THE CAMPUS IS A PICTURE BOOK DREAM: PERFECTLY MAINTAINED, MODERN buildings brightened by green lawns (regularly watered—this is, after all, semidesert country), shaded by maples and other deciduous trees (imported—also carefully watered), surrounded by the snow-dusted, spiky peaks of the Wasatch Range. Every twelve hours teams of students scour the grounds and buildings. There’s not a gum wrapper in sight. Graffiti artists wouldn’t dare.
This is Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, the crown jewel in Zion, “the Lord’s University,” as the campus slogan goes. Students here salute the flag each day when it is raised and lowered. Male students are required to be clean-shaven (unlike many past church presidents); earrings are forbidden. No one goes barefoot. Girls are dressed according to the Honor Code printed in the catalog: “modest in fabric, fit, and style,” with skirt hemlines at the knees or below. Anything “sleeveless, strapless, or revealing” is unacceptable. In order to maintain the “dignity of representing Brigham Young University and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” the catalog warns, students should maintain “a clean and well-cared-for appearance,” since modesty and cleanliness reflect “personal dignity and integrity.” The students, some 35,000 of them, comply.
The students, in fact, comply with a great many restrictions beyond those associated with personal grooming. Other rules, like those on dozens of Evangelical Protestant campuses, forbid visiting the dorm rooms of the opposite sex, drinking, and doing drugs. The BYU administration keeps a wary eye on student publications and campus cultural activities. In 1997 it pulled four nude works from a visiting exhibition of the nineteenth-century French sculptor Auguste Rodin. Campbell Gray, director of the university’s art museum, said the figures in The Kiss, The Prodigal Son, St. John the Baptist Preaching, and Monument to Balzac might offend some viewers. In 1998 the campus movie theater restricted its cinema showings to G-rated films after tangling with several Hollywood producers, such as Steven Spielberg, over permission to edit out scenes deemed unacceptable. As a result, BYU students never saw Schindler’s List or Titanic—at least not on campus. In 2002, BYU issued new guidelines on course materials urging teachers to exercise spiritual caution in assigning materials and to avoid required viewings of R-rated films.
BYU is by far the largest religiously sponsored university in the United States. The church tie is an omnipresent reality, not a vestigial aspect, as it is at Duke or Southern Methodist. For good reason, the Princeton Review ranking places BYU on the conservative side of lifestyle (drugs) and politics (“students most nostalgic for Ronald Reagan”) and, unsurprisingly, the gay issues. In the fall 2006 semester, 75.9 percent of male and 10.7 percent of female students had served missions. And more than half (53.7 percent) of the students will be married before they leave, an extraordinarily high rate. BYU is a strategic venue for finding LDS marriage partners and starting loyal LDS families.
Behind the polite and pious appearance of these well-groomed students lie 35,000 bright young minds. The average freshman arrives with an ACT score of 27.7 (equivalent to an SAT composite score of about 1248), and an average high school grade point average of 3.74. The student body is 47.4 percent female and 52.6 percent male, and 98 percent are Mormon. Enrollment is limited in aspects besides religion. Only 0.6 percent of students are black. The typical BYU student comes from the Intermountain West. Some 91 percent are from the U.S.; the remainder come from Canada, Asia, Latin America, the South Pacific, and Europe.
Education here is a bargain. Officials decline to divulge a figure, but reportedly about 70 percent of the budget comes from church tithes. With that subsidy, tuition for LDS students was a mere $3,620 for the 2006–07 academic year. The extra tax is just double ($7,240 more) for non-LDS students, but there aren’t many. To maintain their access to this good, cheap education, all the LDS students are required to provide the university with an annual recommendation from their ward bishops, a significant control mechanism.
Current BYU president, Cecil O. Samuelson, former dean of the University of Utah School of Medicine, and his immediate predecessor, Merrill J. Bateman (1996–2003), are both members of the General Authorities, the Seventies. The faculty is homogeneous: 97 percent are temple-worthy Mormons, a figure said to be heading toward 98 percent, compared with 93 percent a decade ago.
