“The Place of Understanding”

We welcome you this morning to the opening session of our annual university conference at Brigham Young University. I wish to reassure you that both the Pleasant Grove and Payson volunteer fire departments are on alert, and if a blaze approaches from any direction, we will be notified in ample time to evacuate the building.

We especially welcome this morning those who are new to the university family this year. We want you to feel instantly loved and deeply appreciated as you settle into your work here. Please feel at home and please take the opportunity to make yourself known to us. We look forward to meeting with both old and new colleagues in some of the more personal contacts that may be afforded us in the days and weeks ahead. In that marvelous category of “old friends,” we eagerly acknowledge and welcome the attendance today of many of our former colleagues now retired. This will always be your university, and we are thrilled when you choose to join with us for this or any other BYU activity.

We also welcome today spouses or other family members and friends who may be with us this morning. We are always grateful when personal and family schedules permit you to be with us. You are most important to our work and to our sense of community, and we thank you for the support you so generously give us. We want our association on this campus to be the best of all possible professional opportunities. Thank you, one and all, for your attendance today.

Now, having greeted all of you, I want to confess to all of you. I stand before you a repentant and shamed man. I do faithfully testify that one’s transgressions will be found out and that “the rebellious shall be pierced with much sorrow; for their iniquities shall be spoken upon the housetops, and their secret acts shall be revealed.”¹

I, who have systematically carved out a reputation for corpulence and the sedentary life; I, who like Abe Lemons of the University of Texas resisted jogging because, said he, “When I die, I want to be sick”;² I, who have done more to set back physical fitness than anyone in recent BYU memory—it is I whose name and photo were splashed across newspaper headlines and electronic media as one grabbed by the Divine Hand of Retribution while playing a little early-morning racquetball.

Pain, anguish, hospital, surgery, cast, crutches, cowboy boots, and humiliation. Tell me now, how does one live this down? I thought I had been discreet. A little perspiration here. A little competition there. Squeezing by over these years with just as much as I thought I could stand and as little as I thought heaven would tolerate. And then, crash! One day I have simply gone too far. And a lifetime’s reputation is shattered.

Couldn’t this have been a somewhat more private rebuke? Couldn’t this have been handled on a low-key basis? Oh no. “There is nothing which is secret save it shall be revealed; there is no work of darkness save it shall be made manifest in the light.”³

Was it such a terrible offense? I’m still limping. Will I ever walk again? In return for a healed Achilles tendon, would it be enough to promise I would never again physically exert so long as the sun shines and the rivers run to the sea?

And as if that weren’t enough, we had a plane wreck, still on the ground, while we were seated in the first-class section. Now, can there be a more embarrassing combination than that? Contrary to the rumors being spread by my colleague Art Bassett, the first-class upgrade was a freebie, a courtesy, an unexpected gift from the airline company. Not one dollar of tithing appropriation was used, not a cent of university money expended. There we were, eagerly looking around back there in steerage, where all BYU personnel are to travel, when we were for this trip unexpectedly invited up to the head of the table. We thought, “This is it. The books shall be opened. The last shall be first class” and all that.

Then the Hand of Retribution once more. We were blissfully enjoying our unaccustomed spaciousness when a nearby Boeing 747 was dispatched to ram us. I don’t mean just ram the airplane we were in—I mean ram us. It was as if some great air controller in the sky said, “They are seated in first class. Get it? First class! If we work it just right, we can knock them silly without touching one other passenger on the plane—and the plane doesn’t even need to leave the ground! It will take skillful navigation to hit their seat and their seat only, but we believe it can be done. Good luck. This tape will self-destruct in five seconds.”

Anonymity? A private reconciliation of one’s sins? Oh no. It’s from “the housetops” again.

Well, believe you me, I’m no slow learner. I can get the picture. Upgrades or no upgrades, it’s back into steerage for me, and I’m just grateful that such strict BYU budgeting policies would be confirmed right at the top, so to speak.

Thank you for hearing these confessions and for the absolution I know you have now given. I am a truly repentant man.

The Beginning of a New School Year

This is our official beginning of a new school year, and surely the beauty of the morning is a marvelous omen of the good experiences and great privileges in store for each of us in the days and weeks ahead. Somehow these annual events—all annual events—seem to keep coming around at an accelerating rate, but maybe that is supposed to be part of the fun(?) of growing old. In any case, there is something wonderfully renewing and exhilarating about the start of a new school year together.

Perhaps it is simply the season. These are beautiful days when for a time yet the “[autumn] skies [again] resume / The old—old sophistries of June.”⁴ But perhaps the thrill is also that we once again may see

A curious child, who dwelt upon a tract
Of inland ground, applying to his ear
The convolutions of a smooth-lipped shell,
To which, in silence hushed, his very soul
Listened intensely; and his countenance soon
Brightened with joy, for from within were heard
Murmurings, whereby the monitor expressed
Mysterious union with its native sea.⁵

Forgive the Wordsworthian rhapsody, but surely, along with the passing of summer, the promise of fall, and the mountain beauty of our setting, that renewing contact with a curious child is part of what we feel as school begins again—that unequaled experience of finding one stranded on “inland ground” (as some of you found me) and then, through spiritual and imaginative and intellectual exercise, leading her or him to “mysterious union” with the ever-so-distant sea. That such exploration is possible—indeed essential—right here in landlocked Provo surely must be part of what we feel at the beginning of an academic year. One of the most gifted but least traveled poets in our language wrote:

Exultation is the going
Of an inland soul to sea—
Past the houses, past the headlands,
Into deep eternity!

Bred as we, among the mountains,
Can the sailor understand
The divine intoxication
Of the first league out from land?⁶

Welcome to what I truly pray will be “the divine intoxication” of another year at BYU. It is, after all, the only intoxication we allow here, so we encourage you to drink deeply.

“Whence Then Cometh Wisdom?”

Our theme for this year’s conference is taken from the book of Job, and, as with all scripture, the context is vital to the meaning and appreciation of any extracted phrase or line. By the time we join him in the twenty-seventh chapter of his book, Job has already suffered the terrible reverses that have cost him his health, his prosperity, and most of his family. His boils are only the outward sign of his inner grief. He wonders why he didn’t die in the womb, or at least in this time of terrible affliction. His comforters give scorn rather than consolation, and Job wrestles with the realization that sometimes the wicked prosper in this life while the righteous are allowed to suffer. He is weary of life, but his faith in God is unshaken. He is still confident that sometime, somewhere, justice will be served.

