Amer Ahmed:
Religious and spiritual identity and secular identity is part of our identity. And so as we talk about intersectionality, this is among the intersections that if we connected to racial identity I mentioned to you the experience of Islamophobia, well, you don’t have to identify with the religion of Islam to be subject to Islamophobia, which is, you know, essentially a form of racism.

Heather Shea:
Hello and Welcome to Student Affairs Now. I am your host, Heather Shea. Today on the podcast, we are discussing the climate for equity on college campuses with several folks whose work lies at the intersection of religion, secularism and spirituality. Student Affairs Now is the premier podcast and learning community for thousands of us who work in alongside or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs. We hope you’ll find these conversations, make a contribution to the field and are restorative to the profession.

Heather Shea:
We release new episodes every week on Wednesdays. And you can find us at our website, studentaffairsnow.com or on any of the social media channels. Today’s episode is sponsored by EverFi. The trusted partner for over 1500 colleges and universities. EverFi is the standard of care for students, safety and wellbeing with the results to prove it. This episode is also sponsored by LeaderShape, go to leadershape.org, to learn how they can work with you to create a, just caring and thriving world. As I mentioned, I am your host, Heather Shea. My pronouns are she her and hers and I am broadcasting from East Lansing, Michigan near the campus of Michigan State University, MSU occupies the ancestral homelands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi Peoples. I am so thrilled to have these four individuals sharing space with me today.

Heather Shea:
Let me put them all on the screen here. And I am so grateful for your time. And each of you brings a really interesting and unique vantage point in this movement for equity. So joining me today are Dr. Amer Ahmed, Vice Provost for diversity equity and inclusion at the University of Vermont. Welcome also Christopher Stone-Sewalish Associate Director for resident education here with me at Michigan State University. Hi Chris, Dr. Cody Nielsen Director for the center for spirituality and social justice Dickinson College and Dr. Jenny L. Small visiting Assistant Professor at Salem State University. So welcome to the four of you. Thank you so much as each of you introduce yourselves to our listeners and viewers today. Could you please share briefly about your interest in and work around this topic? And we’re going to start with Cody.

Cody Nielsen:
Well, thank you, Heather, and thanks for the invitation to be a part of this and to all of you listeners out here today, who’ve given a, a chance to, to hear and come to this podcast and spend some time with us. My name is Cody Nielsen and I use he him and his pronouns. I’m coming to you from Carlisle, Pennsylvania on the unceded lands of the Susquehannock nation. Dickinson College, where I work is also has a very troubling history. We are the location of the first Indian industrial school in America. And so we are continuously working to dismantle our long system, our land standing systems of colonialism. My work in this topic is really driven by a call toward equity that I have figured out in the last 15 years of my professional career around this area of religious, secular and spiritual identities. First at my time at other institutions at the University of Minnesota and is really tied toward institutional policies. And so my dissertation work on this topic looked at institutional policies and practices at Penn State where the largest multi-phased center at a public institution of higher learning in north America exists. And I’m mostly focused at this point on both us and Canadian policies and practices.

Heather Shea:
Thank you so much for being here today. I appreciate it, Jenny, welcome to the podcast.

Jenny Small:
Hi, Heather. And hi everyone. Thanks for having me today. I’m Jenny Small. My pronouns are she her and hers, and I’m a visiting assistant professor at Salem State University. I’m joining today from my location in Needham, Massachusetts. I want to acknowledge that the land I lived on I live on has long served as a site of meeting and exchange among a number of indigenous peoples, specifically the Massachusetts Pawtucket and Wampanoag tribes. The Wampanoag tribe also known as the people of the first light has inhabited present day, Massachusetts and Eastern Rhode Island for more than 12,000 years after an arduous process lasting more than three decades. The Wampanoag were recently reignite ridged as a federally recognized tribe in 2007. As for my work, I’ve been interested in this topic for over 20 years since I was first introduced as a master student to the concept of faith development theory, which I realized very quickly, it was extremely Christian centric. I’ve been researching and writing about college students’ religious, secular and spiritual identities since then. And recently I have turned to developing a critical lens that addresses the impact of white Christian supremacy.

Heather Shea:
Awesome. Thank you so much, Jenny. I’m glad that you’re here with us Amer. Welcome.

Amer Ahmed:
Thank you. And I use he him pronouns. It’s an honor to be here. I am on the land of the people want to acknowledge them here in Western Massachusetts, where I currently reside, I want to acknowledge native people in each of the four directions in relationship to me and also acknowledge the University of Vermont sits on Abenaki land as a person who is identifiably Muslim from my name it religious and spiritual identity has been a pretty significant component of my human experience in the United States including the realities of that experience, both pre and post 9/11, which are two fundamentally different experiences in the United States. And as a person who works on diversity, equity and inclusion more broadly, to be honest, I don’t really have a choice as to whether or not I can it’s not a, it’s not a luxury for me. I have no choice as to whether or not I think, or consider the role of religion as spirituality as related to broader issues of diversity equity inclusion. It is a central to my experience individually, but it’s also central to my experience and understanding and engaging so many different kinds of human beings that I’ve been fortunate enough and blessed to have engaged in the work.

Heather Shea:
Thank you so much for being here today. I really appreciate it. That’s a great point. We’re going to unpack that for sure. Christopher. Welcome.

Christopher Stone-Sewalish:
Thank you so much. Like Heather, I’m coming from East Lansing, Michigan, and I’m thankful for the Heather’s land acknowledgement. And I’m also reminded of the land grant history of our institution and just how much work there is to be done there. And the problematic nature of that very term land grant in the discussions that we have. I came to this work first and foremost as an undergraduate student searching for meaning themselves and trying to understand what my place was and where I fit and was fortunate to come across some faculty members in the psychology department that were really interested in the concept of the psychology religion. And I tried to answer some big questions as a confused students around what did it mean for those students that were identifying with faith groups and what did it mean for those students that were identifying outside of those socially?