The BYU mission statement declares that the purpose of the school is to “assist individuals in their quest for perfection and eternal life.” Such preparation is supposed to reach beyond the development of the student’s own potential to “bring strength to others in the tasks of home and family life, social relationships, civic duty, and service to mankind.” Four goals are cited: teaching all students the “truths of the gospel of Jesus Christ”; pursuing “all truth” in a “broad university education”; providing education in “special fields” so that students will be “capable of competing with the best in their fields”; and promoting research, scholarly activity, and education in “selected graduate programs of real consequence.”
Students at BYU can receive a solid education in most fields, and learning with distinction in some. Early in the twentieth century church officials debated whether the school should concentrate on practical vocations, but a comprehensive curriculum won out over a narrower program. There are no graduate degrees in religion, only graduate minors in ancient scripture, church history, and doctrine, aimed at training instructors for the Church Educational System (CES).
After years of languishing in the third tier of U.S. News & World Report’s oft-disputed annual ratings, in 1998 BYU was bumped up to the second group of sixty-seven schools, then grouped alphabetically without number ranking. U.S. News now ranks BYU Provo as seventy-first among “National Universities.” (Southern Baptist Baylor is number seventy-eight; local competitor University of Utah is ranked as number 120.) Undergraduate business programs in the Marriott School of Management have received special notice: Business Week in 2006 ranked BYU undergraduate business programs eighth overall.
High-ranking graduate programs tend to lie in technical and professional vocations rather than the traditional liberal arts. Most frequently mentioned as matters of BYU pride are the law and business schools. The 2006 U.S. News graduate ranking placed the J. Reuben Clark Law School thirty-fourth nationally. Nursing came in at fifty-eighth; education, seventy-seventh; social work, eighty-seventh; and various engineering programs from sixty-second to eighty-fourth. Accountancy has received special notice: the 2003 Wall Street Journal guide to business schools ranked BYU thirty-eighth, noting especially its excellence in accounting; the 2006 Public Accounting Reports ranked BYU programs second nationally in both graduate and undergraduate levels.
Brigham Young has the tightest ecclesiastical control of any religious college or university in the United States. The board is led by the three members of the church’s First Presidency and includes three of the Twelve Apostles, and a member of the Presidency of the Seventy. Thus, the General Authorities have seven of ten seats. The other members are the presidents of the women’s and young women’s auxiliaries (both appointed by the top General Authorities) and a secretary. When Merrill Bateman became BYU president in 1996, the appointment was widely interpreted as a move to tighten the church’s grip. He was the first BYU president to serve concurrently as a General Authority, a policy continued, as noted, with President Samuelson.
The university has ambitions, and money behind the ambitions. Campus buildings like the 22,000-seat Marriott Center testify to major contributions from wealthy Mormon donors. BYU aims to turn out well-educated, loyal, and active Mormons who will form the leadership cadre of lay volunteers who run the clergy-less church of the future. It would appear that the church gets what it pays for. Contrary to common wisdom on the relationship between education and religious activity, some surveys show that Mormons increase religious activity as their level of education rises. And the student body, flying in the face of modern trends, has become more traditionalist in the second half of the twentieth century.
A 1935 study of BYU students showed that 88 percent of them believed Joseph Smith was a true prophet; 76 percent believed Mormon authorities receive continuing revelation today; and 81 percent believed the Mormon Church was more divine than others. A similar survey in 1973 showed clear conservative trends: 99 percent believed in Joseph Smith as a prophet, 99 percent in continuing revelation, and 98 percent in the divine nature of the church. Perhaps the most stunning example were the answers to this question: “Do you place obedience to authority above your own personal preferences?” In 1935 the positive response was 41 percent; by 1973 this figure had risen to a resounding 88 percent. The key difference most likely is that the annual bishop recommendations to ensure obedience and orthodoxy were not required in the 1930s.
