Education as Transformation, Religious Pluralism, Spirituality, & a New Vision for Higher Education in America, Victor H. Kazanjian, Jr. and Peter L Laurence Eds.,

Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York, 2000

Spirituality in an Integrative Age

By: David K. Scott, Chancellor

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Something we were withholding made us weak, until we found it was ourselves.

Robert Frost

Introduction

As the end of the millennium approaches, there is a growing movement toward transformation in the world, in nations, and institutions. On the one hand there is hope for a new vision, but on the other hand a fear that time is running out with many serious problems unresolved. The solution to the challenges ahead demands collaborative approaches instead of the extreme fragmentation and competition which dominate much thinking today.¹ The ability to adopt a systems approach integrating different perspectives and ideas will be crucial. While the times we live in are often referred to as the Information Age, or the Knowledge Age, I believe that a better description of the spirit of the new millennium will be — and must be -- the Integrative Age. Key to our future will be the concept of the complete individual, with a greater sense of wholeness and connectedness. Education must adopt an integrative philosophy of knowledge, including religion and spirituality, which have been largely eliminated from formal education in public institutions for more than a century.

There are many signs that this transformation is under way. Historically, the national mood swings between periods of community caring and periods of individual selfishness. During these oscillations revivals of interest in religion are also common. In The Cycles of American History, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.² describes this phenomenon as shifts between centralization and diffusion of energy. He was building on an idea of his father in an essay titled "Tides of American Politics."³ From 1765 onward, there have been periods of community ascendancy, lasting for about 16 years, followed by comparable periods of individual ascendancy. These swings transcend political parties and reflect reactions of society to either extreme. During this century, for example, Roosevelt’s accession in 1901 heralded the sweep of reform measures comprising the Progressive Era and the Square Deal. Another two cycles of community ascendancy were the New Deal in the ‘30s and the New Frontier/Great Society in the ‘60s. Schlesinger predicted that some time in the ‘90s another burst of innovation and reform would take place. The rhetoric of reform is certainly present. President Bush called for a "kinder, gentler nation," and Clinton spoke of a "new covenant with society." Today we hear about "compassionate conservatism." Slogans, by themselves, are merely "words marching across the landscape in search of an idea." The idea may be discernible on college campuses, which are often the bellwethers of imminent transformation.

In his book, Portrait of Today’s College Students: When Dreams and Heroes Died, Arthur Levine⁴ also describes periods in universities and colleges of community ascendancy which are future oriented and ascetic, and periods of individual ascendancy which are more present oriented and hedonistic, more concerned with duty to self than to others. In a more recent work, Levine and Cureton⁵ analyze student activism during the century by using data gathered from measures of organization strength, viability of student publications, and participation in demonstrations. The high points of these movements coincide with the swings in national mood described earlier. These historical cycles predict that we should now be in a period of community ascendancy. But this time a greater transformation may take place. As Tarnas⁶ has suggested, humanity may be gathering for a climactic denouement, a unification of knowledge, of cultures, of faith and reason, of matter and spirituality, of art and science and religion, which have been increasingly fragmented and separated for almost 300 years.

People everywhere are searching for greater meaning, wholeness, and relatedness in their lives and in their interactions with others, and for a more spiritual and religious view. Yet public education continues to chart a world without religion. Throughout history, as pointed out by Nord,⁷ nothing has been more stable, less budgeable, than religious belief and practice. Polls consistently show that nine out of ten Americans believe in the existence of God. More than seven out of ten believe in life after death. Some 55 percent of Americans say that religion is very important in their lives. Based on decades of polling data, the United States cannot by any stretch of the imagination be described as secular in its core beliefs. The Swiss theologian Hans Kung asks, "Why don’t people openly admit the fact that the death of religion expected in late modernity has not taken place?"⁸

A recent survey by Winston found that students on college campuses are exploring new ways of believing and behaving in their search for a richer, more meaningful way of being in the world. She also notes that as Americans have become more racially and ethnically diverse — and more comfortable with cultural expressions of diversity — our understanding of religious pluralism is changing. "It is not unusual these days for a student to describe her religious preference as Methodist, Native American, Taoist, Quaker, Russian Orthodox and Jew. The growth of religious diversity in our society is paralleled by an increased diversity within individual religious practices. Learning, working and, increasingly, living together, Americans of different faiths bump into beliefs and behaviors that once seemed unusual, even exotic."⁹ Winston concludes that, rather than dismissing these interests of students, we should attempt to learn along with them.

