This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Buddhist Chaplaincy Speaker Series: The Value of Chaplaincy in Education with Annanda Barclay. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Annanda Barclay at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Lovely. Good morning, everybody. Welcome. Welcome to this last installment of this year’s, this academic year’s, Buddhist Chaplaincy Speaker Series. And I’m so excited to invite a friend and a former colleague, Ananda Barclay, who I met when I was doing my residency at Stanford, and Ananda was doing her fellowship there and also working as a chaplain for the students at Stanford University. So I’ve always wanted to hear more about the kind of work that she does there.
Otherwise, the Reverend Ananda Barclay currently serves as the associate pastor at the Sunnyvale Presbyterian Church. She has completed an advanced spiritual care research fellowship at Union Seminary and then also at Stanford University, and there she focused on moral injury1 and spiritual care.
Ananda is the co-creator and host of the award-winning Ambie-nominated podcast Moral Repair: A Black Exploration of Tech, produced in collaboration with PRX Productions and the John Templeton Foundation. Ananda is also a death doula, trained through the renowned Going with Grace program. And she is also in the process of and has been expanding her practice through the UC Berkeley psychedelic facilitation program, integrating psychedelic care into her holistic approach to spiritual support.
So, I think you can all see my challenge there when I approached Ananda to try and identify one topic for her to talk about today. And Ananda, I think you’re going to need to come back and talk to us some more in a little while. But today, I’m excited to hear, we’re excited to hear about the value of chaplaincy in education. So, thank you, Ananda, for joining us here today, and I pass it over to you.
Thank you. Thank you so much, Vanessa, for having me. I’m excited to be here and thank you all for taking time out of your Saturday morning to be here, to be in community and conversation with one another.
One of the things that really drew me to higher education chaplaincy was after the pandemic. I was at Stanford during the pandemic and realized how important spiritual care was in that acute time of crisis. I mean, it seems very obvious, but to hold people tenderly at a time when this was pre-vaccine and we didn’t know what was going on and high death rates. I saw very acutely the need for spiritual care and realized that this is a need that should go beyond just hospital systems, right, hospices, and jails and prisons. I think this is something that can be very, very accessible in other areas. And an area of deep concern for me is higher education, and not just general higher education. I wish I could say that was the case for me, but it was very specifically having to do with technological advancement and being at Stanford, the students there, and what they might be asked to do in light of AI, right, and moral injury.
When I think about higher education chaplaincy, there are some pretty significant differences than clinical chaplaincy. One, it’s a non-clinical environment, which I think has its perks in some ways, in terms of your ability to have long-term relationships with students, with faculty, with staff, and administration. In other ways, because it’s non-clinical, it could be a little bit more difficult to get right to the spiritual ailments that people are having because they’re going about their everyday lives. And so one of the things that I find important is relationship building.
In higher education chaplaincy, especially in a place like Stanford that’s not necessarily known to be as open with religion or spirituality per se, a huge part is getting yourself ingrained into the culture of that particular institution. So that means showing up at student events, and obviously not centering yourself in those events. Showing up in student events, getting to know students, getting to know the different dormitories for both undergraduate and graduate students. A huge partner of mine was the dean, the GLO office, which is the Graduate Life Office, and getting to know the dean of graduate students and studies. These touchpoints are very, very important because we’re not in a clinical environment in higher education settings. So people have to get to know you.
There are some similarities in a clinical setting. A huge similarity is that you still have to teach people what chaplaincy is. So you still have to let them know that you’re not here to proselytize. You’re not here to share—I mean, I’m coming out of a Christian tradition, right? So bless us all—but to like share the good news or anything like that. You’re coming to accompany people in their journey.
Given the age demographic in higher education, what you’re really doing is for undergraduate students, you’re helping them with late-stage adolescence into adulthood. So, a lot of them, this is the first time that they’re experiencing faith, their belief systems, their values outside of being at home with their parents. And they’re beginning to have some dissonance and some friction with what they were always taught to believe, and now they’re encountering the world on their own and what’s coming up for them. A lot of my encounters with students who were undergraduates, as it related to their family system, was, “Oh, my family, I was always taught this, but now that I’m going through life as an adult, I see things differently. And will my family still love me if I believe something different?” This was across race, this is across gender, this is across class and sexuality. “Will my family still love me if I do believe that LGBTQ people have the right to exist and thrive?” or “If I want to explore my sexuality?” I got a lot of Catholic students that would come to me instead of the priests for that.