“The evidence is overwhelming that attending BYU, even for only one semester, produces young adults who are highly active in the church,” wrote five of the university’s sociologists in an internal study leaked to the Associated Press in 1996. The study covered BYU students from 1971 to 1988 and showed them to be more likely to marry in the temple than Mormons who attended secular colleges (86 percent compared to 77 percent) and more likely to pay full tithes (77 percent compared to 62 percent). BYU Provost Bruce Hafen reportedly ordered that the study be withheld from publication, possibly because of the information about church members’ tithing compliance.
The successes of BYU, intellectually and in terms of loyalty to the Restored Church, would have been appreciated by Joseph Smith. “The glory of God is intelligence” is one of his scriptural aphorisms (D&C 93:36) frequently quoted by Mormons. Though Smith had little formal education, he had a curious mind and a love of books and learning that he explored all his life. In Kirtland, Ohio, he studied Hebrew with a tutor. Despite the impoverished background of most Saints, schools popped up on the scene from the earliest days of Mormon gathering. Today Utah ranks close to the top of the U.S. states in the proportion of youth population in school and the median number of school years that citizens complete.
The earliest Mormon-organized effort at education was Kirtland’s School of the Prophets. Opened in 1833, the school was originally intended to train missionaries but soon expanded into secular subjects such as grammar, arithmetic, Hebrew, and history. A similar school began meeting in Jackson County, Missouri, and existed until about 1836. With the move to Nauvoo, a system of “common schools” was soon established for elementary instruction. At its height the system had schools in each ward and about eighty teachers on its payroll. Texts were chosen by a twenty-three-man board of regents that was answerable to the municipal council.
In 1841 Nauvoo chartered a municipal university. This was essentially a secondary school with classes in religion, philosophy, science, mathematics, music, foreign languages, and literature. The university’s first chancellor was John C. Bennett, also mayor of Nauvoo before he had his falling-out with Joseph Smith in 1842. Bennett was one of the better-educated citizens of Nauvoo. He had become a medical doctor by apprenticeship with his uncle and served as president of an Ohio medical college before moving to Illinois. Mormons in Nauvoo dreamed of having a university campus, but meanwhile classes met in whatever buildings were available, including homes and the local Masonic lodge. The First Presidency’s ambitious dream was to make the university “one of the great lights to the world,” though acting on that dream had to wait for decades after the trek to Utah.
Early Utah, of course, was as much a theocracy as Nauvoo had been, and the establishment and supervision of common schools fell under bishops’ responsibilities. During the trek itself, classes were sometimes held around campfires and in wagons or tents; in the Great Basin they often met in buildings that also served as ward meetinghouses. Compulsory public school up to age fourteen came with statehood, but universal public secondary education did not arrive until 1911, so thirty-five stake academies filled the gap for several decades.
In the early twentieth century the church began to divest itself of some of its school facilities and secular educational responsibilities. The state increased its secondary school activities, and by the early 1920s the church had turned over its academies to the states. For about another decade the church operated several two-year teacher training colleges; by 1933 these had been transferred to the state of Utah. What had started as the University of Deseret—chartered in 1850, before Utah was a territory—later became the Salt Lake Academy and eventually, in 1903, the state’s University of Utah. Provo’s Brigham Young Academy eventually metamorphosed into Brigham Young University.
BYU has two campuses outside of Provo: Hawaii and Idaho. Hawaii has 2,400 students from more than 70 countries. It offers bachelor’s degrees in business, computing, and education at $3,040 annual tuition for LDS students and a modest $6,080 for non-LDS in the 2006–07 academic year. BYU-Idaho, formerly Ricks College, has over 11,000 enrolled and a similarly modest tuition structure. In 2005, Dr. Kim B. Clark, then dean of Harvard Business School, was tapped to become president of BYU-Idaho. There is also the LDS Business College in Salt Lake City with 1,300 enrolled in one-and two-year vocational programs.
A possible new direction in Mormon education may be developing. An independent college committed to the LDS faith, Southern Virginia University had 700 students in 2007, its tenth year, and aims for an eventual enrollment of 1,200. Founded by a group of Mormon investors who bought a women’s seminary, it so far lacks regional accreditation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools but is one of the 14 U.S. schools in 2007 accredited by the American Academy for Liberal Education. Administrators have received inquiries about starting similar ventures in Texas and California. The church itself, however, has stated that it will not formally support any additional institutions of higher learning.
