Conversation with
Victor H. Kazanjian, Jr.

Victor H. Kazanjian, Jr., Dean of Religious Life at Wellesley College, is a Project Advisor and key organizer of a three-year project called Education as Transformation: Religious Pluralism, Spirituality and Higher Education . With the involvement of multi-constituency teams from over 100 colleges and universities and the support of education-related institutions, including the Boston Research Center, the project aims to stimulate on-campus dialogues about the impact of religious diversity on higher education and the role of spirituality in the educational process. In this interview, we asked Dean Kazanjian to discuss the origins of the project and his views on religious pluralism and spirituality as tools to enhance learning. Following Dean Kazanjian's remarks, we are happy to include comments from four other Project Advisors, who will be the featured presenters at a national gathering of project teams to be held on September 27-28, 1998 at Wellesley College.

Religious pluralism, increasingly evident in all sectors of US society, has contributed to a "religious vacuum" on many college campuses. As an alternative to the sole Protestant chaplain, many universities have reacted to growing pluralism by eliminating their chaplaincies entirely. Did this trend play a part in your motivation to reactivate religious life on campus through the Education as Transformation project?

Facing this dilemma, many colleges decided that it was just too complicated, so in an era of fiscal cuts, they downsized or dissolved the religious life programs that no longer seemed to reflect the reality of campus life. There are two major problems with this strategy. One is that many of the students coming to colleges today think about religious and spiritual life as a part of what is necessary to support their whole educational journey. The other problem is that those institutions that are calling themselves secular still retain some of the same structures and rituals from their Protestant Christian past. What I saw was the need to take apart these structures and see how they still carry on these old mono-religious traditions, and at the same time look at the possibilities for a multi-religious community being a resource rather than a barrier to a learning community.

I was impressed when I came to Wellesley that they had not only held out against the tide of eliminating chaplaincies, but also begun to articulate a vision for what a multifaith community would be like. This included my role as Dean of Religious and Spiritual Life--someone who wouldn't represent any one religious community but would be responsible for holding the space so that people could encounter each other with respect, mutuality, and equality. The joy of my work has been to look at what a multifaith model of nurturing religious life might mean for a global learning community, and how diversity of all kinds--cultural, racial, ethnic, ideological, and religious--is the key element in making a vital, vibrant, intellectual community.

You have demonstrated a personal commitment to honoring religious diversity at Wellesley College. Can you discuss some of the interfaith activities you've initiated there? How are these activities being used to broaden learning about diverse religious traditions and to enhance education overall?

We began to develop a model which would reflect notions that people of all religious backgrounds should be equally valued, that no one voice should dominate, that there is a way to collectively create rituals for the community that mark moments in the life of a community. We do that not by following the trends of the last quarter century of universalizing everything and taking out all the specific religious language--which leaves everybody feeling lost and the traditions unrecognizable--but by creating spaces of expression for each religious experience held together by common themes, so that we're exploring the particularity of religious experience while we're also unearthing some of the themes of common humanity that bind us together.

We started by building a Religious Life Team, which now consists of Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, Catholic and Protestant Christian and Unitarian Universalist chaplains and advisors, each of whom is supported by their own advisory board of faculty, staff, alumni, and students. We began this relational process of inviting each other into an encounter of learning. We found that team meetings quickly became opportunities to meditate, reflect, and to study together. We spent the first three years really studying about each other's communities and traditions, allowing each other to be both teacher and learner. That process was mirrored by a student group I started, the Multifaith Council, that includes the religions I mentioned plus Baha'is, Jains, Sikhs, Zoroastrians, and other religious groups represented here at the college. There are two representatives from each group--even if there are five Baha'is on the campus and 1,500 Protestant Christians, there are only two for each group. The sense of equity of voice has been very important to the development of this group. Over the six years we've had an amazing group of students who have gone deep into understanding that they can both celebrate the beauty of the other while delving into their own traditions; that it's not an either-or, that you can move in both directions. That's what I think pluralism is about. Those are the two key structures that have allowed us to build the Education as Transformation model and the series of programs based on the model.

As a team, we took apart the Wellesley College community rituals completely and began to look at what would make for moments of meaning for the community where we could celebrate through various means--through dance, music, ritual, and readings--the kind of experience that is important at different moments in the life of a learning community. For example, at the beginning of the year, Wellesley has an old tradition called Flower Sunday where the upper class women bring the first year students flowers at an opening service of the year. It's a tradition that was pretty much defunct because it still basically felt like a Protestant service. What we did was to create a service of friendship where we talked about learning in the context of relationship and where the leadership of that service is the Religious Life Team and the Student Council. We have everything from Hindu dance, to bell chanting from the Buddhists, to native African drumming. We try to model ways in which people of different religious traditions can celebrate together and also hold their uniqueness at the same time. Even people who see themselves outside of institutional religious life can connect to these spiritual themes. This is a profoundly important reason why religious and spiritual life needs to be on college campuses today, because many of the questions that students are asking are spiritual questions. They're not coming in the language of institutional religion but they're deeply spiritual questions.

