Rev. Danny Fisher

The New York Times recently ran a pair of articles about Emory University and my graduate alma mater Naropa University, respectively. The first piece talks about the wholly unique Emory-Tibet Partnership, which includes His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s recent appointment as a professor at the distinguished university. (He is the third Nobel Peace laureate to join the faculty, after Archbishop Desmond Tutu and President Jimmy Carter.) The second article, about Naropa, mainly touches on the university’s commitment to contemplative education.

Contemplative education has defined this Boulder, Colo., college since it began life as the Naropa Institute in 1974. That summer, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche–a Tibetan Buddhist teacher who made his way to the United States by way of Oxford–founded the institute to integrate Eastern and Western studies. He invited artists from all over the country; the artists invited their buddies, and the gathering ended up with a head count of 2,500. Many of the participants decided to stay in Boulder, including the poet Allen Ginsberg. He was co-founder of Naropa’s writing program, the elegiacally named Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, later that year.

The college has gone through transformations since then. It was awarded top-level accreditation in 1986. It now charges $20,738 in tuition and has a student body of 1,083, in three locations. The original campus, in downtown Boulder, is a shady green square where students–some barefoot, some dreadlocked, many proudly scruffy–attend classes in a cluster of buildings that includes wooden clapboard cottages. Two campuses sit on the outskirts of town in office-park-like settings, slightly mitigated by prayer flags rippling in the breeze and students meditating on the front lawns.

One thing has never changed, though: the emphasis on contemplation. In addition to fulfilling the traditional requirements of a major, students participate in Eastern practices like yoga, sitting meditation, Japanese flower arrangement, tai chi, Chinese brush painting and aikido.

Anyway, they’re both good articles about very special educational opportunities. Take a look.