Christopher Stone-Sewalish:
In my work there brought me into doing additional work on domestic terrorism and the ties back into Christian identity theology that is incredibly problematic and frightening that we’re seeing today. The outgrowth of that in many of the white supremacist movements and to watch that come to fruition is a truly scary thing. And so much of the work we have to do around these identities is truly rooted in the safety of so many and our willingness to have difficult conversations, you know, as somebody who identifies as secular, I’ve spent much of my life having to explain to folks that I still do have values. I still do believe things. I still do have a connection to those things that I believe in, which are right and wrong. And I know that there’s a lot of other secular students out there actively trying to have that conversation. So I seek to engage all of those things through a critical lens while making sure to check my identities and my privilege. And I’m deeply thankful to be a part of this conversation.

Heather Shea:
I want to also acknowledge Chris that this was a conversation he brought to me probably, I don’t know, two plus years ago back when we were hosting podcasts on student affairs live. So thanks Chris for sticking with us. So we finally get this conversation needed conversation on the air. So let’s talk a little bit about definitions as I often start the podcast. What do we mean by religious secular and spiritual identities? Cody, can you give us that kind of primer?

Cody Nielsen:
Yeah. thank you. And all the colleagues as you’ve sort of responded to this first question and introduction because I feel like it will really help respond to this question. So for those of you are sort of the first time you’re hearing this term religious, secular and spiritual identity, this is a sort of nomenclature that has come over the last six years into the field more broadly. You have likely heard the term interfaith before. I’ll talk a little bit about the term interfaith and how the term interfaith is somewhat problematic. But the term religious secular and spiritual identities is now is now bound into the counts on the advancement of standards, the CAS standards, if you will that were reorganized and redefined around 2015 and 2016 with a group of colleagues and I we use that terminology that nomenclature specifically because it is in both alphabetical order in the English in the English language.

Cody Nielsen:
And because we are trying to promote an understanding of equity. Religion cannot be the dominant force on college campuses without a space for secularism to exist. And so to the need for us to have spiritual identities that are beyond the scope of religious, religious tradition, specifically to give space for people to, to move fluidly through different forms of spirituality, through different forms of secularism, to be both atheist, agnostic, humanist, skeptic, free thinkers, the many different words that we can use for any of these. So religious, secular and spiritual identity is a very specific and important way in which we sort of define the field right now. The other piece of that, that I think my colleagues really have built really well here is, is specifically naming why we don’t use the term interfaith and the term interfaith has been used traditionally over the last 125 years.

Cody Nielsen:
It was coined at the 1896 parliament of the world’s religions. It has been defined by many religious traditions most specifically, and most recently the Roman Catholic church as a language that is used to define the Abrahamic traditions. So Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and the relations, if you will, interfaith dialogue, interfaith relations between them. The use of that term interfaith is often though equated. If you look deeply in terms of the practices of it as further as further iterations of Christian privilege and Christian supremacy, because it drives from a notion that Christianity has built and constructed a way in which to bring other players to the table. And when the Roman Catholic church has named it as being between Jews and Muslims, they have predetermined who is included in the table and then themselves have made exclusive east and south Asian traditions from being included in this as well as permitted as preventing secular and non-religious students traditions from being included.

Cody Nielsen:
Now we’ve tried to make some changes over the time to this, but I would say that deep down, the roots of it remain and that all stems back from our sort of 384 year history in higher education back to the creation of Harvard in 1636. Anyone who says back to us in this field that we work in a secular field forgets that we have Christmas and Easter and they’re on specific days that align with the Western Christian calendar and that no one has ever questioned those days as being off as being days that people have the quote unquote right to be off. And so that academic calendar really is built around a Christian centric realm known as the Gregorian calendar. And it’s interesting because we often say that we’re seeing such a dynamic shift in higher education or in American culture or US culture because people are becoming more secular, there’s less religion, but we don’t really know that in higher education because we don’t actually measure the data of our students on campus.

Cody Nielsen:
We say most people are not religious, but we don’t actually take the time and the energy to actually ask them what they are. And data is actually contradictory to the sort of pedestrian nature that we’re saying is secular. And instead religion is becoming more complex and more diverse on our college campuses, which all lead back to both our definition of using religious, secular and spiritual identities, but also the imperative of this work to no longer deny that religious identities and secular identities are both changing and dynamic on campus instead of just a something of an afterthought. So let me stop there.

Heather Shea:
Anyone else want in, on this conversation and specifically about how the identities that students bring kind of interact with each other as well as with administration. What have you observed within your spheres?

Amer Ahmed:
Well, I think the experiences of, of certain identities are often invisibilized in the way these systems function and operate. And I’ll just give an example. When I worked at University of Michigan in order to be able to take the day off for my holiday I would have to make a request six months in advance to, to HR to get a floating holiday, which are the days between Christmas and New Years applied for my, for my holiday. The problem is that because we use a lunar calendar, we don’t know exactly which day it’s going to fall on. It’s usually one of two days. And so, and then I have to, would have had to create a rationale, write out a rationale for what I was going to do for that floating holiday that I’m using because the university’s closed on those days. So I would have to explain what I would be working on, on that day between Christmas and New Year. So as a result, I would just not do it so defacto, I just wouldn’t get my holiday. And so that’s like my version, my personal version of just all the different iterations of things, students navigate like access to food during Ramadan, or you know, a lot of other kinds of experiences that various identity groups experience.