With nearly a last gasp, he utters:

Till I die I will not remove mine integrity from me.
My righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go: my heart shall not reproach me so long as I live.⁷

A sadder but wiser Job then asks our questions:

Where shall wisdom be found? and where is the place of understanding?⁸

Job admits through the lessons he has learned that man does not know the full price he may have to pay for wisdom and understanding. Clearly it cannot be purchased, he says, with gold or silver or onyx or sapphire. It cannot be purchased with coral or pearls, and “the price of wisdom is above rubies.”⁹

Whence then cometh wisdom? and where is the place of understanding? . . .
God [only] understandeth the way thereof, and he [alone] knoweth the place thereof.
For he looketh to the ends of the earth, and seeth under the whole heaven. . . .
And unto man he [hath] said, Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding.¹⁰

As we begin another year together, my prayer for each of us is exactly what it has always been and, I suppose, always will be for as long as I am asked to serve with you. In a world that is too often beset by the vicissitudes of poverty and wealth and war and worries and in a time when comforters don’t comfort, terror too often takes hold of things, and the wicked sometimes seem to prosper while the righteous often wait in vain, my prayer is that Brigham Young University will be part of Job’s faithful answer to such concerns, that we who gather here today and start another year together will truly be a source of wisdom in such a world, and that our campus will be a place of understanding.

Such a lofty social and spiritual goal does require reverence for God and the forsaking of evil, but there is nothing new in that idea. At least it is not new to us. But to a younger generation—the incoming class of students each year who probably have not thought much about Job’s questions—it may well be quite a new idea. That unequaled chance for an increasingly learned and wiser generation of believers to help a younger, newer one past the pitfalls of mortality toward “the full realization of human potential”¹¹ is, quite simply, my psalm of joy for us today. I wish us to be a city set upon a hill,¹² a place of learning and wisdom and faith for all to see. I wish us to teach and defend and delight in the truth. I wish us to be a light shining, however dark the night. “My righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go: my heart shall not reproach me so long as I live.”

I don’t wish all this to sound too bleak or Job-like on such a beautiful morning, but too often in every age “Truth [is] forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne.”¹³ And we continue to struggle with such ironies, even in the enlightened 1980s. The cover of a recent national news magazine observed that “assaulted by sleaze, scandals and hypocrisy, America [is searching] for its moral bearings.”¹⁴ A more literate quarterly publication simply proposed that we are currently a “nation without honor.” The list of names and diversities of recent offense against Job’s brand of integrity is now so long that they have simply gotten confusing.

But it can be different at Brigham Young University; it must be different here. We have a chance—especially when measured against such cultural chaos and personal dismay—to change things and make a real difference. We can be a light in a dark place.

I don’t mean this perennial hope of ours—this dream of inspired and inspiring education—to come across as either breast-beating or cheerleading. I don’t even mean it to sound like a new idea. I am told that when Pythagoras established the theorem of the square upon the hypotenuse, he sacrificed one thousand oxen to Apollo in appreciation for that revealed truth. Since then, whenever anyone has had a good idea, oxen everywhere have trembled.

I don’t want anyone trembling, because certainly the place of the university—especially Brigham Young University—is not new to anyone here. You already know of my love for John Masefield’s tribute paid out of the dark debris of World War II’s destruction in Europe:

There are few earthly things more splendid than a university.
In these days of broken frontiers and collapsing values,
when every future looks somewhat grim and the dams are down and
the floods are making misery,
when every ancient foothold has become something of a quagmire,
wherever a university stands, it stands and shines;
wherever it exists, the free minds of men [and women], urged on to full and fair enquiry,
may still bring wisdom into human affairs.

There are few earthly things more beautiful than a university. . . .
They give to the young in their impressionable years,
the bond of a lofty purpose shared,
of a great corporate life whose links will not be loosed until they die.
They give young people that close companionship for which youth longs,
and that chance of the endless discussion of the themes which are endless,
without which youth would seem a waste of time.¹⁵

Our times are not World War II times, and my message this morning is not intended to be some ceremonial moan about political mischief, dying whales, and the advent of Armageddon. No, my message is just about what it has always been as together we ask and reask the questions “Whence then cometh wisdom? and where is the place of understanding?” And as we ask and try to answer for ourselves, we have the renewing opportunity to ask and answer with a new generation of students. How can BYU better stand and shine (referring to Masefield’s phrase)? What do we owe to our students—these young men and women—who are, as they always have been, the embodiment of the future’s strength and its only hope of redemption? What can BYU do to make a difference “in a world we wish to improve”?¹⁶

To try and address such large and ever-present issues, I wish to speak broadly of three basic BYU tasks, the conclusion of which (I hope) will bring us back to some of the more personal aspects of Job’s quest that we have been discussing.

These three basic responsibilities that face us—responsibilities that I reviewed with all university administrators last June—are as old as BYU is old. A review of them won’t prepare us to tilt at any windmills, but it might remind us of what a rare and influential work we can do in reinforcing and refining these thousands of human souls who walk onto our campus each year. And they are out there now, standing at the gates.

These three tasks constitute the most fundamental work of the university—the first applying to every one of us and the other two particularly focusing on our faculty. Of necessity, and as always, these pre-school remarks will pursue the central academic mission of the university, even though I fully realize that not everyone on our support staff and administrative team gets such direct contact with our students. Nevertheless, I have told all of you before what I firmly believe to be true: that the opportunity to work at BYU in any capacity makes all of us teachers, by definition, in our own way.

Certainly all of us must be interested in “the charted course” of the institution.¹⁷ So I don’t apologize for speaking about our educational work, even though a host of groundskeepers and cooks and carpenters are present. The president of General Motors talks a lot about automobiles, and the president of IBM talks a lot about computers. They too have a wide variety of people helping directly and indirectly in those tasks, just as all of you contribute to the learning opportunities of a legion of BYU students.

