Amid surge of campus protests, chaplains find reason for hope in their students

(RNS) — Demand a college chaplain, and you’ll hear a story about the pro-Palestinian protests on American college campuses that is more complex, and in many ways less dire, than what you’re seeing on TV or in your news app.

Media accounts of the pro-Palestinian protests and counterprotests have focused on unwelcome encampments,fights between rival groups andarrests by police. Nevertheless the battle in Israel and Gaza, and the profound concerns it raises, some campus spiritual leaders say, have prompted what colleges and universities are meant to do: prompted them to reflect on what it means to be moral agents and to examine their own diverse faiths.

Whether or not students participated in encampments, prayer vigils, Shabbat rituals or supporting other students, they were growing spiritually and learning how to articulate their own place in history, the chaplains said.

Janet Cooper Nelson, a United Church of Christ minister who has long headed Brown University’s chaplaincy team, said the students at the university where the encampments ended after officials agreed tovote on student demands this fall represented a wide spectrum of beliefs.

On the large public campus of the University of Texas at Austin, Muslim students said Usama Malik, a chaplain withMuslim Space a community-building group in Austin, that their trust in university administrators and public officials has been broken by aggressive attempts to clear the encampments, even as solidarity among students of many religions has increased in recent weeks, often with support from local pastors, faculty and even parents.

Having seen art-making workshops, a sit-in, a Shabbat service and an interfaith prayer vigil in recent days, Malik said, “You’re actually seeing a range of things that are often missed in the way the news media has been covering the story.” The events, often student-led, are “diverse, eclectic and deeply moving.”

At Brown, said Cooper Nelson, students have become more engaged in campus politics and their spiritual concerns. These she has encountered “are prayerful, spiritually formed within,” she said. “You see the students weighing the information and their choices about acting on the following tips or moving them forward, very much in line with how they model what it is to live a life that’s grounded spiritually.”

Sr. Jenn Schaaf, a Dominican sister and assistant chaplain at Yale College’s St. Thomas More Chapel & Center, talked about the battle for many students is by no means an abstraction. “Love the battle between Ukraine and Russia, we have students who have family in Israel and Palestine. They’re panicked about people they know,” she wrote in an email.

“I’m grateful that our students are engaged in the spiritual and political sphere,” she added. “I’m also grateful that they are safe.”

Overall, the chaplains who spoke to RNS seem united in admiration for their students’ ability to form their own opinions, make moral judgments and hold the moment, as turbulent as it is.

Indeed, Cooper Nelson’s colleague at Brown, Reconstructionist Rabbi Jason Klein, said that while Jewish students welcomed the opportunity to connect the protests to Jewish values, spirituality and action, they don’t want to be taught by outsiders what to think about the issues at the heart of the protests.

Cooper Nelson doesn’t think it’s the chaplain’s position to educate as powerfully as to facilitate students’ takeaways. “It’s not my job to tell them what to do. It’s my job to listen carefully and to take note of and hold onto what I hear them weighing and measuring what they are putting forward as the ideas that seem most essential to them. I think we’re acting as friends, non-judgmental sounding boards.”

The Rev. Roger Landry, a chaplain at Columbia’s Thomas Merton Institute for Catholic Life, talked about how he has attempted to focus students on helping one another. “There’s a temptation to believe that a campus demonstration on a New York campus will have a significant impact on a 76-year-old, seemingly intractable dispute in the Middle East. I’ve urged them to be far more reasonable by doing what we Catholics do, turning to prayer and personal care,” he wrote in an email, adding that this “entails reaching out to Jewish and Palestinian friends to ask how they can support them.”

The vast majority of Catholics at Columbia are hardworking students who prioritize sanctifying their studies, and despite their many concerns over what has taken place in the Middle East before, on, and after Oct. 7, they are not pleased that the toxins of that region have been brought onto their campus,” he added.

At smaller institutions, the battle has also had an outsized impact, and the role of the chaplain has consistently been more personal than at larger urban colleges. At Eastern Mennonite College in Harrisonburg, Virginia, students and faculty held a sit-in and a prayer vigil last fall and called for a cease-fire, prompted by students who had traveled to Israel and the West Bank over the summer. After further student-led action this spring, the college administration joined them in urging the U.S. government to work for a cease-fire.

The Rev. Brian Martin Burkholder, the Mennonite chaplain, said he has tried to be present with the students who were on the trip who “felt compelled to speak out for those who were losing their homes and property and land due to Israeli attacks and occupation,” he said. “I’ve checked in briefly to see how they are doing and offer a space for reflection on their experiences. I wanted them to know they were seen, supported and valued.”

“Our Anabaptist Mennonite faith tradition informs supporting one another in community as well as giving and receiving counsel,” said Burkholder.

At Indiana’s Earlham College, historically Quaker but now very diverse ethnically, economically and across faith traditions, students focused on how they could support each other, rather than being combative, said the coordinator of Quaker and religious life, Mimi Holland. As at Yale and many other institutions, there are students who have family, both in Israel and in Gaza, she said.

“I believe there is something about the culture that is rooted in the Quaker tradition that promotes more thoughtful responses. The message of justice, bridge building, how we are all interconnected, not just as human beings but because of the whole world and environment we live in … that’s a very powerful part of our culture.

“Our students are incredible. I see young people actually putting the best of their faith forward and acting on what their faith calls them to do in kind, loving, justice-seeking ways,” said Holland. “I’m truly amazed by how caring and thoughtful they are.”