The Constitution must guide our response to these interests. Although the courts have removed the practice of religion from public education, the constitutional legitimacy of the study of religion has been affirmed, and many universities have departments of religious studies. But the discussion of religion is segregated into these departments so that every other discipline is free to ignore religion. What George Marsden claims for Christianity is probably true of all religions. "It has become not only entirely peripheral to higher education but it has also often come to be considered absolutely alien to whatever is important to the enterprise."¹⁰

I believe that we need a new epistemology which will be more integrative across all areas of knowledge and which will address the emerging emotional and intellectual needs. But it will also be necessary to respond to a second spiritual movement in the academy dealing with the structural organization as institutions downsize, restructure, and re-engineer. Even the language reflects a philosophy of machines, devoid of any human dimension. William Byron¹¹ draws attention to the rhetoric we often hear of transforming the workplace, making it more humane and respectful of human diversity. But this will not happen until the people who go to work are transformed.

In considering religion and spirituality in higher education, and in particular in public universities and colleges, this essay deals with these three important challenges: the challenge of the Constitution, the challenge of epistemology, and the challenge of organizational structure. My intention is not to reintroduce into the academy the teaching of morals and religion but rather to open up a dialogue on the interpretation of the Constitution, the relation between different areas of knowledge, and the balance between faith, reason and spirituality, and the harmony between our work and lives. I do not underestimate the difficulty of this undertaking. A word like "spirituality" is, as Lesser points out, laden with contradictory meanings and confusing traditions. "For some the word is connected to their mistrust of religion. For others the word means anti-scientific. Others hear the word and are encouraged by its whispered promises of grace; others are threatened by it, afraid of looking too deeply at their own behavior, the unlived parts of their lives. For most of us, the word spiritual probably activates all of the above associations." ¹² A statement read before the United Nations in October 1995 provides a prescription for the challenge ahead. "The crises of our time are challenging the world religions to release a new spiritual force transcending religious, cultural and national boundaries into a new consciousness of the oneness of the human community and so putting into effect a spiritual dynamic towards a solution of the world’s problems … . We affirm a new spirituality, divested of insularity and directed towards planetary consciousness."

I have long believed the mission of a university to be the creation of ever more complete and integrative human beings through whom we shall create a better and a wiser world more rapidly. This goal is an essential challenge for the new millennium.

Constitutional Challenges

In order to respond to the growing need for spiritual dimensions in our organizations, the requirements imposed by the Constitution need analysis in public universities and colleges. In the past we have too readily invoked the Constitution as a shield to avoid the discussion. As we shall see in the next section, the epistemological issues pose the greatest challenges and the Constitution does not prohibit a discussion of them. Nord provides a useful perspective. "Public education is obligated to take religion seriously. Judicial conservatives typically argue that the Establishment Clause allows the state to promote non-sectarian religion as long as it does so non-coercively. Liberals argue, rightly, that the state and public education must be neutral both among religions and between religion and non-religion. What liberals seldom acknowledge is that, by ignoring religion and by promoting secular views hostile to religion, public education is effectively taking sides against religion. Therefore, if neutrality is to be restored as the First Amendment requires, religion must be given its voice. It is not the task of public education to promote any particular religion, or religion generally, but it should not ignore or denigrate religion either."¹³

