From the Editor

Higher Values

by Sherri Kimmel

December 30, 2008

In his classic book, Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences, the psychologist Abraham Maslow ponders many lofty questions related to the meaning of life. But in “Value-free Education?”, Chapter VII of this slim 1964 volume, he probes the role of spirituality in the academy. He writes that “… the far goal of education—as of psycho-therapy, of family life, of work, of society, of life itself—is to aid the person to grow to fullest humanness, to the greatest fulfillment and actualization of his highest potentials, to his greatest possible stature.”

Maslow goes on to say, “The final and unavoidable conclusion is that education— like all our social institutions—must be concerned with its final values, and this in turn is just about the same as speaking of what have been called ‘spiritual values’ or ‘higher values’. These are principles of choice which help us to answer the age old ‘spiritual’ (philosophical? religious? humanistic? ethical?) questions: What is the good life? What is the good man? The good woman? What is the good society and what is my relation to it? What are my obligations to my society? …”

These are questions that Dickinson’s Founding Father Benjamin Rush also pondered, as you will read in the president’s and provost’s columns that follow. In his early life, Rush viewed ethical and spiritual issues through a Presbyterian lens. While the lens through which Dickinsonians—educators, students, alumni—see is more ecumenical today, it still is clearly focused on the values that Rush considered to be critical components of a “useful” education.

The succeeding pages depict professors, students and graduates who concern themselves with ethics and spirituality as practiced in a global society. I think Rush and his “offspring” would embrace Maslow’s assertion that “education is properly a universal, ubiquitous, and life-long proposition.” And the belief that spirituality plays a key role in one’s life journey: serving to inspire, to awe, to comfort and to guide.