LEADERS AMONG US

Rick Spalding, an ordained Pastor in the Presbyterian Church, USA, hasn’t spent a lot of time reading from a script behind a pulpit. Following graduate degrees from the Yale Divinity School, Union Theological Seminary and the Hartford Seminary, he served congregations in Boston, New York City and Albany, New York before he moved into campus ministry at a number of institutions of higher learning including Harvard. Most recently, he served for 18 years as the Chaplain of Williams College, a liberal arts college in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts. He focused on the pastoral care of students and building bridges of understanding between students representing many of the world’s great religious traditions. His work has given him a vantage point for observing the growing tension and discord on campus in recent years, as students grapple with some of the most important issues facing our society at large. On a recent summer afternoon, he took the time to look back on his experiences, the role of faith on campus and why “an education doesn’t automatically come with meaning.”

Yes. I think it’s not universal but widespread – and I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing. Not all aspects of it are destructive.  We seem to have turned a corner from being more or less content with society muddling along, to feeling deeply dissatisfied with what we are seeing in the country – and the world, for that matter. I am afraid that in the absence of solutions that we can act upon as a whole culture, we turn on each other — and the university becomes the place where the first fruits of anguish spill over.  The anguish and consternation should concern us, whatever side you are on, even if the expression of them is, on balance, a good thing.

For the last 20 to 30 years, lots of us in education were wishing that young people would find their voices and stand up and say: These are the things that need to change.  For a long time, students have either not known what to say or not wanted to say anything.

They needed to move on, they thought, and make a living. Students are not in that place anymore: it’s more important to them now to stand up and say we have to fix this. They are not going to shrug off things like the climate crisis, racial profiling, enforced poverty. And we need people who won’t accept these things as they are.

I think you start, or at least take full account, of more and more unarmed people being gunned down. Innocent people have been killed before our time, but there was a new sense that this was just unacceptable. Columbine was an outrage, but then there was Sandy Hook. Defenseless children. Shootings that made black people fear for their lives. Relentless bloodletting in the Middle East with no sign of peace or even understanding. People decided to raise their voices and name these things as outrages. They were on edge, they still are, and they should be. But it’s troubling when all of this pits people against their friends and peers and no one can come up with a process to defuse the enmity.

Yes. I am hesitant to make broad generalizations – they never work – but I found in talking one-on-one with students that it was actually part of broad mistrust for institutions in general: institutions that have let us down so dramatically. One of the most obvious is the long-term scandal of sexual abuse, not only in the Catholic Church but in other religions as well. Thirty to 40 years ago we weren’t even talking about these issues, and we are finally finding ways to hold religious professionals accountable. But a lot of this was so widespread, so craven and so hidden that I am not sure many of the students I talk to will ever forgive or understand. And maybe they shouldn’t.

That’s where the hemorrhaging of trust has been very sharp and deep. Young people don’t understand why institutions simply can’t keep up with them, or with the times. Take same-gender sexuality, for example.

The young people I talk to do not find same-gender sex to be problematic or even worthy of note, but many religious institutions are still wrestling with their positions on this issue and agonizing about what they should say publicly. That creates a dissonance. Students think, look, if you can’t keep up with where I’m going, I’m not sure I have time for you.

Some students take time for traditions and services and feel they are right for them. And, of course, many more don’t have an interest. At the same time, I do think something we can call faith or spirituality has been experiencing a renewal. Don’t get me wrong: we’re not back in the Eisenhower era on all this. But something is happening. There are many students, at Williams and on other campuses — at least more than most people would think – who are clear that some important part of their identity, strength, and hope is in traditions or practices that are connected to particular religions. Some of them are already leaning on truth that they have held close through their family traditions. Others arrive with nothing in their religious backpack, but they dive into important questions of meaning and purpose. They want to know what their life is for. And the big questions only get bigger when you engage them. Religion does not make your life simpler, and an education doesn’t automatically come with meaning. You have to make meaning out of the pieces of your life. And more and more students, in my experience, want to do that work.