So if you see yourself in more of a supportive role than in a direct classroom assignment, welcome to the family. That’s exactly how I have to see myself most of the time. I invite each of you to consider today—as we discuss as many matters as we can—how your good work, whatever the range or nature of that service might be, fits with the broad, healthy BYU definition of educator that can include us all.

The three major responsibilities of those who join us in our university work here are faithful citizenship, strong teaching, and solid scholarship. I confess that I am amazed—and often dismayed—at how abrasive some within the university family can make this three-part relationship. Some seem to make an arbitrary choice among the three, pitting one against the other or somehow insisting that to pursue one faithfully is to abandon another totally.

I will try to be as clear as I can be regarding my position on these matters because they are so essential to any success we hope to have personally or professionally, with young or old, or at home or abroad. I have pled from the beginning of my term here—and I am pleading now—for the kind of university colleagues who understand the highest and best aspects of BYU’s mission and who are willing to pursue and defend and encourage and reward all three elements of fundamental work at the university: good citizenship, good teaching, and good scholarship. To the faculty I say, please do not choose sides, particularly on the teaching and scholarship axis, as to which one is more important than the other. Please do not make that an either-or. I have heard too much of that at BYU. We can and simply must have both.

Our individual strengths are not identical, and none of us is perfect. Indeed, the quality of the university depends in part on the diversity of our experience and on the diversity of our professional interests. But this is all the more reason for standards and ideals against which to measure some growth and some success.

I readily acknowledge—as I said in a recent memo on this subject—that one person will be more effective than another in a particular teaching setting. Someone else will be especially imaginative and productive in some aspect of research. And all of us have to exemplify—and teach our student body—good citizenship as ultimately defined by the gospel of Jesus Christ. I think it is fair to say that one who simply does not assume any responsibility for or commitment to one or more of these areas of university obligations does not understand our work or our mission and probably won’t be very comfortable at BYU. However, it is very understandable that a candidate who has a good, strong performance in one area of responsibility and at least acceptable performance in the others will undoubtedly find a place here and with time improve his or her overall contribution to the university, as each of us hopes to do. We are certainly willing to believe that and will work with you toward that end.

Of course it would be ideal to have everyone wonderfully exemplary in all three areas. That probably isn’t going to happen very often, but it happens pleasantly enough that we can dream of it, we can ask for it, and we can hope for it in the rest of us. In any case, we can certainly stop talking like these are mutually exclusive tasks or, worse yet, some kind of brutally antagonistic adversaries in university life. They clearly are not that. These three reinforce each other, and we will continue to ask for people to believe that. It will take some stretching and reaching and growing by us all, but at BYU our “reach should exceed [our] grasp, / Or what’s [the university] for?”¹⁸

Let me just use a very homely analogy from Church life that everyone will understand. The mission of the Church has recently been divided into three separate components: to proclaim the gospel, to perfect the Saints, and to redeem the dead.¹⁹ Now I know young couples who are very missionary minded who don’t do much genealogy work. And I know a few women who are wonderful in Relief Society homemaking lessons who wouldn’t dare ask the golden questions. And I know quite a few men who go to the temple faithfully but who may not teach the gospel in their homes as thoroughly as they might.

None of us is perfect. But having said that, I add quickly that neither are the Church and its gospel purposes well served if we say that one of the three aspects of the Church mission doesn’t really matter or perhaps that “I will do my own thing and somebody else can cover the rest.” Granted, none of us can do everything. But in those three basic areas of Christian life, I believe each of us is expected to do something. Specializations will develop, skills will differ, and interests will change. But each of us is to be whole—or holy, if you prefer—with at least some basic commitment to each of these three Church areas of responsibility.

Now that is a homely example that I don’t suppose anybody in the room needed, but maybe it can cast new light on what, for a few, is a controversy at BYU. I want us to come to some reasonable meeting of the minds on a balanced, appropriate, adequate emphasis on all three university tasks. These next few moments will be devoted to a discussion of them.

Citizenship

The matter of university citizenship, especially as based upon and measured by the gospel of Jesus Christ, is one that by definition touches every one of us and has the most obvious meaning for those earlier-noted issues of values and virtues and of ethical and moral behavior. Our students don’t always behave as well as they ought and at eighteen or twenty-two haven’t always seen the bill that inevitably comes due on moral compromise. I want to talk to them—again—about honor and honesty and virtue and truth this fall; indeed, I hope to introduce and encourage something of a university-wide conversation on such issues. The times seem uniquely right for that. This kind of in-house discussion is off-the-record if the press is present, but we simply have too many come to this campus who believe that if their hair is groomed and their clothing clean—which we still want, by the way—they have somehow met their nominal obligations to “honor” and are then free to cheat on exams through the week and fornicate with abandon over the weekend.

I don’t know what the numbers are, and I’m confident we are talking about a relatively small fraction of that army of strong, faithful, and genuinely good young people who come here, but any who cheat or steal or otherwise compromise is too many at BYU. Indeed, Mr. Wordsworth, “the world is too much with us.”²⁰ And it gets closer every year. We have an immense educational task on our hands at an age and a time in their lives when young men and women are largely finalizing what it is they will become.

That concern for our students starting a new semester next Monday leads me to you, to us here today: We are the host society and the permanent residents of Brigham Young University. We must provide the ideals of citizenship that can be both displayed to and expected of those young people.

And what is that ideal university citizenship? Well, I think a true citizen of the university cares about and understands our religious tradition, our heritage, and our purpose—what it is we have attempted to be as Brigham Young University for more than a century now. That citizen will have read and understood our written mission statement and will have undoubtedly added a great deal of personal meaning to it out of his or her own hopes of what we are trying to become. Above all, I believe a true citizen at BYU will accept responsibility for the success of our collective effort here. It isn’t the administration this or the staff that or the faculty the other. It isn’t Student Life here or wards and stakes there or the personnel office beyond. It isn’t teaching versus research or religion against science. In our marvelous time on the BYU stage, it is a unified, conscientious pursuit of the collective BYU effort that we seek—each doing her or his special part, including groundskeepers, cooks, and carpenters as well as secretaries and librarians and professors.

