There is frequently a question asked in ex-Mo and prog-Mo spaces about whether or not having BYU on one’s resume is viewed as a positive or a negative by employers and recruiters. As a BYU alum, I haven’t personally experienced any negative issues with it, but I’m also much older than those who are attending now, and frankly, the school is changing as is the church. We are in a regressive era, and as social gains in equality have been made for women, LGBTQ people, and racial minorities, the Church and BYU have increasingly (and deliberately) gotten further behind. BYU, which once aspired to be the “Harvard of the West” (which I think Stanford actually has locked down) now seems to be more interested in becoming the Liberty Universty of the CJCOLDS.
Briefly, it seemed that the school was about to break with its Evangelical cohort and become more equality-minded toward its queer students, expected equivalent “honor code” behavior, allowing affection between gay students while still requiring chastity. This came to a screeching halt almost as soon as it was announced, and soon thereafter, the church turned the administrative reins over to Clark Gilbert who is perhaps even more regressive than Ernest Wilkinson.
But that brings us back to the key question of this post. Instead of a trip down memory lane, revisiting what my own experience with BYU was (since it is largely irrelevant to how the school is now), this is about whether parents today (and their college age kids) should choose BYU, or if not, why not. Obviously that’s a personal choice for everyone considering schools.
BYU Positives
- Sunk cost. Your tithing dollars have already paid for this, and it’s either benefiting your kid or someone else’s.
- Tuition. The cost (in dollars) is on par with community college, but at the Provo campus at least, you have access to a higher quality set of professors than you would at a community college.
- Marriage. If you want your kid to marry another church member, this is your best bet. Most people marry someone they met in college (or if they don’t attend college, someone they met at that age). For someone like me, with no Utah ties, my parents certainly assumed this was the only likely way I would marry a church member. There were hardly any where I lived!
- Professors. There are some high quality programs and professors at BYU-Provo. (Idaho has a high percentage of adjunct professors and programs are more limited, although there are a few programs that stand out. I can’t comment on BYU-Hawaii.)
- LDS Peers. If your kid is used to being around a group of Mormon friends, this is something that will continue at BYU. Some parents might like this as a “softer” entry into adulthood than a party school (e.g. ASU where two of my three went). Nobody at BYU will think you’re weird if you refuse to drink or have sex, although honestly, this is something that the current generation tends to be cooler about anyway; pressuring others is considered outre, unlike in my generation where peer pressure was like mother’s milk to us.
- Missions. BYU anticipates taking a break to go on a mission and is flexible about it. Some programs at other schools might be less forgiving of a two year break.
BYU Negatives
- Belief required. A whole lot of Mormon parents don’t really know if their kids believe in the Church or not because the stakes are too high for kids to confide in their parents in a high demand religion. And if your kid is a non-believer, wowzers is this the wrong place to go. They might literally run into problems with transferring credits. Or they might have to pretend for four years, dealing with the pressure to attend church and go on a mission and go to religion classes. It’s a recipe for misery, unless they cave to pressure and convert (like I did).
- LGBTQ not welcome. Many kids do not come to terms with their own sexual identity and orientation until their college years, and BYU is not the place to come out, even to oneself. Parents of queer kids might likewise not know that their child is gay or trans until it’s too late and they are already depressed and suicidal in an unsupportive or even hostile environment. Even if they only have a relative who is gay or trans, they are very likely to hear a lot of queer bashing from various emboldened individuals (faculty, administration and students), and being an open ally among faculty has been squelched. You can even get called out for wearing a rainbow pin now.
- Diversity issues. BYU is still one of the whitest campuses in the country at 80.6%. The black student population is less than 1% (13.6% of the US population is black). Given the racist history of the Church, started by the school’s namesake, it’s not really a great place to be exposed to other cultures, races, and ideas; students may enter the work force without that specific experience unless they got it in their home town. More importantly, the faculty is less diverse than at other schools. Additionally, BYU has a pretty big gender equality problem. Although 34.5% of faculty are women, they earn 21% less than their male colleagues, and are far less likely to hold prestigious positions. One professor with a doctorate expressed the lack of respect when a student introduced her as “Sister X” while introducing her male peers as “Dr X, Y, Z.” BYU is improving, but it’s nowhere near on par with other universities on these issues.
- Religion classes. YMMV, but my personal experience at BYU was that these classes were on par with a youth seminary lesson. One of my religion “professors” literally gave the exact same lesson over and over throughout the semester. I honestly think he had dementia. The types of quizzes students receive in these courses are strictly indoctrination, having to write essays supporting current leaders’ positions regardless what they might personally think. There are very few religion professors who are qualified to teach on this subject in a way that any other school recognizes, so these credits are worthless if you transfer. To paraphrase Logan Roy from Succession, these are not serious people.
- Critical Thinking. Due to these factors, one’s exposure to critical thinking and new ideas may be more limited at BYU than at other schools. This is less of an issue the higher you get into your program because, on the whole, BYU is staffed by highly qualified professors with expertise in their fields. But the school’s primary mission is to increase commitment to the Church, and its methods to do this are even more controlling than when I attended there. Conformity is safer and more valued than questioning, exploring and thinking outside the box.
The more politically polarized the country gets, the more embarrassed I am by having BYU on my resume, but at my age, it probably doesn’t matter that much anymore. I’m more likely to suffer from ageism than assumptions that I’m a racist homophobe (not that those are mutually exclusive assumptions). I found that there were a lot of students I could relate to when I attended, even if they were a minority of the total student body. Dating, on the other hand, was mostly a terrible experience there due to the sexist assumptions most Mormon men had; I found them to be quite self-centered and self-important with limited interest in me as a person or an equal. There was a nearly universal assumption (until I got further in my program) that I, like all other women, was just there to find a husband, not to actually have a career. I found male students at that time to be very patronizing and dismissive which was unappealing to say the least.
- Do you think BYU is (still?) a good choice? If so, why? If not, why not?
- Did you / would you send your kids there? Why or why not?
- Are there pros or cons not on this list that you would add?
- Do you think having BYU on your resume is viewed as a neutral, a positive, or a negative?
- What could BYU do to increase its value?
Discuss.
Wheat & Tares 
Excellent analysis. In Hawaii, few LDS families send kids to BYUH. The BYUH, the Polynesian Cultural Center, and Hawaii Reserves (church land management company), have ruined the reputation of Latter-Day Saints in the area by polluting the land, contaminating the water, mistreating the locals. We send our kids to Provo. The quality of education at BYUH, however, is excellent—many of the professors are overqualified and genuinely seem to enjoy teaching.
If your kids ever run into an issue with a CES professor, do not deal with the school—go to the police and get a lawyer: the CES administration will burn and bury students [our kids] to cover up, save face, and protect abusive LDS professors. Avoid these dishonest and abusive professors at BYUH: Aaron Shumway, Matthew Bowen, Rebecca Strain and James Faustino.
BYUH is liberal. So liberal, that if TBM-LDS really knew, they’d protest or stop paying tithing. It’s a safe place for openly gay kids to be as gay as they aspire to be, and the Polynesian Cultural Center provides employment for the theater-types who love to sing and dance. Critical Race Theory is alive and well at BYUH. Also, it’s easy for BYUH students to skip to Honolulu for the weekend for clubbing and drinking—it’s commonplace. So underneath the holy facade, it’s the most secular of CES schools—which is a good thing. Most folks in the area know that BYUH is used by intelligence agencies to recruit Chinese students by “awarding” them money for business/entrepreneurship. And BYUH still mandates the Covid-19 vaccines, despite the dramatic drop in birthrates for young couples, myocarditis in young men, and abnormal menstruation in young women.
To increase value to LDS, the BYUs could focus on academic rigor, instead of faith-promoting rhetoric. We send our kids to be educated and prepared for life; they don’t need to be indoctrinated by evangelical self-help seminars, or contrived testimonials. Our kids see through it. Some of the speakers that get invited to campus to talk to our kids are so firmly out of touch and uninspiring, they do more harm than good. Statistically, more than half of LDS youth are exiting the Church by age 25, and most of them had already planned to exit the Church before attending BYU. This tells us that the Church marketing of faith-promoting education is little more than a marketing ploy to hope-filled, naive LDS parents.
I don’t disagree with the analysis (though some would find the “cons” to be “pros.”). But I tend to believe that education is what you make of it and that most (nonLDS) employers don’t look that closely at the institution an individual graduates from. They look for the degree (or other relevant info). It MIGHT make a difference for those pursuing post bachelor degrees but it’s an empirical question. My guess (and it’s only that) is that in the world at large BYU is not really on many people’s radar. The LDS (like any group with their own educational institution) tend to believe that because it looms large in our world it must be the same for others. But I doubt it. (Can you name the universities owned by Seventh Day Adventists for example?) P.S. I do tire of the dismissive attitude some have towards BYU-Idaho. Like the other BYUs, it has many many excellent professors, good programs (though there’s a couple I’d probably avoid), and a mission decidedly different from the other BYUs.
I graduated from high school in update NY in the 1980s as a member of a TBM family. To me, BYU was the obvious choice and it’s hard to identify a #2 that would have come close. I could finally be around other Mormons. I could find a Mormon wife. And my parents would pay less for me to attend BYU than any other major university in the US. There was no debate. And several of my friends made the same calculation.
Fast forward 30 years and my own kids start to graduate from high school. Maybe it was growing up in Utah, maybe it was being less committed to the Church, maybe it was being more progressive…but none of my 4 kids wanted anything to do with BYU. And this was while we were still active in the Church.
My kids eventually left the Church one-by-one and so did my wife and I. You pro-BYU types will see a cause-and-effect that isn’t really there: you’ll think that my kids would have stayed in the boat had they attended BYU. But as my oldest daughter once told me: “I didn’t stop believing because I attended x university, I attended x university instead of byu because I didn’t believe”.
It is my opinion that most parents who send their kids to BYU want them to have their family’s world view reenforced during college. This usually means Mormonism and Republicanism. What we wanted, even as active member parents, was that our kids be challenged with new ideas, new kinds of people new places. Provo was not going to fulfill that mission.
In a kind of ironic twist, our kids like to make fun of BYU’s culture, honor code, etc. and they like to make fun of mom and dad for meeting there and graduating from BYU. That’s ok. I make fun of it too now. It wasn’t terrible but I would have thrived somewhere else. I just wasn’t prepared emotionally to even consider the alternatives back then.
Going to a city college wipes out all the positives. Your classes are cheap, some colleges have an institute building where you can hang out with and meet others and a spouse, your teacher isn’t a TA a degree but an instructor with a Masters or PHD, and you can take a two year break at any time.
You can also adjust the level of Mormonism that you want to deal with by how often you go to institute.
My wife went to BYU for a few years, went to the local city college and was blown away by how much better the teachers were and how much less insane the assignments were.
That’s huge considering how very few employers care where you got your degree from.
Hawkgrrrl, You quoted one of Logan Roy’s more tame sayings. No F-bombs dropped on W&T!