The Supreme Court, more than 50 years ago, agreed that the Establishment Clause was intended to erect a wall of separation between church and state. More recently, as pointed out by David Schimmel,¹⁴ this interpretation has been debated by the Court. However in a 1992 opinion, Justice Souter emphasized "the settled principle that the Establishment Clause forbids support for religion in general no less than support for one religion or none." He also rejected the notion that public schools could promote a diversity of religious views because such an approach would necessarily compel schools to make wholly inappropriate judgments about the number of religions the state could sponsor and the relative frequency with which it should sponsor each. But it is also true that the nation was much less diverse in the past, with only one or two major religions. Diane Eck has commented on the new pluralism in universities and colleges today. "What has happened at Harvard has happened at major universities throughout the country. In the 1990s universities have become microcosms and laboratories of a new multicultural and multi-religious America. It is not uncommon to have a Hindu and Jew, Muslim and Christian in a single rooming group. These changes in university demographics have come not from abroad, but from the rapidly changing cultural and religious landscape of the United States. Harvard’s issues, America’s issues, have become increasingly a fresh recasting of India’s issues, the world’s issues: race, culture, difference, diversity and whether it is possible to move from diversity to pluralism."¹⁵ On this subject, Nord concludes, "Because of the massive importance of religion in human affairs, because public institutions must take seriously the full range of ideas, because the Establishment Clause requires neutrality between religion and non-religion, and because truth has become increasingly elusive even for intellectuals, religion must be taken seriously in public universities."¹⁶

In the current pluralistic environment, universities need to examine what is permissible, under the complexities of the law, to meet the needs and aspirations of today’s students, faculty and staff, thereby liberating us to address the intellectual and spiritual needs of the community.

The Epistemological Challenge

In his inspiring book, The Idea of Higher Education, Ronald Barnett¹⁷ identifies the crises facing universities as the undermining of two axioms: first, the epistemological axiom that there is a realm of objective knowledge and that there are recognized truths is under assault with no apparent substitute in sight; and second, the sociological axiom that objective knowledge is most effectively maintained and disseminated in institutions that are relatively autonomous and in which the academic community enjoys comparative freedom. Both of these axioms have led to a "pain of disconnection," as Parker Palmer¹⁸ has described the current status of our universities. Overcoming this disconnection calls for a deeper engagement of the disciplines with each other and with society about the values and agenda of the university.

In the western world, universities have existed for close to a thousand years. During this time they have undergone massive transformation. As society changed from an agrarian age to the industrial age and now to the information age, our approaches to knowledge also evolved. For the first five hundred years universities operated in the medieval culture where knowledge was based on faith and religion. Medieval society and learning were all compounded of numerous and diverse elements with scholars pursuing knowledge from a mixture of motives, combining rational and irrational, scholarly and superstitious methods of empiricism and speculation. There were, however, attempts at the integration of knowledge which we lost in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century and the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. The so-called Age of Enlightenment also coincided with the onset of the industrial age. Philosophers of the Enlightenment aimed to develop objective science and a universal morality and law. They planned to use the accumulation of specialized culture for the enrichment of everyday life through highly analytical and empirical thinking about a universe that was mechanical and predictable. Although noble in intention, the epistemology has resulted in enormous fragmentation of knowledge with the concomitant loss of a coherent, integrative perspective.¹⁹ In the twentieth century, post-modernist philosophy has challenged the assumption that the intellect can direct human civilization toward the progressive realization of ideal forms of human existence and understandings that are universal, knowable, and achievable through discoveries in science. In this epistemology, objective standards of truth and justice are nothing more than conventions propagated by dominant forces in society. This philosophy has perpetuated a fragmented approach to knowledge so that physics departments in different universities around the world interact more closely with each other than with philosophy departments (and certainly the religious studies department) in the same university. Their approach is that there is no universal truth, but a multiplicity of different truths. This approach to knowledge is also giving rise to dissatisfaction within the academy and in society.

I believe that post-modernism is a transitory phase and that we are on a journey to a transmodern philosophy which will overcome the modern world view — not by eliminating world views as such — but by constructing a new world view through a revision of modern premises and traditional concepts. This constructive trans-modernism demands a new unity of scientific, ethical, aesthetic, and religious intuitions. It rejects not science as such but only that scientism in which the data of the modern natural sciences are alone allowed to contribute to the construction of our world view.²⁰ In spite of its fragmented approach, the post-modern movement has created the characteristics necessary for a new intellectual vision, which I call transmodernism. In the words of Tarnas: "If the postmodern mind has sometimes been prone to a dogmatic relativism and a compulsively fragmenting skepticism, and if the cultural ethos that has accompanied it has sometimes deteriorated into cynical detachment and spiritless pastiche, it is evident that the most significant characteristics of the larger postmodern intellectual situation — its pluralism, complexity and ambiguity — are precisely the characteristics necessary for the potential emergence of a fundamental new form of intellectual vision, one that might both preserve and transcend the current state of extraordinary differentiation. In the politics of the contemporary Weltanschauung, no perspective — religious, scientific, or philosophical — has the upper hand. Yet that situation has encouraged an almost unprecedented intellectual flexibility and cross-fertilization, reflected in the widespread call for, and practice of, open conversation between different understandings, different vocabularies, different cultural paradigms."²¹

