Chapter 16
Getting Started
There was no question that David Bednar was the right man for the job of turning Ricks College into BYU-Idaho. Psychologically, the new university president and his colleagues were working from a standing start. However, they had already built the essential foundation for the unique four-year university that Hinckley envisioned. The three-track system of admissions necessary to fill the spring and summer terms and operate year-round was already under development. So was much, though not all, of the necessary building program.
Fulfilling some of the more radical mandates of the new university's strategy, such as eschewing graduate programs and faculty rank, was simply a matter of resisting the bigger-and-better tendency. For this Bednar and the board could thank Ernest Wilkinson and his successor administrators of the church system of higher education. Had it not been for their vigilance in defining Ricks in community college terms, by the year 2000 it likely would have acquired two of the defining characteristics of the research university, Charles Eliot's graduate programs and James Conant's research-driven, up-or-out tenure. That neither existed at Ricks meant BYU-Idaho enjoyed a genetic advantage in undergraduate education like that of academically modest liberal arts colleges. The faculty would engage in scholarship “focused,” as Bednar said, “on the processes of learning and teaching.” They would do it with the help of undergraduates rather than graduate students and would not feel driven to please the editorial boards of traditional scholarly journals and university presses.1
Heavyweight Teams and Administrative Engagement
Even new university responsibilities, such as designing bachelor's degrees and winning four-year accreditation, were accomplished in short order. Provisional accreditation came in 2001 and full accreditation just three years later. This success came in part because of Bednar's creation of a “heavyweight team” to oversee the effort.2 The members of this team included faculty members and administrators with intimate knowledge of both the Ricks College curriculum and the standards of the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, the regional accreditation body. This team was given authority to cross organizational boundaries and create standard processes for designing curriculum and gathering the information required by the accreditors.
Heavyweight Innovation Teams
One of the things that Clayton Christensen found as he did the research that led to The Innovator's Dilemma3 is that disruptive innovations rarely come out of established enterprises. Even when a truly new way of doing things occurs to someone in a successful organization, the established systems and standards take over. A new idea that isn't dismissed entirely is almost inevitably modified to fit the ways things are traditionally done, losing its innovation impact in the process.
The simplest solution to this problem is to create an autonomous organizational unit to develop the idea, as IBM did when it decided to build a personal computer (PC) in the early 1980s. Knowing that IBM's sophisticated salesmen and marketing managers would consider the PC a toy and try to either soup it up or kill it, the senior executive team put the developers in Florida. That was far enough from IBM's New York headquarters that they could focus on meeting the needs of price-sensitive nonconsumers of computers, without regard for the main organization's fixation on high profit margins and corporate image. The result was breakthrough new product for IBM.
Under the right circumstances, major innovation can be fostered within an established organization. A critical tool for doing so is a heavyweight team made up of experts who represent all of the necessary organizational functions and can speak for their departments without feeling beholden to them. Ideally, they are located in physical proximity to one another and led by someone with substantial organizational authority. If members of a heavyweight team take collective responsibility for finding a better way to do things—with awareness but not overriding concern for potential impacts on their individual departments—established organizations can move nimbly in new directions, as BYU-Idaho did in turning itself into a university.
Though accreditation came in record time, other changes took longer to settle out. One was the dropping of the Ricks College name in favor of BYU-Idaho. Descendants of Thomas Ricks, who numbered in the thousands, felt the sting of this loss keenly. The board approved Bednar's recommendation to name a large classroom building then under construction in honor of the school's founder.
Worries about what would become of the beloved Spirit of Ricks plagued more than just members of the Ricks family. With academic offerings and student enrollment projected to grow significantly, many of the institution's supporters feared that it would lose its intimacy and informality. For years after the announcement Bednar spoke publicly of how the university would continue to embody the Ricks College tradition of caring and concern; the formal tagline for the new BYU-Idaho alumni association became “Preserving and Enhancing the Spirit of Ricks.”4 Bednar also continued with his traditions of formal and informal communication, such as regular all-employee meetings and campus-wide Q&A sessions. Efforts such as these notwithstanding, university employees grew accustomed to having students, parents, alumni, and other patrons attribute their disappointments in its policies to a loss of the old college ethos. One angry alumnus called Bednar a “killer of the Spirit of Ricks.”5
For some, even more painful than changing the school's name was eliminating its intercollegiate athletic programs. The announcement not only caught all of the coaches and athletes completely off-guard, it came at a time of unprecedented success. The women's and men's cross-country teams were in the midst of winning, respectively, seven and three consecutive junior college national championships. The football team had lost the national championship game by just three points in 1998 and was a perennial Top 10 performer. The athletes were also successful in the classroom: in 1999, six Ricks teams had finished first in the national academic rankings.6 The situation could hardly have been more different from that of Harvard at the time of the Ivy Agreement. Ricks was winning, and its reputation outside of Rexburg rested heavily on athletics.