The central ingredient in this kind of citizenship is the fundamental requirement of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and the devotion to Christian character that such a faith implies. As President J. Reuben Clark Jr. once pled with university personnel, please do not make your faith “difficult . . . to detect.”²¹ All that we do and say must reflect love of God and of our fellow men and women and complete loyalty to the Restoration of the gospel in this dispensation, including to the Church’s ordained leaders.

I realize that for most of our university family this goes without saying. Marvelously exemplary lives are lived among our number. I truly believe that no finer concentration of Latter-day Saints exists anywhere else in the world. But the issue of loyalty to our sponsoring Church and its teachings will forever be central to this matter of citizenship and the university’s purpose, so I am committed to repeating it anytime we speak of the mission of Brigham Young University and the hope we have for the quality of life that must always exist here—for faculty, for staff, for administrators, and especially for our students. Our colleagues and our students should find it very easy to sense our devotion to the gospel and the Church that combine to give us this remarkable BYU opportunity.

I suppose it isn’t inappropriate to say here that the most difficult problems I live with in my office day-to-day are not in the adequacy of our people as teachers or researchers or administrators or custodians or whatever. The truly serious problems that come to me and that require my greatest time unraveling and explaining are problems that strike at this matter of citizenship—those cases in which someone in our university family (and I include in that definition our students) seems to be at odds with Church standards or Church policies or Church doctrines. Everyone expects better of us at BYU.

Our board of trustees has been very generous with us, as generous as the tithes and offerings of the Church can possibly allow. Indeed, sometimes when I consider the immense trust that the trustees place in the administration in those circumstances, I am very uneasy lest in any way we ever lose that confidence and therefore lose some of the great ground I feel we have gained at the university in recent years. And I am, from time to time, bludgeoned into the realization that everyone at the university plays a role in maintaining—or damaging—that trust. I bear the scar tissue from the transgressions of others to prove it.

So it is in that sense that I consider citizenship to be much more than committee work or attendance at commencement and devotional assemblies or simply conscientious effort in the work we’ve each agreed to do, though all those things are important and visible and of real consequence. But I take the liberty of assuming that kind of citizenship in order to here talk about citizenship that reflects a commitment to the basic principles upon which the university was established and that continues to mark its uniqueness and distinction from all other universities in the land. Indeed, I don’t know of any major university that now speaks of citizenship as a fundamental and basic review touchstone for considering salary increases, promotions, continuing faculty status, rank advancement, professional development leave, and other opportunities at the institution. At least I don’t know of any major university that is doing it the way we do it or as seriously as we do it. But we have taken the matter very seriously, and we intend to do even more in rewarding good citizenship in the future.

With this idea of citizenship in a community, I confess I have never really liked the suggestion that the university, or much less its president, was an “employer.” I guess the university is an employer in the sense that it provides daily bread for more than 7,000 full-time equivalent colleagues, but because we are a university with all the special relationship that implies, I would hope that one’s labor here is truly a labor of love, pursued by choice, and that BYU is—as it is for me—the best possible place in all the world we could imagine spending our working hours. I have said before that if it were intended that we earn our living by the sweat of our brow,²² then there is no place on earth where I would rather sweat than at BYU.

I suppose what I am saying is that much more than our being an “employee,” I am inviting every one of us, including myself, to become a citizen—a part of the university’s very soul. We don’t need to recite John Donne here, but “no [one at BYU] is an island . . . ; and therefore never send to know for whom the [carillon] bell [tower chimes]; it [chimes] for thee.”²³ That kind of integrity and integration toward what we are about is the great hope I have in this matter of citizenship. No one of us has come here by coercion. No one of us is kept here by ball and chain. Every one of us has chosen this professional path (I hope) because it was more appealing and attractive to us than any other we could imagine. That is the privilege of and the premium on the good life at Brigham Young University. It is at the heart of university citizenship.

Let me again quote from a recent memo I sent to the faculty on this matter:

Such responsibility for institutional life is very broad. If we approach our disciplines (or our grooming) in an unkempt or sloppy manner, then our students will be learning carelessness and disorder from us. Students should see in every one of us—teachers, staff, administrators, or whomever—the rigor, the order, the interest, the respect that comes with devoted professional commitment. Students should see in the lives of their teachers and all other university associates that we are women and men here committed to honor and integrity, to virtue and truth, to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

A university colleague who by disruptive behavior impedes the work of a department or support area or team of workers at the university is obviously not a contributing citizen. That is not to suggest that good men and women will somehow agree on every point of policy or procedure here. We obviously won’t. There should be and will be strongly expressed positions. But these should be expressed and responded to as would be expected from civilized, decent, educated people. Gossip, backbiting, insult, and degradation of character simply have no place at Brigham Young University. Neither have incessant jousting or self-indulgent theatrics. We are, because of our heritage and our mission, interested in the common good, the growth and development of everyone. That kind of care and concern will lift entire departments and agencies at the university by their very bootstraps.

I have said before that BYU is one of the few experiments in Zion-like living that the modern Church is able to undertake. This university is the only community of its size I know of where so many people have chosen to live together for the common good, with the principles of the gospel and the religious covenants they have made as the ordering principles of their lives. If that is not an advantage to us in academic life, I do not know what is!

I spend a great deal of my time with other university presidents who lament openly and with painful candor their inability to cross departmental or college lines, to break down the barriers of academic disciplines, or to simply get people to be civil with one another within their areas of university labor. What an advantage we have at BYU just in our brotherhood and sisterhood! And our efforts to use those advantages properly have us on our way toward becoming what I believe we will one day be in response to President Spencer W. Kimball’s charge: one of “the great universities of the world”²⁴ and an “educational Mt. Everest.”²⁵ But we must have everyone’s loyalty and contribution to succeed. I don’t know much about mountain climbing, but I do know that we are roped together and that we have to climb with every other member of the team in mind.

We need each other at BYU if we are to be a true community, academic or otherwise. But we need all of each other if we ever wish to speak seriously of Zion. In those early efforts toward consecration and stewardship, the key was universal participation, and it broke down when universal participation was lost. The scripture says:

This is what the Lord requires of every man in his stewardship. . . .
. . . None are exempt from this law who belong to the church of the living God.²⁶

For a truly profound and powerful university community, obviously a great deal more is required of us than those isolated tasks that can too easily be labeled simply as “teaching” or “research” or “cooking” or “computing.”