Heather Shea:
Yeah. Yeah. I think both what you and Cody are talking about is really this idea that he named, you know, as Christian privilege and that’s campus systems and academic calendar being built around that. And yet we know we have many religious identities on our college campuses based on our domestic student population, our international student population. So there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of complexity there. And then you add in atheism and agnosticism. Chris, you spoke about identifying earlier as secular. Can you talk a little bit about how this plays into interfaith conversations on campus when people don’t consider atheism and agnosticism to be a faith, I guess, in the sense that Cody was naming?

Christopher Stone-Sewalish:
No. And it’s a great question, because, you know, as a part of the secular community, those weren’t conversations I’ve ever been invited to, because there’s no interfaith nature for those folks to say, well, gosh, you’re not of faith. Therefore you don’t have space in the interfaith conversation. It’s interesting because atheism has this tendency to feel combative on its surface. And I think it’s also really important to acknowledge atheists often skew towards majority identities like white cisgendered men. So as we begin to layer this, the conversation needs to be nuanced. I’m able to freely hide my secularism. It’s not something I need to bring up in conversation. And when you live in areas that are potentially heavily Christian, or in this case, I’m in an area that’s heavily Catholic, I can avoid the conversation and engage in certain traditions, right? And it’s simply an afterthought.

Christopher Stone-Sewalish:
I think it’s important for the atheist community to acknowledge that they can do that. You know, I think to discuss being secular is to really broaden that definition and create a more inclusive community because atheism is so often viewed as a negative reaction to faith communities. It doesn’t get included. And that makes sense to me, to a certain degree, right, is, well, gosh, if, if the nature of this person’s identity is an intentional negative reaction towards mine, why would I include them? And that’s why for me, it’s about secularism. It’s about space for everyone. You know, Cody touched on this, the most important movement really regarding the secular identities is acknowledging students are coming to campus with no religious affiliation at higher rates than ever before. And that’s something that often gets termed as agnosticism, but I think that’s limiting because that student’s experience when the relationship they may or may not have with their faith is so much more than how we label those things.

Christopher Stone-Sewalish:
So I think the secular community is being wise and moving away from utilizing some of those terms and really focusing on being secular. But again, it’s update, it’s upending these traditional interface systems that were designed without the secular in mind often because it wasn’t acknowledged we exist because it was a cultural taboo to even acknowledge that the secular community existed. It’s the thing that folks didn’t talk about. And that’s rooted in this idea for some of, well, gosh, how could you have a meaningful value system? What would that, how would you be able to define right and wrong? What does that look like? So I think, you know, secular identities are a part of this larger fabric of the campus conversation around values, because that’s a lot of what we’re talking about. The honest discussion about what influences our world and the decisions we make every day.

Christopher Stone-Sewalish:
Why did you make that decision? What does your inner voice saying? Where does it come from? You know, to be secular is not to be without that compass, but we need to be actively engaging all students in all settings, programmatic student conduct, classrooms, employment in these discussions about their values. And we can’t keep being afraid to talk about it. There’s this old internal adage of, well, gosh, I’m at a state school. So I can’t talk about religion. And that’s absurd because what that does is not only is that socially constructed, it’s socially constructed to stop us from having this conversation about religion and politics and values, and what’s important to us. And because we haven’t been taught to have that conversation, we continue to exist in this nebulous space. So how are we going to learn to have it, if we’re told it’s socially inappropriate to bring it up, and those are the things I ask myself often as once the appropriate time to talk about it. And you know, folks would say, well, gosh, it’s never appropriate to talk about it. So we’re refusing to talk about our values and that’s a really difficult place for us to put ourselves, especially when we claim to be doing that with college students. So we claim that that’s a really important thing we talked about.

Heather Shea:
That’s a fascinating point. And I am really kind of struck by that because I think some of the failures have really been this idea that public institutions, separation of church and state, like we no longer can have conversations, but as you raise, like what do we then, where do we then have these conversations? Jenny, talk with us a little bit about the, kind of just the measurement in general and, you know, as a researcher, how do you, how do you identify the demographics? In general?

Jenny Small:
Yeah. I’ve wanted to jump in on what Chris and Cody were both talking about it regarding like the sort of current presence of who was on campus and, and Cody’s reflection like, well, we don’t know exactly and Chris’s statement would, there are more secular students, but actually like we, we don’t really know that there are more necessarily, and I think part of the problem is that we have tried to do a better measurement.

Jenny Small:
We’ve tried to move away of saying sort of, you know, are you, you know, Christian atheist or other, you know, like there used to be really ridiculous categories, your choices were Catholic, Protestant or other, right. Obviously we are way beyond that. And I think in terms of measuring secular students, we’ve gotten better with having categories that are sort of like none like you, might’ve heard of the phrase, the rise of the nones and O N E S not N U N can get tricky when you’re talking about religion. But the category of nun is still not very descriptive because as Chris describes his identity as a secular individual, that is not the same as other people’s identities, secular individuals. And the, the tricky thing is when you mix in this question of, of privilege, as he, as he noted, you know, a lot of white cisgender, straight men identifying as atheist, there is a question of sort of how people are acculturated.

Jenny Small:
So where are these people who identify now as atheists, where they raise in atheist families, where they raised in Christian families or were they raised sort of with nothing but in a Christian society, when you, when you layer on Christian privilege or white Christian privilege, often you see that people who identify as non actually are quite privileged in terms of their identity. So they’re not going to have the experience, you know, Amer saying, well, I can’t observe my holiday because their holiday is probably still Christmas or, you know not everyone for sure, but a majority. And so they’re still not, you know, marginalized in the way that somebody who identifies with them minority religion in this country is so the demographics are, I would say, if you want to know the breakdown of the different Christian denominations on our campus, if you can really easily get that from or something like that, because there will be 12 different Christian choices, there is one Jewish choice, one Muslim choice, Hindu, Buddhist, and then there’s usually, you know, none and other. So smaller traditions are not representative representative, indigenous traditions, African or Caribbean traditions. Those are all filed in other, and nobody is breaking down how people were raised. And so how much privilege they’re bringing with them on campus, a long way of saying, I don’t know, and we could do better. But that’s sort of where we are right now.

