Search for meaning on campus

When spring arrives in New Haven, and eager high school students with acceptance letters in hand come to get the skinny on Yale University, sophomore Fatema Al-Arayedh gets ready to answer what has become for her a predictable question.

''The Muslim students always ask me, 'How is Yale for religion?' " she says. ''They want to know how Yale is as a place to practice your faith."

In seeing higher learning as a journey of the heart as well as the mind, Muslims are far from alone. Two-thirds, or 67 percent, of first-year college students consider it ''essential" or ''very important" that their colleges help develop their personal values, according to a new University of California, Los Angeles, survey of more than 112,000 students on 236 diverse campuses. Another 48 percent consider it ''essential" or ''very important" for a college to encourage their personal expression of spirituality.

Though skepticism of organized religion is still alive and well among many undergraduates, interest in exploring big questions such as, ''What is my life's purpose?" is teeming. Courses, discussion groups, volunteer projects, and social events are drawing crowds at various types of schools. Such resources are tapping into a yearning for what one educator refers to as a ''connection with something larger than oneself."

For administrators, hunger for meaning on campus poses a challenge: how to foster or enhance spiritual growth among thousands of students when most regard the domain as a unique, highly personal quest.

In figuring that out, colleges and universities have embarked on a quest of their own.

''Students are seeking a development of their internal lives and experience as well as the external, cognitive, rational analysis of reality, which tends to dominate much of modern education and modern culture," said David Scott, former chancellor of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and now a faculty member there. ''I think as we go into the future here, an institution's ability to be responsive to these issues, which clearly is an increasing need amongst the students, probably will be an important recruiting tool."

Many schools have elevated the value placed on students' emotional experiences. UMass ranks among those, for instance, that ask prospective students to describe in an essay how they have overcome a particular hardship in their lives. The exercise, Scott said, ''measures your internal skill for coping with disaster," a nonintellectual skill that colleges are increasingly keen to cultivate among students.

Once enrolled, students at a wide range of institutions take part in courses meant to integrate emotional and rational intelligence by weaving volunteer projects into the syllabus. For instance, communications students at Lasell College in Newton this semester have augmented their readings with volunteer work and intimate conversations with the elderly in an attempt to master principles for effective communication across generations.

In terms of fostering particular religious or spiritual conviction, however, approaches vary widely from school to school. In this domain, educators say, students do well to know themselves and to judge how much or how little they're apt to benefit from particular programs.

At the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Kim McElaney, director of the Office of College Chaplains, said the Jesuit mission is easy to recognize: ''We challenge [students] to be willing to think and ask hard questions: Who am I? What are the gifts I have been given? Is God a part of this?"

As spirituality becomes more ''individualized" with this generation, she says, the school has started giving every incoming student a purple leather journal for each to chronicle his or her unfolding story.

And to help 650 students to process the meaning of their volunteer work experiences, the school trains student leaders for more than 20 theological reflection groups.

Having access to so much spiritual programming has helped Holy Cross freshman Stephen Dutton get closer to his goal of understanding and living out his Roman Catholic faith.

''When you have [faith] and share it with all the people around you who also have it, it makes it really easy to practice your faith," said Dutton, 18, of Burlington. He appreciates, for instance, praying with his swim team before meets and taking road trips with the chapel choir to nursing homes and small parishes, where he says, ''It was just really great to see how happy they were that we came to sing for them."

Other campuses welcome faith in a very different manner. Wellesley College, for instance, has transformed what were once Christian-based ceremonies of the academic year into mosaic rituals where sentiments from many faith traditions get expressed one after another. Students at this women's college leaped at the chance this year to post personal answers to the question, ''What matters most to you?" For those inclined to practice a particular faith, the school relies not on chaplains but paid faith leaders from the outside community to lead a range of services. And regular forums encourage students to express their deepest values, even when others might vehemently disagree.

''Often what happens in interfaith work is you just choose the lowest common denominator and do what won't offend anybody," said Victor Kazanjian, dean of Religious and Spiritual Life at Wellesley. ''Our work is absolutely the opposite of that. Our work is to create spaces of encounter and dialogue where people can talk about their reactions or confusions, their inquiries, their questions about each other."

Yale takes a similar but distinctive approach, based on recommendations from a committee that spent 2004 exploring ''ways to strengthen the growing expressions of religious and spiritual life within the University."

Plans to add a third chaplain are underway, according to committee spokeswoman Martha Highsmith, who says the one hired will aim to revitalize ecumenical Christian worship on campus.

To that end, the school voted this year to sever its historic ties with the United Church of Christ, a relationship that the committee found to ''hinder the reimagination of university ministries." Meanwhile, the search is on for more physical space for grass-roots religious practice. During Ramadan, after campus tours have ended for the day, as many as 50 Muslim students gather nightly in the visitor center for a university-catered meal to break the day-long fast.

Both Yale and Wellesley host regular gatherings, as do other schools, where students of all faiths and no faith can discuss questions of meaning and purpose. Public schools, meanwhile, work within additional limitations as they must honor the constitutional separation of church and state.

UMass-Amherst, for instance, employs no chaplains to facilitate religious life among students. Though it has a chapel, the building has fallen into disrepair. Still, many groups use secular spaces on campus for worship.

What's more, Scott says that as many as 70 faculty members encourage contemplation as an educational tool by providing time for silence or meditation in class.

On just about any campus, students can expect to live by a standard of tolerance for one another's religious beliefs. But working out the right balance between tolerance and robust spiritual life remains an ongoing challenge, according to the Rev. Ashley Cook, President of the National Association of College and University Chaplains.

''We have to kind of find the intersection of tolerance and substantive activity," Cook said. ''If you're too particular and specialized [in religious programming], you lose some people. And if you're too tolerant, you water down what is made available.

''Tolerance runs the risk of thinning the depths of what's available. Their institution may be tolerant, but that means it's not offering as much as [some students] would like."

G. Jeffrey MacDonald is a freelance journalist and an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ.