Imparting Our Double Heritage to Students 

I. Introduction

Good morning and welcome to this all-faculty meeting! This gathering might be the first of its kind. I’m grateful that you’ve responded to this unusual invitation. Thank you for being here and for your tremendous contributions to the work of this university—to its mission and our students. I feel your goodness and your strength.

A few weeks ago, I was feeling buoyed, energized, and inspired by reports of how so many of our faculty were taking innovative and imaginative steps to embrace and impart our “double heritage”¹ ever more effectively. I felt moved to gather all the faculty so we could learn together from at least a few of these remarkable colleagues. I wanted to do so early enough that we could use the summer months to prepare to implement any changes we might feel inspired to make before the next academic year.

I hope this gathering will be a revelatory experience—that each of us will be inspired to prepare this summer to do something new this fall to advance our mission more effectively, to become more fully the BYU of prophecy, and to instill our double heritage ever more compellingly into the minds and souls of our students. I hope you will take notes, both of what is said from this rostrum and of what the Holy Spirit whispers in your hearts.

II. Student Success

We are all intimately familiar with President C. Shane Reese’s charge for us to become the “Christ-centered, prophetically directed university of prophecy”²:

Our task, [he has said,] is to claim in our day the prophecies of the past. Our task is to become the university that prophets have foretold—to become ... the BYU of prophecy and promise. ... This, then, is our challenge during my administration: becomingBYU.³

To that end, President Reese has outlined seven programmatic initiatives that together constitute our university strategic plan:

1. Strengthen the student experience.
2. Retain a focus on undergraduate teaching.
3. Foster BYU’s double heritage.
4. Develop the courage to be different.
5. Build a covenant community.
6. Invest in mission-inspired scholarship.
7. Focus on mission-aligned hiring.⁴

The first of these initiatives—strengthening the student experience—comes first for a reason. Students are the beginning and the end of all we do at BYU. As President Kevin J Worthen once noted, our mission statement mentions students seven times, faculty twice, and administrators only once.⁵ Of the many remarkable attributes of our incomparable faculty, none is so salient to me as your singular devotion to our students—to their academic success, to their flourishing in all facets of an increasingly abundant life, to their Christ-centered character development, to their faith and testimony, to “their quest for perfection and eternal life.”⁶ Today we hope to highlight just a few examples of that devotion, which represent hundreds and hundreds of others. I salute all of you for your consecrated labors in our common cause and for your manifest love for the Savior, for this school, and for our students.

Part of my current role, as I see it, is to be a cheerleader and champion of our faculty toward many constituencies—including the university’s most significant donors and, when invited, senior leaders of the Church. Some have warned, Aaron-like, that my joy in our faculty carries me away unto boasting. My response, like Ammon’s, is that I do not boast of myself, but I will boast about our faculty.⁷ I want you to know that I love you and that I have enormous confidence in you. In saying that, I speak on behalf of the entire university administration and, if I may be so bold, on behalf of those to whom I report.

In recent years, we have observed with increasing gratitude the consecrated efforts of thousands of BYU employees—faculty, staff, and administrators—to help students succeed in what our mission statement calls “the balanced development of the total person.”⁸ At the same time, we have felt that these consecrated efforts might be even more effective if we could unify and coordinate them. Accordingly, in September 2022 we formed a campus-wide Student Success Executive Council. Over time we have refined both the composition and the objectives of that council. Earlier this year, the council, now chaired by Rich Osguthorpe, proposed a student success model, and, after much discussion and many edits, the President’s Council approved it.

If you haven’t yet discussed the student success model in college and department meetings, you will soon enough. This morning I would like to highlight the opening paragraph of the vision statement, which reads:

Student success means helping students to graduate from BYU and, in the process, to increase their faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, strengthen their testimonies of His restored gospel and Church, including prophets and apostles, expand their minds, and cultivate Christlike character and virtues. Students should graduate from BYU equipped with the capacity and fired with the desire to spend the rest of their lives learning for the Savior’s glory and serving others in His name.⁹

There is much to unpack in this preamble. For today, I want to underscore its focus on graduation and its unmistakable and very intentional echo of the Aims of a BYU Education.

One of our campus goals is to increase the percentage of our students who graduate within twelve enrollments. Our twelve-enrollment graduation rate is currently 70 percent. We would like, as a preliminary goal, to raise that rate to at least 75 percent. Ultimately, we hope to see it rise much higher. Graduation, of course, is an imperfect proxy for achieving our institutional aims—the aims of a BYU education—and it is not by accident that most of our student success vision statement is devoted to reaffirming those institutional aims.