Heather Shea:
This is fascinating. And I was, go ahead, Chris.

Christopher Stone-Sewalish:
No, I want to jump in on that because I think there’s an interesting generational piece there that definitely resonates with me as somebody who often has checked the nun inbox, you know, it’s, I think it’s easy to assume none is to be secular. And I think what you just made was a really important point around this idea that it is an impossible thing in many ways to measure, because we don’t have the tools to measure it. And we don’t do a good job of building those tools because we’re still utilizing things that are 50, 60 years old. So no, it’s an interesting point you make, when we talk about, you know, the nones increasing, especially generationally. I do think though for me to check that box is to check a secular box. And I think you’re absolutely right for a lot of folks that might not be it because the definition and where that comes from is so different.

Heather Shea:
That’s a great point. I think your point also about the, they’re probably still celebrating Christmas, they’re celebrating the Santa Claus version of Christmas versus, you know, the religious version of Christmas. Amer, can you, I think one of the things that’s complex about this conversation is I think it has largely been left out of conversations around DEI and diversity equity and inclusion on our campuses and you and your intro really spoke to why that’s just not possible for you in particular. But when we think about larger conversations that are happening ongoing around racial justice and de-colonization both on our campuses and our professional associations, you know, how, how can we as student affairs practitioners really bring all of these concepts together, if we’re talking about students’ identities.

Amer Ahmed:
Yeah, thank you for that. And, you know, religious and spiritual identity and secular identity is part of our identity. And so as we talk about intersectionality, this is among the intersections that if we connected to racial identity I mentioned to you the experience of Islamophobia, well, you don’t have to identify with the religion of Islam to be subject to Islamophobia, which is, you know, essentially a form of racism, you know, that you can be sick, he could be Hindu, you could be Arab Christian, you could be Latin next and be perceived as Arab and experience Islamophobia and the, the behaviors and the impact of Islamophobia, right? Then there’s specific experiences like my, myself, where I’m identifiably Muslim, because, because of my name, irrespective of my own spiritual journey and the relevance of that, it doesn’t matter.

Amer Ahmed:
That I’m, I’m going to have a set of experiences. I’m going to get profiled in a certain way. Those things are going to happen because of the way I show up. And so for us to have the conversation and just act like that’s not part of the mix of how diversity equity, inclusion functions and operates in reality is just a rejection of a huge portion of reality. And then another piece and before I get into this, I want to say that I, 100% agreed with everything that Christopher and, and Jenny shared. And at the same time, when we think about the the, the secular identity being a skewing cis white male you know, we have to get as some of the hostility that exists towards spirituality and faith traditions that exists in the academic space and framing being religious and spirituality is intellectually weak.

Amer Ahmed:
And oftentimes as making declarative statements about religion that are actually about post constitution Christianity and and you know, all religions teach one true way and X, Y, and Z. And then and then once we frame religion and spirituality is intellectually weak and basically make it not worthy of intellectual inquiry, which is something that I experienced in my own academic research and dissertation process. And my research is partially about Islam and black America as related to hip hop and was heavily pushed back on having a religious identity component in that, into that academic inquiry. But but I, but I think one thing that we never say right, is that these predominantly white men who say that this it’s intellectually weak to engage spirituality with subtext. And what is not said is that we’re basically dismissing them all indigenous people in the process, which most of those individuals would not want to be perceived as being dismissive of all indigenous people in that process.

Amer Ahmed:
But there is almost, it is almost impossible to acknowledge the holistic experience realities of experiences and and self understanding of most indigenous people. This planet, if you segment out religious and spiritual identity, it’s almost impossible. And so what does that create? What kind of environment does that create in the academic arena? When we basically say that it’s intellectually weak and in the process, it perpetuates the notion that all science, cause that’s all connected to it. All science is produced by white European people. You know, we don’t have to look at, oh, Islamic civilizations created the foundations of a lot of science and mathematics before, so on, which are essentially inherited by Europe and then acted like that didn’t happen. Right? And so there’s all these scenes of white supremacy that are embedded into all of these elements of this conversation. And so when we segment religious and spiritual identity out, when, instead of essentially letting white supremacy off the hook, you know, of not really fully understanding the way particularly white Christian supremacy functions and operates in our systems.

Cody Nielsen:
Yeah. I, I want to just add to that just briefly, sorry if there’s feedback there, but I really appreciate what you’re saying there. Amer with the sort of intellectual weakness, but also want to sort of highlight, and aluminate, it’s something that is under, that is sort of under the cuff. When we talk about things as being intellectualizing religion, and that is that religion in a sort of Western landscape is often appropriated as being a choice. And if we look at Eastern south Asian traditions, there is a lack of choice that is embedded. If you look at certain communities and cultures, Hinduism in India is deeply tied with one another. And not to say that every Indian or, or native Indian is of course Hindu. But I think oftentimes when we put it into the classroom context of intellectualizing it of like, this is your choice of your belief and practice systems.

Cody Nielsen:
Sometimes we forget the fact that people are so deeply tied to that experience because of the cultures that they are built around, sometimes seeking to escape it. And sometimes just that this is part of their identity. So deeply embedded that it’s not about an intellectual practice. It is a, it is just a true way in which they have lived throughout their entire lives. So that’s enough.

Amer Ahmed:
And it eliminates certain types of inquiry. Epistemologically like if we operate with a science versus religion debate, we don’t have a way of explaining how did Islamic civilizations advanced mathematics science, astronomy the men in the manner that they did are why? Because, it was about the, about not fully understanding the creator. So therefore inquiry into greater understanding of the material world in order to, to understand the immaculate design of the universe, right? This is a different epistemological orientation around science from how it’s framed in the Western academy, right? And so, as a result, we can’t even see that this is the water that we’re swimming in and the ways in which white supremacy and colonialism ended up getting reinforced in the process.