We now have multifaith religious celebrations on Flower Sunday, at baccalaureate, at alumni reunions, and at mid-year. Out of the student body of about 2,400, we have about 1,500 students who pack the space. We've done a grassroots process of rearticulating what spirituality and religious life means, including issues of multiculturalism, and invited people to come and have a community encounter around that.

That brought us to the notion that there's a spiritual dimension to the educational process that's more than just support of religious life. When higher education appropriately rid itself of the constraints of institutional religion, what was also lost was any notion of the spiritual dimensions to learning. So in the West, and in this country especially, there's been a great strain between secular education and spirituality. What we found working with students was that they were seeking to make their education relevant, to answer the questions: How do we integrate this learning into our understanding of self, understanding of other, and understanding of the world? That is precisely how I see spirituality--as that which gives meaning and purpose and context to thought, word, and action. It's the meaning-making parts of our lives. It's about questions that are not often asked in higher education, particularly in the context of separate, rationalistic, objectified ways of intellectualizing information.

When we began to explore this we got a lot of reactions, and some excitement and some rage because this effort was challenging fundamental notions of the educational process in this country. We kept on working with faculty and students to try to figure out where we could begin this conversation so that there wouldn't be a fear of a religious agenda behind it. I ended up meeting with a group of students and saying: tell me stories about moments of meaning and connection, inspiration and wonder that you have had in the classroom, that you can connect with a spiritual dimension to your learning. And they told story after story of moments of being awakened to some realization, whether it was in the study of a cell and suddenly seeing the organic, the life in all things; whether it was a moment of enlightenment reading part of a poem in their English class; or the wonder of a piece of African art. We made a list of the faculty who taught those courses, and I wrote to each of those faculty and said: in your class a student has said that she had this moment of meaning and inspiration, wonder, awe and connection through your teaching. Would you be willing to come and talk about this? We ended up with a wonderful group of about 58 faculty who participated in these "Moments of Meaning" workshops where they began to talk about these moments in their own teaching and learning. It changed the whole dynamic of the process, so that suddenly religious pluralism and spirituality are seen as part of what we can begin to bring to the educational community that's not solely ours in the religious community. It's something that belongs to everyone.

At the same time we began to reach out to see if there was interest in other colleges around these topics, which gave birth to the Education as Transformation project. There was an amazing response at a meeting last October at Brown University--nearly 100 people from 27 colleges showed up--which has led us to the current focus on the development of a three-year program to be kicked off with a national gathering at Wellesley this September. The gathering will bring together some of the people who are thinking and writing about these issues with the people who are actually trying to implement them to strategize about how to address the impact of religious diversity, religious pluralism as a possible strategy, and the role of spirituality in the teaching and learning process.

What elements of your own background and personal life experience have contributed to your interest in this initiative?

One is my family. I have grandparents who were Quaker, Orthodox Armenian, Anglican, and Methodist. So even within that Christian world, there was quite amazing religious diversity. And the deep respect and regard for all those traditions was very important. The Armenian aspect has been and continues to be a formative experience for me--being a grandchild of genocide, and understanding, even though I grew up not immersed in the Armenian community, that I would always be part of that community and had a home in that sense. What that has done for me is that in a culture where you give up your ethnic identity in order to become American, that never happened to me. I always was able to maintain a dual identity of being a citizen of the United States but also very clearly identifying with the Armenian community, mostly in Diaspora. I have come to understand this formative experience as enabling me to see myself located in a particularity, whether it's cultural experience or religious experience, and still be part of a collaborative or a larger whole.

On the other side of my family, my grandfather was the president of Boston University for many years and was an activist. His friend Howard Thurman, who was the dean of Marsh Chapel, was a mentor to me as a child. As an adult, I have come to understand through his writings the powerful potential for universal principles that flows through all life. It is Howard's work more than anything else that I model my current work on. Also Dr. King was a part of our life in those years at BU. When I was a very young boy, in our household there was always civil rights, equality, justice seeking, alongside of religious diversity. I never associated exclusivity with religion until I started growing up in the Episcopal Church, and suddenly I was being told that Christianity was the only truth. But since childhood I had known that not to be the case.

Somehow I managed to continue on a journey that has dropped me deep into the beauty of the Christian tradition, free of exclusivity. I am ordained an Episcopal priest and I think of Christianity as the most beautiful journey for me and continue to fall in love with the faith tradition. But I also see religious exclusivism as heretical to understanding Christianity.

The other major piece in my life which I think helped me frame a personal understanding of wholeness and healing has been my experience being a very severe stutterer for most of my life. All of the emotional and psychological stuff that goes with being a stutterer is always just beneath the surface. And yet my life these days is so very verbal. So I've come to understand in that experience some profound lessons about both humility and humiliation, brokenness and completeness, and what it means to be whole and yet not perfect. I think it's out of our woundedness that we see how wounds in the world and in others can be a healing force. So I try to do that.