In his recent book College: The Undergraduate Experience in America, Ernest L. Boyer wrote:

The tension between individuality and community has been the central theme of our study. The college is committed, on the one hand, to serve the needs of individual students, celebrating human diversity in its many forms, encouraging creativity and independence, and helping students become economically and socially empowered. [But] a college of quality is also guided by community concerns. It has goals that are greater than the sum of the separate parts and reminds students, in formal and informal ways, that there is an intellectual and social [and, we would add, spiritual] community to which they are inextricably connected.

Is it possible for the modern campus, with all of its separations and divisions, to find points of common interest? [Difficult as it may be, we must find such common points.] . . .

A quality college is guided by a clear and vital mission. The institution cannot be all things to all people. Choices must be made and priorities assigned. And there is, we believe, in the tradition of the undergraduate college, sufficient common ground on which shared goals can be established and a vital academic program built. . . .

Because students need guidance, a college of quality has a year-round program of academic advising and personal counseling, structured to serve all undergraduates, including part-time and commuting students. But is the faculty available to freshmen to talk about their disciplines, and do faculty give guidance to young students as they consider choices for careers? . . .

. . . Is the library more than a study hall? Are students encouraged to spend at least as much time with library resources as they spend in classes? . . . Are those who direct the library also considered teachers? . . .

Residential living can be one of the most chaotic parts of campus life, and yet it has the potential of being one of the most rewarding. It is appropriate to ask: Are residence halls not only a place for sleeping and parties but for education, with seminars, colloquia, and informal learning? . . . It is our position that, at a good college, students discover that all parts of college life are measured by high standards, and that educated people are guided in their behavior by civility and decency.²⁷

Each of us must continue to assess our own contribution and those for whom we have responsibility in this basic and vital aspect of high professional standards coupled with worthy personal behavior. It is university policy for every one of us to have an hour’s review with our file leader at least once a year. Such a review gives us an opportunity to evaluate that contribution and measure our progress.

By the same token, the leaders of the university must find better ways to evaluate and assist the members of the BYU family who contribute to the spirit and atmosphere of honesty, integrity, morality, respect, and concern for fellow men and women here. Certainly every one of us at the university who is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—and that is always about 98 percent of us—should be evaluated appropriately by his or her loyalty to our well-known and commonly accepted Latter-day Saint standards. We must not ever play an inappropriate quasi-ecclesiastical role in our professional review and relationships at the university, but because this institution is sustained by the tithes and offerings of the Latter-day Saint faithful, certainly none of us should be unclear about what is expected in our personal lives.

So I don’t think it should have anyone trembling over the square upon the hypotenuse to suggest that members of the BYU family are expected to represent the values and demonstrate the virtues of the Church that make the operation of this university possible. We have recently been reminded by no less a body than the Supreme Court of the United States in a rare unanimous vote that churches have every right to ask of their various agencies and personnel the standards of conduct and behavior that are consistent with that church’s sponsorship. For Latter-day Saints everywhere, it is just understood that we pay tithing and obey the Word of Wisdom and support our leaders and live lives of honor and compassion. If we are of an age and circumstance to have been to the temple, we should keep those covenants sacred and return there often. A temple and a university were always central to the Prophet Joseph’s vision of the city of Zion, and what didn’t endure in Nauvoo is enduring in Provo.²⁸ The light of the temple ought to shine on all we do here on our campus.

In short, every one of us knows what it means to have chosen voluntarily a professional life at BYU. We have a special mission to do all that the great universities of the world do but to do some other things very well, almost uniquely.²⁹ That special added ingredient in our educational offering will come in significant measure from our environment, from our ambience for learning, and from the lives of the men and women in this room. It can’t be legislated, and it can’t fully be expressed. It can’t come just in our clean grounds and certainly not in an administrative memo. It is finally in us—in you, in me, in our people—committed Latter-day Saints whose light casts “a special glow.”³⁰ The Spirit of the Y? A source of wisdom and a place of understanding? “Till I die I will not remove mine integrity from me. My righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go: my heart shall not reproach me so long as I live.”

I will be inviting the entire BYU family to speak often of university citizenship in the weeks ahead to help us find ways to acknowledge and reward it among ourselves and to stimulate a better understanding of it among our young brothers and sisters, our students. It is crucial to our ultimate success as a university if we, of all universities, are to stand and shine as I believe we are destined to do.

Teaching

Let me say just a word or two about teaching. I hear far too much recently that the administration or the university or someone—perhaps Jeff Holland, I don’t know—is abandoning the teaching role at BYU in deference to increased accomplishment in the area of scholarship. Please do not believe that or say it or permit it to be said. If one of you sees a department or circumstance in which that is a genuine problem, tell us and help us correct it. But do not perpetuate an artificial antagonism between the two crucial ingredients of teaching and scholarship in our professional life at BYU. In case anyone is confused or unclear, I am stating unequivocally, as I recently stated in a memo on this subject, that “the university exists in order that students can be taught.” I stand resolutely by President Kimball’s charge to me in 1980: “Quality teaching is a tradition [at BYU] never to be abandoned.”³¹ BYU has always been a teaching institution, it is now a teaching institution, and it will always be a teaching institution.

Furthermore, it is imperative that we teach well at Brigham Young University. A great teacher is one who is excited about learning and is learning something every day and every week and every month, which that teacher then takes into the classroom. That is part of what we are calling scholarship. That is a good deal of what we mean by such an ominous word as research. Surely no one believes we should all still be teaching from notes we scribbled down in graduate school. Good teachers will press themselves for new material, new approaches, new insights, new advantages, and new access to young and impressionable minds. A great university teacher takes a student where she is and lifts her to newer heights, takes an incoming freshman and, by the time he is a senior, changes forever his vision of what the world of nature and art and experience holds for him, in time and in eternity.