To me the biggest pros of a BYU education are (1) relatively low cost of the education and housing in Provo/Rexburg (2) making Mormon connections including getting married and (3) being in an environment that reinforces your religious beliefs.
These were relevant to me 20 years ago when I attended. However, things are different now. To point 1 about cost, my kids in SoCal can attend jr college for free. The local UC/Cal State schools are required to hold sufficient spots for transfer students. Now the cost of four years at BYU is on par with the cost of a UC school. And my kids will save money living at home for the first two years.
For point 2 about Mormon connections, I’m noticing more and more students leaving BYU unwed as less people are inclined to get married so young.
For point 3, I think even those kids who considered themselves all in find the culture and norms of BYU to be just too much sometimes.
In short, the selling points of yesteryear just aren’t there anymore.
As for BYU on my resume, nobody cares now that I have 20 years work experience where I went to school. But I recently spoke to a neighbor whose daughter is a marketing major at BYU. She said several large marketing firms no longer recruit at BYU. They are not interested in what the school has to offer. Being an accounting grad, we still recruit from BYU due to it’s top three status. But underneath that huge recruiting effort, a lot of the partners aren’t too keen on BYU students.
At BYU 20 years ago, my program bragged constantly about how great it was. After graduation and graduate school at other institutions, I realized how lacking my BS truly was. And 20 years later there are still no female faculty in the department. My 7th grader wants to study engineering, and I cannot in good faith steer her towards BYU’s programs when the state school is far better for her field of interest (top 10 in nation).
As an undergrad at Utah in the 90s, I took a sociology class (a 101 class in an auditorium with hundreds of classmates) in which the professor sought to illustrate the differences between the kinds of cultures that exist in different institutions. His example was two similar exercises conducted at BYU and Utah football games. In the former, the student section was given different colored cards that they were then asked to display; the coordinated result spelled something out or displayed a picture. A few students failed to comply and they were escorted from their seats by security and generally scorned by their fellow students, but the overall effort was a rousing success.
Students were asked to do a similar exercise at the U, but instead of displaying the cards as asked, they chose to beat one another with them and generally behave in an uncooperative manner. One of the cheerleaders made the mistake of grabbing a bullhorn and telling the students that, whatever they did, don’t throw the cards, which was followed immediately by an avalanche of cards onto the field and frantic cheerleaders and equipment people scrambling to pick them up before the game started.
This was how the professor illustrated conformity as a value versus acting out as an expression of individuality, though it might also be an argument for the disruptive impact of alcohol. No, everyone acting out at the same time is not an expression of individuality, and maybe it’s not the most stellar example, but it does line up with so many other examples of conformity at BYU.
I had the freedom to find myself and develop of sense of capability and independence during my undergraduate years. I learned to depend on myself first and foremost and that differences of opinion and lifestyle did not have to create divisions among people. If I had a college-age child now, I’d like them to learn similar values and life skills, and it doesn’t seem like BYU is the place to do that.
I went to BYU from 1998-2004. Back then for me it was a good choice. I did Near Eastern Studies major with Arabic minor and it was awash with connections. Lots of my colleagues leveraged their major and Arabic for good jobs with the government and to get into good schools. I had great opportunities open up for me after graduation but didn’t end up playing my cards right for a number of reasons and ended up going a different path. My Arabic is excellent as a result of BYU. I still use it for a wide variety of personal reasons, but not remuneratively. I graduated from BYU debt-free.
BYU still seems to be a good choice for many of my nephews and nieces who are attending BYU right now. One of my nephews got a great job as an actuary after graduation from BYU, and used his connections there for great results. Another nephew has gotten great medical internships through BYU and is in the process of applying to med school. They pay next to nothing for tuition.
Honestly I haven’t really heard too many stories of people being rejected because of religious bias against BYU. Most people don’t know that much about Mormonism and generally think it is wrong to discriminate on the basis of religion. However, BYU is experiencing the grade inflation trend of many other universities and the cheapening of the 4-year degree. But that is not unique to BYU. College students have to try harder now to leverage their undergrad experiences for good results. You can’t just get a 4-year degree and land something only on that basis. You have to have other things to show for it to get the good well-paying jobs.
Now, is BYU a good school to go to if you’re looking to get away from repressive, stodgy religious environments? No.
It depends on who is evaluating you. I think if you are talking an academic job, it is probably a negative. But in business, where most people hiring are conservative, it may be a plus unless the evaluator doesn’t like Mormons.
At my firm’s September corporate retreat, our recruiting team gave a presentation dealing with hiring trends, colleges, backgrounds, etc. Included in the PPT were recommendations related to preferred recruiting locations. Changes from previous years included the removal of BYU (among others).
Curious, I made it a point to generate an open discussion of why BYU was deleted. Bullet points from my meeting notes include:
1. BYU grads interview poorly. They rarely ask questions about the firm or position; rather, they are more self-centered and want to talk about their missions, life experiences, etc.
2. Hiring BYU grads has become a risky proposition. They are more interested in immediate gratification in terms of salary and title rather than leveraging opportunities to learn.
3. One manager provided an example: Three months after hiring a BYU grad, he came into her office unannounced, set his phone to record and demanded to know exactly when he would have her title and salary. This is a manager with over twenty years of experience. Thankfully, she terminated him forthwith.
4. As a rule, BYU grads are socially inept and awkward in groups. At cocktail parties, they make it a point to lecture about why Mormons are better people because they don’t drink alcohol. Most non-drinkers simply take a Sprite or Coke and intermix.
5. Employees from BYU take an inordinate amount of PTO for trivial reasons such as church meetings, soccer games, etc. Typically, they demand rather than ask.
I understand these experiences are anecdotal; however, they speak poorly of the quality of a BYU education. There is clearly a retrenchment in terms of producing graduates with informed worldviews.
Our oldest child decided he didn’t believe in the church when he was 14 and we were a TBM family who never missed reading the BOM and praying every night until he was 20 years old. We tried to persuade him to go to school at BYU ID which is near his grandparents (we live in NV). It’s actually cheaper than other choices here. He wasn’t the least bit interested. He wanted to stay here near his friends. He got an associates at the nearby community college. My 2nd and 3rd struggled with academics and didn’t finish their associates. My 4th is academically gifted, but he refused to apply anywhere but in our local community college. He has 3 scholarships there and will start his last semester in the spring. He’s thinking of attending UNR.
Time flashes by and nothing turned out like we expected. My husband graduated from Ricks then attended BYU and eventually transferred to USU. Back then he struggled to compete and fit in at BYU. We are both Utah State University graduates.
“I think if you are talking an academic job, it is probably a negative”
Most academic jobs require a PhD. BYU is not known to be a PhD school. It has only 3,000 grad students. It awards about 300 PhDs a year. BYU has been a springboard for many students for entry into good Master’s and PhD programs in my personal experience. I have many BYU colleagues who have gone to Ivy Leagues and top 25 schools for PhDs.
That said, getting an academic job, meaning a tenure-track faculty position, at a university or college anywhere is extremely difficult in any department. There is a glut of PhDs granted and that has long been the case. To land such a job, it is almost an absolute necessity to go to a top 25 school or at least a program that is top 25 in a particular discipline even if the school isn’t top 25, to work with the most accomplished advisors, and to show publishing output early on. If you don’t get into a good PhD program, forget it. If you don’t have publishing output early on, forget it. If research and writing is too hard or too slow, forget it. In fact, mostly I would say to those thinking of pursuing a PhD or academic job, forget it. There are more jobs out there that you will make more money at that you will not have to work as hard to earn. And these jobs can be landed without wasting 7+ years of your life to get. I speak from personal experience having slogged many years to earn a PhD at a low-ranking university whose program fell into shambles while I was there. My academic job that I landed after such hard work? A worthless, low-paying adjunct teaching position at UVU where I was looked down upon by the full-time faculty and virtually cut off from interaction with them.
The PhD program should be abolished and turned into an actual teaching and research job. Universities admission boards can tell at a much earlier level whether or not a student shows promise in teaching and publishing. That will force the universities to stop admitting so many students for programs on fake promises of prestige that lead to nowhere for the vast majority of them. The adjunct positions need to be paid high salaries, not starvation wages. If all adjuncts went on strike simultaneously, the whole university system in the US would grind to a halt. Adjuncts, unite! Take from football coaches’ and university presidents’ and deans’ and deanlets’ exorbitant salaries if needs be to pay the adjuncts what they deserve. I hope the vast network of labor exploiters at the university systems around the world burn. But I digress.
The backlash I receive in the Midwest (close to church history sites, ground zero for the Mormon Wars, CoC and LDS bristling, and steeped evangelicalism, is horrific. Brutal. A professional non-starter. I’d say anywhere in the Bible Belt is an no-go. Unless you use your BYU degree to pivot to the Intermountain west, think twice before going to the Y. Don’t expect praise here in the Midwest.
As the dust settles, we see that the Mormon Moment overwhelmingly construed us negatively. Pew research polls consistently rate us as the second most disliked religion in the nation.
We have been victims of outright discrimination in the past, but today it feels more entrenched- more informed (our six toes and horns have been replaced with detailed facts about Kolob, garments, the PH ban, the Pox, all sorts of theological bashes, etc.) It’s a tough time to be a proud, outspoken Mormon.
I was at BYU from 1985 – 1989 and LOVED IT. I found my people. There were a few people with sticks up their butts, but I didn’t hang out with any of them. It sounds like they have changed since then.
I received my undergraduate degree from BYU in the mid-80’s and have two daughters out there right now; a freshman & a junior. They both love it and are having great experiences. They are both very different. One wants to find a husband and be a school teacher while the other wants to be a corporate Wall Street attorney and intentionally wants to wait until she’s out of law school before even dating, much less marrying. However different they are, they both wanted to be out there, as did I, BECAUSE of the unique & particular things about the Y. Many of the items listed as negatives (not all, but many) are actually deemed positives by many who have attended or are out there now. Agree or disagree, most of those kids are exactly where they want to be.
I’ve worked in both Michigan and Illinois (Chicago-ish) and never felt like my BYU education was very noteworthy one way or another. I’ve also interviewed for and been offered positions in NY and MI. I’ve interviewed for multiple positions in NC. As far as I recall, no one has ever commented one way or the other on my BYU education. It is, of course, impossible for me to know what they aren’t saying, but in my life I think I’ve had a reasonable success rate at getting offers when interviewing for jobs. I’ve had a dismal rate of responses to job applications, so maybe the bots are filtering out my BYU resume, but from what I can tell on the internet this isn’t at all unique to BYU graduates. Once I was in a job, my Mormonism made me a curiosity to some people, but I never felt looked down on. I’ve also worked within the Jello Belt, and now that I think of it, all those hiring managers did have BYU degrees. Maybe they were subconsciously (or consciously) favoring me.
