Recent data from UCLA "suggests not only that undergraduates are far more spiritual than was widely believed, but also that they're seeking help with their seeking from their colleges - mostly in vain," according to an article called "Adding Spirituality" by Elizabeth Redden from one of my favorite websites, insidehighered.com.
Who knew?
In a country that I see more and more turning away from God and from spirituality, it came as quite a shock to me to come across this article, which suggests that college students are becoming more spiritual and looking to us, as student affairs professionals, to help them cultivate that part of themselves. If you would have asked me the last age group I thought would be turning more towards spirituality, I probably would have said college students. I guess you learn something new every day.
I am a woman of faith, and at my undergraduate institution (which I hate to keep bringing up, but it is a very interesting point of reference to life at Ole Miss) spirituality was never discussed on campus. In fact, it was taboo. KU is so incredibly "separation between church and state (aka college)" driven that you never, ever would hear student affairs professionals discussing their faith with a student, and there is just no way you would ever open a meeting in prayer. Not that I agreed with the way spirituality was dealt with at KU - but that's just the way that it was. There were not many religious or spiritual organizations at KU, and most people just didn't discuss their faith in everyday conversation. Now, this is by no means saying KU was an athiest campus or anything. Quite the opposite, I'm sure, but it just never really came up. KU was such a liberal campus - which is ironic, because it is in such a conservative state.
Since I have been at Ole Miss, I have been impressed and amazed really at how strong my faith has grown. At one meeting I attend weekly, we open in prayer. I talk about my faith almost every day, either with students or with fellow staff members. I don't know if it is just Ole Miss or if it is the South, but God is very present on this campus, anywhere from daily conversation to student organizations. If I would have read the insidehighered.com article while still at KU, I would have never believed it. But now, I can see the gist of that article being true.
Responding to the data UCLA found, the lead researchers for the Spirituality in Higher Education Project "invited representatives from 10 non-sectarian institutions to Los Angeles in November to develop individual plans to better address matters of spirituality on campus." Check out the article for what schools like Carnegie Mellon, Florida State, and Miami are doing to help students with spirituality issues - http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/05/08/spirituality
We tend to often forget that when we work with students, we are working with the student as a whole, not as the sum of his or her parts. To many students - and, according to this article, apparently even more than we thought - spirituality is important, and anything that is important to students is something we as student affairs professionals need to know much about. Therefore, being able to handle issues of spirituality is crucial. As the article says, we need not be priests or pastors or rabbis - but we do need to know how to handle issues of spirituality with our students.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Student Protest On College Campuses
When I was an undergraduate, I can remember absolutely dreading the days that the Students for Life were going to be protesting on campus. Though personally I am pro-life, I absolutely, completely, and totally dreaded the days that the Students for Life - the pro-life group on campus - would hit campus and inevitably spark a firestorm of controversy.
I worked in the Student Involvement and Leadership Center all four of my years on campus at the University of Kansas, and that was the office at KU that housed the University Events Committee. The University Events Committee had to approve any event that any of KU's 500 plus clubs or organizations wanted to put on, and no event could take place on campus without UEC's approval. This often caused a lot of headaches for our office, because it was UEC's duty to regulate any event - including protests - that happened on campus. As a right of the first amendment and the right of free speech, we had to let students protest - but it didn't mean we enjoyed it.
The Students for Life's protest was absolutely the worst one. Once a semester, the group would descend like hawks on campus, armed with picket signs with offensive messages and large, billboard-like posters with dead or dying fetuses on them, showing exactly what happened to the unborn child in the process of an abortion. These posters were so large that they were almost as tall of some of our campus buildings. This means, basically, that you could not avoid seeing bloody and disfigured fetuses as you walked to class on the days when they were protesting. It was, in a word, disgusting. The last image I wanted to see as I trudged up the hill to class at eight o'clock in the morning was that. I could hardly stand it.
Members of Students for Life were mulling about on days that they were protesting, holding picket signs and passing out pamphlets on the topic of pro-life issues. As disturbing as those images were to see while I was just minding my own business on campus - and as disturbing as some of the words spoken by the protesters were to innocent bystanders walking on campus - I had to keep continually reminding myself that these students had the right to do this.
Student protest is a tricky issue. It can sometimes be a huge headache and a huge hassle, but we as student affairs professionals have to remember that these students have a Constitutional right to do this. As much as I dreaded the days when Students for Life were on campus, I had to remember - as did all members of UEC - that if I wanted to protest an issue, I had the right to just as much as they did.
One of the best parts about our country is that we are allowed to have whatever opinion we want about whatever we want. We have to respect that and allow that to be true on our college campuses. We can dictate time, place, and manner but we cannot dictate what student protesters are protesting about. This may be frustrating at times, but the roots of this issue go as deep as our fundamental American beliefs.
I know that I will have to deal with this issue as a student affairs professional, and thankfully I am ready for it because of my prior experience with UEC. I have to continually and constantly keep in mind that everyone deserves a fair shake, and I will give all students that as a student affairs professional.
I worked in the Student Involvement and Leadership Center all four of my years on campus at the University of Kansas, and that was the office at KU that housed the University Events Committee. The University Events Committee had to approve any event that any of KU's 500 plus clubs or organizations wanted to put on, and no event could take place on campus without UEC's approval. This often caused a lot of headaches for our office, because it was UEC's duty to regulate any event - including protests - that happened on campus. As a right of the first amendment and the right of free speech, we had to let students protest - but it didn't mean we enjoyed it.