So you’re really helping out folks that, to be honest, whose brains aren’t fully developed yet, and so also helping them with decision-making. Helping them make decisions that will lead to harm reduction. And what I mean by harm reduction isn’t simply, you know, like saying, “No, you shouldn’t take those drugs,” although sometimes we probably don’t want our students to take drugs, right? But harm reduction is giving the students the appropriate tools to pursue their self-determination in ways that reduce the harms that they might experience in that pursuit. Does that make sense? And so that’s also a huge part of chaplaincy.
Additionally, in higher education, when I look at graduate students, for the most part, their brains are still developing. It’s interesting because a lot of their worldview is all education, y’all. It’s all education. Like most of them have yet to have a job outside, like maybe they’ve had an internship, but it was still in the context of education. Older graduate students, I feel like those encounters were very similar with what I encountered in the hospital or something like that, again having to do with brain development. They’re able to make certain decisions and interact that way. But I was very surprised in higher education how I actually had to go back to youth. It makes sense saying it, but it was very surprising.
For graduate students, a lot of it was dealing with stress management. Some of them had children or had spouses. Some of them were in the military. For those who were in the military, it was often they came to see the chaplain because if they saw the psychologist, they were afraid that it might disqualify them or get them kicked out if they showed signs of depression or anxiety, depending upon which branch of the military they were in. For some of them, they actually probably could have used a psych referral, to be honest. I had one student who was in the Air Force and they were working on space engineering. They had experienced both, I would argue, PTSD and moral injury from training in the academy, and had lost both an uncle and a cousin that they were close to in a tragic helicopter accident. Part of what their training was in the Air Force Academy was to recover a helicopter crash in the middle of the ocean, which is kind of reenacting the exact death of their loved ones because that helicopter crash took place in an ocean. This is a situation where clearly it would be great to have a multi-disciplinary team for that particular student of psych and spiritual care, but in this particular case, this was not possible. So, it’s how to use the best skills and tools that you have to bolster without undermining the student’s ability to remain in the military, earn their income, and pursue their career. So, it could also get very, very sticky.
Another thing I’ll say about being in higher education chaplaincy is it is unique from clinical chaplaincy in that for the first year, I was the only clinician on the team. And what I mean by that, I was the only chaplain that had clinical training. All of the other chaplains did not have clinical training. And so when we get outside of the hospital and the hospice environment, “chaplain” doesn’t necessarily always mean the same education or training background. I do have a bias towards clinical training, I’ll admit it, but I don’t think it’s necessarily better than the other in the sense that the other chaplains all had PhDs. So they knew how to navigate the academy, which is incredibly important for students in ways that I did not. So when it came to acute things as it related to student credit hours, when it related to students trying to finish their dissertations or PhDs or trying to finish their thesis, their undergraduate thesis, those chaplains were excellent at being able to teach them how to navigate that space.
Clinical training does equal CPE.2 And so I was learning from the non-clinically trained chaplains, and the non-clinically trained chaplains were learning from me. And yes, there were frustrations at times because I was seeing some dynamics that just drove me nuts, but that’s just a part of it. And I’m sure they were frustrated with me, like, “Why are you so clinical?” which came as a surprise because I typically did not find myself to be as clinical until I got into the higher education space.
Another thing that I will say as it relates to higher education chaplaincy that is really, really important to note, believe it or not, you have more relational freedom. Meaning you will get to know most of your students over time. The more you show up on campus activities, the more connections you make, the more you garner trust, the more people understand what it is that you do and realize that you’re actually providing value and service. I hate to talk about it in capitalist terms, but let’s be honest, they understand that you’re providing a value and service that other admins’ job descriptions aren’t supposed to hold.