It may help that I have a STEM degree and work in a STEM field. My BYU classes were mostly non-religious. There’s no religious or moral angle to Newton’s laws. I wonder if social sciences, humanities, etc., are different, as the classwork intersects with religion very differently than the hard sciences. I was at BYU from 1999 to 2006 (with a mission in there) and it worked well for me. I had fun, made friends, met my wife, etc. I was also a white, Utah kid with, at the time, pretty generically conservative Mormon views, so fitting in wasn’t hard. These days I’m still an active member, but considerably more liberal and progressive, both politically and religiously, and it pains me to now feel so conflicted about the university that I enjoyed so much in the past. My oldest is trans, so BYU is a non-starter; he doesn’t want to go, and we would advise against it anyway. My youngest is in 8th grade, and for now would fit in easily at BYU. It may be what she chooses, but I hope that she looks into other good options. As a teen didn’t put much thought into college and just went with the “default option” of BYU.
Faithful COJCLDS families have choice not previously mentioned: BYU-Virginia.
Southern Virginia University has a new President, Bonnie H. Cordon. President Cordon received a bachelor’s degree in education from BYU and worked in management in the software industry.
In Utah, students who qualify academically for BYU can generally earn scholarships at Utah’s public universities. The environments at these institutions is more socially and ethnically diverse than BYU’s and even in business and accounting, the programs are as good as BYU’s.
My children all choose state schools, even though my wife and I are both BYU grads. The youngest is finishing up a pre-med program and will soon depart for med school. He was more successful academically and socially at a state school than his high school peers who went to BYU.
Interesting post. I attended BYU in the 80s/90s and, like the OP, I’m old enough now with enough experience that it doesn’t matter that it’s on my CV. The biggest issue you point out for me (I’m in academia) has to do with the perception of BYU as an intolerant, homogeneous place. Outside of the Mormon corridor, the church and BYU, at least in my professional circles are far less likely to get called out for a lack of critical thinking or Religion classes and far more likely to get called out (and rightly so) for lack of diversity, homophobia, and its issues with women. For example, there was a rhetoric and composition conference a few years back scheduled to take place at BYU-Provo. Once the organizers were informed of BYU’s stance on LGBTQ issues, the conference was canceled. Also, ditto what DeNovo said about BYU grads. I saw a lot of this kind of thing when I was there; too bad things haven’t changed.
Speaking personally, the deeply problematic stances that BYU takes on LGBTQ issues, women in general, and a lack of any kind of awareness of the importance of diversity are the chief reasons why I never volunteer where I went as an undergrad. Because the church has these same issues, it’s also why I never share my religious affiliation with anyone. I’m ashamed to be a member of this church. Since I’m PIMO (and will likely be physically out soon as well), it doesn’t bother me as much as it used to, but there it is. And one of the truly sad things about all of this is that I feel like I actually got a good education at BYU. My professors were, for the most part, more than competent educators; I was exposed to new ideas and experienced tremendous intellectual, spiritual, and emotional growth. My first summer at BYU remains the best summer I’ve ever had. It’s a shame that BYU’s former and current stances and policies diminish even those memories, but that’s how it goes, I guess.
I loved my time at BYU (Provo), early to mid aughts. I got a bachelor’s and master’s and a fantastic education. The faculty were outstanding, and I’m still in touch with a handful. BYU wasn’t a liability then, but in my field (academia, liberal arts) it is now because of the perceived (and real) culture of homophobia at BYU. I wouldn’t have my job today if I was interviewing now and my terminal degree was from BYU. I now have a PhD from a state school, and enough work experience and ally bonafides that BYU isn’t a dealbreaker. But I do have to address it every time my BYU background comes up. I try to make sure it doesn’t come up.
My daughter is a very gifted student. She applied to a number of the most highly rated academic institutions in the country (Ivy League included). It turns out she was accepted to 3 of them, rejected by 1 of them, and waitlisted (and she ultimately didn’t get off the waitlist) by 12 others. We live in Utah. She was offered a full 4-year tuition scholarship to BYU and a full-ride to the U of U (including tuition, housing, books, etc.). Those were her 2 backup schools. Even though I attended, and really enjoyed, BYU myself, I didn’t really want her to go to BYU mainly because of the emphasis on young women marrying early and not pursuing a degree and because she is, quite frankly, significantly more intelligent that the average BYU student.
I took my daughter to both the east and west coasts to visit the 3 elite colleges that accepted her. One of the things she had on her list of things to consider was the Church’s presence at her college (how many active Mormon kids were there, what was the Mormon community like for students at the college, etc.). Unfortunately, the Church had almost *zero* presence at the 3 elite schools that accepted her. She attended Sunday services at the young adult branch that covered the school and even attended one of the weeknight activities at a couple of them. Coming from Utah, she was shocked to see that the 2 active Mormon students at one of the schools chose to attend the family ward instead of the local young adult ward since the local young adult ward consisted mostly of somewhat older young adults that weren’t on a similar education/career path as her. The experience was similar at the other two schools, except there were maybe 4 or 5 active members there instead of just 2. She spoke with several of these students, and several of them told her that while the school was good, they actually didn’t really like the lack of a Church community at the school. While my daughter otherwise really liked one of the schools (we even sent in the deposit because she’d decided that was the place), she eventually backed out and decided she wanted to be at a school with at least some real Church presence (20 or 30 active members would be fine, but 2 was not). Had she been accepted to a school in Boston, she definitely would have gone there. However, she was waitlisted there (and at the other elite schools with a good Church presence), and could only choose from 3 elite schools that had essentially no Church presence. She didn’t want to go to the U of U because it’s a commuter school, and by her estimation at least, had lower academic standards than BYU, so she eventually decided on her other backup school, BYU.
It turns out that she really enjoyed her year on BYU. She made friends with a really nice group of freshmen that have some more progressive thoughts and ideas than the Church at large. They had a lot of deep religious discussions where they were very open about their doubts, questions, and concerns, yet she came out of it with an increase in faith to the point that she is currently serving a mission (which she previously was leaning against doing). In fact, I think all the boys and almost all the girls in this group are now on missions. She made friends with a boy who we were at first concerned about because his father is a volunteer seminary teacher in a state far from Utah, but our concerns were assuaged when our daughter told us that his father sat him down in high school to teach him about prophetic fallibility and started off the discussion with the statement, “Boyd Packer is a jerk.“ There definitely still is a contingent of students at BYU that have faith in Christ and who are able to make a clear distinction between Christ and the inherently flawed LDS institution.
My daughter felt like about 3/4 of the student body was “normal”, while another 1/4 of the student body was “ultra-Mormon and weird”. She wisely considered that a considerable number of students at the elite colleges she was considering were also quite extreme in their views (extreme to the left instead of extreme to the right at BYU). In other words, she was going to have to deal with a fairly large number of extremists at either BYU or an elite college–they would just be different types of extremists.
My daughter attended all the weekly devotional/forums at BYU. I’d say that she was quite disturbed by some of what was taught by the Q15/70s at about half of these devotionals (Kevin Hamilton’s talk and Oak’s talk immediately come to mind). She really liked many of the presentations given by people who were not Church leaders (BYU faculty and outsiders) and was dismayed to see that attendance was much, much higher for a GA than it was for a much better and more thoughtful talk given by a non-GA.
My daughter entered BYU as a junior (almost a senior) in terms of credits earned due to AP credits, concurrent enrollment credits, etc. As a result, she is not required to take most of BYU’s general education courses. She is also leaning extremely heavily towards STEM, so she took an extremely heavy STEM load both semesters as a freshman, with a few fun classes thrown in based on her personal interests. She very carefully chose her professors for all of her classes based on word of mouth and online reviews. As a result, she really felt like she received a great education her freshman year, and I agree with that. She had a number of professors who were highly qualified and who really went out of their way both inside and outside the classroom to help their students. She wouldn’t have received this kind of helpful attention at some of the other elite schools she had applied to (but she would have at some other ones). Also, because she is interested in STEM, interference in the curriculum from religious leaders isn’t likely to be a very big issue since LDS leaders generally don’t take issue with scientific/engineering/mathematical findings (with a few very notable exceptions).
BYU is interesting in that while it doesn’t have students with the average test scores and GPAs of the elite schools, it does have quite a number of students who do have very high test scores and GPAs and who, like my daughter, could have chosen an elite school, but chose BYU for Church reasons. As a result, there is a sizeable set of very gifted students mixed in with the rest of the student body. My daughter was able to make friends with a few of these students, which has been very good for her.
My daughter took the required “Eternal Family” course as a freshman. I told her that might not be a good choice for a first religion class, but there was a section from a highly rated religion instructor, so she took it anyway. I saw the syllabus, and it looked awful. There were lectures dedicated to The Family Proclamation, Dating and Marriage (Oaks’ talk telling BYU students to marry young was listed as required reading), polygamy, etc. According to my daughter, the professor actually did a good job of presenting a balanced view of these topics including some of the ways that more progressive members view these topics, and he frequently shut down students spouting hate speech or insisted that their conservative viewpoints were doctrine. In short, while she would have preferred not to have taken the course, and it probably would have been awful with a different instructor, her experience with this class was passable. She is definitely not looking forward to having to complete the remaining religion credits in order to get her degree.
My daughter isn’t interested in partying, so she was actually very happy to be at a school where most people don’t party.
A number of my daughter’s STEM classes are making a very concerted effort to help female students in their courses. They are encouraging females to participate in research, and a number of them took time in class to lecture the male students in their courses that the females in their class don’t necessarily want to date and marry right away–they want to pursue a career just like the males. It’s actually to the point where much of the time females in STEM at BYU are explicitly favored over males for opportunities. I have some concerns that this is not fair to male students, but my daughter benefited from the favored treatment. I don’t think Dallin Oaks would agree with this preferential treatment, but a lot of STEM professors are really going out of their way to help females in STEM anyway.
My daughter has now been a missionary for awhile, and she still talks almost weekly about how much she enjoyed BYU, and how she is looking forward to returning there after her mission. I, on the other hand, am still back to where I was before she went to BYU. I really don’t like the marriage culture at BYU where it is almost expected that students will marry before graduation. At the elite schools we visited, less then 1% of students were married prior to graduation. I don’t know what the percentage is at BYU, but it has to be approaching 50% at least. Maybe it’s starting to lower, but it’s still much, much higher than other colleges. I personally think the “the world” has it right where the average marriage age is now in the 26-28 year old time frame. That seems just about right to me. Unfortunately, Mormons who would like to wait until that age to marry another Mormon find that a lot of their prospective mates have already married (the marriage pond is a lot smaller for 28 year olds than it is for 20 year olds).
While I do believe my daughter did receive a very good education her freshman year, I wonder if that can be sustained for another 3 years. I also worry that BYU might not look so good on a resume in the future though I believe in STEM fields, once you’ve worked for a few years, most people don’t care very much about where you went to college.
Honestly, what I’d like to see the Church do is to shut down all the BYUs. Obviously, Mormon kids would immediately start attending other colleges if this were to happen which would allow other colleges to have larger Church communities there. With the money that is saved from closing the BYUs, I’d like to see the Church focus on providing a good Church community at a number of schools throughout the country (well, even internationally, too). The Church could also use this money to provide financial help to kids to attend these other schools. If BYU didn’t exist, there probably would have been a lot more LDS kids attending the 3 elite schools my daughter was accepted to, and she could be receiving the quality education that she deserves without undue pressure to marry and have kids too early that exists at BYU. She also wouldn’t have to waste valuable time trying to make sure she gets good grades in religious classes that don’t interest her.