When I first started out in my career, there was a lot of what I would call clenched-teeth tolerance, along the lines of: I guess you’re okay, but don’t expect me to try and understand you. But as different types of young people, from different cultures and backgrounds, started to get access to higher education in this country, it fairly suddenly became likely that your roommate or suite-mate was going to be very different from you economically, racially, religiously – pick your category. There are at least 30 or more religious or spiritual traditions in the student body at a college like Williams every year. And that has led to wider understanding and acceptance and friendships across what used to be some pretty well-defined social and cultural lines. Tolerance moved to acceptance, and even actively embracing differences. Remember when you would hear someone say, “I don’t know any gay people?” Nobody can say that now, because the evolution of our society has made that possible. Fewer and fewer, regardless of where they came from, can say, “I don’t know any Muslims. I don’t know any atheists. I don’t know any evangelicals.”

Yes, of course. There are still strands of conviction in a close-knit community that can be hard to accommodate, and that’s when everybody’s good intentions are tested. Some students show up on campus who just aren’t ready for an environment as diverse as you are likely to find now.

They might be reeling from the shock of seeing values lived that are completely unfamiliar to them. Or you have students who have deep disagreements over a very fraught issue like the Middle East – Israel and Palestine, or Sunni and Shi’a. What I have tried to provide is some spiritual guidance on the practice of studying lives other than your own. And I really believe that can help them practice being the human beings they want to be. Toleration may be the best you can hope for on morally charged issues at the beginning – but you hope to inculcate, first understanding, then empathy, then, ultimately, solidarity.

A lot of colleges and secondary schools have tried to be a better reflection of society than in the past — but it’s not as if society is in great shape. So, if you are going to bring this into the mix on campus, we are going to have to work even harder to find at least some common ground. Students always bring their own life-experience with them; they don’t leave those things behind. When I was going to college, you just assumed that the culture of college was something anyone could figure out pretty easily. Now a lot of students don’t have that in their family history – they have no experience of what it is like to go to college, and they don’t come from a system that has prepared them. And, if they don’t get the right support, they can come to feel alienated fairly quickly.

Look at what happens to lower income families when their kids actually get a chance to get an education. Many colleges offer generous financial aid, at a level of “lifestyle” that some families could never even dream of having. Those students come from very far away, socially or economically or geographically, but the home they leave behind is a family just barely making it with basic necessities. The family may be very proud to have their son or daughter admitted. But that student may have contributed part-time income to the family budget. What happens to that family when it loses that income? I’ve known students to take whatever they can from the income from their part-time jobs to send money home, even while trying to stay 150% focused on studying.

Everyone in education knows there is more work to do to understand the experiences students are having in institutions that are really quite dramatically different than they were just 10 or 20 years ago. I think it is important that we make many kinds of support available to students just as they come on campus. I have often said that one of the most important experiences a student can have over four years is to find one adult with whom they can be, honestly and courageously, fully themselves. But we have more work to do to ensure that happens, and to have the right people in place so they can make the connections that need to be made. College can be a lonely place, and students can be very reluctant to share early struggles. Confidence can be fragile. But if we’re not there for them right then, we may lose them, and all they have to offer to the learning community at college, and to the world. We want to do whatever we can, whatever is necessary, to help them to be the human beings that they want to be, the human beings that the world needs them to be.

Notwithstanding their many imperfections, all of humanity’s noble religious traditions are trying to teach us how to be our best selves and how to live together as human beings in a community. They may not have finished the job, but it isn’t for lack of trying. I don’t feel in any way those traditions are so unworthy that people are better off without them. People often accuse religions of hypocrisy, but it’s not as if religious communities have cornered the market on that: hypocrisy is one of the things we humans, unfortunately, are quite good at. Religious affiliations are not a cure for society’s ills, but divesting them isn’t the answer.