"Interfaith Work and Higher Education"
 
 
This morning’s session, regarding the role of interfaith work in higher education, was a vibrant discussion involving people from many different roles within higher education.  Eboo Patel, founder and Executive Director of the Interfaith Youth Core, began the session by telling the story of his own college experience.  At the University of Illinois in the early 1990s, Eboo took an active role in the multicultural movement, engaging issues of race, sexuality, and class.  However, whenever he would go home, his father would always ask him where religion was in all of these conversations about diversity. “ In a tumultuous time of religious violence, why isn’t the issue of religion on the table?”

With this frame in mind, Eboo posed several questions to the panel about how institutions of higher education should properly engage religious diversity.  Each panellist came with a distinct point of view.  Rev. Scotty McLennan is involved in religious life as chaplain of Stanford University. Dr. Barbara McGraw runs a Center for Engaged Religious Pluralism at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, California. Dr. Alan Ray is the President of Elmhurst College outside of Chicago, and Dr. Paul Arntson is a professor at Northwestern University studying issues of leadership and civic engagement.   The resulting conversation ranged from issues regarding what universities are already doing to build religious pluralism to how we can catalyze students and institutions to engage these issues more deeply.   All participants emphasized that despite the difficulty of discussing issues of religion on campus, the work is deeply important to building stronger communities throughout the world. 

Eboo urged the panellists to respond to some of the harder questions regarding interfaith work:  how do we know when we’ve created real change?  How are we making our issue relevant to broader society?  How do we get more people involved?  Dr. Ray reflected on the importance of making universal claims, such as “interfaith cooperation will build a better world,” local through concrete action.  Dr. Arntson stated that the action itself must be the driving force of interfaith work; interfaith work proves its relevance through its impact.  Dr. McGraw emphasized the importance of bringing the whole campus community to the table, which will make the issue one that everyone knows cares about.   While the conversation certainly shed light on how to address some of the barriers to interfaith work, what was most clear is that we still have so much to do.  Building bridges on campus is crucial to furthering the interfaith movement.
Mary Ellen Geiss
Interfaith Youth Core Partnerships Associate
October 26th, 2009