Campus Prophets, Spiritual Guides, or Interfaith Traffic Directors? The Many Lives of College and University Chaplains The Luce Lectures on the Changing Role of Chaplains in American Higher Education Based on a Lecture Delivered on November 13, 2018 John Schmalzbauer Department of Religious Studies Missouri State University 901 South National Avenue Springfield, MO 65897 Email:
[email protected] What roles do chaplains play in contemporary American higher education? Drawing on the National Study of Campus Ministries (2002-2008), this paper contrasts the post-war chaplaincy with its twenty-first century successor. While a relatively young occupation, the job of the college chaplain has shifted greatly over the past sixty years. Vastly different from the 1950s, the demographic profile of college chaplains has also changed, reflecting the growing presence of women clergy and the diversification of the American campus. Accompanying these shifts, changes in American religion have transformed the context of the profession. Though some things have remained the same (chaplains still preach, counsel, and preside over religious services), other things are very different. On the twenty-first century campus, chaplains have increasingly found themselves occupying the roles of campus prophets, spiritual guides, and interfaith traffic directors, a combination that did not exist in the mid-century chaplaincy.1 In chronicling these changes, it is helpful to compare accounts of post-war chaplaincy with the twenty-first century profession. Historian Warren Goldstein’s work on Yale University chaplain William Sloane Coffin, Jr. looms large in this comparison. For a whole generation of mainline Protestants, Coffin modeled an approach to chaplaincy that emphasized the public, prophetic components of the role, accompanying the Freedom Riders and protesting the Vietnam War.