There has been much public debate about prayer in classrooms, the role of religion in secular society, race and multiculturalism. Do you see these controversies and other social trends in the US and/or the rest of the world as obstacles to developing new models and strategies to support religious diversity on campus?

There are two major things I've learned. One is that the principles of American society around state and religion offer freedom of religion, not freedom from religion. The beauty of the original philosophy of fighting against tyranny and of keeping the state free from the control of any one religious tradition has been completely turned on its head. We've lost the dialogue between religious traditions and society, and have deified a notion of religious singularity by talking about this country as a Christian nation. That strange combination of nationalism and religion in this country is a major obstacle to pluralism, because we are forced to fundamentally challenge a religious exclusivism that has gotten translated into a kind of xenophobic nationalism.

On the issue of prayer in public schools, it's absurd to think that we should be having Christian prayer in public schools when we have a multi-religious and multi-spiritual society. If we want to develop something in schools that's spiritual, we have to do it in the context of religious and cultural pluralism. We can't do it in the context of one religious tradition. So those who believe that America and Christianity are synonymous are going to have a hard time with this model.

We also need to grapple with the notion of assimilation and conformity versus pluralism. Pluralism ultimately allows for difference to remain at the same time that one seeks common identity, whereas assimilation, which often leads to conformity, punishes difference and rewards sameness. The more we become affected by globalization, the more we see ourselves in relationship to a world as a whole, the more we're going to have to deal with that struggle that we've had in this country around conformity. The Baha'is have a wonderful image about the beauty of a garden, of flowers of many different varieties and hues and textures and yet rooted in the same soil and watered from the same source. But we have not been very good in this country at seeing diversity as something of beauty. We see it as a threat.

Picture a successful outcome to this project five years from now. What will higher education look like? What wisdom will we gain from spiritual traditions to enhance the educational process and reform curricula? What is your vision of the effect of this project in broader society in the 21st century?

I hope that colleges will understand themselves as global learning communities in which a diverse curriculum and interactions that happen around community service, in the dining hall and residence hall, walking across campus are all valued as part of the learning experience. In communities of diversity we need to help students to understand all of these experiences as some of the most powerful and challenging learning opportunities they'll have.

We are beginning to craft a global learning experience which is much more holistic, much less split. I think about this work as having identified the deep split in higher education in the West. Whether we talk about it as the head and heart split, or the mind-body-spirit split, or the split between the relational and the intellectual, we have this great divide. By isolating the intellectual processes from the relational, emotional, and spiritual in order to achieve some kind of objective purity, we have created deep societal wounds that manifest as intolerance, injustice, oppression, and illness. That's part of the reason why some people are excited about our project and saying: I've been waiting to be healed in this way. It's also why other people are saying: we don't want to touch this, it's too dangerous, it hurts too much.

When we see education as an integrative process which helps us to locate ourselves in the world, then we're on track for what I call the movement from information to knowledge to wisdom. If we understand knowledge as being the seeing, analyzing, and contextualizing of information, then wisdom becomes applying that knowledge with a deep regard for others. If institutions of higher education are to be truly about furthering that educational experience so that people can gain a deep understanding of themselves and others in a global context, then they have to look at it as more than simply mastery of information. That has dramatic implications.

I have a notion that our learning has meaning only in as much as it relates to our engagement in the world. That's how we make meaning of our knowledge, our education. In as much as that offering is in loving service of others, that is the actualization of education in the context of wisdom. I think the beautiful ideas of wisdom and courage and compassion that Daisaku Ikeda defines as qualities of global citizens are three cornerstones of what education needs to instill, particularly education in the West. It takes tremendous courage to do this work. We put ourselves outside of our comfort places, in many cases outside of what we learned in order to engage in this next step. And that process has to be a compassionate one, with a primacy toward loving action.

There is clearly a philosophy in our culture that Americans are the controllers of the world. To face the question of whether higher education in America is training people for that kind of future or whether it will take up the vision of global citizenship in which our allegiances are to a larger, more global community is a major challenge.

Diversity isn't a question, it's a reality. Global citizenship is not a question, it's a reality. We are inextricably linked in a global web of interdependence. We can spend lots of energy trying to deny that reality, which is what we often do in this country, but that only wastes the energy which could be better spent on learning to find healthy and exciting ways to be engaged in an interdependent world.

The one thing that I care most deeply about in this project is that we see it as being part of a movement. What we're doing at Wellesley is not a generic model, it's a particular story about a particular place. I hope in that story that there are learnings and meaningful pathways that will inspire others. The Education as Transformation project is simply a piece of a larger movement. If we see ourselves as competitive or working in isolation from each other, we can't do this work effectively. The community organizer in me is devoted to making connections across the barriers--whether it's religious barriers, ideological barriers, or institutional barriers--that keep us from engaging in this work of moving beyond tolerance of diversity to the actualization of pluralism.

Comments from Project Advisors...