As far as the issue of serving a mission while attending a different school, from what I could determine, missions aren’t typically an issue anymore at most schools. Gap years have become so popular in recent years that most schools just rubber stamp a two year leave of absence for a mission. I think this used to be a problem, but from my experience, it no longer is, even at the elite schools where you might think it would be.
If you are mainstream LDS then BYU-Provo is an exceptional school that provides a beautiful campus, a safe community, and a decent diversity of generally good and intelligent people, all at an extremely affordable cost. A few academic programs at BYU-Provo are competitive with the best available. Other departments are not and that is something to consider. If BYU being serious about being a church school is a reason to be bothered than I say do not attend. I am not a fan of the heavy handedness of some BYU policies but it should be understood that BYU schools are church schools and the church leadership has every right to have expectations that students are supportive of the church and its policies.
The majority of my family and extended family attended BYU-Provo and had a very positive experience. Some actually left BYU-Provo to go to BYU-Idaho. Others attended other schools in Utah and elsewhere. As a parent, my advice to my children has been that unless they have a strong conviction on a course of study that requires a very specific university, they should attend the most affordable school that provides an environment where they feel comfortable. BYU-Provo and other schools in Utah have met that criteria.
A comment about diversity. Yes, BYU schools have restrictions on certain advocacy. How do these limits compare to other universities? Is BYU less diverse and less welcoming of a diversity of opinion than other universities? Depends. Some universities are truly tolerant and welcome a wide diversity of advocacy. Others, despite their proud declaration of being Liberal are in fact extremely intolerant. For example, BYU is more tolerant of political viewpoints than most Ivy league schools – at least BYU students are not shouting down speeches of speakers they deem to have an unacceptable opinion. And in fact you will find alumni of certain “elite” universities who are also ashamed of their schools for the intolerance those schools openly display and support.
I’m going to defend BYU here a bit. Sure it’s easy to criticize things like the honor code and religious requirements, but it’s also not this monolithic Mormon experience for all students either. Once I got past the over-crowded GE classes, I had my preconceived ideas about Mormonism challenged more at BYU than anywhere else until I strolled into W&T. I think this is largely because the Mormon aspect is so front and center that it has to be confronted. When I attended grad school at a non-LDS school, the topic of Mormonism just never came up at all. There’s a ton of variation between the different colleges and departments in both tone and quality, but this is true of every university – they all are better at some things than others.
The business school operates almost completely independently from the rest of the university. They don’t even follow the same class scheduling intervals as the rest of BYU because they wanted longer default class times (which is sometimes a real pain if you’re taking classes in multiple departments). Sure, there were some stereotypical BYU TBMs at the business school too, but that’s also where I had an ethics class that openly challenged the idea of discrimination against LGBTQ people at a time when the LDS church was actively mobilizing people to fight against same-sex marriage legislation. The professor was devoutly LDS, she was not protected by tenure, and wouldn’t hesitate to eviscerate the logic of students in her classes trying to argue in favor of unequal treatment of LGBTQ people. She was highly respected at the school and I still go to her for ethical advice.
I was friends with a French major who wanted to present at a sexuality and eroticism symposium in New Orleans with another student – my friend was male, his co-presenter was female, and they weren’t married. A professor in the department liked the idea and sponsored their trip, including getting them clearance from the university to officially represent BYU and have the university pay for the trip. They caused a serious stir at the conference because everyone was shocked to see BYU students in attendance, much less presenting.
I took a film class and we watched all sorts of films that were locked in the “questionable” section of the library. There was never a fuss from the librarian handing over the films for the class, and they were never censored beyond needing to go to the “special checkout” desk. We were also reading essays by feminists like Laura Mulvey and her “male gaze” theory of film. There was nothing stereotypically BYU about it. I also took biology classes that bluntly denounced evangelical literal creationism as antithetical to academia and even Mormonism, and unflinchingly taught the theory of evolution.
The standard required religion classes were mostly crowded and simplistic…like most freshman & sophomore classes are. However, then you got into classes like World Religions where the professor had an actual PhD in theology from a non-Mormon school and was raised in the Greek Orthodox church before converting to Mormonism. His class was detailed and academically rigorous; he also had zero tolerance for delusions of Mormon superiority over other churches. The class was eye-opening and fantastic.
I’m not arguing that there aren’t cons to BYU, but my point is that you can go to BYU and find whatever you want to find. You can find a whole lot of TBM Mormons looking to get married ASAP…you can also find quality professors who will push and challenge you, even if they are different than the LDS mainstream.
I think this BYU been under attack somewhat in recent years with certain church leaders trying to exert more control over it academically, but it’s still a university that can offer a quality education (and at a price that’s difficult to ignore for church members). I would be fine if my kids decided to go there to study one of the things BYU is good at…otherwise, they should probably go somewhere else. But BYU is not necessarily a copout choice for real education.
OMG – the contribution from PiratePriest is so distinct from the prevailing view that it should be further investigated by somebody familiar with the current university sonstruct. Can a [gasp: non-tenured] Ethics prof even discuss both sides of the LGBT question w/o being denied further employment at contract renewal time? That seems contrary to a few recent newspaper reports about the situation. Also, some of their other experience details should be examined to see if that is still possible. Inquiring minds want to know . .
True story, I was part of an interview team for an engineer. Midwest. The entire team was comprised of engineering graduates from various schools. Some well known. Some not. We interviewed a recent BYU grad who was well spoken, seemed bright.
The hiring manager hired a grad from a “no name” school who was less articulate in his interview. The reason is very telling, and describes how BYU is viewed by most outside the mormon corridor: “He graduated with more religion credits than math credits”
@Raymond Winn – She’s still teaching at BYU. So is the French professor who sponsored the trip to New Orleans.
Pirate, want to second your experiences with individual faculty and programs at BYU. The education I got was top notch. Was introduced to queer studies at BYU, was taught to think critically about beliefs I had taken for granted due to a very orthodox LDS upbringing. Could share similar stories to yours about my time at the Y and with the faculty. And faculty are still (sometimes quietly) doing outstanding and courageous work.
What has changed, at least in my field, is the outsider perspective on BYU. It’s a shame, but I can’t fault my non-BYU colleagues—the press has not been good and the policies abhorrent.
I taught at BYU for many years; now retired. Some thoughts:
1. My sense is that BYU exists primarily to allow young members of the church to find a spouse, in order to generate future tithing and make it less likely that these people will leave the church (it is often more difficult to leave when a spouse is involved). If there is a good academic experience along the way, that’s great — but that’s not the main focus.
2. By and large, BYU students are top-notch. Very good academically, and just good, kind people all around.
3. As a faculty member, it’s really frustrating how BYU aligns [ department / college / university ] with [ ward / stake / GA’s ] in terms of orientation and outlook. For example, in the same way that it would be “taboo” to bypass a stake president and go to the GA’s, at BYU it is likewise “bad form” to report a dangerous / rogue dean to the ASB. (I’ve taught at other universities, and it’s not that way elsewhere.) And there will be serious consequences, if/when the dean (i.e. stake president) finds out what’s happened. (D&C 121:39 and all of that)
4. Following up on #1, I have a very close friend in another college, who is in a college where there have been serious issues in terms of faculty pushing back on BYU norms (feminist and LGBTQ+ issues, etc). The university (actually the Board of Trustees) decided that they would bring in a new dean — who had recently served as stake president — because they needed a righteous “priesthood holder” to handle these “wayward” faculty. (I don’t want to dox this person, but they 100% had access to knowing about the decision making process there.)
5. BYU has some nationally and internationally respected programs — mainly because of the faculty that want to teach at BYU. This is only ruined by the administration’s incompetence. Many in the administration (looking at you, ASB) really don’t have a clue about what could put BYU on the map academically, or they don’t care. I’m not sure how long BYU will keep attracting promising faculty.
6. The fact that Clark Gilbert was turned down for tenure in 2009 and was then hired by the church (Deseret Digital Media and then BYU-Idaho) might explain his animus towards academia and academics. And this does percolate down the line. Add to this people yes-men like Shane Reese (who doesn’t have an academic bone in his body), and there are bound to be some problems.
Again, good students and faculty are the only thing keeping BYU afloat.
Lol are thumbs down just for defending BYU or for claiming it’s not always Mormon AF?
@Cam – I have seen a dip in quality from some students coming out of technical programs like computer science at BYU, and I’ve heard similar reports from other professionals I know. I’m not sure this has much to do with religion, but it is possible. Also, UVU is aggressively competing for the technical talent in Provo. The business school is still rated quite well, especially accounting.
Since a lot of folks here are using anecdotal evidence, I’ll provide mine: I got my BA from BYU-Idaho, and I was heavily critical of the school’s pharisaical dress & grooming standards, imperious administration, and deep-red conservatism the entire time I attended there, and in all the years since; nevertheless, I am also the first to admit that the quality of instruction was excellent, and that my compassionate, encouraging, and highly-educated professors well prepared me for graduate school. Like Ric, I too tire of the dismissive attitude some have towards BYU-Idaho, by people who clearly have little-to-no direct experience with the place.
Incidentally, since several commentators have already brought up their Midwest experiences, I must also note that I was accepted to a competitive PhD program at a major Midwestern university in the 2010s, right in the heart of the Bible Belt and Community of Christ territory. I afterwards landed one of those all-too-rare tenure-track positions at a deeply liberal, east coast junior college near New York. (While we’re at it, I also tire of folks impugning the reputations of junior colleges; I had to beat out over 200 other applicants for my current position, and the dedicated instructors here provide high quality and personalized instruction to a diverse, working class and immigrant student body who would otherwise never be able to attend college. I could even argue that my BYU-Idaho professors are who best prepared me for this position).
In none of those places–whether Midwestern Bible Belt or East-Coast Liberal–was my BYU-Idaho degree a liability; never, in fact, did it ever even come up in interviews. Whether you are TBM or ex-mo or whatever, the BYUs are a whole lot less notable than we think are.
Does this mean that the BYUs don’t have numerous deep-seated problems or that they are beyond reproach? Heavens no! Keep the pressure on them! Hold their feat to the fire! But a BYU degree is not some albatross on everyone’s resume.
I attended BYU in the late 80s to early/mid 90s. I think I caught BYU at its apotheosis as a more broadminded and academically centered institution. Eugene England, William Bradshaw (who may have done more than anyone to help the church understand being gay is not a choice), Jim Kearl, James Falconer, Stephen Robinson (seen at the time as a rebel within the department of religion), and many others, including non-Mormon faculty members (my thesis advisor was Catholic) all seemed committed to creating a real academic ethos on campus. I should add those I list did not agree on many issues. England and Robinson, for example, fiercely dueled with each other on the Daily Universe’s op-ed page about academic freedom at BYU. In my senior ethics seminar, the professor, a noted scholar, opened on day one with this: “You all think you are moral people because you are Mormon and obedient. This class will demonstrate to you how much you lack in moral development, and how under-developed your personal ethics are likely to be. As Mormons, some of you may be offended by this, but I will demonstrate that it is true. If you stay with the class, you will be challenged, but you will learn and grow.” Several students, offended, stood and walked out. He was a remarkable professor and it turned out to be one of my most valued courses. I wonder if this approach and level of challenge exists at BYU today.