Instead, the LDS is focusing on strengthening the Church Educational System (CES). Mormon wards operate weekly Sunday school classes, as most Protestant churches do. But among major U.S. religious denominations there is nothing remotely comparable to the CES system in scope. It operates a worldwide “seminary” program, which does not refer to graduate-level professional theological study but to catechism instruction for high school students, who are expected to attend an hour a day, five days a week, for four years. In the 2006–07 school year there were 363,370 seminary students enrolled worldwide. The “institute” program offers college-level training for Mormons attending non-LDS campuses, with 363,034 enrolled worldwide in 2006–07. CES classes, all using identical instructional materials translated into many languages, reach into 144 countries. The massive network reports 3,300 full-and part-time paid employees, assisted by 34,000 volunteers and missionaries. A 1998 church study shows that 96 percent of institute graduates receive temple endowments, 96 percent of the men serve missions, and 98 percent of their wedding ceremonies are temple rites.
The seminary program began as a response to public secondary education. It started in 1912 in a church-owned building adjacent to Salt Lake City’s public Granite High School so that secular learning could be supplemented by daily religion classes. At first Utah schools granted credit for these courses and permitted students to be taught during the normal school day on a released-time basis. Today many students in western states other than California attend seminary on a released-time basis but do not receive secondary school credit for the courses. Most of the rest attend early morning classes before their regular school day. A small number of students who live in areas with a sparse LDS population, mostly outside the United States, complete the seminary program on a home-study basis, meeting weekly with a teacher. The church estimates that more than two-thirds of eligible teens attend seminary; in some areas with released-time programs the figure rises to 80 or 90 percent. The required course sequence covers the Old and New Testaments, the Mormon scriptures, and church history.
The institute program provides both courses and social interaction for post-secondary school young people. BYU students are required to take fourteen hours of religion courses; these, including classes on the Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants, are part of the CES institute curriculum. The ambitious CES goal is to provide institute courses near every major college or university worldwide with a sufficient concentration of Mormon students. Like the Catholic Newman Centers or the Jewish Hillel, these institutes also provide social gathering places for students of the same faith. The church tries to have an institute building of some kind and a resident missionary couple in every school where there are one-hundred or more LDS students. The largest institute building is a 114,500-square-foot structure adjacent to the University of Utah, and dedicated in 2002 by Hinckley. A CES institute is a place where young people can meet fellow Mormons, eat lunch, or play pool as well as take courses.
On the first Sunday evening of the month during the school year the CES usually provides a “Fireside,” an inspirational message typically given by a major church authority speaking from BYU. Translated into Spanish, Portuguese, French, and several other languages, the message is transmitted by satellite to stake centers and institute buildings around the United States and abroad. The Fireside begins with a song, a prayer, a welcome from the CES administrator to young adult listeners “wherever you are,” and an introduction of the speaker. BYU’s Marriott Center is generally filled to capacity, but the audience may also include fifteen young people sharing refreshments while listening at a stake center in Brazil or Boston, all reminded that they belong to something bigger than they are.
Curriculum materials for this huge enterprise have become more conservative in the late decades of the twentieth century, standardized and carefully vetted by the officially constituted screening committee. The Mormon sociologist Armand Mauss, a retired professor at Washington State University, has said, “An in-depth historical and contemporary study of the Church Educational System would almost certainly demonstrate in great detail the gradual (and probably deliberate) transition from a pedagogical philosophy of intellectual articulation and reconciliation to one of indoctrination.”
CES materials in the early decades, according to the late Leonard Arrington, drew on non-Mormon as well as Mormon scholarship, attempting to relate Mormon doctrine to the wisdom of the world. The idea was to replace a “kindergarten-level faith” with a faith that could withstand a “maturing scrutiny,” he wrote in a Dialogue essay celebrating the founding of the institutes.