Heather Shea:
Jenny, you made mention, I’m going to switch to you, hear you for just a moment you made mention earlier about critical religious pluralism. As a theory, you’re picking up on, and I’m thinking about all of this conversation as, as kind of an interesting layer upon that you know, what, how do we know what are multiple ways of knowing? And when I think about a epistemology, I kind of go back to that idea of, you know, we need to be critical about our, the ways in which our institutions are promoting one specific way of learning and inquiry. Can you talk a little bit about your work around this area?

Jenny Small:
Yeah. I mean, some of how it started really related to this question of how people perceive you, you know it’s, you know, talking about Islamophobia, as you know, based on your, your skin color, your name, maybe your religious practice, but maybe not.

Jenny Small:
For the, for many years, probably, you know, 15 years or so when spirituality became a topic that was a little safer to study in higher education, it became a deep study of beliefs and values and practices. So essentially mostly people’s internal structure as a meaning making, and then how they acted or didn’t act upon those beliefs during the college years and did not at all touch on the question of what happens to, based on how other people see you and treat you essentially what we’re talking about, the college campus experience right now, forget the whole of society, but looking at the microcosm of college campus. So, you know, I kept coming back to the question of, well, why does it really matter what a Muslim student believes or doesn’t believe that doesn’t change their impact of the impact upon them of Islamophobia or, you know, structural racism or microaggressions, or any of the things that happened to Muslim students during college?

Jenny Small:
So I started looking for, and then eventually creating a critical theory to examine these questions. And I modeled it intentionally on critical race theory and lat crit, which is Latino Latina critical theory. Lat crit actually is, you know, in my deep study of all existing critical theories, I found that lack grit was actually one that did was a rare one that did look at religion as a piece. And it had the reason as the deep cultural connection between Latin X identity and Catholicism, not to say that all LatinX individuals are Catholic, but people believe that they are. And there is a strong cultural influence even with Latin X people who don’t identify as Catholic. And so I use these as a model to question things like campus policies, research that we’re doing in student affairs, our practices as student affairs, practitioners and faculty members to say, you know, how are people differently being treated and existing in the world based on their religious, secular and spiritual identities, but really it’s looking at, you know, who the privileged the typically white Christians and who isn’t, who are not privileged, who’s being marginalized and oppressed.

Jenny Small:
And so, you know, I was able to look at lots of different practices on campus. And also I looked at this question, you know, back from the beginning of this podcast about the interfaith, you know, is interfaith a good enough model to address privilege and marginalization along religious science? And I would say that, no, it is not for multiple reasons, one of which is that it doesn’t look at oppression. It looks at individual people and sometimes groups, communities through houses of worship or student clubs getting along better, doing things together to make positive change in society, but it doesn’t touch the structural pieces at all. It also only touches those who choose to opt in and or who are invited in. And so and so I so I’ve moved towards this critical framework just as we have with looking at race, especially because I just don’t think the old models of meaning-making and interfaith relations are cutting it anymore.

Heather Shea:
No, thank you for, thank you for talking about that. Because I think that’s a really important point. And I think when we put that labor upon students and those interfaith spaces to work together and build coalitions, you know, we’re, as you said, not addressing the structures that that are at their heart. So Chris, I want to switch to talking about practitioners. So many of our viewers of Student Affairs Now play a fairly specific role in supporting students’ identities, whether they’re in housing or campus activities or leadership development programs or fraternity and sorority life. Can you talk about what role student affairs and academic affairs needs to play in supporting religious, secular and spiritual identities and particularly maybe housing, right? Since you’re, you’re, you’re the practitioner from housing on our podcast today?

Christopher Stone-Sewalish:
No, I think there’s really three key areas that all administrative units. So those are academic and student affairs units can immediately focus on. It becomes really easy for folks to say, well, next year, when we calendar, we’re going to keep these things in mind, or next time we’re going to keep these things in mind for training or, you know what, I have an idea we’re going to have Cody come into RA training and he can just talk about all of this and then it’s going to be fine. It moves well beyond that into really looking at things like, you know, first and foremost, calendars and finance, we calendar around and we spend money on the things we care the most about. You know, it’s an old adage that you can tell what a university cares about based upon what it spends money on.

Christopher Stone-Sewalish:
And that is true. I also think it’s reasonable to say, you can tell what a university cares about based upon how it calendars. You know, oftentimes those calendars are built years out, sometimes in three to five-year increments. Whereas some traditions can look decades into the future for key dates. There is no excuse for academic calendars and administrative calendars to have these kinds of misses. You know, I really begin to think that we actively dismantle this Christian colonization of time and space by starting our planning first with the needs of our faith-based and secular communities in mind, instead of reacting to them later. You know, we ultimately need active reviews of our planning by members of these communities prior to dates being published and shared. And I think we make that harder than it needs to be. And we say, well, gosh, you know, how, why didn’t we know and how will we find out?

Christopher Stone-Sewalish:
Well, most of our universities have really, really capable folks in all of these areas on campus. That would be more than willing to look at your calendar and more than willing to look at your practices and say, well, gosh, you might want to think about these things prior to engaging in them. And we saw that recently with the University of Wisconsin and their academic calendar. I think the other piece to think about as human resources, how do we manage time away? What are our hiring practices and work flexibility. It speaks volumes to staff and in turn sets the tone for students. What we care about as employees and employers is what sets the tone for how students are going to interact with us, particularly students, staff that matters. I also think it’s worth looking at structured and candid dialogue. You know, we have to be able as campus communities to discuss these things.