Instead of the information age and the explosion of knowledge, we should speak of the integrative age and the implosion of knowledge. I am not advocating a return to the past with a total rejection of reason and empirical approaches. Rather the possibility now exists for the connection of different knowledge areas in new transdisciplinary ways at a deep level. This connection differs from the traditional interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches common in universities, which really continue to link closely related areas of knowledge. I am advocating exploration of the relationship between religious, spiritual views and approaches of science, for example. The current debate over evolutionary theory and creationism highlights the poverty of thinking that results when the deeper linkages between different areas of knowledge are ignored. Failure to explore the deeper interconnections drives people into one extreme mode or another, forcing a choice between faith and reason. The university of old — the University of Faith — evolved to the University of Reason. We must now foster the University of Communication, described by Gregory Heath,²² which will integrate different approaches to knowledge. I call this university of the future the Integrative University for an Integrative Age.

The task ahead relates to Kant’s attempts to integrate the "big three" value spheres of art, science, and religion (morals) which, as a result of the Enlightenment were beginning to fall apart, and which have become even more disassociated in the modern university. Attempts to bring about this integration in the past have failed because they have adopted a rigid stance against rationalism, as in the romantic movement, for example. Wilbur points out that they fell into the "pre-trans" fallacy. "Granted, spirituality is, in some sense, beyond rationality. But there is a trans-rational and a pre-rational. Pre-rationality includes all of the modes leading up to rationality … Trans-rationality, on the other hand, lies on the other side of reason. Once reason has emerged and consolidated, consciousness can continue to grow and develop and evolve, moving into trans-rational, trans-personal … modes of awareness. Trans-rationality includes pre-rationality, happily incorporates the rational perspective and then adds its own defining characteristics."²³ The exploration of these approaches to knowledge is the responsibility of the modern university, influencing all aspects of education through the curriculum, research, and applications of knowledge.

In achieving this integration, all disciplines, including religion, will have to adopt new ways of thinking. As Ken Wilber points out: "Many of the world’s great religions contradict each other, but if we cannot find a common core of the world’s great religions, then we will never find an integration of science and religion. Indeed if we cannot find a common core that is generally acceptable to all religions, we would be forced to choose one religion and deny importance to the others; or we would have to pick and choose tenets from among various religions, thus alienating the great religious traditions themselves. We would never arrive at an integration of science and religion that both parties would find acceptable, because most religions would reject what was done to their beliefs in order to force this reconciliation. It will do no good, for example, to claim, as many Christian creationists have, that the Big Bang suggests that the world is the product of a personal creator God, when one of the most profound and influential religions in the world, Buddhism, does not believe in a personal God to begin with. Thus we cannot use the Big Bang in order to integrate science and religion unless we can find a way to reconcile Christianity and Buddhism, and the world’s wisdom traditions in general."²⁴

It seems to me that the great challenge for universities and colleges is the definition of this common core, this general framework which would be acceptable to most religious traditions at least in the abstract. Students at many institutions recognize this need through the formation of inter-faith councils and dialogues between different religions. This spirit was very much in evidence at the Wellesley Conference,²⁵ with close to 1,000 participants. It is also evident on our own campus where students of many different faiths have proposed that our Old Chapel (which has not been used as a chapel in over a century) should be transformed into a spiritual center for a new community.