The Students for Life's protest was absolutely the worst one. Once a semester, the group would descend like hawks on campus, armed with picket signs with offensive messages and large, billboard-like posters with dead or dying fetuses on them, showing exactly what happened to the unborn child in the process of an abortion. These posters were so large that they were almost as tall of some of our campus buildings. This means, basically, that you could not avoid seeing bloody and disfigured fetuses as you walked to class on the days when they were protesting. It was, in a word, disgusting. The last image I wanted to see as I trudged up the hill to class at eight o'clock in the morning was that. I could hardly stand it.
Members of Students for Life were mulling about on days that they were protesting, holding picket signs and passing out pamphlets on the topic of pro-life issues. As disturbing as those images were to see while I was just minding my own business on campus - and as disturbing as some of the words spoken by the protesters were to innocent bystanders walking on campus - I had to keep continually reminding myself that these students had the right to do this.
Student protest is a tricky issue. It can sometimes be a huge headache and a huge hassle, but we as student affairs professionals have to remember that these students have a Constitutional right to do this. As much as I dreaded the days when Students for Life were on campus, I had to remember - as did all members of UEC - that if I wanted to protest an issue, I had the right to just as much as they did.
One of the best parts about our country is that we are allowed to have whatever opinion we want about whatever we want. We have to respect that and allow that to be true on our college campuses. We can dictate time, place, and manner but we cannot dictate what student protesters are protesting about. This may be frustrating at times, but the roots of this issue go as deep as our fundamental American beliefs.
I know that I will have to deal with this issue as a student affairs professional, and thankfully I am ready for it because of my prior experience with UEC. I have to continually and constantly keep in mind that everyone deserves a fair shake, and I will give all students that as a student affairs professional.
Restorative Justice - A Little Bit Late
I went on vacation last week and had little to no access to E-mail while I was gone. By the time I finally checked my E-mail and found our blog topic there, Thursday's class had long gone by and the weekend was nearly over. Even though I didn't get the opportunity to talk about this week's blog topic in class, I would still like to say a couple of words about the topic, restorative justice.
Restorative justice has been the buzzword around the Dean of Students' Judicial Affairs Office for the last few weeks. Last month, the three staff members of the Judicial Affairs Office attended a conference where restorative justice was an agenda item. Since returning back to Ole Miss, they have been talking about embarking on a philosophical shift in their office to implement aspects of restorative justice into the office's everyday workings. I am particularly close to one Judicial Affairs staff member, and he has spoken to me numerous times about how much he is in favor of this philosophical shift to restorative justice and how good it could potentially be for the university.
I myself am in love with the concept of restorative justice. Slapping sanctions on students who do wrong on college campuses are just allowing them to do the bare minimum of what they need to do to clear their record, without teaching them that what they did was fundamentally wrong and without showing them who their actions hurt. If students can see who they affected by their actions - can really see who they hurt - their actions will become more real and they will be less likely to repeat them. In my opinion, an apology goes a long way, and restoring justice to those who justice was taken from is the perfect way to make up for the crime committed.
Let's say a student steals a composite from a fraternity house. (This is a situation that happens quite frequently, by the way.) Instead of sanctioning the student to ten hours of community service - which they will begrudgingly do and learn nothing from - it would be so much better for the student and for the members of the fraternity that student stole from if the student in trouble could publicly apologize to the chapter, express his remorse, return the composite, and then do something to better the fraternity. This could be anything as simple as taking care of the fraternity's lawn for a month to putting on a leadership program for new members of the chapter. Wouldn't that be so much better for all parties involved - the perpetrator and the victims - if everyone could learn something from the mistake?
So, in short, I am a proponent of restorative justice and I am excited to see Ole Miss hopefully implement it in our Judicial Affairs Office.
Restorative justice has been the buzzword around the Dean of Students' Judicial Affairs Office for the last few weeks. Last month, the three staff members of the Judicial Affairs Office attended a conference where restorative justice was an agenda item. Since returning back to Ole Miss, they have been talking about embarking on a philosophical shift in their office to implement aspects of restorative justice into the office's everyday workings. I am particularly close to one Judicial Affairs staff member, and he has spoken to me numerous times about how much he is in favor of this philosophical shift to restorative justice and how good it could potentially be for the university.
I myself am in love with the concept of restorative justice. Slapping sanctions on students who do wrong on college campuses are just allowing them to do the bare minimum of what they need to do to clear their record, without teaching them that what they did was fundamentally wrong and without showing them who their actions hurt. If students can see who they affected by their actions - can really see who they hurt - their actions will become more real and they will be less likely to repeat them. In my opinion, an apology goes a long way, and restoring justice to those who justice was taken from is the perfect way to make up for the crime committed.
Let's say a student steals a composite from a fraternity house. (This is a situation that happens quite frequently, by the way.) Instead of sanctioning the student to ten hours of community service - which they will begrudgingly do and learn nothing from - it would be so much better for the student and for the members of the fraternity that student stole from if the student in trouble could publicly apologize to the chapter, express his remorse, return the composite, and then do something to better the fraternity. This could be anything as simple as taking care of the fraternity's lawn for a month to putting on a leadership program for new members of the chapter. Wouldn't that be so much better for all parties involved - the perpetrator and the victims - if everyone could learn something from the mistake?
So, in short, I am a proponent of restorative justice and I am excited to see Ole Miss hopefully implement it in our Judicial Affairs Office.
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