Allegheny College will be hiring a new assistant Spiritual and Religious Life dean to focus on spiritual wellness along with the current religious and spiritual organizations on campus.
Dean for the Student Experience Ian Binnington explained how the new role will expand responsibilities to include unaffiliated spiritual life on campus.
“We took the opportunity to review the position, look at what our peers were doing, think about what kind of students’ needs were in general,” Binnington said. “And so we redesigned that position to expand beyond traditional faith or religious-based student organizations and part of the reason for that is that the student population is changing.”
For a long time, the majority of students who declared an affiliation at the college have been Catholic, because the college’s recruitment areas were majority-Catholic. The population of students who have been identifying as Catholic has gone from about a third of students to about a quarter, according to Binnington.
“It is about to be overtaken by the population of students who regard themselves as spiritual but unaffiliated,” Binnington said. “I was particularly struck by a model I saw at Albion College and I borrowed heavily from that model after I met with their vice president for student affairs and got permission.”
According to Binnington, the new model strengthens the spiritual and wellness parts of the job while leaving the religious parts intact.
“It is a strengthening of the kind of interfaith and more spiritual base part of the job,” Binnington said.
The new position will have a lot of agency in how the role is navigated in order to give the person an opportunity to use their expertise, according to Binnington.
Dean of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Heather Moore Roberson said the office is envisioning a partnership with student experience to provide two-tiered support for the new hire.

“We have noticed in regards to spirituality that many of our students who come to campus are looking to have more conversations about spirituality as opposed to having conversations about religion,” Roberson said. “They don’t want to be boxed into a religious categorization and they don’t want to think about spirituality as being aligned to religion.”
The new position will also continue working with the IDEAS Center and other organizations on campus to create events that include more spirituality and wellness conversations, according to Roberson.
“I think having somebody who’s focused on spirituality, wellness and religion is the way of the future,” Roberson said. “Those three areas are not mutually exclusive, they are three areas that are interconnected and are a valuable part and component of the student experience. So I think that this person will be able to support all students if they are interested in helping them to be successful in whatever ways that make sense for them.”
In the process of searching for the new role, students were included in interviews after being selected.
Newman Catholic Campus Ministry President Joseph Leszczynski, ’25, was one of the students who was involved in the search for the new assistant SRL dean.
“I have been in multiple interviews that involve other faculty and administrators but I have also been in interviews that are all just students,” Leszczynski said. “I would probably want someone willing to stand up and give a lot of effort in making things happen for our students and I feel like the most important thing in a candidate is their willingness to advocate.”
Leszczynski said that through working with administrators to search for the role, he hopes that the feedback students gave will be taken into consideration when hiring.
“Students will be the people who will be the most familiar and interact with the most with this role and addressing the needs that they have set out to meet is the most important part of this and that involves taking our feedback,” Leszczynski said. “I feel like the sort of attitudes of the administrators that I have been working with have been really conducive to that sort of goal.”
According to Binnington, the individual hired will need to take up the banner of interfaith conversations.
“I am really going to rely on the expertise of this individual to advise us on what they think the job should be doing,” Binnington said. “And I want to make sure that I don’t impose a model that doesn’t include their input.”