DEAN'S LETTER

Good news! Our new staff is now in place and we are ready to get a regular newsletter out to all of you—students, graduates, board members, and faculty members. We hope this will become a great way of communicating. For those of you new to the Institute, previous dean's letters can be found on our web page:

www.humanistinstitute.org

As many of you know, since of our founding in 1982, we have functioned with two boards: one for the North American Committee on Humanism (NACH) and the other for the Institute. There have always been a number of overlaps of persons and it became an unwieldy set up. Howard Radest is chairing the committee that is drafting a new constitution, one that will effectively merge the two boards and recognize that the primary activity of NACH at this time is the Humanist Institute. My main concern as dean in this proceeding has been to preserve the integrity of the Institute and its academic freedom, and I see no real problems in that regard.

On January 1, Suzanne Paul assumed duties as Program Administrator. Graduate of the Institute, past president of NACH, retired minister of a UU church, she will take on many of the roles Jean Kotkin played in terms of student recruiting and seeing that everything moves smoothly during class sessions. Kristin Wintermute is now our Business Manager, and will handle directory and mailing matters as well as billing and bookkeeping tasks. She will also handle Institute/NACH files. Addresses for Suzanne and Kristin are elsewhere in this newsletter.

Along with this process, as many of you know, we began a major capital fund drive last summer. This is progressing well and you will hear more from your representatives in the next few months.

On an experimental basis, and with the approval of the board, I have been conducting in Minneapolis at the First Unitarian Society a mini-seminar in the name of the Institute. This will cover the history of humanism, the organizational and ethical problems that humanists have faced and continue to face, and a series of tasks that humanists must take to function more effectively. I have completed the first two sessions (with some assistance from Carol Wintermute and Khoren Arisian). If these continue to go well, we hope to have something quite exportable for faculty and graduates to try in their own areas.

In the way of indirect outreach, Andreas Rosenberg (Institute adjunct faculty) and I will start a class on "Science and Religion" next month for the University of Minnesota's Elder Learning Institute. We will be using a WebCT program which allows readings and the like to be posted on a website which students can then access with a password, making it somewhat parallel to a library's reserve shelf and conforming to copyright laws. This might be a good future resource for Institute classes.

I want to congratulate Robert Grant, one of our graduates, who has just published American Ethics and the Virtuous Citizen: Basic Principles (Humanist Press, 1999). Bob was kind enough to donate 100 copies to be use as incentives for our capital fund drive!

A sad report is the sudden death of Betty Brout, an Institute graduate who served on our board and who had been a faculty resource on public speaking for our classes. We will miss her counsel.

When we get an internet bulletin board set up, we will all probably be exchanging useful websites. Let me start with 3. The first two were designed by a New Zealand philosopher, Dennis Dutton, and are very addictive. Look at them and you will see why. The third is a good supplement to the daily press.

1. http://www.cybereditions.com/aldaily/

2. www.scitechdaily.com

3. [quote follows} AlterNet depends on word-of-mouth to publicize our site. If you found the AlterNet Headlines useful, interesting, or entertaining, we hope you'll e-mail them to a friend and suggest they sign up. The Headlines are free and anyone can sign up to receive them at:[quote ends]

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Our bulletin board will also be a good source of book touts, and I'll start with Michael Shermer's How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science (NY: Freeman, 2000). He is publisher of Skeptic magazine, and does a great job with the history and psychology of belief. Also well-done is Wendy Kaminer's Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and Perils of Piety (NY: Pantheon, 1999).

Along with news, a dean's letter should have some constructive word. Long experience, intensified in the past few months, has reminded me of the mediating task expected of the Institute in the personal and organizational tensions among humanists. These steadily sap our effectiveness and feed the pens of our many critics. We all need to recall the exciting shifts in the last century when Kant's stress on ethics took hold. Our predecessors began speaking of ethical culture (and not dogmas), of salvation by character (and not by faith), of a good life in this world (and not some alleged next one). Unless we can keep this vision alive as well as related to contemporary ethical issues and challenges, we will remain weak and divided. This means assuming the best of each other, and then finding ways to evoke that best.

We already have some students for class 11 which will start in Washington December 1, 2000. Help by recruiting more good students. And we still need some volunteers to mentor this class.

Robert B. Tapp