This newsletter is free and goes out to over 26,000 subscribers, but it’s only able to sustain itself due to the support I receive from a small percentage of regular readers. Would you please consider becoming one of those supporters? You can subscribe via Patreon or the Subscribe button below! You can also make one-time donations through Venmo, CashApp, or PayPal.
The new Acting Executive Director of the Secular Student Alliance is someone who spent the past 16 years working at colleges that promote unscientific, unsound “medicine.”
The SSA’s mission is to empower “secular students to build inclusive communities, proudly express their identity, and advocate for a better world.” In other words, it’s a group that supports young atheists. It’s been a formative part of my own life. I began an SSA chapter in college, served on the group’s board of directors for many years (including a stint as chair), and I’ve been donating to them ever since. It’s fair to say I never would have gotten involved in atheist activism without the support I received from the organization. I love the group and I want to see it succeed long into the future.
Last week, the SSA announced that longtime Executive Director Kevin Bolling would be stepping down after nine years and a national search would begin to find his replacement. In the meantime, the group’s second-in-command, Elena Howells (below), would serve as acting Executive Director. It was a swift promotion for someone who only joined the staff in July and is now running a group whose revenue in 2025 exceeded $1.1 million.
“Elena has made a strong mark on SSA since joining as Deputy Director this year, so naming her acting Executive Director was an easy decision. I am confident she will lead the organization well, with a clear focus on our students and the secular community. We are grateful for her leadership as we conduct a national search for SSA’s next leader.”
— James Modisette, Board Vice Chair
Howells’ official bio on the SSA website is also interesting:
Elena Howells assumes the role of acting Executive Director for the Secular Student Alliance on October 24th, 2026. Prior to joining SSA, Elena worked in higher education administration for more than 14 years, most recently serving as Associate Vice President for Student Affairs & Registration at a small, nonprofit health sciences institution. In that role, Elena and her team implemented a successful student advising program that increased student retention and satisfaction and resulted in a commendation from the institution’s accrediting agency, led a transition in the institution’s student information system that included updates to nearly all policies and procedures related to student records, and oversaw the relaunch of the institution’s student government following a COVID-19 hiatus, which included working with a broad group of students and administrators to rewrite the governance bylaws to ensure representation by students from each academic college on the student executive board.
Prior to her work in Student Affairs, Elena served in a variety of administrative roles in higher education, which included functions such as supervision of university donor and alumni relations offices, coordination of executive and Board of Trustees support, and creation of a Policy Development and Review committee to ensure broad institutional input and alignment on official university policies and procedures.
She adds that she’s “moved” by the SSA’s mission to empower secular students. To that end, she says she wants to live in a world “where problems are solved through the application of technical and scientific expertise, critical thinking, curiosity, and compassion.”
All of that makes for a solid background for someone who’s running a large non-profit group like the SSA.
But the reason that biography is interesting to me is because it doesn’t go into any detail about where she worked in the past; it only mentions what she did. To get that information, you have to find her LinkedIn profile. And this is where her stated goals appear to conflict with her previous experience.
For the past 12+ years, Howells served as an administrator at University of Western States, a Portland, Oregon-based private school best known for promoting chiropractic and naturopathic care. (It used to be called Western States Chiropractic College.)
Why is that a concern? The interim leader of a group that celebrates atheism and critical thinking spent the past decade promoting pseudoscience. The “health sciences institution” where she spent her career up to this point arguably promotes neither health nor science.
And it’s not just pseudoscience but specific fields that SSA-allied groups have fought against. Earlier this year, the Center for Inquiry called naturopathy “a discredited and dangerous form of quackery [that] fails to meet the rigors of science-based medicine, and it is rejected by nearly every medical expert because it relies on unproven or disproven treatments such as energy healing and homeopathic remedies.”