Sometimes the CES sent its most promising young scholars, with church support, to graduate study at the University of Chicago and other elite schools, though as early as the late 1930s this was regarded with some uneasiness on the part of such General Authorities as J. Reuben Clark and Joseph Fielding Smith. Writes Mauss, “A struggle thus ensued within CES between the original philosophy of reconciliation with outside learning and the emergent philosophy of particularistic indoctrination.”
Mauss maintained the latter philosophy has “gained clear ascendancy,” since the new teachers selected by CES are those “much more amenable to the indoctrination philosophy.” The remarks of Apostle Mark E. Petersen at a 1962 CES staff summer school made a strong impression on George S. Tanner, longtime director of the institute at the University of Utah. As Tanner recorded the message in his journal, loyalty had priority over learning, and CES teachers were to develop faith and testimony in their students while avoiding intellectualizing. The CES had no room for academic freedom or intellectual inquiry, and teachers who did not like it were to go elsewhere. Since then, wrote Mauss, “CES has become increasingly anti-scientific and anti-intellectual, more inward-looking, more intent on stressing the uniqueness and exclusiveness of the Mormon version of the gospel as opposed to all other interpretations, whether religious or scientific.”
Institute courses are nonanalytical, avoiding critical or controversial issues. The textbook for Religion 121–122, a survey of the Book of Mormon, provides no critical framework and is a catechism-type explication. The church history course, Religion 341–343, tends to sidestep sensitive historical matters that might reflect badly on the church or raise delicate questions. The institute’s history textbook, for example, devotes four pages to the Haun’s Mill Massacre of 1838 in which seventeen Missouri Mormons were mercilessly slaughtered, including a young boy. The story legitimately stresses the persecutions of early Mormons.
By contrast, the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857, described in two pages, is not indexed in the history textbook. Not mentioned is the fact that, as documented by Mormon historian Juanita Brooks, the ill-fated emigrants had posted a white flag and laid down their arms, complying with the instructions of white flag-carrying Mormons. As planned, the murders were carried out with one Mormon “guard” assigned to each emigrant, Indians following Mormon instructions to kill the women and older children while the Mormons disposed of the men. Also unmentioned is that John Lee, executed twenty years later for the crime “with the connivance of the Mormon church,” was made the scapegoat, as Jan Shipps put it in a foreword to a recent edition of Brooks’s classic study. As previously mentioned, Brooks’s research did exonerate Brigham Young of involvement in the massacre, but the textbook tiptoes around the full disclosure of Mormon involvement in the tragedy. Mormons, of course, were living in a vigilante culture: they were both victims and perpetrators.
Another obvious subject from Mormon history, polygamy, is treated gingerly. The curriculum avoids the murky complications after the 1890 Manifesto. The actions or decisions of past or present church leaders are not to be criticized or questioned. Students read nothing about Joseph Smith’s well-documented activities with magic and interest in the occult or about the influence of Masonry on the temple endowment ceremony. The textbook for religion stresses the suffering and courage of the Mormons, the misconduct of anti-Mormons, the drama of the pioneer trek, the heroic faithfulness of the Saints, and the triumphalistic march of the church in new times.
Apostle Dallin Oaks in 1985 told a summer convocation of CES teachers at BYU that “some things that are true are not edifying or appropriate to communicate. Readers of history and biography should ponder that moral reality as part of their effort to understand the significance of what they read.” Official church literature, he maintained, has no more responsibility to present both sides than does anti-Mormon writing. “Criticism is particularly objectionable when it is directed toward Church authorities,” said Oaks. “It is one thing to deprecate a person who exercises corporate power or even government power. It is quite another thing to criticize or deprecate a person for the performance of an office to which he or she has been called of God. It does not matter that the criticism is true.”
Oaks, who had become a member of the Quorum of Twelve the previous year, is a true intellectual, a minority among the Apostles. He had been a law professor at the University of Chicago, executive director of the American Bar Foundation, and a Utah Supreme Court justice. He was also president of BYU from 1971 to 1980. During his years at the helm, BYU busily hired faculty with academic credentials from major universities, scholars with a strong commitment to professional excellence in their own disciplines. This was to yield a positive benefit as BYU emerged on the national scene as a major university. It was also to yield a challenge in the form of significant intellectual ferment boiling toward crises in the 1990s.