In the Salt Lake press conference following the announcement, the first question asked of President Hinckley was about the football team's future. In response to a subsequent question, “Why do away with athletics?” he replied, “It takes too much money.”7 Hinckley knew what top-flight athletic teams cost at BYU, and it was easy to imagine how coaches and players who consistently won at the junior college level would strive for similar success in the NCAA. He could foresee the problem NCAA president Myles Brand would identify in 2008: “Athletics spending has increased in recent years at a pace that ultimately is unsustainable.”8 That would almost certainly be true for the church if it operated two independent programs, particularly with one of them in a rural community with a limited fan base.
The burden of implementing the decision to eliminate intercollegiate athletics fell to David Bednar. He determined to honor Ricks College's scholarship commitments by operating all existing teams through two additional seasons, during which time the school won two more cross-country national championships and finished with a number 5 ranking in football.9 The ongoing athletic success only added to the pain and indignation of those involved, and Bednar bore the brunt of their efforts to reverse the no-athletics decision. He stood firm, declaring his door to be open but categorically refusing to revisit the university's position. Nearly all coaches and other athletics support personnel were offered continuing positions at the university; a few qualified for retirement packages.10 In the end, some chose to take coaching positions elsewhere. Most, though, stayed and focused on the physical education classes they had previously taught part-time.
The End of Intercollegiate Athletics
The day after Gordon Hinckley announced the creation of BYU-Idaho and the end of Ricks College's intercollegiate athletic programs, the region's largest newspaper, the Idaho Falls Post Register, ran the headline “So long Vikings.” The lead article on the subject described the news as “personally and professionally devastating to everyone in the athletic department.” The photos of eight coaches, along with their Ricks College career records, appeared under the heading “The Coaching Casualties.” Football coach Ron Haun's record was listed as 160–32–2. Women's basketball coach Lori Woodland was recognized for 243 wins against 40 losses.11
The Post Register, noting Ricks's success in two premier athletic conferences, said, “It was the broad range of those leagues, which include teams from Idaho, Utah, Colorado, Oregon, and Arizona, and the expense that it took to travel in order to compete, that ultimately led to the decision to eliminate Ricks' athletic program.”
Notwithstanding the personal and institutional pain associated with such decisions, economic realities have led other schools to look hard at the costs and benefits of their intercollegiate athletics programs, especially football, the most expensive one. Hofstra and Northeastern universities both eliminated football at the end of the 2009 season. At Hofstra, $4.5 million was thus freed for other purposes, including need-based student aid.12 In 2010, the University of California, Berkeley eliminated five sports, including baseball, affecting some 20 percent of its student athletes and thirteen coaches, but producing a much needed savings of $4 million in the year immediately following.13
A New Approach to Student Activities
One former Ricks coach who stayed was the school's athletic director, Garth Hall. He became chair of a committee—another heavyweight team—tasked with creating what Bednar called in his post-announcement press conference “a wide-ranging and extensive activity program, including athletics.”14 Hall approached the task with the perspective of having coached football at the NCAA Division I level for more than two decades at six universities. He appreciated the rationale for taking a different path at BYU-Idaho. He had seen the high institutional cost of intercollegiate athletics, especially as a head coach at a regional university in a city several times larger than Rexburg; its athletic program's revenues covered only 25 percent of its nearly $5 million cost.15
Less than sixty days after the announcement of BYU-Idaho's creation, Hall's team of faculty, administrators, and students proposed a wide-ranging set of programs, including activities in the categories of sports, fitness, outdoor recreation, visual and performing arts, hobbies and crafts, service, entertainment, and academics.16 What proved to be most significant for the university in the long run was the proposed principle that “students who advance will be given the opportunity to serve in teacher, coach, and supervisor capacities.”17 The team envisioned a student leadership pyramid. For example, a freshman might start as a participant on a volleyball team and in the ensuing years rise to team captain, team coach, and ultimately league organizer. The last of these positions might come with a scholarship or stipend, but the other leadership responsibilities would be filled on a volunteer basis. All of the positions would allow students to teach other students.
Involving students via what would become known as the student leadership model was significant in two respects. In addition to offering hands-on leadership training beneficial to students in their personal and professional lives, it would also allow for cost-efficient growth. The entire cost of the new activities program, including the non-athletic categories, was funded at one-third the cost of the old athletics budget.18
By 2009, the university sponsored 192 unique activity programs that were run by more than 7,500 students. The former intercollegiate athletic teams were more than replaced, at least in terms of student involvement. Where there had been a single football team before there were eight, playing in full pads on a field that experienced so much wear that the natural grass had to be replaced with artificial turf. Where there had been no competitive swimming team in Ricks College days, BYU-Idaho had four. Non-athletic activities such as musical performance and community service also multiplied.
Internships and Career-Oriented Majors
Much as the end of intercollegiate athletics made possible greater benefits for the bulk of students, so did the institutional name change that initially piqued champions of The Spirit of Ricks. Those benefits became apparent as BYU-Idaho students sought employment. The new name provided recognition and a measure of credibility with employers, many of whom had BYU graduates already on the payroll. Most who hired a BYU-Idaho student found that students from Rexburg could perform on par with those from Provo.