Of course good teachers will be very different from one another, not only in personality but also in the technique of instruction used. However, just being odd or sensational does not generally make one an able teacher in the long run. Similarly, a teacher is not necessarily “good” even if an occasional student rises to some degree of excellence in spite of poor instruction. A teacher who the students see as the enemy and who brings no spirit of helpfulness and encouragement to the class will be a failure in the eyes of most of his students. On the other hand, a teacher who seeks the favor of the students by setting easier requirements and giving inappropriately high grades cheats those young people out of what they might have learned—both in terms of the content of the class and the industry and independence that each should have developed there.

A teacher who is habitually late, disorganized, poorly prepared, or uninterested in the progress of the students surely cannot be considered a good teacher. A teacher who does not manage the class environment, who returns papers carelessly graded or late or not at all, or who wastes class time with war stories or complaints about this or that or other bits of time consumption to offset a shallow lecture is not a good teacher.

I think it is fair to say that we learn a great deal about a teacher’s feelings from our conversations with and observations of that person. Surely no one can teach very well who dislikes the experience, dislikes the subject, dislikes the students, and dislikes the university. It seems to me a sad assignment when anyone has to be involved with such a person.

Of such, Steven M. Cahn wrote in Saints and Scamps: Ethics in Academia:

Once we recognize the extent to which students are necessarily dependent on their instructors, we realize how much harm faculty members can inflict. Which of us has not felt the sting of a teacher’s thoughtless or malicious gibe? Or been victimized by a teacher’s carelessness or meanness? Or developed a blindness or aversion to some potentially fascinating subject as a result of a teacher’s incompetent, boring, or aberrant presentation?³²

And then there is this from a recent national report entitled To Reclaim a Legacy:

Just as students can be drawn to [a subject] by good teachers, they can be chased off by poor ones. “Students come to learning through their teachers,” wrote Oberlin College Dean Robert Longsworth, “and no list of great works nor any set of curricular requirements can do the work of a good teacher.” Although it can take many forms, we all know what poor teaching is. It can be lifeless or tendentious, mechanical or ideological. It can be lacking in conviction. Perhaps most commonly, it can fail to have a sense of the significance of the material it purports to study and teach. It can bore and deaden where it means to quicken and elevate. Giving one example, Harvard Professor David Riesman pointed out that poor teaching can masquerade as good teaching when it “invites students to join a club of sophisticated cynics who are witty, abrasive, and sometimes engrossing; many teachers . . . parade and glorify their eccentricities, and only on reflection and at some distance does one realize that they are really lifeless.”

. . . In one crucial way, good teachers cannot be dispassionate. They cannot be dispassionate about the works they teach—assuming that they are teaching important works. This does not mean they advocate each idea of every author, but rather that they are moved and are seen to be moved by the power of the works and are able to convey that power to their students. Just as good scholarship is inspired, so must good teaching be.³³

Let me say a word about evaluating good teaching. I have said to my own colleagues in the academic vice president’s office—and I am saying it repeatedly and openly here—that as difficult as it is, we must continue to find the very best ways to evaluate and acknowledge and reward both good citizenship and good teaching as well as good scholarship. Research is often more objective, more visible, and more quantifiable, though I do not believe the quality of research is necessarily any easier to assess. But we do try to evaluate good research. And as challenging as it may be and as difficult as we acknowledge it is, good teaching can be evaluated too, and we must improve our ability to do so. Some of that evaluation may be by students, some will be by peers, and some will be by those serving in departmental or college administrative positions. Some of it, I would hope, might be truly constructive self-evaluation. But good teachers, able teachers, will not be fearful of the process, whatever form it takes, and will indeed invite and seek comment or counsel that might improve the quality of their teaching.

All of us have been touched by some great teachers in our lives. Indeed, I suppose that the real quality of our educational experience and the real milestones along that path are the milestones that mark the influence of inspired teachers upon us—be that at the grade school, high school, undergraduate, or graduate levels—teachers who changed something in us, perhaps a great deal in us, forever.

I believe most faculty members at BYU maintain excellent relationships with their students. The eagerness with which graduating seniors bring parents to meet teachers at commencement time is one of the many indications of this.

But I am very disappointed to hear what I am sure is the exception to the rule: I do hear of some remarkably insensitive and blatantly unkind ways in which some in our university family treat students. (And the principle here can be applied to every area of university work—not just faculty but also staff and administrators. Everyone.)

• Surely we can be civil and courteous in our contacts with students.
• Surely we can post and keep office hours.
• Surely we can open the door more than three-sixteenths of an inch when a student comes calling, seeking help.
• Surely we can encourage women as well as men in the full range of our academic offerings.
• Surely we can convey an attitude in class and out that the happiness and success of our students are important to us and that that is why we are at the university.

We have agreed in our own circle of offices that we will not send students with questions round and round through the revolving doors of BYU’s complexity. If a student comes to our offices with a question and it is not one we can or should handle, we hold the student while a phone call is made to whoever is the proper person on campus. We make an appointment or otherwise seek counsel of the person and then send the student on their way knowing they haven’t just been given the runaround or been tyrannized by BYU bureaucracy.

I know something about demands on our time. Indeed, I think I know as much about that as anyone at the university. I know that some days are longer than others and that we can’t always be all things to all people. But a commitment to students, our attitude toward them, and our kindness expressed to them ought to be clear and obvious to all who would observe us. As I said earlier, a student is really the reason for the existence of this university. That young man or young woman is not an enemy and clearly cannot be seen as a nuisance to be put up with or an intrusion to be tolerated. Any associate at the university—faculty, staff, or administrator—can take the time to speak with students, grant them appropriate audience during carefully regulated office hours, and treat them with courtesy and respect.

We need to say to our students, “I love you. I care about you. This university cares about you. You are valuable and important and a living child of a living God.”

If we are too busy for that, we are too busy. The idea that somebody else in Student Life or somebody in the dorms or somebody in the wards and stakes can worry about these students is so patently wrong on the face of it that I suppose it need not even be mentioned. And yet I hear of problems of this kind, few as they may be.

Please, even as I am making a personal resolve to be closer to the students myself this coming year—including spending more time with them in my office and in my home as well as in my classroom—I ask you to take the special interest in them that is perhaps unique in all the world to the teacher-student relationship. Speak with them after class and help them work through their problems. We don’t have to be their bishop or Relief Society president, but I do think we ought to be their brother or sister. Be sensitive and thoughtful. Remember that you were once a freshman—or maybe even a senior—and that you may have had some difficult days then. We have lots of students here who have difficult days, and if the image of a great teacher is to be what I think the image of a great teacher must be, it needs to reflect that humanity and gentleness and caring concern that mark not only a truly civilized person but, in our case, a true disciple of Christ.

