Each year, the In Trust Center provides Resource Grants to support schools with matching funds for special projects. This story, by Karen Stiller, is part of a series highlighting initiatives made possible through these grants. Learn more about the Resource Grants program here.
United Theological Seminary Raises a Glass to Higher Education
Imagine a comfortable room in a Benedictine abbey nestled in the central Minnesota prairie. It’s twilight on the closing day of a two-day conference, where a small group of regional professors are united by their passion for teaching, higher education, and the role of the humanities, especially about the value of religious studies in the academy and to the world.
Everyone holds a glass, raises it, and offers a toast to higher education, sharing what it means to them, to their lives, and their students. That clinking of glasses and story sharing provided a fitting conclusion to the Higher Aspirations of Higher Education conference, held May 28-29, 2024, and hosted by United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities.
The conference offered an intentional pause for the seminary’s professors to discuss what Dr. Andrew Packman, assistant professor of Theological Ethics and Formation at United, describes as three central realities – economic, technological, and environmental – facing higher education. Under each reality, Packman identifies three related ideas of what it is to be human: “rational utility maximizer, disembodied information processor, and vulnerable culprit of our annihilation.” These views, he suggests, influence how higher education has shaped, how it functions today, and what it offers the student and the professor. Is there another way?
“I wanted to recruit and build relationships with fellow teachers and religious practitioners at other universities to get people interested in this question that was bearing down on all of us,” says Packman. “What should we be aspiring toward as educators? What alternative visions of the human might we consider and cultivate in higher education?”
The seminary professors also wanted to deepen relationships with fellow professors of religious studies in schools across Twin Cities institutions, as well as hear voices from disciplines equally concerned with the experience of teaching and learning in higher education today.
“It turned out to be an energizing conversation,” says Packman. “We had a religion faculty, a philosophy professor who reflected on the impact of AI on students, and chaplains sharing field notes from their frontline work from the intersection of higher education and religion. We also welcomed an agricultural economist, who had nothing to do with religion. She studies bush meat markets in sub-Saharan Africa and is the kind of economist who subverts some of the assumptions we have. Yet, she takes seriously the formative value of higher education beyond its immediate utility on the job market.”
According to Packman, the economist, “reflected to the religion scholars the empirical state of play in higher education right now. It’s easy to villainize economic forces in higher education, as if they alone are responsible for corrupting our institutions of higher learning. But wouldn't it be more interesting if we invited an economist into this discussion, to see if they might help us find ways to respond more deftly to these realities? I think people responded to her presentation.”
The retreat-like setting at St. John’s University in Collegeville added to the conference's relaxed and collegial environment. “We had this mix of theologians, chaplains, historians, philosophers, and an economist," says Packman. "There was value in changing the scenery to loosen up the more rigid habits we get into. We were able to let our minds wander and be more playful than reactive to administrative concerns.”
Some of the administrative concerns in the minds of United’s faculty were the rewriting of degree and program outcomes. Packman says the thinking generated by the time away helped with that process.
“As higher education faces a plethora of crises that are fundamentally changing its nature, how we teach religion that reinflates student imaginations for what higher education is for, instead of the economic calculus of ‘How can I get a job?’ and ‘What do I get out of this?’”
An In Trust Resource Grant helped fund the conference, including a post-conference dinner for United Seminary professors could debrief the experience and discuss next steps. Packman believes the seeds were planted for a collaboration network and ongoing support between the different schools and disciplines represented at the Higher Aspirations of Higher Education conference.
“The establishment of a better network has been on my mind, and one of the reasons we pursued the grant,” he explains. “We wanted to discern the deeper spiritual impulses of students in higher education and use that knowledge to recalibrate our degree outcomes. The proximate interest is to be more appealing to students graduating from the other schools we invited. As a theologian, I wanted to interrogate the spiritual impulses as potential sites of revelation, and if we find these nascent spiritual impulses, then this might be a movement of the spirit of the living God in this time. What can we learn about what God is up to now in this bizarre moment of higher education, which might help us create a more responsive approach to theological education?”
It’s a question without easy answers, though some were hinted at in the final, joyful group toast. Packman found the idea of an ending toast in the book "The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters," by Priya Parker. “She suggests priming a group conversation with the idea of offering a toast in service of some value we all admit,” explains Packman. “We toasted higher education. This transformed the atmosphere of the gathering and got us thinking about why it is we love this thing we've committed our lives to.”
ne of the questions we asked them was about the concept of fusion theology. And they loved it.”