By the end of my first year, I found a great partner in El Centro,3 which is the Latino/Latina student designated house on campus for that community, and they understood chaplaincy right away. They were like, “Oh, we would love this, please host.” So I created some clinical hours where students could have one-on-one 30-minute sessions. I called it “Talk with a Chaplain.” It evolved to “Chat with a Chaplain.” And that was really wonderful because it enabled students, one, to experience what this chaplaincy is. That particular location was on campus, very important for higher education, it was right in the main quad. So it was right across from the bookstore, it’s right across from where most of the restaurants are in a central place on campus. So, everybody’s coming. El Centro was like, “Anybody’s welcome in our space to use this service.” So, it wasn’t exclusively for Latina folks. They were already open to having it be a value for the community that they were more than willing to house. And what it did is it provided relief for the admin in that particular affinity group because students are students and they’re going to come to the folks that they’re most comfortable with in their community to talk about what’s going on in their lives. And you all know that admins, they can hear a little bit, but they actually don’t have time to hear all the woes of the students and the dramas in their lives, which range from loss of a loved one to unsure what’s going to happen after graduation, also to the petty stuff of, “Do you know what this girl said about this and that?” It’s the whole range, right, of friend dramas.
Once El Centro got it, they said, “Yes, set this up,” because the value that I found that higher education chaplaincy provides is it allows the admins, it allows everybody else to perform their job well, similarly to in a clinical setting. And it allows the chaplain to take some of the messy stuff, right? The messy stuff that might not necessarily go to the therapist. At Stanford, the students were blessed to have, I think, free 10 sessions with a therapist, but also because students were so concerned about taking sessions from somebody who might need it most, the students who probably could have used the therapist didn’t necessarily reach out to the therapists. That was a huge issue all three years while I was at that post. And it just increased as dissent on campuses across the country increased with what has been going on with Israel and Gaza. Students knew that that particular resource for them was precious and there was not enough. I mean, Stanford has a pretty expansive program, I would say, but it still didn’t meet the actual need, I would argue. And the students were aware of that, so they would hold back and basically say, “If I know somebody who is in extreme need, I don’t want to take that from them.” And so chaplains, we were able to kind of cover that, which is huge.
Three times a quarter, we would partner with a multidisciplinary team on campus. Stanford has life coaches for students, so they could help them get their life coach together, which is free access. There are therapists on campus, again, that’s free. And they would also invite ourselves, like chaplains. And what we would do three times a quarter is do a grief support group. What I found with that grief support group was most of the students that came, the grief and bereavement that they had was from a loss of a loved one. And I think this is really important for this particular age group because their peers might not have experienced death of a loved one yet. And so, especially for the undergraduates, but it was also very poignant for the graduate students as well. And that was, “How do I talk about the loss of my parent, the loss of my sibling?” And it felt isolating for them because their peers just didn’t know how to relate, didn’t know the right things to say. And so, it was common to see normal bereavement and slight depression with that reality because who could they turn to? We encouraged not just that group, but for them to get to know each other and meet up outside of that group so that way they can form bonds and friendships of people who can relate to that life experience, which most of those students could not.
Another interesting thing about higher education chaplaincy is what I encountered a lot with students who are international. I came at the offset of the pandemic, and so a huge thing that international students had was, one, “If I go home, will I be able to come back?” That happened a lot for our Middle Eastern students during my tenure, and some of the Chinese students, which Stanford has a lot of. “If I go home, will I be able to come back?” “How do I explain to my family what life is like in America and some of these things that I need to do in order to finish my degree or to continue to pursue my career because it’s a foreign concept from where they come from?” Or, “Will I be able to afford to continue on to what I hope for?” A fourth one was, if a loved one died back in the home country, trying to get back home and trying to negotiate that. There were several international students who weren’t able to make a funeral or passing or go through those rituals of grief that help us manage the grief that comes up. There were several students who missed parts of those rituals, if not all of them at times, given when the grief happened, what was going on during class, or maybe some geopolitical tension where they didn’t know if they’d be able to go or come back.
So it was a really interesting and, I will be honest, it was a humbling learning curve. I didn’t realize how critical I was until I got to the education side.
If I were to sum up what a higher education chaplain does, a higher education chaplain does nothing different than a chaplain that’s gone through CPE or any other space, but it is very relational. It reminded me more of parish ministry than I expected. And so I think that is a huge difference. So for those of you who are really into community, the nurturing of community, showing up in community, and getting to know long-term relationships, higher education chaplaincy, I think, is a really unique place for that.
