This article originally appeared in the SSA eMpirical No. 19 - After the Conference.

While at the New Humanism conference, eMpirical Editor-in-Chief Lyz Liddell spent most of her free time wandering around talking to students who were there.  The idea was to get a feel for what it's like to be at the conference from a student's point of view.  So, now that you've read what a humanism conference is all about, you can find out what it's like to be there!


I probably talked to several dozen students at the New Humanism Conference at Harvard University.  While everyone had something unique to say, and there were as many reasons for being there as there were people, I found a few similarities.  Most of the students came for one of three major reasons:  to become more active with their own student groups, to further their own personal studies, or for reasons related more to their identifying with humanism as a spiritual belief.

As you might guess, most of the students I talked to during the student activist training sessions were interested in improving their student groups, or creating them in the first place.  It didn't seem to matter how large or long-lasting the group was – everyone I talked to found material that they could use in their group.

Wendy Lyman and Lauren Hayden of University of Minnesota's Campus Atheists and Secular Humanists (CASH), for example, are members of one of the oldest student groups in the SSA.  One might think that they would have "been there, done that" with anything that could be brought up in the training.  But when I talked to them, they said that there were things in every session that were useful to them.  Particularly useful, they said, was the presentation on "Promoting your Group with Blogs, Podcasts and Other Newfangled Media," by Duncan Crary and Jes Constantine of the Institute for Humanist Studies.  "We're trying to create a Public Relations officer for next year," they said, "so this presentation was very helpful."

Roy Natian, founder and leader of the UCLA BASS (Bruin Alliance of Skeptics and Secularists), found August Brunsman's presentation on "Long Term Planning and Sustainability" particularly useful.  He founded his group two years ago and is finishing up his junior year – meaning that he's starting to look forward.  He admits that he has trouble asking people for help.  He's the sort of person who likes to do everything himself, so August's presentation helped him realize that he should start planning now.

Lindsay Baldwin meets Steven Pinker in an impromptu office visit.

 

Other people came to the conference for more personal, but still practical reasons.  For them, humanism ties into their work, their major, or even just one particular class.

Take Brendan Randall, a grad student in education and divinity at Harvard.  As a secondary education teacher, he was well aware that most students without religion "don't really have spiritual support in a standard school environment."  He was inspired by Tu Weiming's presentation about multicultural dialogue.  As he put it, he'd like to "expose students to worldviews that may not be represented within their classroom," so that they have the chance to explore their own belief systems.  That's also his dissertation thesis, so getting to come to the conference was in large part research for him.

Andrea Murray, on the other hand, was "here by accident."  She had been reading Foucault for her class and came across a reference to "the rise of modern humanism."  Wondering what he meant by humanism and knowing that she had seen the term recently, she dug through her junk mail pile to find the brochure for the conference.  "Hm," she said, "I wonder if this is what he was talking about.  I guess I'll go!"  Talk about extra credit!