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After 35 years as a student union/student activities administrator at 4 different institutions, I have been a full time cult awareness educator and consultant for 5 years. I travel throughout North America, presenting lectures and workshops about cults, mostly at colleges and universities. I also serve as Director of Education for the American Family Foundation (AFF), a non-profit cult research and education organization. I would like to make a few general points.

1. It is possible to define "cult" without reference to religion. For example:
"A totalistic cult is a group or movement, exhibiting excessive dedication to some person, idea or thing, and employing unethically manipulative techniques of persuasion and control, designed to advance the goals of the group's leaders, but in actuality, are detrimental to the member, their family, and the larger society."
2. Colleges and universities need to focus on the harmful techniques used by such groups to deceive, coerce and manipulate students to take total control of their lives. It is inappropriate to focus on the group's beliefs.
3. When any campus group, religious or otherwise, violates campus regulations, they should be punished, including being banned from the campus, if the violations are serious enough.
4. Colleges and universities need to provide preventive educational programs for students, faculty and staff, about the times in a person's life when they are most vulnerable to cult recruiters, and about the techniques that cults use to deceive and manipulate them.

I have been presenting cult awareness educational programs for 25 years and I know they work. A number of students who participated have contacted me a few years later, and described how the information helped them identify and prevent a cult recruiter from being successful.

: -- Ronald N. Loomis, Cult Awareness Educator & Consultant, New London, CT (posted 8/19, 4:35 p.m., E.D.T.)

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