Now, I will say, it’s also at this point with this particular administration, it is at risk. So even right now, the office of religious and spiritual life there is one chaplain fellow that is still there, Ken, great guy, he’s a Hindu chaplain. And I know that they’re cutting hours. So if we also look at how our country right now, how this current administration and the unique political situation that we’re in is impacting higher education chaplaincy, it’s significant. We have a lot of these programs beginning to shrink and close, which for me is kind of devastating because the students could very much use this, and once they get it, they get it. I had a lot of regular students. It almost felt like if I had a private practice chaplaincy, in a lot of ways, this is what it would look like.
When we’re talking about the future of higher education chaplaincy, because right now I’m talking about a past, if we’re thinking about the future or the current present, I think it is incredibly important to show, not simply through words and explaining what a chaplain does, but to make it very plain the value of the services that we provide. The value of students being able to go to somebody to seek spiritual emotional care as it relates to their formation as a human being, and to differentiate that from a campus therapist or a campus life coach. Those things are similar, but they are acutely different. You have to show that you’re worth maintaining in the academy. So I think that’s actually the biggest fight that’s going on right now is how do we stay? And I think the biggest way to show that is to show the value, like what is the ROI for having chaplains on campus, which is kind of crude, but it’s just true.
I feel like we chaplains do our best work when other members of the team are like, “Oh, I don’t have to hold that,” or, “Oh, I didn’t know this information about this particular person that would be helpful to the overall care that we’re trying to provide.” Those kind of things that help to take certain stressors off the plates of others in the interdisciplinary team that is within our particular wheelhouse. Also, they could see the transformation of a student, which I will say in a higher education setting takes time. There is something very satisfactory of being in a hospital or possibly even a hospice, and even though it is harrowing situations, you’re able to dive deep really quick. You’re able to kind of go through a lot of these steps of spiritual either transformation or acknowledging that there’s an issue because the medical crisis is bringing it to the forefront. So, it becomes very fresh and accessible, and so the ROI, so to speak, becomes very quick for the other interdisciplinary team because it has to be. In some cases, it has to do with life or death, somebody’s going into a surgery, there’s a palliative situation. So you’re able to see the results of a chaplain as a part of that interdisciplinary team quite quickly. It is very different on the higher education side. It’s significantly slower. There is no medical crisis most of the time. And if there is, they’re sending them over to Stanford hospital, so those chaplains are reaching it. But if it’s not hospital-worthy, so to say, it’s slow, which is why relationships are crucial, crucial, crucial.
If I could go back and do one thing better, I would dive into, I would be the biggest networker. I would 3x my networking and I would 3x, “Here’s what I do,” and I would 3x, “If this is helpful, you know, let me talk to your center.” I would have to sell what is chaplaincy and really get in there. And I think that could make a difference because now you have a broader network of people seeing the value that you’re providing.
Lastly, I’ll say for higher education, different campuses have different cultures. Stanford’s very relational. You get into places because people know you. But when I talked to a chaplain colleague of mine, an Episcopalian chaplain colleague of mine who got his masters of divinity at Harvard, he said Harvard’s very different. He goes, “Harvard is just like if you’re there and you know somebody else, then you’re kind of in.” So there’s also, every campus has its own culture. So the question is, what is the culture of that campus and how do you have your chaplaincy appropriately adapt to that culture? What is the need in the campus? So I know Stanford students, high performers, usually type A personalities, very stressed. So there’s this thing called the Stanford duck. That’s how they describe their students, where they look fine on the surface, but below, their feet are just going, going, going. And so catering, learning how to cater and shift the spiritual care that I came to provide, because I had to build that program, “Talk with a Chaplain,” from scratch. So I had to figure out what are the times. I was testing out, is 60 minutes a time? Is 60 minutes too long? Is 30 minutes a good time? 30 was the sweet spot. How do I make sure I set up to where folks know how to find me, where to find me? Because originally I was at the old student union, which is where the spiritual life office is, which would make sense. And students have, like every religious and spiritual student group has their own kind of office in that space. So you would think that makes sense, right? But it’s kind of an obscure place to find on campus. And so if you’ve never met a chaplain before, you kind of don’t fully know what this chaplain or the spiritual care visit is. And then you have to go to the old student union on campus that you never really go up to the top floor because why? It just added all these additional barriers. So El Centro was just huge because it was incredibly accessible. So, it’s like how do you have the least amount of touch points that a student needs in order to find you?