Strains between faith commitment, as defined by supporting constituencies and administrative bodies, and academic freedom, as perceived by faculties and sometimes students, are frequent grounds for conflict in religiously oriented institutions of higher learning. The battle between the theologian Charles Curran and the Catholic University of America spread over two decades and Curran was eventually fired. Catholic University was censured in 1990 by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Other denominational schools blacklisted by the AAUP have included Yeshiva University (1982), Southwestern Adventist College (1985), Southern Nazarene University (1987), and the Christian and Missionary Alliance’s Nyack College in New York (1995). Brigham Young University joined the list in 1998.
As the BYU administration pointed out, twenty of the fifty-five AAUP-censured schools have a religious affiliation. It is a difficult task to balance a faith commitment with academic freedom. The history of religion in American higher education is largely the history of secularization, as Notre Dame history professor George M. Marsden showed in his study The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (1994). Catholics are troubled about whether a parallel trend is well under way in Catholic higher education.
BYU’s first purge occurred in 1911 when the hot issues were evolution and higher criticism of the Bible. Three or four of its better professors resigned under pressure. The outwardly placid period of Ernest Wilkinson’s presidency (1951–71), when BYU’s well-groomed undergraduates contrasted so favorably with the disheveled student demonstrators disrupting other campuses, witnessed some of the school’s worst assaults on academic freedom. A supporter of the John Birch Society (as was then-Apostle Ezra Taft Benson), Wilkinson organized students into spy rings to report on their professors. One outgrowth of this unsavory chapter—which was eventually publicly acknowledged by Wilkinson—was the establishment of an AAUP chapter on the BYU campus.
Ecclesiastical entanglements affect aspects besides academic freedom. In one lively 1996 incident, a Mormon high schooler who was a hot basketball prospect told the Deseret News that Roger Reid, the most successful basketball coach in BYU and conference history, berated him for going to Duke instead of BYU. “He said I was letting nine million people down. He said I was letting down the Prophet and the Authorities.” Reid denied that he had invoked the Prophet and Apostles, but the damage was done. For this and other reasons, Reid’s midseason departure soon followed.
Science, business, law, and technical subjects are not likely to seed intellectual unrest on contemporary religious campuses. Trouble typically arises in English departments, philosophy, the social sciences, and on student publications. BYU follows this pattern. Its official student newspaper, The Daily Universe, has predictably been reined in; an independent off-campus student publication, Seventh East Press, which lasted from 1981 to 1983, died after the BYU administration prohibited on-campus distribution. Especially objectionable to BYU administrators had been an interview in which the University of Utah philosophy professor and Mormon gadfly Sterling McMurrin criticized church officials for limiting access to historical materials and said he did not believe the Book of Mormon to be an ancient text. Surviving for a time was another off-campus student publication, the Student Review, which had been distributed at off-campus locations frequented by students.
Troublesome faculty at BYU have also tended to come from the predictable disciplines, particularly English and any academic specialty that approaches Mormonism or Mormon studies analytically. These are the areas of scholarship in which ideas may challenge traditional assumptions or cause students to assess their beliefs from a new perspective.
Tenured BYU German professor Scott Abbott, writing in a 1992 issue of Sunstone, described some of the pressures on Mormon studies, saying that in many areas scholars can get funding for research, but that “when professors write about sexuality among Mormon adolescents, or query working Mormon women about their opinion of President Ezra Taft Benson’s advice that they stay at home, or speak about Mormon women from a feminist perspective, or ask why Mormon chapels are bombed in South America (these are four actual cases), immediate pressure is applied.” In a 1997 Sunstone article Abbott reported that President Bateman on December 13, 1996, had informed the humanities faculty that about one hundred professors were under investigation with the possibility of termination.