Christopher Stone-Sewalish:
This moves well beyond relying on, on an RA to do a program or leaning on campus clergy, we’re talking structure, facilitated dialogue programs around our values, where they come from and how our identities intersect, and these things are all possible. And these things are all done in pockets. It’s ultimately on us to want to do these things in bigger ways and to ultimately want to bring folks in and compensate them for doing this as opposed to saying, well, gosh, could you, would you mind just coming, giving us a hand with this incredibly identity, rich, emotionally intense dialogue, that’s most likely going to cause harm willing, and would you mind doing it from three to 4:00 PM? We have to be better than that. You know, what we’re seeing is really an outgrowth of, you know, religion and politics from the 1940s and fifties in the United States.

Christopher Stone-Sewalish:
And there’s a really rich history there. I would encourage people to learn more about because we’re seeing these things play out in really problematic ways. But again, those three areas are things we can do now, right now there’s inevitably a residence life professional. Who’s thinking, how am I going to structure my year? And what am I putting on my operational calendar? My question is, who else are you asking that question of? You know, there’s a university thinking, gosh, we need to get our next round of the academic calendar. Who are you bringing into that conversation? There’s human resources professionals saying, well, gosh, we really need to improve our onboarding. What an amazing opportunity for you to really onboard an employee into the kind of institution that you want to live your values and be?

Heather Shea:
Yeah, I’m really thinking about conversation that we just had at MSU or one of my colleagues mentioned what would happen if we centered the needs of the most marginalized students. And so shout out to Oprah who mentioned that not the Oprah, our own Oprah at MSU you know, cause I think that that’s kind of what you’re speaking about is, and instead of, you know, going from this majority perspective, like what if we really thought about it differently? So I want to pick up on this idea about campus planning. I, Chris knows Michigan state just released a multi-year project DEI strategic plan with mentioned to religious holiday accommodations. It is something only goes so far perhaps Amer, can you talk a little bit about the institution level policies that student affairs and you as a chief diversity officer should be considering?

Amer Ahmed:
Yeah, well it starts with first of all, basic baseline level of resources and support including resources like religious and spiritual life. Let’s just start there. I’m fortunate. I’m at my second consecutive institution that has a resource like that. My last one Dickinson College is where Cody works spiritual life and social justice. My current university of Vermont, I have a director of interfaith center that reports to me, that’s part of our intersectional work of our division of diversity equity inclusion. So that sends a statement to our campus immediately that religious and spiritual identity is a component of diversity equity inclusion. It signals that to everybody, including our students, including administrators and faculty. What that allows is that as a division of diversity equity inclusion, that’s tasked with leading out institutional strategy and implementation across the institution and partnering with various schools and colleges and divisions around the institution is to ask them to embed these components, every aspects of what we do within our division, into what they do in their various areas and have the conversation around how we can be a consultative force and resource to work with them, to develop and implement their comprehensive strategy, to include religious and spiritual identity and so forth.

Amer Ahmed:
And how do we work together to identify what is the components of capacity building that you should be developing internally to your area of the institution and one of the aspects that we need to be delivering across your area. So let’s take reflection rooms and spirit and and prayer rooms for example, right? So some areas of the institution they can prioritize, they might be in a space circumstance, but they can probably prioritize that relative to what they have the control over, but some may not be able to do that. So maybe that’s a conversation more broadly institutionally as we think strategically around physical space is where are some strategic locations in which we can make those kinds of spaces available for students so that they are not unrealistic and with regards to ability to access in a meaningful way as part of their daily life on campus.

Amer Ahmed:
Right? So that’s just one of many aspects in that. And when I think about inclusive excellence and then implementing DEI strategy, what I try to remember or remind people is that is not to just think tactics, but think strategy. So how do those tactics connect to the overall strategy? Right? So how did this, how does religious and spiritual life and the different components that comprises that for our students and others on campus? How does that connect to our overall DEI strategy? Right? How does that connect to the ways in which we’re addressing racial inequity and gender inequity and so forth?

Heather Shea:
That’s great. And I love talking about it, the system level, and then also at the individual action level. And so Jenny, as a, as a faculty member and also thinking about student affairs programs, you know, how can we build this into our course policies? Or how can we take action at the individual level when we teach.

Jenny Small:
some of our faculty and student affairs programs specifically? I, I would say that there’s two roles. The first is to help your graduate students learn to identify and address Christian privilege. So graduates of student affairs, prepper preparatory programs should be able to identify Christian privilege just as easily as white privilege and other identity based depressions. Christian supremacy, and structural racism go together. They developed together, they support each other and feed each other and you can’t dismantle one with the other. So if you’re talking about structural racism and a crisis of Christian supremacy, but you’re not looking at Christianity and how it relates to that, you’re missing half of the puzzle.

Jenny Small:
And you’re going to run into a lot of problems in though, you know, the work that you’re trying to do. So I would love all graduate students to learn about this and to be prepared, to identify Christian privilege Christian supremacy when they get onto college campuses. And, you know, they’re developing policies and practices are working with those that already exist. The second piece that I’d like to see, and I think this is harder is for faculty in our field to interrogate their own blind spots in their teaching and research. It, it’s really hard, especially when you’re in a position of privilege to see that privilege. And, and we all know that it’s easier to understand the areas where you are marginalized oppressed, but faculty members really cannot be doing research anymore that doesn’t examine or doesn’t consider the impact of Christian supremacy.

Jenny Small:
It’s just like, it’s way too late to be playing catch up here. Like you should already be doing this. And you know, if you are listing demographics and you, and one of your demographic categories is not religious secular or spiritual identity, that’s not great if you’re, if your questions are about things like religious practices, and you’re asking like, how often do you read the Bible? That’s not great. You know, and those are very low hanging fruit. You know, there’s much more sophisticated ways to to reduce our blind spots and research. But those, I would say for student affairs practitioner or faculty members, those are the big things that I would like to see examining your blind spots and teaching your graduate students to see it for faculty in other fields. You know, the, I think that the low hanging fruit is the religious accommodations, like the holiday question.