As I got to know students and faculty, there was one faculty member I got to know and she was really great. And her students, they had an issue with the curriculum, bless their hearts. They were all undergraduate students, I think they were either freshman or sophomores. And I think this was the Africana African-American studies program. They got an intro into African-American studies. I’m forgetting the name of the particular scholar, but this particular scholar in this particular aspect of field of African-American studies, his work is a stalwart work. You have to take it in order to get the field, but homie had some issues in his personal life. It wasn’t the best. And so the students were like, “Well, why are we learning about this person who is awful in their personal life and yet is foundational in this academic field? Do you not think that there’s an issue here?” Thinking that the professor is signing off on this academic’s personal life. The professor’s like, “I’m not signing off on this, but you do need to learn this material because it’s vital to this field.” And so the students were basically protesting in class like, “You know, Stanford doesn’t care about humanity,” all this kind of thing. And so the professor brought me in. She created time in her schedule, which is wild, you all. Stanford runs on a quarter system. So she made time, which is wild, in her schedule for a whole class day where I come in. She did not sit in the class at all. She introduced me and she left so that way they can kind of air their grievances and I could hold them in a spiritual, emotional space. It was a unique time. It was kind of wild and it was one of those moments where I was like, “Oh my gosh, yes, I’m still talking with late adolescent humans.”
And it worked out well. I think they appreciated her willingness to do that. Do I think they appreciated it enough? Not as much. But, you know, I also think that’s at late-stage adolescence. And so, I highly recommend brushing up on just late adolescence development in higher education. I really cannot stress that enough because it just rocked me the first year. I was like, “What is going on?” I was like, “Oh, they’re teenagers. They’re late teenagers.” And as we’re seeing with technology, interestingly enough, it’s actually increasing adolescence. So, if we wonder sometimes, you know, Gen Z, bless their hearts, if we wonder, you know, when I was in my early 20s, I’m a millennial, but when I was in my early 20s, I was working two jobs. There were just certain things you just had to do. And that might not necessarily be the case with these younger generations because technology is shifting development. It’s impacting development, also relationality.
Another very fascinating thing that I saw, a phenomenon which is across the board but impacted chaplaincy in a very particular way, was the pandemic. So the loss that those students had of socialization during those years was significant and it also impacted their ability to communicate in person well. So, we had students that when it comes to conflict, just kind of went 0 to 60 as opposed to knowing how to sit in tension with another person or how to communicate disappointment or dissatisfaction outside of texts or emails or social media comments.
So it’s kind of a new world in that way. Chaplaincy has yet to address that, which is why I’m really interested in moral injury as it relates to STEM and tech in particular because I think with tech, we’re just going through the fastest, most dense revolution in the history of humanity right now, technologically. It’s just significantly faster, as we could see in the past three years since ChatGPT went public. And that is impacting how we move through and behave in the world, and it’s impacting these students.
Long story short, I guess, is spiritual care in higher education worth it? Yes. And also, will it be available in the future? I don’t know because of what’s going on with this administration. I don’t know.
Paul: Are you aware of specific education requirements for higher education chaplains?
Ananda: That’s a great question, Paul. No. So, there are no specific education requirements for higher education chaplains at this time, which was another part of a little bit of shock for me, to be honest, because I’m like, “Hey, we all need to be on the same page about what it is that we’re doing, same standards.” I never thought I would say that in my life about standards and process, but no, we do. And so I know the association is called ACUHO, the Association for College and University Housing Officers. They have a conference, they meet every year, they are trying to come up with educational requirements. What I met from my colleagues and other institutions is most of them have not had CPE training. And when I asked them why, for some reason, life things, most of them were academy-driven. So most of them have their PhDs, most of them do not have CPE, but 98% of them wish that they had. And so for those who have CPE or clinical training, I think you just provide more value as a clinician on the team. I think it’s better to see system dynamics, to be able to have assessments and interventions that are very clean and legible, especially when we’re talking to interdisciplinary care for the student. When we’re talking to a therapist, and I also think it provides, in an institution of higher education, especially one like Stanford, it adds to legitimacy for something that might be considered woo-woo.