An excellent starting point for a dialogue between humanities, sciences and religion, is David Bohm’s work on implicate order.²⁶ In his theory, which derives from a reformulation of quantum mechanics, the universe is constructed as a hologram with all aspects of the entire universe enfolded into each component, just as a holographic image contains the entire image in each fragment of the hologram, only more blurred as the component selected becomes smaller. Karl Pribram,²⁷ has also suggested that the hologram is a possible model for how the brain stores memory in a distributed rather than localized fashion. Since holograms are constructed from interference patterns of laser beams reflected from objects, perhaps the brain also deals in interactions, interpreting frequencies of vibration so that what we perceive as reality is in fact isomorphic with the brain processes. I mention this example because the idea of the concrete world as illusion has long been present in various eastern religions. An extraordinary ancient description of a holographic reality is found in a Hindu Sutra, "In the heaven of Indra there is said to be a network of pearls so arranged that if you look at one you see all the others reflected in it. In the same way, each object in the world is not merely itself but involves every other object, and in fact is in every other object."²⁸ Pribram observed: "It isn’t that the world of appearances is wrong; it isn’t that there aren’t objects out there at one level of reality. It’s that if you penetrate through and look at the universe with a holographic system, you arrive at a different reality, one that can explain things that have hitherto remained inexplicable: paranormal phenomena ... synchronicities, the apparently meaningful coincidence of events."²⁹ This example is not meant as "scientific proof" of spiritual dimensions of experience (although there are studies also on this topic³⁰) but rather as fertile ground for opening up a dialogue across disciplines which have little contact at present.

After all, our current approach to knowledge evolved over the last 500 years and is also based on a theory of mind and matter, the relationship between them, and the relationship of human beings to the universe. Following Tarnas,³¹ the evolution began from the Copernicus shift of perspective in the mid-sixteenth century, which displaced the human being to a peripheral position in a vast, impersonal universe with the ensuing disenchantment of the natural world. The Copernican revolution constituted the epochal shift to the modern age. Almost a century later, Descartes woke up in the Copernican universe and fully articulated the experience of the emerging, autonomous self as separate from the external world it tries to master. With the human mind distinct from the world, then the apprehended universe was ultimately the mind’s interpretation. Another century passed, bringing us to the mid-eighteenth century, before Kant, building on his empiricist predecessor, drew out the epistemological consequences. He deduced that all human knowledge is interpretive, and that the mind can draw no mirror-like knowledge of the objective world. Here was seen emerging the roots of post-modernism. The world is essentially a construct and knowledge is radically interpretive. Every act of perception and cognition is congruent, mediated, situated, contextual, and theory-soaked. Over a period of 200 years the cosmological estrangement of Copernicus and the ontological estrangement of Descartes were completed by the epistemological estrangement of Kant, a threefold mutually reinforcing prison of modern alienation which has resulted in the fragmentation and relativism of knowledge prevalent today.

Gradually over the ensuing 250 years the model has permeated thinking in almost every discipline. Another century after Kant, the radical displacement of the human being from the cosmic center was emphatically reinforced by Darwin’s relativization of the human being in the flux of evolution — no longer divinely ordained, no longer the favored child of the universe. Tarnas concludes, "The world revealed by modern science is devoid of spiritual purpose, opaque, ruled by chance and necessity, without intrinsic meaning. The human soul has not felt at home in the modern cosmos: the soul can hold dear its poetry and its music, its private metaphysics and religion, but these find no certain foundation in the empirical universe … But the lesson of

Kant is that the locus of the communication problem — the problem of human knowledge in the world — must first be viewed as centering in the human mind. Therefore, it is theoretically possible that the human mind has more cards than it has been playing. The pivot of the modern predicament is epistemological, and it is here that we should look for an opening."

The theory of mind and matter implicit in the holographic model of memory and the universe and of the intimate relation between them differs radically from the theory of Descartes. Instead of estrangement we discover a web of connections which could reverse the fragmentation of knowledge, the separation of reason and emotion, of spirituality and science. Here may lie the opening to greater overlap of the value spheres of art, science, and religion. The times have never been more propitious for such transdisciplinary thinking. A fresh perspective was recently given by Edward Wilson in his book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.³² Once a conversation in universities between the disciplines takes place, the fear of studying deeper connections will dissipate.

An example of this deeper connection is discussed by John Polkinghorne.³³ He points out that mathematics, which is essentially an abstract, free creation of the human mind, repeatedly provides the indispensable clue to the understanding of the universe. For example, abstract theories developed hundreds of years ago by Euler, with no application of any kind imaginable, have recently turned out to provide the theoretical framework for the string theory of the universe. It is as if there is a connection between the structure of the universe and the structure of the human mind. Polkinghorne relates these connections to the logos doctrine of Christianity but they may also be implicit in Pribram’s holographic theory of the universe.