The beneficiaries of the BYU-Idaho name included not only graduates but also junior and senior students served by an internship program created under David Bednar's direction by another heavyweight team of faculty and administrators. The goals of this internship team were twofold. One was to supplement the new university's “integrated” bachelor's degrees. Many of the departments offering the new four-year degrees were initially too small—in some cases only three or four faculty members—to teach the typical range of specialized junior and senior-year courses. The solution was an integrated degree, one with a major of no more than 45 credit hours, less than the typical 50-plus hours. In addition, the integrated degree required a 24-credit minor or a set of two 12-credit “clusters” in complementary fields. For example, a construction management major might take a minor in business, and an English major one cluster in graphic design and another in computer technology. This would not only solve the problem of limited upper-division offerings but also increase the employability of graduates. The simple, low-cost solution might also be one of higher quality for the ordinary student.
In fact, the rationale for the integrated degree was only secondarily to make up for lack of curricular depth, which was a problem that would soon be solved by the hiring of additional faculty, the majority of them Ph.D. holders. Given BYU-Idaho's mission of serving undergraduates of diverse academic abilities, the emphasis on employment preparation made sense regardless of the university's capacity to provide advanced courses.19 Though some graduates would proceed immediately for further study, the majority would be looking for jobs.
David Bednar had a keen sense of the kind of education required to win those jobs, thanks in part to his work at the University of Arkansas. While on the faculty there, he had helped design the curriculum for the Walton Institute, Wal-Mart's in-house provider of management education. He had also led Arkansas students in consulting project work for Wal-Mart and many of its supplier companies. From these experiences, he had seen the value of integrating classroom and workplace-based learning. Though Rexburg lacked the natural learning laboratories provided by the myriad corporate offices in the area of Northwest Arkansas around Bentonville, Bednar believed that the right kind of university-sponsored internship program might provide even greater educational opportunities for BYU-Idaho students.
Creating internship services for undergraduate students amounted to another alteration of traditional university DNA. With Eliot's placing of Harvard's graduate programs atop the college, undergraduate curriculum designers began to presume that the primary purpose of a bachelor's degree was to prepare a student for graduate school. Especially as Harvard's selectivity and prestige rose in the second half of the twentieth century, professors and students alike took it for granted that the latter were either gaining a liberal education in anticipation of studying business, law, or medicine, or that they were taking the introductory coursework required for admission to a Ph.D. program. Expecting to spend at least six years at the university, undergraduate students felt little pressure to become acquainted with professional environments, let alone to prepare for a career immediately upon college graduation. Rather than viewing summers as an opportunity to augment their classroom studies with workplace experiences, they treated them as they did in high school, as vacation time. Unfortunately, that attitude of “time to spare,” which is unwise even for the students at elite colleges who are likely to attend graduate school, carries over to typical college students, who may face a greater likelihood of failing to graduate at all than of earning a graduate degree.
Hoping to avoid this problem, the BYU-Idaho team tasked with creating the internship program recommended that an internship be required as part of each integrated major. Though academic credit would be granted, the requirement would be fulfilled in a student's semester away from classes; a student attending the spring and summer terms and the fall semester, for example would perform the internship in winter. Along with this recommendation, the university implemented the team's proposal to create an internship office and establish formal relationships with major employers in a dozen “hub cities” spread from Seattle, San Jose, and Los Angeles on the west coast to New York and Washington, D.C., in the east.20
The track system gave the new university's interns an advantage over their competitors from other schools. The internship office encouraged employers to think of their interns not as mere future recruits, for whom special projects would have to be manufactured each summer, but as a steady stream of real workers available year-round. The idea found especially warm reception with the major accounting firms, which could plan on having BYU-Idaho students working not only in the summer but also in the much busier fall and winter seasons, when most clients close their books and finalize their taxes. This year-round availability, combined with the brand recognition provided by BYU's well-regarded undergraduate programs, quickly opened doors in places where the name Ricks College had never been heard.21
Though valuable to students, the internship program proved expensive to implement. Establishing employer relationships required five full-time administrators to travel heavily, especially in the early years. They were often joined by faculty members, who sought to understand what employers wanted and to ensure that the academic curriculum provided it. The university also found it necessary to subsidize students' travel to the hub cities for hiring interviews. Many students failed to see the value of an internship at all. As the internship program matured, the emphasis shifted from creating new employer relationships to convincing students to take advantage of the opportunities already available.
David Bednar presided over all of these developments (see Table 16.1)—the creation of four-year curriculum featuring integrated majors, the securing of university-level accreditation, and the development of student activities and internship programs—with confident patience. He could feel the power of the institution's design and people, and he knew that both were independent of him. He spoke often of feeling honored to be “only laying a foundation” for BYU-Idaho.22 The president who would build on that foundation was yet to come.
Table 16.1 Innovations of the David Bednar Era, 1997–2004
| New Traits | Implications |
| University program and accreditation | Advanced study opportunities |
| Potentially increased cost | |
| Integrated majors | High customizability |
| Low cost of curriculum creation | |
| Limited opportunities for advanced study | |
| Activities program and leadership model | Increased student involvement |
| Low operational cost | |
| Decreased spectator interest relative to competitive athletics | |
| Internship program | Enhanced career placement |
| Increased cost |