III. BYU Aims

The Aims of a BYU Education were approved by the Board of Trustees thirty years ago last month. Over the past year and more, I’ve been inspired to learn a little more about their creation from John Tanner, who is with us this morning and who was the principal draftsman of the aims document. John has shared with me two insights that have profoundly shaped my view of our work as BYU faculty.

A. Aims as Learning Outcomes

The first has to do with what the Aims of a BYU Education attempt to do. John was serving as associate academic vice president for undergraduate and international education in the early 1990s when Bruce Hafen, then serving as provost, asked him to draft a document articulating our institutional objectives. Initially, John struggled with the assignment. After all, he reflected, BYU already had an eloquent and inspired mission statement that had been approved by the board of trustees. What was he supposed to add?

One morning, Todd Britsch, the academic vice president, stopped by John’s office and asked how things were going. After John described his conundrum, Todd responded: “Well, John, when you teach an English class, you have certain objectives, right? Such as you want students to learn to write? Well,” Todd continued, “we want you to write the objectives of the university—what we want to happen in our students’ lives because of their time at BYU.”

That simple explanation opened the windows of heaven for John, leading toward the familiar expression that “a BYU education should be (1) spiritually strengthening, (2) intellectually enlarging, and (3) character building, leading to (4) lifelong learning and service.”¹⁰

This brief anecdote from our history highlights an important insight: the aims of a BYU education are learning outcomes. They are the capital-L, capital-O Learning Outcomes for the entire university. Accordingly, I believe, they should inform and infuse all the lowercase learning outcomes for every course or program on this campus. In that spirit, may I suggest a simple, two-part exercise:

First, for any set of course or program learning outcomes for which you have stewardship, color code each current learning outcome in terms of the BYU aim to which it is most closely connected. You might, for instance, highlight spiritually strengthening outcomes in blue, intellectually enlarging outcomes in green, character-building outcomes in pink, and lifelong learning and service outcomes in yellow.

Second, consider which of our uppercase Outcomes might be missing from these lower-case outcomes. My strong sense is that our current outcomes overwhelmingly hew toward intellectually enlarging and that there is much more we could do to incorporate the other three aims explicitly into our course and program learning outcomes.

What might this look like in practice? While writing this talk, I asked ChatGPT: “Please provide five spiritually strengthening learning outcomes for an introductory constitutional law course at Brigham Young University.” Here’s what it spat back about three seconds later:

1. Recognize divine influence in constitutional foundations.
2. Articulate the role of law in God’s plan of happiness.
3. Apply gospel principles in legal analysis.
4. Defend religious liberty with faith and understanding.
5. Develop a spiritually centered legal identity.

Not perfect, I thought, but also not bad. Then I thought about poor Larry Howell and posed a follow-up query: “Please provide five spiritually strengthening and character-building learning outcomes for an advanced course on compliant mechanisms in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Brigham Young University.” Here’s what came back, this time after five or ten seconds (apparently the AI had to think harder about this one):

1. Develop Christlike creativity and stewardship.
2. Strengthen faith through understanding order and law.
3. Cultivate integrity in innovation and collaboration.
4. Build resilience through iterative learning.
5. Foster a sense of divine purpose in engineering.

These two computer-generated lists prompt at least two thoughts.

First, neither list does enough to capture spiritually strengthening and character-building in the thick sense in which the aims document uses those terms. By spiritually strengthening we mean increased faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and fortified testimony of His restored gospel, His true and living Church, and His special witnesses. By character-building we mean forging a Christlike character by cultivating virtue and honoring sacred covenants.

Second, if a machine can generate almost instantaneously a fistful of meaningful learning outcomes linked to the BYU aims, then the inspired faculty of Brigham Young University, under the inspiration of heaven, can do much, much more. I believe the time has come for us to review every learning outcome on this campus with our focus resolutely fixed on our inspired mission and aims. I hope we will undertake this work “with an eye single to the glory of God” and the eternal welfare of our students.¹¹

B. Building Character and Cultivating Virtue

The second insight about the creation of the aims underscores the centrality of character and virtue. John Tanner explained in an email that

I placed “character building” where it is in the aims not because it is less important than intellect and spirituality, which precede it in the aims, but because it is more important. It should be built on them. It is not enough to know about truth or to feel it spiritually; one must live the truth. ... BYU will have failed in its mission[, he continued,] if we just produce graduates who [are] bright. Or even who only [have] testimonies—who [have] felt the Spirit but [do] not live up to its hard demands, especially in times oftemptation.