There were some talismans of dark times to come, however, during and near the end of my BYU experience. Cecilia Contra Farr was fired for being who the English department hired her to be, The Chronicle of Higher Education wrote a piece that was highly critical of academic freedom at BYU, and later Brian Evenson was let go for shameful and cowardly reasons, and Eugene England was effectively pushed out of the university. For those of us who had found, as Lily writes in her comments, “our people” (and I had found mine in the philosophy department), this sent shock waves across campus. As I graduated and left for my next life’s experience, these events deeply concerned me. Around this time Merrill Bateman, as the new BYU president, implemented a policy that all faculty had to maintain a current temple recommend. A couple of years before I graduated, Sunday church attendance became compulsory for all students who wanted their ecclesiastical endorsements renewed (yes, there was a time when attending church was not tracked or judged).
My sense is all of these things were the beginning of the end looking back over the last thirty years. I’m not naive enough to argue everything was wonderful during my years there. The honor code office was as ominous and overbearing as ever, as one example. BYU was still a place of conformity with all of the jokes about it being “Breed’em Young University”, and that its real logo was not “The world is our campus” but rather “The campus is our world.” Still, I liked the vibe of the time I was there.
Years later, my Utah-based company would have more poor experiences hiring BYU graduates than good ones, for the exact reasons De Novo lists in his comments above. A department chair at BYU called me one day to ask for advice on how to help prep their college’s students for the job world–most of our BYU hires came from his program. He told me, “I am having so many uncomfortable conversations with employers within my former professional network who report our grads are inflexible and unable to adapt…” These were grads who were going back east for great professional careers, and crashing and burning within six months so routinely that the employers were starting to pull back. The chair asked me to work with him to create a series of presentations that could be given to help his students better prepare themselves for the hard realities of professional life after BYU, particularly for those from Utah who would leave the state of Utah. A few months later, tragically, the chair suddenly passed away. The new chair held no interest in anything but reinforcing orthodoxy, and my personal relationship with the department ended.
Roll ahead to when my children started to apply to universities and none of them wanted to apply to or attend BYU. Why? They all had their reasons. The Title IV debacle weighed heavily on my daughters, as it did me. It’s the first time I have ever written a letter to any church leader (Kevin Worthen), copied the CES commissioner and my stake president, eviscerating the school for failing so many of their students, and me as an alumnus. POX, the displayed racism and homophobia present at BYU, Brad Wilcox’s dopey Alpine fireside, Jeff Holland’s faculty address that attacked the LGBTQ student community and the resulting anti-gay policies BYU implemented…all of these things and more were noted by my youngest kids as reasons not to go to BYU. (All of my kids are STEM students too. It’s not only church youth in the humanities who pay attention to matters of social justice at BYU.)
Personally, I think where our young adults attend college is about fit and access. There are many good choices out there whether fit means attending a local JC or community college, a state school, a highly competitive university, or one of the BYUs. I don’t completely condemn the BYUs. It was not for my kids and today it wouldn’t be for me. And while I think the negatives at BYU today outweigh the positives, I have friends whose children attend BYU-I and BYU and it’s been a good experience for them and they have received solid educations for the most part.
My issue is that the church promotes the BYUs as these unique and extra special places, where the honor code stands singular, “The Lord’s university.” By any objective measure, academically, BYU is a credible school with some programs being meh while others have earned a broader national reputation for excellence. But the fact is BYU is not *that* special. My oldest went to Utah’s flagship school and had an outstanding experience in a program that is stronger than BYU’s in the same field, made wonderful friends (from many faith traditions) and now works for one of the most highly respected tech companies in her field, a company that actively recruits from the U, and not at BYU. She has yet to bump into another BYU grad in her division where she works (major West Coast tech hub metro). Another child attended an Ivy League school that has its own honor code and sets high standards for academic honesty and respect for all individuals, including a consent commitment. She had unparalleled experiences there with small class sizes, world class faculty who cared about her mental health, personal welfare and her academic growth. She had amazing internship experiences and was surrounded by the brightest students in American who challenged her and supported her. What surprised me is how strong the parent network was at this school. We had a closed Facebook group with hundreds of parents and the advice and opportunities that poured in through that community is something I have never experienced. Many parents had sterling resumes themselves, and they were so quick to provide real and ongoing help to parents who had not graduated from college and whose kids were first gen. The collective wisdom this group shared was incredibly helpful not only to other parents but to their students. These are people who value family as much as Mormons do, who value education probably more than most Mormon households do, who are hard-working, promote honesty and respect for the individual, and certainly more accepting of other faith traditions, family constructs and sexual orientation than my Mormon peers. Another child of mine went to a top twenty, “new Ivy” school. Similarly, She was surrounded by faculty who work with million dollar research budgets, who are all distinguished and committed to student development. I’ve been shocked to see the resources this institution commits to student wellness and mental health. The resources they commit to academic counseling and career counseling is something I never experienced at BYU, and don’t believe exists today. The parent network is equally strong and beneficial to its members.
And while there are enclaves at the elite schools with more outspoken or “radical” students compared to BYU, the idea that you can’t express yourself on any topic at these other schools is rubbish. What a BYU student and their friend can’t do is both wear a rainbow pin and walk across BYU’s campus together without violating campus demonstration policies—this is such extreme speech control it is dumbfounding. And for the record, what I saw at my kids’ elite colleges is that most students were more concerned about getting through OChem than they were in rallying. I also saw that queer and minority students were universally embraced, respected, seen and heard without qualification or restriction. For my children, each of their institutions did more for them than BYU could have. They found their fit, and I’m thrilled for them. As a BYU alumnus, I am discouraged by Clark Gilbert’s dystopian educational priorities. I’m shocked they have taken away clergy-parishioner (bishops and faculty/CES employee) confidentiality as a matter of codified employment contract terms specifically used to enforce thought and expression boundaries for all faculty and staff. I am not aware of those conditions existing in any other accredited college or university in the country. This should alarm everyone who cares about higher education.
heterodoxcl,
Great observations. I adjuncted at BYU for a semester in 2013. My impressions were that the faculty tends a bit more liberal and are what connects BYU to the outside world. I knew many professors who were extremely bright and had credibility outside the university. Dil Parkinson, my Arabic teacher, had worldwide acclaim in Arabic linguistics and teaching it as a second language. He commanded tremendous respect and was well-known in the Arabic-teaching world. But the administration was grossly incompetent, playing no other role than to ensure that the rigid rules and teachings of Mormonism were implemented and followed. The teachers I had at BYU seemed like believing Mormons, but mostly more nuanced. The Department of Ancient Scripture was an exception, containing faculty who staked their reputations on Mormon apologetics and were committed to defense of Mormonism and historicity at all costs, often resorting to scorched-earth tactics in maintaining their positions. But I often wonder how many faculty are PIMO or will even do a full exit of the church upon retirement or if they get a different job. I just don’t understand how if you are in some of the hard sciences that look at human and material history well beyond 6,000 years and evolution how you can maintain full belief. Or if you teach psychology and about human sexuality, how you can support the anti-LGBTQ teachings of the church. Some pretty major cognitive dissonance I can only imagine. Back when I adjuncted at BYU in 2013 I was on my way out, but still a nuanced believer. There was a position opening at that time. In retrospect I’m glad I didn’t pursue it. I could not have psychologically maintained the appearance of a fully active member.
Never attended BYU or any school in the states. I did my mission in Texas, and just like people pushing the “Tennis Shoes among the Nephites” series on me, the more American members encouraged me to attend BYU the more I wanted to do my studies in Canada. Petty, I know- but at the time I was a zealot, and wanted the church to thrive in Canada. I knew even then that there were demographic consequences for losing so many young, Canadian Saints to American schools.
Fast-forward to today and given my prior zealousness, I’m so grateful that I attended a Canadian private university, as the new friends and ideas met there gave me ‘nuff of a pushback to start deconstructing things.
*public university.
Full disclosure: current BYU faculty.
BYU’s raison d’etre, in the words of one of my colleagues, is to train the shock troops of the Restoration–that is, they are to be the next generation of leaders in the Church as they “go forth to serve.” That is why TPTB, including Clark Gilbert and the Board, have cracked down so hard on the students, faculty, and environment in Provo in recent years. They want to create a cohort of students who will reflect and spread their worldview and orthodox beliefs.
Someone posited above that Gilbert’s actions might be connected to his failure to earn tenure. I can say with a fair amount of certainty that a contributing factor in his approach to BYU–i.e. his crackdown on perceived heterodoxy and allegedly apostate-adjacent faculty behavior–is the fact that one of his children attended BYU and is no longer an active member of the Church. I can also attest to the fact that his predilection for regressive decisions/policy positions as Commissioner of Church Education dates back to his teenage years and mission (with even more certainty).
I can also state with first-hand experience that having BYU on one’s resume (either as a student or faculty member) can have negative effects on one’s career prospects and reputation. To be sure, one can overcome those obstacles through hard work and personal connections, but it is a real phenomenon (probably more so in some fields than others–e.g. accounting).
From my perspective–not only as BYU faculty, but also a former BYU student (briefly) and the father of two BYU students (again, both only briefly)–BYU has a few problems in addition to the resume issue. I will only mention three here for the sake of brevity (I could go on for pages):
* The Honor Code. I have no issue with the idea of an honor code, especially if it is actually focused on “honor”–i.e. academic honesty. I also understand (if not agreeing entirely) enforcing LDS teachings on campus. But to put hedges around the law by having an honor code standard that is “higher” than what is required to enter the temple is only one example (of many) of how the university and its sponsoring institution infantilizes the faculty and students. If I can go to the temple with long hair, a beard, or multiple earrings, why not BYU?
* Lack of pastoral care. Someone referenced this above, but the lack of a true confidentiality between a bishop and a faculty member or student is highly problematic. Moreover, it is a disincentive to be completely honest with one’s spiritual leaders. What faculty or student, facing (for example) a struggle with addiction, would be open with their bishop if it meant losing one’s employment or being kicked out of college (and likely losing credits toward graduation elsewhere)? Leadership roulette is real–again, first-hand experience–and for every leader who would be sympathetic and not inform the university, there are many more who would pass along that information. Apparently, the principles of the Atonement are suspended within the confines of BYU.
* Sycophantic leadership. Shane Reese is a good guy, but he was clearly selected as president because he is not going to push back on Clark Gilbert’s agenda. Newly-appointed deans and administrators (e.g. Justin Collings) are being appointed because of their ecclesiastical bona fides and/or their unwavering support of the current direction of Gilbert’s policies rather than their academic credentials. At what other university would that occur?
