CFI Student Leadership Conferance

Mike and I have just returned from this year’s student leadership conference. We both agreed it was worthwhile, but could have been improved in some ways. For simplicity, I’ll break it down into pros and cons.

Pros:

Good conference food.

Networking: Normally it’s difficult to meet and this contact other student leaders of skeptical groups, but since facilitating contact between atheists is sort of CFI’s specialty the conference allowed us to meet and speak with a number of other student leaders.

Most of the information which I found useful in the conference came from other students.

The parties.

Cons:

As always CFI did a great deal of self promoting, and self congratulation. It must be a strategy that works because they keep doing it, but it becomes tedious after a weekend. To be honest I’m not sure how they put up with it. Giving such a sickening deferential introduction to your colleagues and bosses has to be tiring after a while. I resented the exhortations for money and the implication that at some point we might be asked to change our name to CFI RIT.

We are the RIT Skeptics. We choose to affiliate with CFI because we think that it might be useful, but we are our own entity. We have our own agenda, and our own goals. While these very much overlap with those of CFI, they are not entirely identical, and we do not exist to serve an outside organization. We’ll cooperate with CFI and SSA, but we must do our own thing.