I am stressing here in this conference that we are committed to such teaching, that the student is in every way central to the university enterprise, and that we can and will find ways to evaluate and reward good teaching. I not only pledge that as a matter for continuing faculty status and rank advancement, but I pledge it for the general atmosphere and quality of instruction that are essential to our concern for and commitment to the rising generation. If you have suggestions for us on this topic, I invite them, but I hope I have been clear and unequivocal about the strong, central, and unwavering position of this administration on the value and desirability of superb teaching.

Scholarship and Creative Work

For the third of our three responsibilities, I speak of solid scholarship, a word that somehow seems to strike terror in the very heart of some. Perhaps this is an area in which we have not communicated adequately. But I have just suggested that genuinely good citizens and truly great teachers at a university also understand the mission of the university and participate in the full range of its mission, including scholarship.

Brigham Young University is a university. I have said before that we are not the Tabernacle Choir and we are not the Deseret Gym. We are not the Beneficial Life Insurance Company nor KSL Radio. We are not even the LDS Business College. Worthy as all of those Church-sponsored agencies are, their work is not our work. We are to be a university. That involves a special and genuine commitment to growth and development and learning. We have to be alive to our disciplines, and we have to bring to our work the discipline—I use the word advisedly—of writing and subjecting our work to the constructive criticism of our peers and the sharing of our insights and our contributions with others. It is not enough at BYU just to be a good person. There are good people everywhere (we hope!), but to be worthy of our hire here, we must be good persons who do the work of the university in a first-rate way.

I am grateful, for example, that people as “unscholarly” as Mormon and Moroni and Ether and Nephi wrote something down. I am grateful that Luke and John and Jacob and Paul put pen to paper on behalf of an audience long, long ago. If they hadn’t, their words would not necessarily have reached me in my lifetime. I did not have a chance to sit at their feet, but heaven only knows the tears I have shed and the gratitude I have expressed for the fact that they wrote what they knew. That kind of scholarship is inextricably linked with very great teaching, and I cannot imagine great teaching without it.

Can that analogy be transferred to our university setting without excessive violence? In this way perhaps it makes scholarship more easily seen as an essential activity of a university faculty. I detest the phrase “publish or perish.” That phrase has never been used by this administration, and I am disappointed with those who use it against the growth of the university. But there is—I think every one of us would agree—a kind of self-imposed perishing that comes from stagnation, that comes from lack of new experience, and that comes from stunted growth and dwarfed development. There is every evidence that at a university we just kind of grow old and poop out—Paul Thompson tells me that nationally that decline begins at the average age of forty-two—unless we are involved in what President Kimball has charged us to do: namely, “rolling back the frontiers of knowledge,”³⁴ our own knowledge, if no one else’s.

An excellent teacher recently wrote:

When we seek legal counsel, we have a right to expect that our attorney is knowledgeable about [the most] recent [and relevant] court decisions and does not rely solely on cases studied during law school. Analogously, students are entitled to assume that their instructor does not merely repeat stale ideas, but is able to provide an informed account of the most promising lines of recent thought [in that field]. A Ph.D. signifies that, as of the date awarded, the recipient has mastered a discipline. [But] the degree does not entitle the bearer to a lifetime exemption from scholarship. A professor [the root word for which is the same as profession] who depends on tattered, yellow notes reflecting [unchallenged and unrefined and] timeworn thinking is [certainly] as guilty of malpractice as the physician who relies on antiquated [and perhaps now even dangerous medical] treatments. Both are ideal candidates for early retirement.³⁵

That too is a little strong, but I suppose it is a point to be made.

Please don’t let that be threatening, and, by the same token, don’t use it as a bludgeon against your colleagues. I am simply talking about the kind of Latter-day Saint scholarship that has us devotedly at work in our discipline the way the Latter-day Saint work ethic would always have us “rolling back” the frontier of anything—whether that be the Ohio or Illinois frontier or an international mission field or genealogical research. Latter-day Saints are not known as squatters. They move out and move up. At a Latter-day Saint university there really shouldn’t be an inert intellect among us. Solid scholarship will always be a crucial ingredient in any assessment of a truly great Latter-day Saint university.

Final Thoughts

Now let me conclude, moving from our broad institutional hopes back toward somewhat more private ones. I began with a reference to the sleaze syndrome in which we as a nation or world so often find ourselves. And I have tried to suggest that a university—especially Brigham Young University—is a bright and beautiful response to such aimlessness. Such a sense of mission was reaffirmed in a recent national report as stated by David Savage from the Los Angeles Times:

Most students enter college expecting that the university and its leaders have a clear vision of what is worth knowing and what is important in our heritage that all educated persons should know. They also have a right to expect that the university sees itself as more than a catalogue of courses.³⁶

The report went on to say:

Each institution must decide for itself what it considers an educated person to be and what knowledge that person should possess. While doing so, no institution [should] act as if it [is] operating in a vacuum. There are standards of judgment: Some things are more important to know than others.

The choices a college or university makes for its common curriculum should be rooted firmly in its institutional identity and educational purpose. In successful institutions, an awareness of what the college or university is trying to do acts as a unifying principle, a thread that runs through and ties together the faculty, the curriculum, the students, and the administration. . . . Merely being exposed to a variety of subjects and points of view is not enough. Learning to think critically and skeptically is not enough. Being well-rounded is not enough if, after all the sharp edges have been filed down, discernment is blunted and the graduate is left to believe without judgment, to decide without wisdom, or to act without standards.³⁷

The most phenomenal and least likely literary success of 1987 has been Allan Bloom’s runaway bestseller The Closing of the American Mind. The book and its success are something of a paradox. The rate at which it is being purchased—and presumably read—would almost seem to be evidence against Bloom’s severe judgment about our decaying interest in life’s large, moral questions.