Yet for all of its problems, BYU remains an affordable and generally academically sound university. Its best students are competitive with the best students at other institutions (even if a distressingly growing number do not seem ready for the academic rigor of a university…but I digress). In fact, BYU is consistently in the top ten universities in the country in terms of students who go on to earn doctorates. Its best faculty are experts in their fields with national and international reputations that transcend any concerns about where they work. It is located in a beautiful location; every scholar I bring to campus to speak raves about the mountains and the scenery. It certainly is not for everyone, but you can find what you are looking for in a college education there if you look hard enough.
What does this all mean? Like any other institution, BYU has its pros and cons. But anyone hoping to see real, substantive change in Provo will need to wait at least until after Gilbert’s tenure as commissioner is up and after President Oaks is no longer around (he, after all, is the one who codified the Honor Code in 1972). Even then, however, I would not hold my breath for big changes…but a return to the intellectual and administrative environment of the late 1980s or early 2000s is something for which we can all hope.
Ironically, my two children that attended the BYUs were the first to leave the church. The hypocrisy there was just too much for them, among other things. The only child that still attends went to my states land grant university.
So many great comments and no one has yet mentioned Kerry Muhlestein or John Gee. Isn’t the fact they remain in any institution of higher learning itself a damning indictment (only written with half seriousness)?
Why are so many students who graduate from BYU socially awkward? Inquiring minds want to know.
Mortimer
The backlash I receive in the Midwest (close to church history sites, ground zero for the Mormon Wars, CoC and LDS bristling, and steeped evangelicalism, is horrific. Brutal.
The issue with this is that the LDS church wears this persecution as a badge of honor, they spin it to mean they are doing things correctly, rather than as opportunity to self reflect and improve themselves.
Add Alonzo Gaskill to Jaredsbrother’s list. Academic fraud isn’t disqualifying?
I have said before that I graduated long ago from a BYU program later dropped because of a refusal to teach national standards. Because that national standard involves an attitude/belief system, my degree became a liability. It nearly derailed a job offer even several decades later. I had a proven record of success in my field, but was not perceived as reliable.
I loved my years at Ricks/BYUI and BYU. I did not encourage my children to apply.
The BYU trustees (who consist of the First Presidency and nine other men and women who are either general authorities or general presidents) have created a dilemma in their goals for BYU. They want the school to be two different things that can’t coexist.
On one hand, the trustees want BYU to be a university.
On the other hand, the trustees also want BYU to be a finishing school. Consider this definition of a finishing school from Merriam-Webster: “a private school for girls that emphasizes cultural studies and prepares students especially for social activities.” That’s the old, original sense of the term that started being used in the mid-nineteenth century. A finishing school is a place where young people are taught not what they need to be broadly and deeply educated, but rather what they need to function in a narrowly defined social sphere. I like what commenter “A” wrote above about using BYU to “train the shock troops of the Restoration.” That’s a similar idea.
The premise of a university is that in order to educate, we must be dedicated to expanding the limits of our knowledge and wisdom. That premise carries wonderful possibility, but it also brings risk; exploring unknown regions can be dangerous. So university education is threatening. It threatens institutions and conventional ways of doing things. It can threaten personal stability. From a certain point of view, the advantage of a finishing school is that it limits the range of inquiry in the educational process, and therefore limits the risks of exploring the unknown.
The dilemma facing the trustees is that they want the advantages of university education (prestige, economic value, and character-building) packaged inside the risk-minimizing constraints of a finishing school. It does not seem possible for BYU, or any educational institution, to be both a university and a finishing school.
(As an aside, it’s interesting to compare the dilemma that Adam and Eve faced in the Garden of Eden. Should they take the risk of eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil? Or should they decline knowledge and remain “safe”? They could not do both. It’s not an exact parallel, but it’s useful.)
We’re seeing how this dilemma plays out over time. This kind of internal conflict does not get resolved quickly at a university, where professors spend decades-long careers and alumni spend a lifetime trying to influence decision-making. If we think of a generation as lasting roughly twenty to thirty years, it’s fair to say that deep changes at a university can take generations to become clear. It will take a while before we know whether BYU turns out to be more like a university or a finishing school.
Right now BYU’s character as a university continues on the strength of inertia from an earlier era. In the 1970s, church and school leaders laid out their vision of BYU as a great university. The clearest milestone was Spencer W. Kimball’s 1975 speech in which he talked about wanting BYU to become an “educational Everest.” From the mid-1970s, the school had a systemic commitment to diversifying its faculty and student body, and strengthening the academic rigor of its programs. It was challenging to accomplish this in ways that were consistent with the school’s religious mission, but the school’s leaders really tried because they believed that this effort was necessary if the school was going to level up. And they substantially succeeded in making BYU a genuine university.
The effort to diversify the school officially (but quietly) ended in the late 1990s. Since then, the proportion of non-LDS faculty and students has been deliberately shrunk and surveillance of faculty and students has increased as the trustees have tried to make BYU a more predictable, controllable place. The enormous practical problem they face is that the aspiration to create a great university is far more inspiring than the aspiration to create a finishing school. All of those highly qualified PhDs who are hired to teach at BYU come there to be at a university, and they are not suddenly going to give up their life’s work to help a person like Clark Gilbert dumb the place down. Tens of thousands of students who hunger for real education are not going to just roll over and accept something less than that. So, as “heterodoxcl” wrote above, BYU remains a university because teachers and students continue to make it so, inspired by the vision of prophets and the desire for eternal growth.
In effect, the trustees are free riding on this inertia. Trustees can claim the benefit of students’ and professors’ commitment to a university while, at the same time, the trustees work to undermine the school’s character as a university. Of course, that is a weird contradiction. But it will continue until the trustees face the realities of their dilemma or until the inertia favoring university education finally runs out. I have no idea what course this strange power struggle will take. I only know that it is sad and painful to watch.
jaredsbrother, on Muhlestein and Gee, there are a select few professors that BYU has recruited based on their aggressive apologetics, publishing record, and willingness to “lie for the Lord” for lack of a better term. They carry forward the disingenuous and intellectually dishonest tactics of Hugh Nibley in defending the church’s historicity narrative. They are there as bulldogs, to intimidate through smokescreens and mental gymnastics the BH Roberts-minded professors at BYU who might subtly undermine the church’s historicity narrative. They are there to recruit more like-minded boneheaded apologist minions to publish as much nonsense garbage as they can to make it harder for the skeptics or PIMO profs to try to challenge them. They twist, bend, contort, obfuscate, and just plain lie to defend their flimsy arguments. The tactic is to win the argument by drowning opponents in word salads and excessive publishing that no one will really read or has the time and patience to read, but they get to point to all that publishing and say that it is there. They have zero standing in the larger world of Egyptology. They have never published anything that remotely contributes to forwarding knowledge of that field. All they do is write ridiculous defense narratives of the Book of Abraham and parse the issue to death. But alas, most professors at BYU have little to do with apologetics and mostly focus on their respective disciplines.
I attended BYU in the late 80s and loved my time there. Our church attendance wasn’t being tracked and there seemed to be some freedom to find and discuss ideas with like minded individuals. I felt very well prepared for graduate school in my chosen field and was grateful to excellent BYU faculty for a solid undergraduate education.
One of my children graduated from BYU’s MBA program a few years ago. They have been able to find great employment and I think enjoyed the MBA program. This child stepped away from the church during the pandemic. They have since added the following disclaimer to their LinkedIn: “While I attended BYU, it’s important to clarify that my own personal views about inclusion and acceptance are not aligned with those held by the university.” I don’t know how prevalent disclaimers like this are, but it’s sad that BYU grads are having to distance themselves from the institution this way. I wish things were different.
I attended BYU-Provo from 1989 through 1996, taking off a few years for a mission and then working a while as well. I majored in English Lit, minor in French, and also took a bunch of Zoology/Biology classes because I wanted to. My comments here focus on my academic experience, which was amazing.
The English department was, for the most part, stellar during my time at BYU. I will never forget taking a Milton class from John Tanner and discussing Paradise Lost through the lens of the gospel and Kierkegaard. Being in that class was like sitting at the feet of a sage. Prof Tanner was intellectually sharp, inquiring, curious, informed, and most of all, a genuinely nice guy. I also took other English classes from other professors who pushed students to think critically and show that in our writing. I also took a Histology class from an older professor who, hearing some women chatting in the back of the class, hurled a chalk eraser in their direction to startle them into silence. It was both horrifying and hilarious. I also learned a lot from that professor, who was actually a pretty nice guy outside of class.
I no longer attend church. However, I will never forget the indelible experience I had in many of my classes at BYU. I treasure my memories of certain professors, because their intelligence and humanity taught me how genuinely good people act.
Just a couple additional points:
If you would like insight into Clark Gilbert and his approach to BYU, read some of his writing from Harvard Business School on radical disruption and what institutions do when they perceive a threat. Eye-opening in the BYU context.
The problem is that this retrenchment is turning BYU into BYU-Idaho South, an echo chamber with a de-emphasis on research and doubling-down on all of the conservatism (religiously and politically) that Gilbert, et. al., embrace. Not exactly in line with the ambitions for BYU that SWK expressed in 1975 except in terms of religious orientation and uniqueness.
Loursat’s “finishing school” comparison is quite accurate.
@vajra2:
My firm’s recruiters attribute the social ineptness of BYU grads to four factors:
1. Associating primarily with other Mormons in their formative years and having little or no exposure to a diversity of thought or individuals.
2. Essentially being cloistered from normal society while serving missions.
3. Attending college in a highly restrictive, orthodox environment where conformity is required.
4. Having a sense of entitlement related to being members of a church that proclaims exclusive ownership to the truth. One recruiter recalls being lectured on the 6,000 year-old earth during an interview for an accounting position.
@jaredsbrother and @Brad D:
Excellent comments re: BYU apologists. The comment “They twist, bend, contort, obfuscate, and just plain lie to defend their flimsy arguments” is spot on. Bottom line is that the BYU pharisees/apologists do far more harm than good. Yet no one either at BYU or 47 E. South Temple dares to attempt damage control. Why is that?
I have a question about current dormitory life at BYU. Since so many young men start their missions before college these days, do they all start college life in the dorms as 20 year-old RM freshmen, mingling with the 18 year-old young women as they look for wives as instructed by their mission presidents? Sounds horribly awkward.
Ditto what Freckles said about the English Dept. I was there from ’86 to ’92 and while it may have had a few “company men”, most of the faculty in that department (Gail Houston, Phil Snyder, Tanner, etc.) were staggeringly smart and are really the primary reason I was able to have a career in academia because of how they modeled intellectual rigor and critical thinking. It’s doubly frustrating to me that the work of a number of wonderful faculty is obscured when BYU keeps making the huge missteps we’ve been discussing on this thread.