We need to unfreeze the boundaries and barriers constructed by the empirical approach to knowledge over the last 300 years. There are signs that a warming trend is in the making. But it will also be necessary to unfreeze the culture of our academic institutions and make spirituality an integral dimension of the workplace. This topic is the subject of the last section of this paper.

The Organizational Challenge

Judging from the plethora of books on spirituality and soul in organizations, it is evident that there is a growing discontent not only with epistemology but also with the culture of the workplace. Some recent publications bear titles such as The Soul of the Firm,³⁴ Leading with Soul,³⁵ Leading from the Heart,³⁶ and the Leadership Wisdom of Jesus.³⁷ As pointed out by Robert Marx et al., "Business provides us with positive benefits such as jobs, financial resources and necessary products and services. It can also introduce cutthroat competition, political power plays and a cold bottom line focus on profit. Meanwhile our spiritual roots call for us to live and work in a different way. Compassion, integrity and service are virtues often considered naive and impractical in our competitive environment. The time is ripe for a movement towards a more spiritual practice that positively incorporates these seemingly contradictory forces."³⁸ Many forefront organizations have sought to transform the workplace into a learning organization with more integrative and spiritual environments.³⁹ Academic institutions, although obviously organizations of learning, are more resistant to becoming a learning organization.⁴⁰ The following ideas for transforming universities and colleges are drawn from the work of Susan Awbrey et al.⁴¹

Just as our approach to knowledge is the product of the reductionist approaches of science developed so successfully in the eighteenth century, so also are the models of organizations. In this century, modern science describes the universe as a web of connections in which all components are highly linked to every other component. Margaret Wheatley describes how these ideas will influence the organization in the future:

The world described by new science is changing our beliefs and perceptions in many areas, not just in the natural sciences. I see new science ideas beginning to percolate in my own field of management theory. One way to see their effect is to look at the problems that plague us most in organizations these days or, more accurately, what we define as the problems. Leadership, an amorphous phenomenon that has intrigued us since people began studying organizations, is being examined now for its relational aspects. More and more studies focus on followership, empowerment, and leader accessibility. And ethical and moral questions are no longer fuzzy religious concepts but key elements in our relationships with staff, suppliers, and stakeholders. If the physics of our universe is revealing the primacy of relationships, is it any wonder that we are beginning to reconfigure our ideas about management in relational terms?

We are refocusing on the deep longings we have for community, meaning, dignity, and love in our organizational lives. We are beginning to look at the strong emotions that are part of being human, rather than segmenting ourselves (love is for home, discipline is for work) or believing that we can confine workers into narrow roles, as though they were cogs in the machinery of production. As we let go of the machine models of work, we begin to step back and see ourselves in new ways, to appreciate our wholeness and to design organizations that honor and make use of the totality of who we are.

The impact of vision, values, and culture occupies a great deal of organizational attention. We see their effects on organizational vitality, even if we can’t quite define why they are such potent forces. We now sense that some of the best ways to create continuity of behavior are through the use of forces that we can’t really see. Many scientists now work with the concept of fields -- invisible forces that structure space or behavior. I have come to understand organizational vision as a field -- a force of unseen connections that influences employees’ behavior -- rather than as an evocative message about some desired future state.

Our concept of organizations is moving away from the mechanistic creations that flourished in the age of bureaucracy. We have begun to speak in earnest of more fluid, organic structures, even of boundaryless organizations. We are beginning to recognize organizations as systems, construing them as "learning organizations" and crediting them with some type of self-renewing capacity.

In chaos theory it is axiomatic that you can never tell where the system is headed until you’ve observed it over time. This is also true for organizations, and it is what makes trusting something as ethereal as a strange attractor difficult. It takes time to see if a meaning-rich organization really works. A few are already out there, bright beacons to the future. But if they have not been part of our own experience, we are back to acts of faith. As the universe keeps revealing more of these invisible allies, perhaps we will grow in the belief that systems can evolve into an orderly shape when they center around clear points of self-reference.⁴²

Although derived from the models of modern science, this language is natural to the world of spirituality. The model is essential for institutions to become resilient, engaged, and vibrant. The transformation will be deep, broad, and systemic. It will impact the organization as a whole and how its units interrelate rather than simply changing things in one segment of the organization. This systemic view gives the organization a spiritual dimension. Resiliency in individuals describes the ability to prosper in the midst of the most unfortunate circumstances.⁴³ Theorists and researchers of resilience alike argue that single-system, to say nothing of single-faceted approaches, to promoting resilience will fail. Transformational change means getting to the heart of the institution, to its values and its people. Universities, like most organizations, spend a great deal of time focused on incremental or transactional change — change that does not take the entire organization into consideration and is narrowly focused. This transactional change usually affects the operating procedures of the institution. Unfortunately, a large part of determining if such change takes place has to do with elements that often receive little attention. These are the social environment and culture of the organization, the perceptions of the individuals who make up the institution.

Without "unfreezing" the current attitudes and behaviors of people at all levels who comprise the institution and without creating such a cultural framework for change, there will be little synergy between isolated, individual change efforts on campus. This approach constitutes a spiritual journey in search of wholeness, completeness, and integration of all dimensions of work, life, and thought, which will complement the new epistemology described in the previous section.

Conclusion

In this essay I have attempted to show that a powerful movement is under way to transform education and organizations through integrative approaches that overcome fragmentation, specialization, and isolation in life, learning, and in the workplace. The movement represents a search for greater meaning and wholeness. To make progress we need to overcome triple barriers concerned with the challenges of the Constitution, the nature of knowledge and epistemology, and the challenge of developing dynamic interactive organizations. Our impression is that we have readily chosen to interpret the Constitution as a convenient barrier to tackling the difficult issues of fragmentation in our educational models and in our organizational structures. But there are signs of a great transformation which will make us more integrative in our world view. I end with a quotation from Tarnas, who sums up the emerging ideas as follows. "More generally, whether in philosophy, religion, or science, the univocal literalism that tended to characterize the modern mind has been increasingly criticized and rejected, and in its place has arisen a greater appreciation of the multidimensional nature of reality, the many-sidedness of the human spirit, and the multivalent, symbolically mediated nature of human knowledge and experience. With that appreciation has also come a growing sense that the postmodern dissolving of old assumptions and categories could permit the emergence of entirely new prospects for conceptual and existential reintegration, with the possibility of richer interpretive vocabularies, more profound narrative coherencies. Under the combined impact of the remarkable changes and self-revisions that have taken place in virtually every contemporary intellectual discipline, the fundamental modern schism between science and religion has been increasingly undermined. In the wake of such developments, the original project of Romanticism—the reconciliation of subject and object, human and nature, spirit and matter, conscious and unconscious, intellect and soul—has reemerged with new vigor."⁴⁴

This vision sets the stage for education in an Integrative Age. It will combine aspects of the University of Faith and the University of Reason into a new Integrative University preparing educated citizens for a new millennium and a new age in which spirituality will be a natural ally rather than an enemy in the education of engaged citizens for an enlightened democracy. The words of Lawrence Durrell in Justine from the Alexandria Quartet give a message of hope for the future:

Somewhere in the heart of experience there is an order and a coherence which we might surprise if we were attentive enough, loving enough, or patient enough. Will there be time?

Endnotes

1. David K. Scott and Susan M. Awbrey, Transforming the University (Proceedings of the Conference on Women in Science and Engineering, Bloomington, Indiana: Committee on Institutional Cooperation, 1993).

2. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Cycles of American History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1986).

3. Arthur M. Schlesinger, "Tides of American Politics," The Yale Review, Vol. XXIX, Dec. 1939, No. 2.

4. Arthur Levine, Portrait of Today’s College Student: When Dreams and Heroes Died (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1980).

5. Arthur Levine and Jeanette S. Cureton, When Hope and Fear Collide: A Portrait of Today’s College Student (San Francisco: Jossey-Boss, 1998).

6. R. Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind (New York: Ballantyne Books, 1991).

7. Warren A. Nord, Religion and American Education: Rethinking a National Dilemma (The University of North Carolina Press, 1995).

8. Hans Kung, Theology for the Third Millennium (New York: Anchor Books, 1990).

9. Diane Winston, "Campuses are a Bellwether for Society’s Religious Revival," The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 16, 1998.