First in a series of highly public faculty firings was that of David P. Wright, an assistant professor of Asian and Near Eastern languages who is now on the faculty of Brandeis University. A highly ranked scholar and teacher approaching his three-year tenure-track review, Wright was terminated in 1988 for his “examination of LDS texts with the scholarly tools of biblical criticism, which examine issues of authorship and influence by contemporary sources,” according to a report in the May 1988 issue of Sunstone. The article reported a division between the College of Religion, which houses the CES institute instruction on the BYU campus, and the nonreligion faculty. The former “did not want seminary and institute teachers being exposed to his views when they took Hebrew and other biblical classes” in Wright’s department, while the nonreligion faculty found it embarrassing for the university to graduate students who were uninformed about methods of contemporary biblical scholarship.
Wright issued a statement acknowledging that his views departed from the LDS belief system. The Book of Mormon, he wrote, “is best explained as a nineteenth-century work of scripture rather than a translation of a document from ancient America around 600 b.c.–400 a.d.” He went on to state that “while some Mormon scholars, mainly at BYU, argue for its antiquity, more and more Mormon scholars are recognizing that if the book does not entirely derive from a nineteenth century provenance, it has been largely colored by concerns of that era.”
Over the next several years a number of troubling events pointed to disturbing trends. In 1992 the nation’s most prestigious academic honors society, Phi Beta Kappa, for the third time rejected BYU’s application for a chapter on the grounds that its mission as defined was incompatible with academic freedom. That same year, BYU’s administration and board of trustees adopted a formal statement on academic freedom written by a faculty committee appointed by the administration. The statement distinguished between protecting the freedom of an institution with a mission to pursue a particular religion, and the academic freedom of individual faculty. The policy regards limitations as reasonable on any activity or expression that “seriously and adversely affects” the mission of BYU or the church. Faculty have complained that the definition is too broad, vague, and nonspecific and that only the administration decides how it is applied; the administration has maintained that it will not be changed.
Ecclesiastical discipline was tightened. Though faculty had traditionally been expected to be temple-worthy, the rule was systematized, with the bishop of each teacher sent a checking-up letter annually. That made all scholarly careers subject to the endorsement of nonacademic, off-campus church officials. In 1993 several faculty members appealed the negative results of their tenure reviews; two, David Knowlton and Cecilia Konchar Farr, went public about their dismissals.
In anthropologist Knowlton’s case, Mormon doctrine was not the cause for trouble. Rated highly for his scholarship and teaching, Knowlton came under fire when he criticized certain “problems within the Mormon cultural system.” A specialist on Latin America, he studied why missionaries are sometimes targets for terrorism and quoted Latin Americans who linked the church with American imperialism. He was also criticized for publishing in Dialogue and Sunstone. Farr, a popular English teacher, was fired for her feminism and support of abortion rights, though she maintained that she personally does not favor abortion.
Another highly publicized English department case was that of Brian Evenson, son of a former dean and BYU physics professor, who was hired in 1994 and resigned in 1995 after criticism of the violence in his award-winning book of short stories, Altmann’s Tongue, published by Alfred A. Knopf during his first year at BYU. He did not use the book in his classes, but his job review was sparked by an anonymous letter sent by a student to an LDS church official. He left BYU for a job at Oklahoma State University.
Yet another English department cause célèbre, the 1996 refusal of tenure for Gail Turley Houston, produced the AAUP investigation and censure. Houston, a feminist who had taught at BYU for six years, was refused tenure on the grounds that she advocated praying to Mother in Heaven as well as Father in Heaven. She now teaches at the University of New Mexico. Mormon theology does indeed say that God the Father is married, so there is a mother in Heaven, but Gordon Hinckley, then First Counselor, gave a 1991 speech stating that “I consider it inappropriate for anyone in the church to pray to our Mother in Heaven.”
President Hinckley, who is BYU’s board chairman, said in his Time magazine interview that “anybody who persists in opposing the church, who is in public opposition, speaking out against it, I think may receive some discipline from the church. It’s just that simple. But those cases are so very, very, very few.” He also observed that “every university in America…draws some parameters around what it classifies as academic freedom. They all have some rules. They have to have some rules to live by. They can’t just have anarchy.” He contended that BYU’s policies do not limit “intellectual curiosity.”
As Bateman, BYU president during those firings explained, “Although we want to ensure that every faculty member has the right to discuss and analyze as broadly and widely as possible any topic, including religious topics, including fundamental doctrine of the church, we do not believe they should be able to publicly endorse positions contrary to the doctrine or to attack the doctrine. Secondly, we don’t believe they should be able to attack the church deliberately, or its general leaders.”
An anonymous BYU insider in a 1996 Sunstone essay wrote that problems at BYU run significantly deeper than the few highly publicized firings. The article detailed a bias against women’s studies; a pattern of refusing to hire scholars chosen for appointments to the English department, placing that department in “virtual receivership”; the “dismantling of Honors and General Education as the intellectual center of the university”; the harassment of the Student Review; and the threat of tenure denial to Larry Young, an assistant professor of sociology whose research suggested that the church’s international activity level is considerably lower than convert baptisms suggest. Young’s tenure and promotion were granted only when he convinced the church’s commissioner of education, Apostle Henry B. Eyring, of his sincere testimony. The Sunstone essay listed a number of discouraged faculty who had departed in recent years.
Current BYU professors have of necessity learned to exercise self-censorship. Darron Smith was denied contract renewal as an adjunct sociology teacher after a 2003 article saying the church should do more to eliminate racial “folklore.” There were three further dustups in 2006. Todd Hendricks, the university staff member who advised student government, was fired after writing a letter to the student newspaper that criticized the process for choosing candidates for student office. The school did not renew part-time philosophy instructor Jeffrey Nielsen’s contract after he wrote a Salt Lake Tribune article against the church’s call for adding a ban on gay marriage in the U.S. Constitution. And physics professor Steven Jones negotiated early retirement after an embarrassing furor over his involvement in the “9/11 truth” movement, which alleges that the U.S. government secretly orchestrated the World Trade Center slaughter.
In 1998 the university passed its reaccreditation evaluation with ease, as expected. The evaluators did note, however, that there seemed to be some indication of poor faculty morale and concern about academic freedom. The hiring process at BYU is cumbersome, involving a dozen steps in interviews and approvals. Prospective faculty are often asked whether they would be willing, should the brethren ask, to suppress potentially troublesome research. A January 1994 memo sent to deans by Assistant Academic Vice President Alan Wilkins, and obtained by the Associated Press, stressed that “we should not hire people who are a threat to the religious faith of our students or a critic of the Church and its leaders.” In spite of the accreditation evaluators’ observations about faculty morale, most professors willingly accept the restrictions. A 1999 Baylor University survey showed only 15 percent of BYU faculty agree they should be free to explore or write about any idea, even questioning church doctrine. This contrasts with 70 percent at Southern Baptist Baylor and 75 percent at Catholic University of Notre Dame.
The independent Student Review has complained that prospective women faculty members are asked about their marital status and family plans, which the publication considered a potential violation of federal rules, but the BYU administration says that such inquiries are legal under Title IX of the 1972 education amendments because of exemptions that apply to religious institutions. Women make up about 15 percent of the faculty at BYU, roughly half the national average, a proportion that seems unlikely to increase significantly.
The hiring decisions currently being made are shaping Brigham Young University, and the leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, well into the twenty-first century. BYU students are pleased with what they get. The 2007 Princeton Review may rank BYU first in “stone cold sober” and first in “students pray on a regular basis” (with evangelical Wheaton College, Illinois, ranked second in each of those categories). But student assessment scores on “quality of life” also place BYU near the top, expressing a happy contentment. The educational system is successfully feeding into the church the kind of members and leaders it wants: bright, dedicated, disciplined, hardworking, intensely loyal, obedient, fairly homogeneous in outlook, impressively capable of altruism and personal sacrifice, generally highly submissive to ecclesiastical authority, and committed to official orthodoxy as defined by the hierarchy.