A: Love your comments. It’s great to have the inside scoop since my own experience, like Brother Sky, was 86-92 (also English department!). I had some excellent professors. The admin / honor code office were honestly very faith-shaking, just the way students are policed and infantilized. My two oldest kids who went there did not return. One left after freshman year. The other left after one semester. It was enough for both to push them over the edge on leaving the Church, although they had good things to say about professors. My third, despite amazing grades and test scores did not get in, and ended up extremely happy at ASU which has far more diversity and the benefit of being closer to home (although all my kids love Utah).
I highly doubt anyone on the board of trustees is willing to correct their mistakes. I suspect they see these things that we all see as so damaging as their actual vision for the university and the church. It’s funny how once you are in charge, it’s easy to think that if only everyone was completely under your control, thinking the same thoughts you do, they would be better off.
A, great comments. I would like to add to one thing you wrote:
“Right now BYU’s character as a university continues on the strength of inertia from an earlier era. In the 1970s, church and school leaders laid out their vision of BYU as a great university.”
It seems that between the 1930s to about the 1990s, that Mormon leaders and scholars really believed that traditional Mormon truth claims could be fully reconciled with science and history and that they could show substantial evidence for a wide variety of traditional beliefs. No doubt that Mormon scholars made incredible progress in developing an evidentiary narrative that circulated among the Mormon-belt culture and even found its way into a select number of conference talks. Still to this day, arguably, many scholars and leaders still subscribe to this narrative, i.e. Book of Mormon Central and Jeffrey Holland. However, what has grown in the wake of the rise of the internet has been a current of scholars and leaders who realize the great weakness in touting traditional claims as compatible with modern science. The Nibley defenses have been torn apart (and were almost since their inception) and these tearings apart are readily available with just a few clicks. Chiasmus used to be bandied about and celebrated fully thumb-in-nose back in the 1990s only to be shredded and debunked so ruthlessly that one barely hears of it anymore. The ex-Mormon community has adopted the tapir as a sort of mascot in mockery of the outlandish claims of many old-school apologists who really believed that they could produce evidence.
Much of the old school Mormonism is this type. Based on the belief that Mormonism could be proven and that intellectualism and Mormonism went hand in hand, not having to face relentless challenges to such claims. Now in this age of relentlessness, fact-checking, and also of rampant disinformation and smoke and mirrors, the newer generation realizes it must take a different tack. The more savvy types, such as Clark Gilbert, have learned from Trump. What’s true or not true, and how you prove or disprove that, doesn’t matter. It’s all about image, loyalty, fast maneuvering, sleight of hand, fear, and outrage. The tides of intellectualism are so obviously working against traditional Mormonism from many angles. To survive requires not a running with these tides, but a deft counter-intellectualism. A part of me misses the “inertia” of old, as you say. The professors who thought they could prove it true. For they believed in intellectualism and that we could combine faith and reason. A lot of the newer generation administrators may pay lip service to such an idea, but their hearts are far from true intellectualism, which deep down they really hate.
Now there are certainly issues at BYU, especially with the current leadership and hardline stances as many have mentioned. How much of this can be attributed in some way to macro issues in academia more broadly?
Undergrad enrollment has been declining since ~2011, with a drop of 1.23 million students just since covid. Cancel culture has impacted how professors can do their jobs. There is decreasing public trust in science and areas like business, journalism, and politics. Populism is on the rise. All religion is in a slump in the US and elsewhere…lotsa macro things going on.
Is the current climate at BYU just the result of LDS leaders scrambling to confront issues that face academia more broadly (in an authoritarian, seclusionist, LDS way), or is it something more unique to just BYU and CES (i.e. self inflicted)?
“Belief required.”
I’m okay with a honor code, in general. But belief? I’m interested to know exactly how this is enforced. I attended BYU long ago and have no memory of my belief being measured. But I know now of several friend’s kids in the horrible position of pretending to believe so they can graduate.
Do kids at Notre Dame, for example, have to hit a certain belief mark to be in good standing and able to get their transcripts when it’s all over and done?
Do lesbians face this kind of pressure to go to Bryn Mawr?
I am with you Ruth. I have come to really resent anything that requires or even promotes social pressures to say you believe something (or to say don’t doubt). For me it feels like the thought police. Everyone has random thoughts all the time that doubt or believe or neither. The crucial issue to me is if you choose to follow Jesus Christ, not what thoughts cross your mind. I have no interest in being controlled to that level, and I certainly don’t want my children controlled like that. The church is moving in a really controlling direction, and as you mentioned the actual control doesn’t work. Youth put in this position lie because they have to. And then the people trying to control feel better, but it’s a false success. When the control is released people do what they think is best, or even immediately rebel. At some point all people have to mature and differentiate and determine what they believe for themselves. Trying to control people down to their thoughts can only backfire.
Perhaps I am in the minority in this forum, but I’d postulate that BYU (and its sister schools) is one of the things the church does best. I’d love to see a vast expansion of the BYU network in the near future to a worldwide network of interrelated church schools. I’d love to see a BYU-Africa, BYU-India, BYU-Brazil, BYU-Philippines and numerous other places to meet the educational needs of our worldwide community.
I can’t sum up any better than what Pirate Priest has said about BYU. I fully acknowledge there are things about BYU that drive me crazy and that are stupid. I’d ditch the Dress and Grooming standards in a heartbeat. The positives outweigh the negatives by an astounding margin. Let’s capitalize on these positives and expand to the whole world!
Many of the commenters attended BYU in the 80s and 90s, so I’ll give my perspective as someone who graduated high school in 2017 and attended my state’s flagship university instead of BYU.
I was accepted to BYU (worth noting: in the 2016-2017 school year, applicants had a 50% chance of being accepted at Provo. Admission rates at BYU-I were higher). Hilariously enough, I didn’t go for financial reasons. My GPA and ACT scores were good enough to get me into BYU, but not to get scholarships, whereas I got a full ride to my state university. Minimal moving costs (I don’t live in the Jello Belt) plus free college was a no-brainer.
My peers who served missions finished undergrad this year. I am, to my knowledge, the only person from my childhood stake between the ages of 22 and 27 who still participates in church but didn’t serve a mission and/or attend a BYU. I can think of only one person in that age range who served a mission but didn’t go to a church school. She went to UVU instead.
BYU isn’t training the shock troops of the restoration. It is training the entire future of the church in the US, and leaders know it. I liked the finishing school metaphor above. That strikes me as an accurate description of what I’m seeing. Providing an education is a secondary concern to stopping the mass exodus of young people. Right now, if you go to a church school, you’re guaranteed to be active for at least four years, and if you don’t, you will probably never attend church after high school graduation.
Belief is enforced the same way that it is in temple recommend interviews. Students must receive an ecclesiastical endorsement each year and answer a set of questions that mark them as worthy to attend BYU. Leadership roulette, student actions that are observed/reported, and attendance/activity in their YSA wards all factor into this process of determining belief as well.
The reality is that the vast majority of students, by the time they reach BYU, understand how to work the system. Either they are believers who can answer honestly or they know the correct answers that will allow them to receive an endorsement regardless of what they might actually believe. There is a miniscule percentage of students who take the process seriously and confess (without some sort of accusation/report–e.g. having an Honor Code file opened on them) behavior/actions that might imperil their standing at BYU. Those students are the ones we should really worry about, as they are the ones for whom pastoral care is most needed while being the ones who are at the most risk of leadership roulette.
Incidentally, the same holds true for faculty in every respect.
As for the current intellectual climate at BYU, I would suggest that most of it is self-inflicted. To be sure, there are elements of contemporary academic issues that manifest themselves on campus, but they do take on a uniquely BYU perspective.
One final thought (and then I will shut up on this thread): BYU students can struggle with social and/or professional situations, but I would suggest that they are not that different than many other university students in the current generation. The struggles may derive from different places (e.g. limited experience with people who drink) and may be manifested in peculiar ways compared to those who attended secular universities, but I do not think it is a problem unique to BYU graduates. It is easier to make broad assumptions about BYU graduates, however, if you have had a poor experience with one in an interview or social situation–because you can chalk the experience up to the education and culture and then surmise that all BYU grads will look and act similarly.
Four of 100 current US Senators attended BYU. That is a very impressive showing that says a lot about the school and the caliber of students it attracts.
https://universe.byu.edu/2021/11/17/cougars-in-congress-share-how-byu-taught-them-to-serve/
As I wrote previously, there are reasons a person may choose to to not attend BYU. But there are many good reasons to attend BYU. Ones experience at BYU or at any university will be what one makes of it.
Brad D – loved your post. You said, for they believed in intellectualism and that we could combine faith and reason. A lot of the newer generation administrators may pay lip service to such an idea, but their hearts are far from true intellectualism, which deep down they really hate.
Combining faith and reason, I think, is possible, but requires faith and reason to approach themselves from a place epistemological humility. Faith, rather strangely, has put itself into an inescapable chokehold by asserting itself as “certainty”. Faith, and the LDS church, has made truth claims, or hypothesis, but without any capacity to potentially be wrong.
Eric Facer, in his wonderful essay titled “Leadership in Difficult Times: Critical Thinking and Wisdom (Part II)”, he said, “True scholarship, by definition, must “be conducted without bias, and results published, regardless of whether they confirm any particular hypothesis or doctrine,” If you begin with a desired conclusion, you must ignore contradictory evidence. “That is not scholarship; it is propaganda.”
This statement is a stinging indictment against any intellectual or spiritual endeavor that begins with the need to confirm what has already been decided. This problem, in my opinion, not only threatens “True Scholarship”, but also meaningful “Faith”. If my faith is pinned, at every turn, to confirming that “The Church is true”, then it already lacks what I think Moroni is teaching us in Moroni 7. Moroni seems to suggest that faith carries with it an ethical responsibility, which is, a willingness and humility to continually place my beliefs back into the experiment of mortalities crucible, to be tried and tested, to bring forth fruit meet for repentance. For as Moroni says, “Ye receive no witness until after the trial of your faith”.
Faith is not a clinging to what I know, it’s taking the assurance I have and using it to hurl me towards the unknown. It’s exposure to the mystery of what God is and what I am capable of becoming.
We might say faith is where rationality meets intuition. It’s when we have enough evidence to make things, not seen, plausible, and our common sense, moral compass urges us forward into the unknown. The LDS Church has created a dilemma by refusing to actually embrace their own idea of “revelation”. Revelation implies change, yet I have repeatedly heard that, doctrine doesn’t change, God doesn’t change. Ok, God in fact may not change (at least his commitment to his children doesn’t change), but “We” change, and must or this mortal project is useless. To assert that “Doctrine”, which is just our current professed understanding about God, doesn’t change, suggests we have been imbued with omnipotence, and that somehow, we alone have been granted the 100% correct interpretation. This logic is both ridiculous and arrogant. Revelation, in my opinion, would be much more useful viewed as “revealing ourselves to ourselves”, instead of some privileged supernatural GPS unit. Then revelation, rather than making everything previous prophets say irrelevant (eventually), it would be recognized as mankind “Awakening” to its failures. That is “Living Faith”. And also, the way to make faith and reason friends, instead of enemies.