Stanford’s one of those schools where even its comparable schools on the East Coast, like MIT, those students have more humanities classes requirements that are in the sciences than Stanford students. So when we look at CS, which is a big major, computer science, those folks that are in STEM fields, and that’s really where I focused on, those folks that are in STEM fields aren’t being encouraged to be in conversation with humanities at a rate that’s significantly higher than its sister institutions. So, you know, Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Yale, all of those students have more humanities classes in STEM fields than Stanford students. And so, when we think about technology being developed void of engagement with the humanities, I think that’s a problem. People are not data. And you see the result of that kind of thinking, I think, very much in what’s going on politically today, which is very much in many ways a product of, I hate to say it, but it is a product of elite schools, and in particular Stanford with tech. I mean, it’s just true.
But yes, I hope this was legible and accessible. I know it’s 9:43, so I would love to take questions. I think higher education is a field that’s still developing. I just hope it can stay around long enough to actually develop. It’s been around since the 50s, but it was mostly centered in Christian hegemony.
Shannon: Could you speak… I know a little bit about moral injury from more medical systems. And so I’m curious how that manifests or what that looks like in higher education or even in the adolescent population.
Ananda: Oh, thank you, Shannon. That was my research. We don’t fully yet know, so I’m slightly unsatisfied but still in deep pursuit. From the data I was gathering in the interviews—I did a mixed qual study, I still have the IRB, I have like 18 more years to finish it, but it got disrupted because of Israel-Palestine stuff, the students were just like, they just stopped taking surveys across campus, they were done—but what I’m seeing is for folks, students that are entering into, and again I focused on STEM, so I just want to name there’s a limitation here on my end, but some of them were asking questions of, “What part of my beliefs or values do I have to give up in the pursuit of innovation?” So if they wanted to be a part of this particular advancement in technology, which they were just happily, nerdly, really excited about, but they know that the moral, ethical culture doesn’t necessarily match up with their own, but that’s the only way to get into the door, there were already undergraduate students negotiating what part of themselves are they willing to compromise in order to have the ability to just the love of the pursuit of innovation. That’s a big one.
Augusta: I have a lot of heaviness and part of why I’m beginning to explore chaplaincy… How does a person… what I’m struggling with is in my service, how to show up for this, right? Because I have lovely friends who are doing great work in the world, well-educated, relying on AI. And I’m not using AI. It’s fine, I can choose not to use AI, but that’s not going to solve a problem. And so I just see down the road the fallout from decrease of jobs, increase in financial instability, increase in the number of people who are unhoused, increase in opioid epidemics and other substance use, and more stealing and more buckling down from the administration and violence. I get hot just naming it. And so I know you don’t have any answers, but I don’t even know who to have the conversation with.
Ananda: Thank you for asking it. I think you said a quiet part out loud just now. It is one of the main reasons why moral injury in tech haunts me. When I was putting the pieces of the puzzle together to just try to begin to pursue it, it haunted me because of a lot of the things that you named. I think one of the gifts that millennials and up in terms of generations can give is that we know how to relate to people, we know how to talk to people. We grew up before we were digital natives. So teaching our young folks that it’s okay to talk, it’s okay to disagree, because they’ve never seen a government that’s bipartisan, if you think about it. And I think this is something that y’all as Buddhists in particular can be really amazing for everybody else at, and it’s your ability to be present. Because it’s moving so fast… but there are ways in which to use AI and how not to use AI and how to watch out for AI that are going to be very needed.
Moral Injury: The psychological distress which results from actions, or the lack of them, which violate one’s moral or ethical code. It is often experienced by individuals in high-stakes environments like the military, healthcare, and, as discussed here, technology and education. ↩
CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education): A standardized, experience-based form of theological education that provides spiritual care training in clinical settings, such as hospitals and hospices. It is a common requirement for professional chaplains. ↩
El Centro Chicano y Latino: Stanford University’s cultural center for the Chicano/Latino community, providing resources, support, and a gathering space for students. ↩