Earlier this month, President Russell M. Nelson urged us all to embrace “charity and virtue” as the heart of our quest to develop confidence in the presence of God.¹² In response to that prophetic charge, I believe that there is more we can do to enthrone character and virtue at the heart of our educational enterprise.

In January of this year, we hosted as our forum speaker Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center. As you surely recall, he interrupted his message to have our students stand and recite section 4 of the Doctrine and Covenants.¹³ It was a stirring, unforgettable moment. It left imprinted on my soul the indelible image of a royal army of returned and future missionaries—the select cadre of the kingdom of God—giving united expression to our common faith.

Subsequently, Jeff related this experience publicly, describing how moved he was to see our students recite in unison what he called “the Mormon oath.”¹⁴ Now I have never heard section 4 referred to as an oath. And although I recited it as a missionary scores of times, it never occurred to me that by so doing I was making a promise or vow. But it strikes me now, upon reflection, that we at BYU can indeed approach that revelation as a kind of covenantal pledge—a commitment to do our work with “faith, hope, charity and love, [and] an eye single to the glory of God”; a resolve to cultivate, in ourselves and our students, the Christlike attributes of “faith, virtue, knowledge, temperance, patience, brotherly kindness, godliness, charity, humility, [and] diligence.”¹⁵

Can spiritually strengthening and character-building learning outcomes be measured? I believe some of our faculty are already doing so. Before describing how, it’s worth remembering this warning from John Tanner:

My deepest fear regarding assessment[, he said,] is that faculty will tailor objectives to measures rather than the other way around. That is, that we will define learning outcomes based on what is easy to measure. This would be a huge mistake because there is often an inverse correlation between what is easy to measure and what is important.¹⁶

John’s fears should prompt us to reflect: Do we sometimes omit the weightier matters from our learning outcomes because they are hard to measure? Do we sometimes over-index on lesser matters because they can be measured easily?

In focusing on weightier matters, it is important not to conflate assessment with grading. Assessment includes grading but is not limited to it. It would be inappropriate to grade students’ faith, testimony, and character but very appropriate to invite students to reflect about these matters. In the spirit of section 4, we might take a cue from the Church’s missionary program. Jeff Rosen was deeply moved when I told him about chapter 6 of Preach My Gospel, which invites missionaries to assess their progress in developing key Christlike attributes.¹⁷ In a similar vein, one of our colleagues established in a clinical course a learning outcome of helping her students become Christlike clinicians.

At the beginning of the semester, [she writes,] each student prayerfully selects a Christlike attribute to focus on. Every two weeks they submit a short reflection on what they have studied about that attribute, how they have observed it in others, and how they are seeing it develop in themselves. At the end of the semester, they write about their overall growth in that attribute. Students also share their experiences as they give spiritual thoughts at the start of class. I have also loved hearing organic comments throughout the class that reflect how their thought processes are more toward the Savior. It has been powerful to witness their transformations and see how striving to emulate the Savior blesses not only their lives but also the lives of those they will serveprofessionally.

I am grateful for colleagues throughout campus who are working hard to foster the creativity, imagination, and inspiration needed to invite student reflection focused on our highest aims and connected to meaningful coursework and experiential learning opportunities—all, as our mission statement enjoins, in “an environment enlightened by living prophets and sustained by [Christlike] virtues.”¹⁸

I am not suggesting that we simply add a few learning outcomes to each course to reflect the other aims, nor am I suggesting that we abandon a few intellectually enlarging outcomes and replace them with others. I am suggesting that we carefully calibrate all of our learning outcomes to advance all of our aims in a seamless, integrated, holistic fashion. There is much to be done in this regard, and I am excited to undertake this crucial work together.

I have also been inspired recently by colleagues who have taken imaginative steps to reevaluate grading in the context of our unique mission and our consummate devotion to improving the student experience and fostering student success. For example, many colleges, departments, and individual faculty members are asking what can be done to reduce the number of students earning grades of D, E, or W.

Our current DEW rate is staggering. Over the last four years, our students have signed up for an annual average of more than 72,000 credits—you heard that correctly: 72,000 credits a year!—for which they receive a D, E, or W. We might call these “unproductive credits.” At twelve credits a semester across our two main semesters, we could give a BYU opportunity to more than 3,000 additional students—enough, almost, to fill the ROC in the Marriott Center—if we made such “unproductive credits” productive. Translated into a fraction of our annual operating budget, the cost of our DEW rate amounts to scores of millions of dollars a year—a figure that dwarfs our entire internal research budget.