10. George Marsden, Soul of the American University (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).

11. William Byron, "Spirituality in the Workplace," American Association of Higher Education Bulletin, Vol. 51, No. 8, April 1999.

12. Elizabeth Lesser, The New American Spirituality (New York: Random House, 1999).

13. Nord, op.cit.

14. David Schimmel (University of Massachusetts, Amherst, private communication, 1999).

15. Diana L. Eck, "Neighboring Faiths," Harvard Magazine, 99 (September-October, 1996): 38-44.

16. Nord, op. cit.

17. Ronald Barnett, The Idea of Higher Education (The Society for Research in Higher Education and the Open University Press, 1990).

18. Parker J. Palmer, "Community and Commitment in Higher Education," American Association of Higher Education Bulletin, September 1992/1993.

19. See Nicholas Maxwell, From Knowledge to Wisdom: A Revolution in the Aims and Methods of Science (Basil Blackwell, London, 1984).
20. See David W. Orr, Ecological Literacy (State University of New York Press, Albany, NY, 1992).
21. Tarnas, op. cit.
22. Gregory Heath, The University as a Communicative Institution (EAIR Forum, University of Warwick, England, 1997).
23. Kenneth Wilber, The Marriage of Sense and Soul (Random House, 1998).
24. Wilber. op. cit.

25. "Education as Transformation: Religious Pluralism, Spirituality and Higher Education" (Wellesley College, September 27-28, 1998).
26. See David Bohm, On Creativity, ed. Lee Nichal (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1998); David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980); Kevin J. Sharpe, David Bohm’s World: New Physics and New Religion (Bucknell University Press, London and Toronto and Associated University Presses, 1993).
27. See Karl Pribram, Consciousness and the Brain, ed. Gordon Globus. (New York: Plenum Press, 1976); and Karl Pribram, Perceiving, Acting and Knowing, ed. R. E. Shaw and J. Bransford. (Wiley, 1977).
28. Marilyn Ferguson The Aquarian Age (Penguin Putnam Inc., 1987).
29. David Peat, Synchronicity (Bantam Books, 1988).
30. See David A. Ash, The New Science of the Spirit (The College of Psychic Studies, London, 1995); and Frank J. Tipler, The Physics of Immortality (Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1994).
31. R. Tarnas, op. cit.
32. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1998).
33. J. C. Polkinghorne, The Particle Play (W. H. Freeman and Company, 1979).
34. C. William Pollard, The Soul of the Firm (Harper Business and Zondervan Publishing House, 1996).
35. Lee G. Bohman and Terrance E. Deal, Leading with Soul (Jossey-Boss Publishers, San Francisco, 1995).
36. Kay Gilley, Leading from the Heart: Choosing Courage over Fear in the Workplace (Butterworth-Heinemann, 1997).
37. Charles C. Manz, The Leadership Wisdom of Jesus (Berrett-Koehler, 1998).
38. Robert Marx, Peter Laurence, Diane Dana, Karen Manz, Charles Manz, and David Schimmel, Concept Paper on Conference on Going Public: Spirituality and Religion in Higher Education and Workplace (to be held at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, June 2000).
39. See Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (Doubleday, 1990); Peter M. Senge, Art Kleiner, Charlotte Roberts, Richard B. Ross and Bryan J. Smith, The Fifth Discipline Field Book (Doubleday, 1994); and Peter M. Senge, Art Kleiner, Charlotte Roberts, Richard Ross, George Roth and Bryan Smith, The Dance of Change (Doubleday, 1999).
40. Peter M. Senge, The Academy as Learning Community: Contradiction in Terms or Realizable Future? (Private communication, to be published in 2000).
41. Susan M. Awbrey, David K. Scott, Peter M. Senge, Ronald Hansen, Phillip DiChiara, Joseph Raelin, and Mark Braun, Learning to Change: A Proposal to Create the Center for Integrative Studies (Kellogg Foundation, June 1999).
42. Margaret J. Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science: Learning about Organization from an Orderly Universe (Berrett-Koehler, 1994).
43. Jennie Spencer Green and Page Monahan, Building Capacity and Resilience for Change: Personal and Organizational Levels (Professional Development Workshop at American Council on Education Annual Meeting, February 13, 1999).
44. Tarnas, op. cit.

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