Jenny Small:
I would like to see campuses moving away from faculty, having the power in those situations, but given that almost all campuses, the faculty do have the power. I would like to see a much different, more open faculty in every department that the default answer is. Yes, of course you can observe your holiday or your tradition or your families, you know observance and the default answer is yes. And we will figure it out from there, it related to your coursework. You know, if you want to examine your own blind spots around religious privilege, that would be great too.

Heather Shea:
I love it. That’s great. So Cody, you do this job at Dickinson college, right? So your role is really specifically in this space. Talk a little bit about what you do and then also what other campuses that you’ve researched in your study are doing this well.

Cody Nielsen:
Yeah. thank you. And thank you, Jenny, for naming the power and privilege and all of us for naming that power and privilege in this, because it goes directly to the question of what campuses are doing it well. So have you, as you’ve sort of alluded to, so at Dickinson college, I’m the director of the center for spirituality and social justice. I’m in our office for equity and inclusivity. The office that I have is sort of the echoes of like what was a previous office of the chaplain as Dickinson college, like so many other private university institutions. And there’s a couple of things here that I want to speak to about these campuses and thinking about this. So the private universities that have often had chaplains offices also have to be implicated in the sort of history of Christian privilege and a lot of Protestant Christian privilege in the midst of this public universities often say, oh, we can’t possibly have an office that does this work because we’re a secular institution, or we have this separation of church and state, which I will speak to what Jenny speaks of as what we call false neutral secularism, the belief that because we’re a public institution, we can’t possibly have this.

Cody Nielsen:
If you look at the way in which I do my work on a college campus and the way in which my colleague, Laura, who is at the University of Vermont, that, that Amer has the privilege of working with does their work. Our work is really around those policies, those practices creating the campus, climate manufacturing and fostering the sort of training and outgrowth of a climate that is done through exploring and implicating our implicit biases that are, that are there in that way. Any public university that seeks to do this work should also in many ways have offices that I would say parallel the work of Greek life and oversight and a support that looks at this. And we spend hundreds of millions of dollars every single year on Greek life. And not to say that Greek life is all bad, but we do a lot of risk management.

Cody Nielsen:
And admittedly, if we look at the sort of history of this field of religious, secular and spiritual identities, it could be very well argued that that multiple times over more individuals are part of some level of religious, secular and spiritual identity than they are in Greek life. And yet we deny that this is something that we need to provide oversight and support of, and strategically think about with 17 million college students and millions of students on public institutions today. So my work is really designed around institutional policies, practices and such, and I want to, before I conclude this, I want to, I want to state something around what Jenny says about the power and the privilege within that faculty realm. We are so often focusing in this area and we are talking about what campuses do this well by looking at the ways in which campuses have empowered students to be what we call interfaith leaders, but we are not being held responsible as administrators to actually do the deep work of climate that is there.

Cody Nielsen:
If our students are the ones who have to address and solve issues of anti-Semitism on campus, if it is our Muslim student association who has to do the work of overcoming Islamophobia on campus, we’re not doing this well at all. And in fact, I would argue that the problem is that so few campuses across the country are even willing to say out loud that it is our responsibility. So the campuses that are doing it well, and I don’t want to specifically name too many or, or such, but I often look to places like Penn State and sometimes the University of Maryland and sometimes Rutgers University in terms of public universities and in private universities enter this it’s, the schools have moved and really address the fact that the chaplain’s office has have been historically white Christian and privileged. So places like USC, wherever ruins, Sony, the only Hindu Dean of the, the only Hindu who is the Dean of religious life in all of north America, is those are the schools that I look to.

Cody Nielsen:
And I think too, in terms of our work around this, because they are implicating themselves and they are looking at their deep structural systems. And I think any campus that wants to claim themselves as doing well, cannot pinpoint back to student interfaith engagement, but must pinpoint back to what they are doing internally to address those systems of power and privilege that Jenny and others have spoke to inherit.

Amer Ahmed:
And Heather, I just want to interject real quick if we, if we, as institutions don’t do this well, there’s so many manifestations of, of what’s challenging again at the intersections in which we can’t acknowledge certain ways in which, for example, cultural appropriation happens and in the desire to separate religion out or spirituality out from cultural practices and spiritual practices like yoga. And we can’t have a conversation around the fact that that’s a spiritual practice that is segmented out from its spiritual tradition utilized as a and then not named and not engaged at, around the broader social justice issues related to those communities, right. Or mindfulness and in the use of contemplative pedagogy so forth and not naming it as Buddhism or and the culturals and traditions and the experiences of colonialism of the various cultures, traditions connected to that. So there are, there are so many layers and dimensions to what we cannot get to if we don’t even do the basics well.

Heather Shea:
Yeah, yeah. And who hurts, you know, who’s hurt by all of that. Right. And I, I bring this conversation always back to our students and future Dr. Stone-Sewalish, I know your research interests lie kind of around this idea of sense of belonging. And, you know, I think about my own incoming first year student experience coming into a massive institution, trying to find a community of support you know, among our most welcoming organizations are our religious organizations. So there’s a fine line. Right. and so I’m curious about meaning-making and these organizations on our campuses, how we connect students and form these centers of belonging, and maybe some of a little bit about what you’re hoping to study. And then we’re going to our final question.

