MODELING HIGHER EDUCATION EFFECTS ON STUDENT SPIRITUALITY

Spirituality is an increasingly important topic to management educators and researchers alike. This paper attempts to contribute to this emerging topic by proposing a preliminary theoretical model of student spirituality in higher education including its antecedents, attributes, campus influences and outcomes. Spirituality can be a “powerful force in the lives of people ” (Gibbons, 1999) and it may help organizations to become more humane, socially active and environmentally responsible (Mitroff and Denton 1999; Nadesan 1999). Evidence of the increased interest in spirituality within business is pervasive. Because of it, management educators must also be attentive. If spirituality can impact work places and their workers, so too might it be able to impact business schools and business students. To this point in time however, management educators, and educators in general, have largely omitted the spiritual dimension. To illustrate, English and Gillen (2000) note that “…educators have paid a great deal of attention to the aesthetic, social, emotional, physical, intellectual, and other aspects of education but have neglected the equally important spiritual dimension ” (p. 2). They argue that to omit the spiritual dimension is to ignore the importance of a holistic approach to learning as well as the complexity of the learner