Recent world events have led students to more actively engage in real-life, philosophic, religious, and spiritual questions such as: Who am I? Why am I here? What does it mean to be human? What is the life worth living? Can I really make a difference in the world and how?

Inward Bound will be a dynamic gathering of 350 college students, professors, administrators and presidents from across the country devoted to helping students transform their education and university experience by undertaking to sincerely answer these fundamental questions. "This will be a great opportunity for students to think deeply about and articulate what is important to them and what they want out of their education and their lives," says Kavita Kapur, Executive Director of the Self Knowledge Symposium Foundation. "But more importantly, Inward Bound will give them the tools and encouragement to go ahead and start acting on those core values on their own and with their peers when they return to their own communities. Abstract contemplation is all well and good but the real wisdom, the real value, and the real character will come where the rubber meets the road...in how people actually live their lives and interact with the people around them."

Support inside of academia for integrating these unaddressed dimensions of a student's experience has never been stronger. "Inward Bound is at the forefront of a quiet revolution in the university. Many students are no longer content with higher education as merely pre-professional training," says Scott McLennan, Dean of Religious Life at Stanford University and Inward Bound Advisory Committee Member. "They are beginning to demand authenticity and depth in their education. They want to pursue what really matters."

Other Inward Bound Advisory Committee members include a veritable "Who's Who" list of luminaries across all professions and all parts of academia, including Huston Smith (author of The World's Religions and grandfather of the academic discipline of "Comparative Religion"), Steve Grubbs (CEO of PHD, the New York advertising powerhouse that handles the advertising for the Super Bowl, among other things), Janet Dickerson (VP of Student Affairs at Princeton University), Jon Dalton (Director of the Institute for College Values), David Scott (Physicist and former Chancellor of U. Mass at Amherst), and David Gold (author, former trial lawyer, and award-winning spiritual documentary producer), to name only a few. (Click here for the complete advisory list.)

The experiential programs and speakers at the conference will be at least as diverse. Everything from IBM Executive School Founder Lou Mobley's "Value Options Game" to "Writing as a Contemplative Discipline," from meditation instruction to learning how to solicit and integrate constructive feedback from peers, attendees will have the opportunity to acquire first-hand a variety of practical tools and techniques for more conscious and deliberate living. In addition, attendees will have the benefit of a variety of powerful role models in the form of speakers across a wide diversity of religious traditions and independent approaches. Speakers include:

• Father Francis Kline—the Julliard-trained world-touring musician who left it all behind at age 23 to join a monastery that allowed no speaking or even music, of which he eventually rose to become the Abbot
• Rabbi Niles Goldstein—NYPD Chaplain at Ground Zero, the voice behind MSN's "Ask the Rabbi" and author of five books including God at the Edge which relates his own adventurous quest for meaning
• Fleet Maull—the drug-smuggling Buddhist lay-monk who served 15-years in a Federal Penitentiary and who in the process of reforming himself and the prison around him founded the National Prison Hospice Association and the Prison Dharma Network
• Mariana Caplan—decades-long spiritual seeker and author of Halfway Up the Mountain, a book which exposes phony gurus and their premature claims to spiritual enlightenment
• Noah Levine—the twenty-something, former Juvenile Hall resident turned meditation instructor, founder of Dharma Punx, an alternative Buddhist organization for rough-and-tumble / street youths much like he was

The SKS has made programs such as these available on a small scale with great success since 1989. The close partnership between the SKS and EasT that Inward Bound represents has the potential to touch and inspire far more young people than ever before. Said Roop Mundi (NCSU '99), a past participant in the types of programs that will be offered at Inward Bound, "I've learned more from these programs than I have from any class or professor I've had. This is much more than just teaching. Teachers teach you about books and famous people and math. This teaches me how to live. This makes me a better person." Rachel Medlock (Duke '00, recently published in Radical Spirit: Spiritual Writings from the Voices of Tomorrow) agrees, "This has given me the courage to live my life the way I know I should."

The Self Knowledge Symposium started in 1989 at North Carolina State University (NCSU) when a group of students heard the life story of August "Augie" Turak, an entrepreneur with 25 years experience of intense spiritual seeking. Enthralled by the lecture, the students wanted to know what they could do to get the most out of college and their lives. Augie replied, "Start a group that is centered around asking and delving into the most universal questions: Who am I? Why am I here? What is my purpose?" Now, 12 years later, there are chapters at Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) and NCSU. In 1999, the SKS acquired 501(c)(3) non-profit status. Over the years, it has worked with thousands of students, from weekly meetings to sold out lectures, from running a national student spiritual magazine to organizing alternative spring break trips to monasteries, from rock climbing and skydiving to mentoring and leadership development.

About the Education as Transformation Project (EasT):

EasT is an ongoing national movement based out of Wellesley College committed to initiating a dialogue about religious pluralism and spirituality in higher education. In 1998, a small group of organizers from several universities began planning the first EasT conference at Wellesley College. Aiming for a crowd of no more than 350, they realized they were tapping into a major national trend when they were forced to turn hundreds away when they cut off registration at 850. In 2000, they staged a more intimate gather of 350 at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Both conferences were covered in feature stories in major media outlets such as National Public Radio (NPR) and the Boston Globe. SKS members attended the first conference, hosted a small student section of the second conference, and were invited to host the third conference because of their expertise in working directly with students, upon whom this third conference was designed to focus.