I make no effort here to summarize the richness of the book, but I do share with you Professor Bloom’s final assessment. It gives a link back to the several American moral blemishes with which we began these remarks:

Our problems are so great and their sources so deep that to understand them we need philosophy more than ever. . . . I still believe that universities, rightly understood, are where community and friendship can exist in our times. Our thought and our politics have become inextricably bound up with the universities, and they have served us well, human things being what they are. But for all that, and even though they deserve our strenuous efforts, one should never forget that Socrates was not a professor, that he was put to death, and that the love of wisdom survived, partly because of his individual example. This is what really counts, and we must remember it in order to know how to defend the university.

This is the American moment in world history, the one for which we shall forever be judged. Just as in politics the responsibility for the fate of freedom in the world has devolved upon our regime, so the fate of philosophy in the world has devolved upon our universities, and the two are related as they have never been before. The gravity of our given task is great, and it is very much in doubt how the future will judge our stewardship.³⁸

Stewardship? I have tried to outline some portion of what I think ours is. At BYU it is to be custodians of a precious gospel ideal. At BYU it is the pursuit of virtus et veritas—virtue and truth. At BYU it is the work of a “fully anointed university”³⁹—a place of reason and revelation, a place of wisdom and genuine understanding.

For us, education “is not a handy knack,” as someone has suggested:

It is a moral condition. The ability to read attentively, reflectively, and judiciously is equally the ability to be attentive, reflective, and judicious. For the sake of just and sane living, literacy is not an optional adornment. It is a necessity. It is the necessity. It is not a variety or portion of education. It is education. It is the whole thing, the wholesome nourishment of the mind, by which it may grow strong enough to be the master of the will and not its slave, the judge of desire and not its procurer, the censor of sentiment and not its tool, and the inquisitor of belief, and not its flack. It is our only path to whatever wisdom we can have, which is our only path to whatever goodness we can know, which is our only path to whatever happiness we can enjoy.⁴⁰

The writer may lack some gospel perspective on the full range of wisdom and goodness and happiness, but he makes a wonderful point about true education, which I believe Latter-day Saints best of all can appreciate.

The wisdom we can have! The goodness we can know! The happiness we can enjoy! I don’t know that we are having any more heartache in our community than usual, but it certainly seems to me that we have a great many in our BYU family who have recently struggled with disappointment, disease, and sometimes death. For obvious reasons I won’t name names or run through the directory, but we are close enough at BYU to know one another and to know the difficulties we often face. I am sure I am not aware of everyone’s pain, but I do know that in just one four-day span last week, we buried a colleague, the spouse of a colleague, the missionary son of a colleague, and a young, recent member of one of our BYU stake presidencies. All that in just four days’ time one week ago. We needn’t go back many months nor in some cases look ahead many months to know of other losses and heartaches you have. Just on Friday I learned of another fearful, fateful circumstance facing one of our families.

I don’t mean any of this to be morbid or maudlin, but it seems we have had a great deal of it these past several weeks and months. And I don’t know why in these last two weeks we’ve again been subjected—perhaps necessarily so, back to back, if you will—to recounting earlier local horrors and tragedies. Those brutal and horrible things seem to stay with us and go on and on and on. I confess that the recent air disaster in Detroit has been almost constantly on my mind. I have thought about it inordinately, almost obsessively, and can’t seem to strike from my inner eye the image of that young mother throwing her body over her precious child to shield the blow of impact and the certain, searing flames about to come.

“As I have loved you, . . . love one another.”⁴¹ Although I wanted the humor to begin our conference this morning, I found it difficult to joke about our recent experience coming back from the Middle East. I might well have been stepping down this morning—which thing I hope to do someday in any case—but which I surely would have had to do now if my dearest friend and closest advisor, the patient and attentive guardian of my soul, and the mother of my children had been taken from me. A few inches of wing tip in almost any direction—a great, blunt knife slicing through the fuselage of a plane like a butcher knife attacks beef—and her life would have been taken, and surely my life would have been over even if I had lived. And even when the tearing of metal stopped that day in Vienna, I was not unmindful that the greatest air disaster in recorded history was from the aftermath of fire when two 747s had collided on the ground in much the same way we had been involved in those identical planes. Six hundred people had burned to death that day in Tenerife. At least 158 didn’t survive last week’s tragedy in Detroit, where just this morning it is reported that the child is asking for her father.

I do not know the answer to such things—why they happen or why some are taken and some are not. But I do know that God loves us all and that surely we will all go sometime. I was touched by Elder Dean L. Larsen’s devotional address for Education Week in which he acknowledged such “intimations” of mortality and wondered whether for him there was time enough left to set right what needed to be set right and to do what conscience knew needed to be done.⁴² These recent events affecting so many on our campus have sobered and saddened me, and they have given me some of the same thoughts.

I said that I do not know the answer to many of these things, nor why they come in just the way they do. But I do know where ultimate peace and safety lie, regardless of when death stops to call for me.⁴³ I believe in repentance and ordinances and covenants and redemption. I believe in the gifts of God. I believe in the power of the Comforter, and I believe in Christ, who gave us everything. He is the Shepherd of our souls, the eternal Prince of Peace. Furthermore, I believe in praying for each other, because prayer is—among other things—a pure act of love, and love is perfect power unequaled.

How would you describe the act of someone kneeling five feet—or five thousand miles—from another, asking for that other person’s comfort or asking for his personal safety or for her much-needed success? Would that best be called loving prayer or prayerful love? Or are such distinctions silly? I know only of its power. I have been the beneficiary in my lifetime of loved ones pleading past time and space for me—and so have each of you.

I know too that many of you pray for me and for my family in the daily work of the university, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for such love. I want you urgently to know that we surely pray for you. Prayer isn’t all we need in matters of success or safety or sorrow, but it can do so very much when almost no other expression is adequate. A wonderful bishop, who himself had lost two children, quoted in one of these recent services, “One of God’s children escaped sin, but none of God’s children escape suffering.”⁴⁴

Job? We are not yet as Job. Sometimes “the world is too much with us,” but our love for one another and our loyalty to gospel truth can make our BYU experience a unique source of wisdom and this campus a very special place of understanding.

May God bless you in the new school year, I pray, in the name of and with love for our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, amen.

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