Higher Education Must Strive to Connect Hearts and Minds

By Diana Chapman Walsh | March 11, 2007

Last month, a group of over 600 educators from 260 colleges, universities and other organizations met in San Francisco for a conference entitled "Uncovering the Heart of Higher Education: Integrative Learning for Compassionate Action in an Interconnected World." Sponsored by the Fetzer Institute and the California Institute of Integral Studies, the meeting is described on a website with the url: www.heartofeducation.org.

The conference brought together a wide range of voices from many different perspectives: faculty from across the curriculum, student life professionals, chaplains, deans and provosts, presidents and vice presidents, students, young alumnae, community activists, clergy, administrators across the spectrum. These were educators who are forging vital connections between religion, peace, contemplation, justice, ecology, dialogue, diversity, service, community, vocation, spirituality, forgiveness, love – a mighty river flowing to a destination that's still uncertain.

The call to the conference tapped something very deep, a yearning and a hunger in the many hundreds who made their way to San Francisco, and the many thousands more they serve or represent. The speakers' roster included a number of people who have been working for years to challenge institutions of higher learning to think more broadly about their missions. The keynote addresses are available on CDs which can be purchased through the website.

The backdrop for this gathering was – and is – the disturbing reality that the world we are passing on to future generations is far more fragile than we imagined it might be – even a mere decade ago. Intense and sobering questions daily press on our awareness now in new and alarming forms: environmental degradation, nuclear proliferation, absolute poverty and a terrible gap between rich and poor, wars in the name of the sacred all around the globe, and here at home, the erosion of vital boundaries between church and state, and a military-industrial complex that has run amok. The recent shift in political tides in the United States has, if anything, brought into sharper focus how far we have wandered, as a people and a nation hell-bent on accumulating wealth, from a core commitment to the mutual obligations that a generous reading of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" was intended to stir.

Many participants argued - cogently and on a variety of grounds – for reforms to our educational system that would encourage much more powerful connections between head and heart, theory and action, privilege and service. Many interesting and promising models were described and discussed. But I haven't been able to shake one brief interchange I heard at a plenary session. A young philosophy professor described in vivid detail the tactics evangelical groups at her university are using to "prey on" incoming first year students who are lonely and vulnerable and to convince them not to believe anything their professors are teaching them.

I came away from this meeting more convinced than ever that we must not allow this "Whatever..." generation to graduate from college perfectly content to accept that all belief systems are equally valid and true. The stakes are too high, especially now. If we leave them unable to know their own minds and hearts, they will stand helpless in a market economy hawking selfish materialism, and hopeless in a world of fundamentalisms -- dangerous shortcuts to the coherence and the meaning that we failed to help them find for themselves while they were in college.