InFORM

Including Faculty on Religious, Spiritual, & Secular Mattering

The role of religion in American society broadly, and higher education specifically, has been a topic of increased discussion. News outlets such as NPR have covered the decline in religion’s importance in the lives of many Americans, yet religious perspectives remain entrenched in our national politics and conversations. In many ways, higher education is at the center of this debate, as conservative governors replace college and university presidents and faculty grapple with divisive conversations in class.

While much is known about religious, spiritual, and secular (RSS) affiliations of Americans generally, no recent empirical efforts have examined the RSS identities for faculty working in American colleges and universities and how these identities shape teaching, research, and service. InFORM, funded by the Templeton Religion Trust, is a mixed-methods effort with two objectives aimed at filling this gap:

  1. Capture information on faculty RSS identification patterns, including denominational, political, racial, gender, and philosophical worldview affiliations, and

  2. Examine faculty expression of RSS beliefs and their salience in informing practices related to teaching, research, and service.

Focusing on Faculty

Faculty are the most important persons influencing student learning, development, persistence, and degree attainment (see Mayhew et al., 2016). However, no systematic data collection efforts are underway regarding how their RSS affiliations influence research, teaching, and service practices. This project will create the necessary data gathering system regarding RSS faculty affiliations and practices and will recruit a nationally-representative group of faculty for participation.

This project also complements much of the work on RSS affiliation currently underway in higher education, which have focused on student experiences or institutional practices designed to address issues related to religious pluralism.

InFORM Timeline

InFORM aims to examine how faculty connect to and make meaning of their religious, secular, and spiritual beliefs and affiliations as they relate to research, teaching, and service practices. To that end, project follows a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design wherein quantitative survey data are collected first, analyzed, and then qualitative data are collected to explain the initial findings and provide further nuance (see Creswell & Plano Clark, 2017). A pilot study was conducted in 2024, and the national project is currently underway in four phases:

Phase 1: Survey Instrument Design

The first phase of the project involved building a survey instrument that collected nuanced information about faculty RSS affiliations and their role in shaping research, teaching, and service practices. The survey’s theoretical framing was multi-dimensional, including the Interfaith Learning and Development Framework (Mayhew & Rockenbach, 2021), Soules and Jafralie’s (2021) RSSI teaching practices, Boyer’s (1990) functions of scholarship, and Ward’s (2003) categories of service.

Items were pilot tested and psychometrically evaluated in Autumn 2024.

Phase 2: Survey Administration

The second phase of the project involved participant recruitment and administration of the survey instrument. Our goal was a sample nationally-representative of RSS affiliations, faculty disciplines, and institutional types in the United States. We conducted a power analysis to determine the optimal sample size needed to detect statistical differences in faculty members’ survey responses by institutional religious affiliation (public, private nonsectarian, private sectarian), geographic region (Northeast, Midwest, South, West), discipline, and religious identification. Surveys were distributed to over 14,000 faculty during this phase to meet our response goals.

The National Survey was conducted December 2024 - February 2025 and is currently being analyzed.

Phase 3: Qualitative Data Collection

Survey respondents indicated their interest to participate in qualitative interviews. The third phase involves interviewing selected participants across RSS affiliations, academic disciplines, and institutional types, matched to interviewers from the same or similar worldview background. We planned to select 125 faculty members based on a 5x5x5 sample matrix, consisting of the five religious affiliations (i.e., Atheist, Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim), five disciplines (i.e., arts and humanities, business, STEM, education, and social science), and five institutional types (public, private-Evangelical, private-Mainline Protestant, private-non-sectarian, private-Catholic). These categories are empirically-based representations of major RSS affiliations, disciplines, and institutional types, with additional interviewing of underrepresented RSS affiliations. The goal of the semi-structured interviews is to allow participants to elaborate on their RSS beliefs and their roles related to research, teaching, and service.

Interviews will be conducted in late Spring and Summer of 2025.

Phase 4: Dissemination of Findings

The final stage of the project will involve the dissemination of the findings through various academic and non-academic outlets. In the public domain, we will host a website where the public can easily access our project’s findings as we have done with IDEALS and the Interfaith, Spiritual, Religious, and Secular Campus Climate Index (INSPIRES). With our funding partner, Templeton Religious Trust, we look forward to offering a publicly accessible de-identified dataset to support further research on worldview in higher education.

Advisory Board

KC Culver, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Higher Education Administration
University of Alabama

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KC Culver KC Culver, Ph.D.
University of Alabama

KC Culver is an assistant professor in the Higher Education Administration program at the University of Alabama. She earned a bachelor’s degree from St. Mary’s College of Maryland, master’s degrees from the University of South Carolina and Auburn University, and a PhD from the University of Iowa. Prior to Alabama, she has taught, conducted research, and served as an administrator through academic appointments at the University of Southern California and the University of Miami.

Her research seeks to improve equity in three areas central to the academic mission of higher education: faculty careers, teaching practices, and the relationship of students’ academic experiences with their outcomes. She is the Associate Director of the Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success, housed in the Pullias Center for Higher Education at USC; she also serves as the Associate Editor of Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning.

