Senior Campus Organizer Alison Bates interviews Alex Khalaf, president of the Hendrix Humanist Association at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas.

Your group affiliated with the Secular Student Alliance on September 9th, and it seems like you're off to a great start, how are things going so far? 

Things have been going well. We have our second meeting of the year this Thursday, which will be the test.  Let’s see how many people show up for the second meeting (we had 17 at the first). This meeting is going to be a roundtable discussion on various issues pertaining to secular life. Hendrix College is a Methodist-affiliated college, and we at first expected some resistance, but we’re now an officially recognized Hendrix student organization. I even received an e-mail from a member on the Hendrix College Board of trustees congratulating us on our new group and expressing his happiness that our organization would "advance the cause of enlightenment at Hendrix."

You guys decided to only include 'humanist' in your name.  Tell me what that conversation was like.  Was there tension about using 'humanist' instead of 'atheist?'
 
The co-founders and I first came up with the name the Hendrix Secular Association, but as we are all planning to apply to graduate school we were a little apprehensive about applying to schools with "Co-Founder of Hendrix Secular Association" on our resume. We felt Humanist in place of Secular was a nice euphemism for what we were trying to accomplish. In my mind the last thing I wanted to do was to be apologetic for what our group was trying to promote, but in this religiously dominated environment (especially here in the South), the other officers and I felt it was necessary to change the name.
 
Do you have a website or Facebook page in the works to increase your membership?  

I rarely use Facebook myself, but I am interested in getting something up akin to a website or a Facebook group to promote our group. Hopefully this will be worked out at the next meeting.

Last year one of our groups in Texas visited a Hell House for Halloween.  Have you guys thought about a Halloween event?
 
We really have nothing planned for Halloween. We’ve been discussing attending a "paranormal expert" lecture at the school around Halloween and trying to ask some relevant questions to help students attending the lecture understand that this is just pseudoscience.