Christopher Stone-Sewalish:
No, I think you make a really important point and, you know, to contextualize much of what we’re talking about back to what it means to be August in higher education, you have a lot of students coming to campus right now in the midst of a pandemic that are going to be together and residence halls and on campus, and seeking to make sense of everything that has gone on and will go on into the future around COVID. And when we think about these questions and we talk about sense of belonging, there has been this massive shared trauma. And so many of the groups you referenced in the discussions we’re having around spiritual and secular and faith identities, offer something to manage that. And I’m really interested to understand that is how do students utilize their identities to make sense of what’s happening, or are they, and what is that going to look like in about two or three weeks when they’re having those awkward first conversations with folks that they don’t know, or their RA is doing the first knock on the door, or they’re at an activity fair. And they’re just walking by rows and rows and rows of tables. And I think there’s this outstanding question of like, gosh, how do you make sense of that and make meaning of that you know, in the context of the world, in which we’re living. And that’s why this conversation is so important because it matters. It always has mattered. It matters at this very moment. It matters for these future moments because students are looking to us to facilitate those discussions and open the door for them to be able to talk about it.

Heather Shea:
Yeah. Thank you for, for bringing it back. I think that’s one thing I always like to kind of think about who is hurt in the process potentially. So as we conclude every episode on our podcast, we asked the question focused on the name of our channel, which is student affairs now. And I’d love to hear what each of you were pondering questioning troubling, kind of thinking about maybe related to this conversation or beyond as a result of our, of our time here today. So, Jenny, I’m going to start with you.

Jenny Small:
Yeah, I’m thinking about white Christian supremacy. I think all the time I kind of have a one track mind. So I am thinking about how to, how are we getting our scholars and practitioners to understand it, to make strides again, sit on campus, you know, when they’re framing their research questions about identity and belongingness, I want them to consider it. And you know, and how can we get people to think about religion through a critical lens? Like people are more practice anyway at about thinking of practice at thinking about race through a critical lens. I’d like to see people doing that with religion as well. Thank you, Amer.

Amer Ahmed:
Yeah, I’m thinking a lot related to what Christopher was talking about, just the reflection that is needed as related to the collective trauma that we’ve all and particularly a bit more acute experiences of inequity that this pandemic has laid to bear. And this kind of operating as if we have to go back to normal or whatever that is. And I’m like, then we’re just not supposed to act like this all just happened and we’re not still in it. And that and I think religious and spiritual identity is a huge source of reflection for so many and source of identity and also a component of how people experience inequity. So what does this conversation look like for our campuses going forward?

Heather Shea:
Thank you so much, Christopher final thoughts.

Christopher Stone-Sewalish:
There is a student right now who is petrified and afraid to move in and to start their education. And it surrounds all of this. And my thought goes back to what are we doing for those students and what are we doing to frame and shape their experience in the next couple of weeks? You know, I reflect back on this conversation that we’ve had, and there’s just so much work to do. And I think of what that student is experiencing as they sit in their room and try to make sense of all these things we are talking about. And my heart goes out to them because so much of what the work we need to do is about that student with that experience and that fear that they’re having.

Heather Shea:
Yeah. Cody, final thought with you.

Cody Nielsen:
Yeah. I’m thinking about the listener, the listener who has heard us talk today and has been thinking about this conversation, the person who has has, you know, snapped their fingers a few times, and the person who feels somewhat implicated in the midst of this. And what I want to say back is that this is of the most complex issues in higher education today. It is one of the areas that has been the least talked about, and it is complex, and it is meant to trouble the waters, if you will, that we have had this conversation. And I think about from a Jewish lens, the rabbi often the Jewish community often deals with the fact that there are 613 Torah laws. And the rabbi says, when asked, what do I do? And how do I actually practice this? And the rabbi says, pick one and get on the road. And I think about the ways in which there’s so much here to do, but for those of you that are listening and you’re like overwhelmed by this, my suggestion is find something and start on the road. And that will be the beginning of something that will transform the institution and transform your own experience of doing this, that moves from deniability or moves from feelings of being implicated or moves from feelings of feeling overwhelmed and moves into a direction that allows us to actually have this conversation and move this policy policy agenda forward.

Heather Shea:
Thank you to all four of you today. This was an absolutely fantastic and very timely conversation. I am so grateful for your time and your contributions to the podcast. Also want to give a shout out to our sponsors EverFi and LeaderShape. So a little bit about each of them. EverFi, how will your institution rise to reach today’s socially conscious generation. These students rate commitments to safety, wellbeing, and inclusion, as important as academics and extracurriculars. It is time to reimagine the work of student affairs as an investment, not an expense. For over 20 years ever EverFi has been the trusted partner for 1500 colleges and universities with nine efficacy studies behind our courses. You will have the confidence that you are using the standard of care for students’ safety and wellbeing with the results to prove it so you can transform your institution and the community you serve and visit everfi.com/studentaffairsnow.

Heather Shea:
Our other partner today is LeaderShape. LeaderShape partners with colleges and universities to create transformational leadership experiences, both virtual and in-person for students and professionals with a focus on creating a more, just caring and thriving world. LeaderShape offers, engaging learning experiences on courageous dialogue, integrity, equity, resilience, and community building to find out more, please visit www.leadershape.org/virtualprograms or connect with them on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn. Again, huge shout out to our podcast behind the scene superstar, Natalie Ambrosey the production assistants who will do all of the work to make us look and sound good and transcribe all the words that are our guests spoke today. If you are listening and you’re not already receiving our weekly newsletter, please visit our website and scroll to access our MailChimp login. So you can also check out all of our archives while you’re, while you’re there. We are approaching the one-year anniversary of Student Affairs Now, and we have launched a contest. So subscribe to our newsletter to learn more about it in the coming weeks. Again, I’m Heather Shea, thank you to the fabulous guest and to everybody who’s watching and listening, make it a great week, everyone.

Websites: 

www.amerfahmed.com

Jenny’s Book and Speaking Website

Books: 

Small, J. L. (2020). Critical religious pluralism in higher education: A social justice framework to support religious diversity. Routledge.

Podcasts: 

The Eclectic Inclusion Podcast