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Michael Roth, Ph.D.
President
Wesleyan University

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Michael Roth Michael Roth, Ph.D.
Wesleyan University

Michael S. Roth '78 became the 16th president of Wesleyan University in 2007. He has overseen the launch of academic programs at Wesleyan such as the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life and the Shapiro Center for Writing, as well as five new interdisciplinary colleges emphasizing research and cohort building in the areas of the environment, film, East Asian studies, integrative sciences, and design and engineering. Under his leadership, Wesleyan had its most ambitious fundraising campaign in its history, raising more than $482 million, primarily for financial aid. Roth has undertaken a number of initiatives that have made a Wesleyan education more affordable for many and more accessible to students from under-represented groups.

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision in July 2023, he announced a suite of new recruiting efforts aimed at enhancing diverse campus learning including an end to admissions preference for legacy applicants and the creation of an African Scholars Program. An intellectual historian, Roth has published several books centered on how people make sense of the past. Since returning to Wesleyan, he has published three books (all with Yale University Press) bearing on liberal education, the most recent being The Student, A Short History (2023). His Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters (2014), was recognized with the Association of American Colleges & Universities’ Frederic W. Ness award for a book that best illuminates the goals and practices of a contemporary liberal education. Roth’s 2019 book, Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatist’s Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech, and Political Correctness, addresses some of the most contentious issues in American higher education, including affirmative action, safe spaces, and questions of free speech. Roth continues to teach undergraduate courses and at Wesleyan and online.

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Mathew Guest, Ph.D.
Professor in the Sociology of Religion
Durham University

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Mathew Guest Mathew Guest, Ph.D.
Durham University

Dr. Mathew Guest is Professor in the Sociology of Religion within the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University in the UK. He has been on the academic staff here since 2004, pursuing a series of research projects chiefly concerned with the status of religious identities within UK universities. Emerging co-authored publications have included Christianity and the University Experience: Understanding Student Faith (2013), Chaplains on Campus: Understanding Chaplaincy in UK Universities (2019) and Islam on Campus: Contested identities and the Cultures of Higher Education in Britain (2020). He has, for the past 2 years, co-led (with Kristin Aune) a project on Building Positive Relationships Among University Students Across Religion and Worldview Diversity, a UK initiative inspired by and modeled on the US-based IDEALS project.

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Linda Sax, Ph.D.
Professor of Higher Education
UCLA

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Linda Sax Linda Sax, Ph.D.
University of California, Los Angeles

Linda J. Sax is a Professor of Higher Education in the School of Education & Information Studies at UCLA and Founding Director of Momentum: Accelerating Equity in Computing and Technology. Dr. Sax’s research focuses on gender differences in college student development, with an emphasis on women in STEM fields. An author of more than 100 publications, Dr. Sax has generated over $10 million in research funding and is currently Principal Investigator for several research studies focused on understanding diversity efforts in undergraduate computing. Her work on this topic has been funded by the National Science Foundation, AnitaB.org, the Computing Research Association, the Kapor Center, and Pivotal Ventures, Executive Office of Melinda Gates.

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Muhammad Khalifa, Ph.D.
Professor of Educational Administration
The Ohio State University

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Muhammad Khalifa Muhammad Khalifa, Ph.D.
The Ohio State University

Dr. Muhammad Khalifa is a professor of educational administration and the Executive Director of Urban and Rural Initiatives at The Ohio State University. His research has addressed culturally responsive leadership, anti-racism, minoritized student identities in school, and how schools can become liberatory spaces for youth by recognizing and valuing the experiential/ancestral knowledges in and around schools. He contributed to research and learning projects in over 10 countries in the Americas, Asia, and Africa.

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Kentaro Toyama, Ph.D.
W.K. Kellogg Professor of Community Information
University of Michigan

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Kentaro Toyama Kentaro Toyama, Ph.D.
University of Michigan

Kentaro Toyama is W.K. Kellogg Professor of Community Information at the University of Michigan School of Information and a fellow of the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT. He is the author of Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology.

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Sharrona Pearl, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Medical Ethics
Texas Christian University

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Sharrona Pearl Sharrona Pearl, Ph.D.
Texas Christian University

Sharrona Pearl is Associate Professor of Medical Ethics at Texas Christian University. A historian and theorist of the face and body, Pearl has published widely on Victorian history of medicine, media and religion, and critical race, gender, and disability studies. Her recently released book Do I Know You? From Face Blindness to Superrecognition , with Johns Hopkins University Press is the third in her face trilogy, following Face/On: Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other (University of Chicago Press, 2017) and About Faces: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Harvard UP, 2010). She also has a trade book forthcoming on “The Mask" with Bloomsbury Academic. Pearl maintains an active freelance profile, with bylines in a variety of newspapers and magazines including The Washington Post, Lilith, and Real Life Magazine.

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Laura Trevino, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Information Systems
University of Texas at El Paso

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Laura Trevino Laura Trevino, Ph.D.
University of Texas at El Paso

Dr. Laura Lunstrum Trevino is an Associate Professor in the Entering Student Experience Program at the University of Texas at El Paso where she was awarded the UT Regents Outstanding Teaching Award. Dr. Trevino is a charter member of the PhD Project and the PhD Project Information Systems Doctoral Student Association. She is a member of the prestigious Circle of Compadres and in 2014 she was inducted into the KMPG PhD Project Hall of Fame. In 2015 Dr. Trevino was appointed to the White House Initiative Committee on Hispanic Excellence in Education. She is the first tenured female Hispanic Professor in Management Information Systems in the U.S. and serves as a dedicated mentor to Hispanic Ph.D. students in business schools across the country.

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