There are, of course, good reasons why students withdraw from courses, and we should not give credit to students who haven’t minimally met the course learning outcomes. But I believe we can do more to help all students succeed, and so many of you are leading the way in an inspiring and devoted fashion, both by refining your pedagogy and rethinking traditional approaches to assessment.

I am deeply grateful, for instance, for what strikes me as a campus-wide shift away from measuring students against each other and toward measuring them against rigorously defined learning outcomes. Despite this welcome trend, let me share three concerning counterexamples.

1. A new faculty member—freshly arrived on campus, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed—is taken aside by a senior colleague who explains what he describes as a secret to success learned over many years on the BYU faculty. “One F,” the senior colleague observes, “equals two B’s.” Sensing some bewilderment in the new colleague’s countenance, the veteran faculty member continues, “If you fail one student, you can give two students a B with no effect on your mean GPA.” By implication, the secret to faculty success is student failure.

2. Another new faculty member explains a dilemma. She is very confident that she can help struggling students do better on their papers. Unfortunately, she continues, “I need them to do poorly for the sake of my average GPA.” Although she knows she can help them do better, she fears that doing so will hurt her during annual stewardship season or at rank-and-status time.

3. A student is asked what, if anything, he would change about his BYU experience. “I would do away with beater courses,” he says. Not weeder courses or feeder courses but beater courses. “Courses,” he explains, “that just seem designed to beat you down. The professors tell you at the beginning of the semester that you’re unlikely to succeed, and they spend the rest of the semester trying to prove themselves right.”

I hope such cases are exceptional, but we hear about enough of them to conclude that there is room for improvement. In my view, these things ought not to be—not on this campus. I believe we can find ways to remain rigorous and exacting in our teaching and assessment while finding inspired ways to measure our students against defined learning outcomes, not against their classmates. I believe we can do so in the spirit of President Jeffrey R. Holland’s memorable teaching:

Brothers and sisters, I testify that no one of us is less treasured or cherished of God than another. ... He cheers on every runner, calling out that the race is against sin, not against each other.¹⁹

On this campus, the race is against ignorance and darkness, not against one’s peers; it is a race toward growth and becoming, capacity and achievement, light and truth, perfection and eternal life.

I am just Pollyannaish enough to think that such a shift will curb rather than exacerbate grade inflation. A’s will be reserved for students who have truly mastered the material, not just those who have done marginally better than most of their peers. And D’s, E’s, and W’s will be reserved for those who truly did not meet the learning outcomes, not just those who couldn’t quite keep up with their peers. Rigorous, outcomes-based assessment will, I am convinced, produce all the distribution and sorting anyone might reasonably require. But that will be a byproduct, not an objective. The real objective is enhanced student experience and increased student learning. The real objective is advancing our inspired mission, achieving our institutional aims, and pursuing our prophetic destiny. I hope we can all embrace patterns of grading and assessment that will further our most important ideals.

IV. Conclusion

I want to close these introductory remarks by reiterating my enormous gratitude for and my tremendous confidence in the consecrated faculty of Brigham Young University. I am in awe of what you have accomplished and contributed this year and every year. I am humbled and honored to be part of your ranks.

I commend to you the messages you will hear from the various presenters today. Each is an amazing colleague who, despite years of experience and demonstrated excellence, has recently sought ways to improve—ways to advance our mission more fully and achieve our aims more effectively. Today’s presenters will offer a handful of invitations that I hope you will consider carefully and prayerfully. Our goal is not to overload you with invitations but rather to provide an opportunity for all of us to seek inspiration and revelation in the hope of receiving an insight or two that we might spend part of the summer incorporating into our teaching plans for next year—and that such insights will help fuel the revelatory pattern of constant improvement that is a hallmark of our faculty.

I testify that the Lord Jesus Christ lives and that our sponsoring institution is His true and living Church—His latter-day kingdom led by His authorized witnesses, established to prepare the world and His people for His triumphant return. His living prophet, President Russell M. Nelson, has said: “My dear brothers and sisters, do you see what is happening right before our eyes? I pray that we will not miss the majesty of this moment! The Lord is indeed hastening His work.”²⁰ Earlier this month President Nelson added: “We do not know the day or the hour of His coming. But I do know that the Lord is prompting me to urge us to get ready for that ‘great and dreadful day.’”²¹

It is my conviction that this university is evidence of that majesty, emblematic of this moment, and part of that preparation. We have, I believe, a role to play in the coronation to come. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

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