Howells’ roles at the school included overseeing student affairs and serving as chief of staff for the university’s president. So there’s an argument to be made she was merely working in a non-academic capacity. She wasn’t promoting nonsense; she was just doing high-level administrative work and there’s no shame in that. I’m sympathetic to that thinking. After all, I’ve met atheists who told me they spent years working at megachurches even after they realized they no longer believed in God. Maybe it was a well-paying job at a time when they couldn’t find anything else. Maybe they wanted to be a professional musician and serving as a music director was a dream, even if that involved worship music.
But that excuse only works if you can reconcile the cognitive dissonance.
So the questions become: Did you really believe in this stuff or was it just a job? How can it just be a job if you worked there for over a decade? Do you believe in that nonsense now and will that impact your ability to promote critical thinking?
Prior to working there, by the way, Howells spent two years as administrative coordinator at National College of Natural Medicine, another school that promotes pseudoscience.
I should point out that, like most non-profit groups, the SSA doesn’t discriminate in hiring. Perhaps they felt they couldn’t go into her beliefs as long as she says she supports the group’s mission. And maybe that past doesn’t matter, though it’s fair game to ask questions about someone’s work history.
Theoretically, an atheist could manage the staff at a megachurch. For many years, a minister ran Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Even the Secular Coalition for America was once led by a Republican lobbyist (though that didn’t end on good terms).
If a group is looking for a competent leader to oversee staff and finances and behind-the-scenes work, that person doesn’t necessarily have to be a spokesperson or advocate for the cause, even if that would help, right?
But it’s still unusual.
I posed a number of my questions to Howells and SSA Board Chair Ryan Bodanyi earlier this week. Howells didn’t respond, but Bodanyi did. He reiterated that Howells served in non-academic roles at her previous job and supported the SSA’s mission, adding, “I think Elena's doing a great job, and the board voted to make her our Acting ED because collectively, we believe she's the right person for the job.”
Then he said this:
I haven’t asked Elena how she feels about naturopathic and chiropractic medicine, nor will I. That’s both irrelevant to her current responsibilities, and to our organizational mission.
As you may know, SSA is a big tent organization. We represent students who’ve never believed in God, who doubt or question the existence of God, and committed theists who nonetheless believe in the separation of church & state. We don’t tell our students how to feel about naturopathic and chiropractic medicine, nor have I ever heard a single student bring it up on their own.
This is where we have a difference of opinion. While “alternative” medicines are relatively low on the church/state priority list right now, they speak to a larger culture of how we respond to scientific expertise.
Do we listen to experts who say all of that is bullshit or do we listen to the likes of RFK, Jr. who constantly promotes fake science? Republicans have actively supported vaccine-deniers. Just this week, the Trump administration announced they would approve sales of untested, unverified drugs to treat osteoporosis and insomnia over the objections of career FDA scientists.
Even if there are more pressing concerns, supporting science and evidence-based medicine is very much an issue that matters to SSA members. Students themselves may be not be knowledgable about the issues, but the group should be helping them navigate those questions, just as it does with religion. To put it another way, supporting science—actual, evidence-based science—is absolutely in SSA’s wheelhouse. It’s not “irrelevant” to the group’s mission.
Now, all of that might be irrelevant to an executive director’s administrative duties. But the public face of any organization should be able to speak to a broad range of concerns shared by the board and group members. In this case, I don’t see how that happens. The SSA would need other people to fill that role because its leader has a history of being on the wrong side of the issue.
I genuinely hope this is a short-term problem and the SSA can hire someone to fill this ED role who can be both an experienced non-profit leader and a strong voice for secularism—along with all the related issues that come with it. Right now, I don’t see that happening.
I'm not saying they should fire her. But I think supporters of the group should be asking these questions because they're not going away. And you shouldn't need two separate people to both run the group and be an advocate for the group's mission.
Sometimes, you find yourself in a place where you don't agree with management but it's a job and you need the money. I am retired now but I recall the days when I had to bite my tongue and stay in positions where they had the most toxic leadership. The alternative was losing it all.
As always, you know what they call medicine that is proven to actually be efficacious? Medicine.
The same cannot be said of quackery, no matter what guise it hides under.