Colleges Try to Raise Awareness of Cults and Protect Plurality

Getting ready for her first year at the University of Maryland, Lisa Gaddy was thinking mostly about which classes to take and how to find her way around campus. But at summer orientation and in a handful of classes and meetings this fall, she and other students found themselves reading and talking about cults.

“I was surprised to see it in the list of material they gave us to read,” she said. “My second thought was, ‘Oh, that can’t happen to me. I’m a well-adjusted child.’ ”

Torn between a commitment to respect pluralism and a desire to protect students on campuses that offer prime hunting ground for destructive cults, schools are trying to make students aware of questionable tactics some groups use to lure and hold members.

“There are a significantly greater number of colleges and universities today that are aware of cult activity on their campuses,” said Ronald Loomis, education director for the American Family Foundation, the nation’s leading cult watch group. “And they are initiating programs to educate their students and faculty and staff about them.”

New students at Georgetown University receive a pamphlet titled “High Pressure Religious Groups” that describes groups using “persistent, manipulative and often dishonest persuasion.” A similar pamphlet is mailed to the homes of incoming students at George Washington University. Both schools, as well as American University, provide resident assistants with special training in spotting manipulative tactics.

Howard University’s dean of the chapel, Bernard Richardson, said Howard’s Religious Life Committee investigates student complaints about “undue pressures” to join campus groups. Harassment, he added, “is not protected by religious freedom.”

Those most vulnerable to deceptive recruiting often are intelligent people who are “between major life affiliations,” said Carol Giambalvo, a cult expert in Florida. “People who typically join cults are in a transition stage in life, and I can’t think of a bigger one than being in college.”

Students fall victim, she said, to what amounts to an elaborate scam. “They are joining something that looks wonderful,” she said. Only slowly does the group take control of the student’s life and finances, using sophisticated psychological techniques. Even psychologically healthy people are vulnerable, if they have not been trained to recognize the techniques, she said.

“There’s a lot of research that shows that when people are aware of the factors that lead to mind control, they’re less likely to succumb,” said Jim Maas, a psychology professor at Cornell University.

To blunt recruiting drives, administrators at several campuses nationwide have stripped official recognition from some student groups found to be using deceptive approaches. The groups can be forbidden to use campus facilities or adult members of certain groups can be banned from residence halls.

Robert Watts Thornburg, dean of Boston University’s Marsh Chapel and a longtime critic of cults, said universities can avoid jeopardizing religious liberty by focusing on a group’s behavior rather than its beliefs. At Boston University, “nowhere do we say that a student cannot practice his religion on campus,” Thornburg said. “We do say that a student can’t proselytize another student” or harass others. “We’ve defined religious harassment.”

At UC Berkeley, presentations on cults occur regularly in residence halls and other gathering spots. “Berkeley has been a target of most of these groups for years,” said Hal Reynolds, a student affairs officer on that campus.

No one asserts that a large number of students fall prey. Among 32,711 students on the University of Maryland’s College Park campus, the highest estimates suggest 100 to 200 students are active in cult-like groups at any given time. Other universities offered equally modest estimates.

But in a four- or five-year college career, experts said, a student will probably be approached at least once by cult recruiters.