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Cultivating the spirit: how college can enhance student’s inner lives

The stereotypical image of university students might cast them as perhaps more politically than spiritually active but Astin, Astin and Lindholm’s book Cultivating the spirit, the fruit of a comprehensive seven-year study on the effects of college life on student spirituality, would belie such a view. Of course, interest in the spiritual life of students is far from new. Scholarly attention to the topic stretches back as far as Gilkey’s (1924) experiential reflections on Religion among American students in which the “spiritual awakening” of undergraduates is explained in large part as springing from “the desire of youth to face for itself at first hand the ultimate facts of life and work out its own attitude to them” (p. 4). A conclusion which is not at all at odds with the findings contained in this book. Wickenden’s (1932) paper “The effect of the college experience upon student’s concept of God” is also worth mentioning, not only for the similarity between titles, but particularly for its assessment that as often as the college experience has been deemed to have a negative effective on student faith, so has it also just as often “been painted as a place of spiritual enlightenment and development, where significant consecrations occur, and where great spiritual movements are born” (p. 242). This conclusion is congruent with much of the current study’s findings. It also chimes with Rorty’s (1989) assessment that higher education is properly conceived (and practiced) as a dual but distinct process of “socialisation and individuation”. The authors of Cultivating the spirit lay no claim to being the first to draw attention to the subject of student spirituality. What they do propose as novel is that theirs is the first comprehensive work of empirical research on this “little-understood but potentially important topic” (p. 2). Potentially important because, according to the authors, the balance between the amount of pedagogical space and attention given to the development of the “inner and outer aspects” of student lives has become out of kilter. As a result, the rounded liberal education traditionally offered by universities has been displaced by a more fragmented business model version taught by faculty whose expertise is too narrow to offer the “holistic, integrative approach to teaching” (p. 140) they suggest is sorely needed today. The under-development of student’s selfawareness during college years may be worrying when one considers the central contribution made by context and the “moral atmosphere” to personal growth (Kegan 1982; Power et al. 1989) and also how important reflexive Journal of Management, Spirituality & Religion Vol. 8, No. 4, December 2011, 365–369