutherans from the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. At Sewanee: The University of the South, an Episcopal institution in Tennessee, the chaplain’s office coordinates a weekly discernment group for undergraduates. At many institutions, pre-seminary student associations, programs to fund student visits to seminaries, and a huge variety of ministry-internship programs are popular, including internships with local churches, parishes, and campus chapel programs.
Faculty Development
Recognizing the centrality of the faculty’s role, most programs funded by the project include a major commitment to faculty development. Assisting students to think about vocational issues is radically different from what most faculty members have been equipped to do in the graduate programs that trained them. It involves teaching in ways that bring questions of purpose and direction to bear in the classroom and advising students in a way that includes vocational mentorship as well as dispensing of information. Thus, many institutions, such as my own, have used their Lilly vocation grants to initiate or strengthen faculty-development programs.
At Seattle Pacific, faculty explore such issues in a variety of programs, including a new-faculty seminar (with course-release time), mentoring programs, theological workshops, and research grants. Baptist Baylor University in Waco, Texas, holds discipline-specific summer faculty retreats, such as “Vocation, Liberal Learning, and the Professions,” and “Vocation and the Profession of Social Work.” Gustavus Adolphus, a Lutheran school in Minnesota, sponsors sessions called “Teachers Talking,” during which faculty discuss the intersections among vocation, higher education, and teaching and learning. At the University of Indianapolis, affiliated with the United Methodist Church, faculty and staff engage in book discussions and optional seminars to explore the university’s mission.
Many colleges in the program offer faculty grants to revise disciplinary courses or develop new courses that incorporate vocational issues. Some of these include “Women, Work, and Calling in the Organized Church” at the Presbyterian Alma College in Michigan; “Christian Faith and the Engineering Profession” at the Catholic University of St. Thomas in Minnesota; “Let Your Life Speak: Social Justice Vocation Symposium” at Santa Clara University; and “Exploratory Studies and Vocational Discernment” at Valparaiso University. The Lilly project’s Web site (http://www.ptev.org/) includes the syllabi from these, as well as many other, vocation-driven courses.
Assessment of Program Impact
While the participating institutions have conducted assessments of specific program components, and stirring stories of individual students’ experiences with the program can be—found on the project’s Web site (including the quotations cited in this article), at most institutions larger studies of the project’s impact on an institution’s graduates are just beginning now, in the fifth or sixth year of the programs. But in their annual reports to the Lilly Endowment, most schools claim that their students increasingly engage in thoughtful reflection about their vocational choices in light of their faith commitments.
At Indiana Wesleyan University, for example, the project’s Life Calling Initiative sponsored the development of the “Life Calling Conceptual Model,” which is informed by a Wesleyan theological underpinning. Beginning in fall 2005, the model was used to structure the curriculum for a required first-year course. In a preliminary assessment, “nearly all participants indicate that they have a better understanding of what a life calling is as a result of this program. The majority also indicate a clearer perception of their own life calling after participating in the assessment process.”
Seattle Pacific’s SERVE program was designed to challenge students to go beyond merely thinking in terms of their professional careers to thinking about vocation in Christian terms as encompassing all of life. The capstone reflective essay completed by all graduating seniors has been used as a means of assessing the overall impact of the Lilly initiative on the university’s students. A sample of essays completed between spring 2003 and spring 2006 found that 35 percent of graduates showed a solid understanding of vocation as involving their whole life and an ability to reflect theologically about their vocation, with another 29 percent showing a moderate understanding of vocation either holistically or theologically.
Several campuses also report an increased number of students planning to attend seminary to become church pastors and leaders. Data from the Association of Theological Schools reveals that the average age of students attending seminary is beginning to drop after years of increasing. One program to encourage seminary attendance is the Jubilee Fellows Program at Calvin College (Christian Reformed, Michigan), which provides academic training, pastoral mentoring, and summer church-ministry internships for 12 juniors exploring a call to church ministry. Of the Jubilee Fellows who graduated in 2005, five are in seminary and six are involved in outreach and other church work. Within the next two years, eight to nine of these 12 Fellows expect to be enrolled in a seminary program.
At the evangelical Azusa Pacific in California, researchers studied the vocational and personal development of senior ministry majors taking a required internship sequence. Pre- and post-intervention surveys showed growth in students’ self-awareness of how their own personalities will affect their ability to engage in ministry. Based on responses to the statement, “I am aware of how characteristics of my personality support my ability to engage in Christian ministry,” scores averaged 4.3 for the pre-test and 4.8 for the post-test. Change was even more evident concerning the statement, “I am aware of how characteristics of my personality hinder my ability to engage in Christian ministry,” where the average score was 3.3 on the pre-test and 4.3 on the post-test.
Wrote one student: “My understanding has changed a lot. I now understand that ministry is not bound to church or a parachurch organization. I have learned a lot about what God’s heart looks like for the world. ... I have also learned that ministry can still be done while I am in process or haven’t solidified everything.”
A major national evaluation of the impact on students and their mentors of initiatives involving theological exploration of vocation on the 88 participating campuses is currently under way. It is being conducted by Timothy Clydesdale, professor of sociology at the College of New Jersey and the author of The First Year Out: Understanding American Teens After High School (2007). During a four-year study, he will collect information about all the project’s activities on each participating campus; conduct in-depth interviews and focus groups at about a dozen project campuses; administer a Web-based survey of students, alumni, and faculty from a national sample; and study the individual program reports and other project-related documents. His effort, called “The Life and Vocation of American Youth Project: A National Evaluation of PTEV’s Impact on Students and their Mentors,” is intended to result in a public report and two books.
One of the greatest difficulties in addressing spirituality, values, and belief in higher education lies in nebulous definitions of “spirituality” and the accompanying blurry distinctions between spirituality and religion. Even if we agree that spirituality includes a sense of transcendence and a search for the purpose of life, being “spiritual” can include anything and everything, including practices from Christianity, Judaism, and Islam; Buddhist meditation; and donning New Age healing crystals. What the Lilly initiative suggests is that church-affiliated institutions that want to provide effective opportunities for their students to explore spirituality and develop a sense of the meaning of their lives might design programs that are grounded in the theological traditions specific to their missions and histories.
But public institutions, of course, cannot do this. One experimental pilot project, directed by the Indiana Network for Higher Education Ministries, is currently under way in Indiana to test whether similar activities can be designed and implemented for students attending public universities.
At Ball State, the project is centered in the current network of student religious organizations belonging to the Council of Religious Advisors. At Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, the project is working through various offices and schools to provide support for course development and student internships, among other things.
To avoid privileging any one religious or spiritual tradition, public institutions might offer a program or selection of programs drawing on a number of traditions. Or they could take a completely non-theological approach by designing programs that help students explore three key vocational questions: “What gives me delight?” and “What are my talents?” and “How can I use my abilities to meet the needs of the world?” And as they create such programs, even secular institutions may find in the Lilly project models that will help them address issues that are so central to their students’ lives.
Susan VanZanten Gallagher has published widely on American literature, South African literature, and Christian higher education. She is a professor of English and director of the Center for Scholarship and Faculty Development at Seattle Pacific University, where she directs a program funded by the Lilly Endowment— Spiritual and Educational Resources for Vocational Exploration (SERVE).