Is it possible to not know or even doubt the many details while remaining faithful to the project itself? The answer for me is a resounding, Yes! In fact, I think being truly faithful to the crucible of mortality, is only possible when we let go of the manmade idea of “Perfection” and replace it with “Wholeness” (telios).
Faith and truth go hand and hand, but as soon as we emphasize truth as propositional certainty, we cut the life out of faith. Faith has a fragile strength built into it, rather than binding us through agreement about a list of facts, it seals us by trusting the “Whole” messy mortal project, by agreeing to tell the whole truth, to share life’s weakness and inherent vulnerabilities as the very source that brings about the great At-one-ment.
Z, homophobia rears its ugly head in the usual places. Thanks for the demonstration.
Toddsmithson,
Thank you for that beautiful truthful post that lays bare the reality of what I see happening in the church. Joseph Smith genuinely sought more revelation from a position of not knowing. Open, honest studying, pondering and prayer like Joseph’s prayer and Moroni’s promise are the models on which I have always based my spiritual life. Unfortunately it feels to me like there’s no room in the church today for the doubt and questioning that is an essential part of that model.
A Disciple
When I saw your link to the politicians, I thought at first it might be a function of geography. And I shuddered at the list. It’s like bragging on Apophis, Anubis, Nirrti, and Ba’al. These Goa’uld would make better senators.
At least Romney is halfway decent. Oh, and thanks for explaining the mindrot of Sinema.
When I look at the list of congress members from Harvard and Stanford it seems to be geographically diverse.
There was Gordon H Smith from Oregon, but BYU’s is mostly concentrated in the inter mountain west.
But when I look at Gordon H Smith, I think not of geography but of relationality (whatever that is)
This topic has confirmed for me that as much as the church likes to think of itself as a worldwide faith, it’s really really not.
I live in Western Canada, and in my opinion, my experience with university is the option that is sustainable in the long run. I attended the University of Alberta in Edmonton, which has numerous YSA wards and several stakes, and an Institute with a venerable history (started after WW2 when N. Eldon Tanner was branch president, and the first instructor was Hugh B. Brown.)
My parents met at the Institute, I met my husband there, and my children older children have met their spouses there.
I got a quality education, had good institute instructors that helped me develop a more nuanced faith (granted, this was in the 90s), and loved my YSA bishops, who had NOTHING to do with my university standing. You don’t need an honor code to, you know, live a lifestyle you’ve *chosen.* Several professors at the university were members, and I regularly heard conversations from classmates that they were impressed that these profs were just really good people. There were lots of convert baptisms.
I know Joseph Smith’s vision was a community apart, but I don’t think that’s what’s best for our faith at this stage. I’ve quipped that if Christ called us to be the salt of the earth, we are most effective when sprinkled among larger society. The only benefit for salt all clumped together is a salt lick, and that’s for cows.
If we live in places with strong stakes, have friends who aren’t members of the church so our kids realize we don’t hold a monopoly on truth or goodness, and learn how to navigate social situations where we’re not drinking and others are without being pompous, and we’ve got a future.
Or, we can slowly dwindle into a localized faith in the American West.
Rach, don’t think for a moment that this wasn’t a consideration when they made the age change. The sooner they can marry those kids off, the better. See above comments about BYU’s raison d’etre.
vajraz, I meant no slight against Wellesley!
Would you believe I’m a big Bechdel fan?
Hey all y’all, calling SVU “BYU-Virginia” was tongue in cheek. I def should have followed it with “/s” to clarify. Probably “BYU wannabe” is more descriptive.
I am incredulous that they selected a president whose academic credential is solely a bachelors in education.
You may see it differently.
In 2020 after BYU pulled the Honor Code bait and switch that caused many gays to out themselves, I removed BYU from my résumé. Now if people ask where I went to college, I reluctantly admit to attending BYU, followed quickly by, “I was young and didn’t know better. We all make stupid decisions when we’re teenagers.” (Ok I don’t always add the second part, but I always think it.)
@ruth: Happy to answer about Notre Dame. My niece is a recent graduate. I hear comparisons between BYU and Notre Dame often, but ND has nothing like BYU’s honor code. Church attendance is not required of students or faculty, no one (Catholic or not) has to live by Catholic tenets to attend or work there, plenty of non-Catholic faculty.
My niece tells me that the climate for LGBTQ students could be much better. But her queer friends from her dorm were able to attend the dorm-sponsored formal dances with their partners, the gay student organizations are officially recognized, the counseling center is affirming.
Truth be told, I wonder how many employers really look at the college one went to unless the applicant is pretty fresh in the job market or they are applying for a job through the “good ‘Ole boy” network like we see at Harvard and Yale and such. The Law School I went to was considered a tier 2 school and people were worried about the truly premier job prospects handed out to Ivy League grads and then, I was told by a wise man that they only look at school for the first job you get. Just establish your skill and knowledge and that is most important for the jext job. And that’s been true for 20 years.
I think it comes down to the education you want and the skills you want to obtain and then match it to the school. BYU has one of the best business schools in the country. Their art department? I don’t hear anything about it, but you sure do hear about that degree program elsewhere. So maybe if you want to pursue a degree where the education isn’t as good as you would like, a different school is better.
I don’t get the criticism of the honor code. There are dozens of schools with honor codes. I think BYU gets a lot of grief because it’s tied directly to the religion, and that’s not necessarily fair. Not to mention if you choose to go there you are aware of it from day one so it seems a bit odd to go there and then complain about it. I would think if that’s a deal breaker then it’s not the school for you.
As far as the education, I think the proof is in the pudding. There are a lot of successful alumni, so it seems the education experience is a quality one.
There are honor codes, and then there are honor codes.
BYU: Stay a Mormon, ix-nay on the rumpy-pumpy
West Point: “A cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.” (There are, of course, many other rules not in the honor code.)
Bryn Mawr (since I mentioned them): It’s very long, but covers academic integrity, “the right of each student to privacy,” alcohol and drug policies (they’re complicated and depend on setting and status, e.g. undergraduate or whatever. Entering students have to take a class in this), and what to do “if a student is offended by the actions of another student.” Sexual misconduct (understood as harassment and criminal behavior) is covered separately.
https://sga.blogs.brynmawr.edu/honor-board/honor-code/
Rice: only covers academics, not student discipline or whatever. On tests and papers, students are requested (not required, though held to the standard in any case) to check boxes that read ““On my honor, I have neither given nor received any unauthorized aid on this (assignment, exam, paper, etc.).”
Liberty University: they’re like BYU! The honor code covers everything from dress to “entertainment guidelines” to sexuality. (One must avoid the appearance of impropriety, defined according to a certain understanding of biblical standards.)
Click to access The-Liberty-Way.pdf
So I guess the question for BYU fans is, which type of school do you want BYU to be like? If you answered “bottom-tier Bible college,” then you must be very proud.
In Australia the church promotes BYU pathways. Most stakes have a coordinator. But it is not recognised or accredited by any universities here. I do not understand what it involves, but assume if you apply to BYU having done it you get some credits.
A granddaughter married a man who had been doing BYU pathways full time for 3 years. Total waste of time. He now works as a storeman. His employer is paying for him to do a forklift driving course to improve his skills.
A friend who is a university professor says there are similar things offered by some local universities, which would go towards a degree here, but the Church is promoting BYU which is not accredited here.
I got a junior college degree from ricks college, but had to leave America for visa reasons. Went to Sydney University and was told it was equivalent to high school.
Our second daughter was born in Madison memorial hospital during a blizzard. You might think being born in America is an advantage, but she does not think so. She visited America and instead of getting a visa she had to have an American passport. Much more expensive. We do love Yellowstone though.
Toddsmithson,
I not playing the victim card as an LDS person in the Midwest. In mentioning that there have been and continue to be tensions (regrettably) between LDS sects near the historic sites, I’m just stating a fact, I made no accusations. I agree, we certainly aren’t blameless.
This week over on Wheat and Tares, CoC archeologist Paul Debarthe described presenting recent research about Haun’s Mill to the Caldwell County Historical Society, and the push/pull between labeling it a massacre (with 17 bodies at the bottom of a well) and an “incident”. I call it a “massacre” and I also call Mountain Meadow’s a “massacre”. I don’t have any interest in spinning politics to downplay either historic loss of life. As we see today in the Gaza Strip, Massacres are massacres, despite who started it or whose politics you support.
I’d be dishonest if I did not admit that there are (lamentably) tensions here at ground zero. It’s not in every institution or every field, it’s not every university but you can find yourself in a hornets’s nest if you step in the wrong places.
Cam, I’m glad if you were unaffected, but your positive experience doesn’t account for or dismiss others who have passed through the fire swamp.I feel like this type of “me too” moment needs some respect- it can be truly painful.
For many reasons, I won’t mention the specific metro-wide institutions, the universities (and specifically- key professors and departments), businesses, etc. where professional inter-religious relationships have been most problematic. The states involved and the metro are much larger than either population, so- again, it’s not everywhere, but there are certainly hot zones.
I don’t mean to disparage the excellent diplomacy that both institutions have curated recently, or the bridges of brother/sisterhood built specifically by the bloggernacle or by academic camaraderie. But turning a blind eye to pain points is not an effective treatment for an infection. Sunlight on the other hand is an antiseptic.
I got multiple degrees from BYU a long time ago in a technical field. My team in a large multinational company was hiring a couple of years ago. The interview process included giving them a “homework” assignment, which candidates would then explain to us. We interviewed quite a few candidates. The best candidate, by a wide margin, was a recent BYU graduate. I didn’t even see the resume until after I’d seen his work. We hired him. Unfortunately he has already moved on to other opportunities, but I don’t think anyone on my team regrets hiring him. Truly, there are some exceptionally bright and talented graduates from BYU. I understand all of the reasons progressive-thinking BYU graduates worry about their degree becoming a liability on their resume, but I am not convinced most employers pay all that much attention to where you got your degree, and I am also convinced that employers would be foolish to categorically rule out graduates of an institution that, for all its problems, really does produce some very capable graduates.
I know I’m extremely late to this discussion, so if no one reads this, so be it. I attended BYU – Idaho (didn’t even attempt to apply to Provo) and while I agree with many of the criticisms already discussed at length (with much of the campus’ conservative retrenchment being linked to the Bednar administration), it was overall a good experience. I never felt like I had to hide my liberal political and theology leanings. As others have indicated, you tend to find your “people.” Career-wise, my BYU -I education has not really worked out, but that has less to with the BYU brand than it does poor planning. I have friends who have done very well. So is BYU a good choice? Is college, in general a good choice? I would argue that trade school is a better option for many young people than traditional college. The skilled trades can pay extremely well and are a better career fit for many. @ Geoff -Aus, I can’t vouch for the pathway program, but there’s nothing wrong with being a “storeman” or operating a forklift. Hopefully you thank the young man every time you see him for contributing to moving the supply chain along and making your life a bit more convenient. Perhaps his company felt he was a good fit for paid training do to his diligence in sticking with an educational program.