Answering the Dual Calls for Academic Excellence and Discipleship 

Seeing BYU for the First Time

Have you ever noticed that you have a heightened sense of your surroundings when you visit an unfamiliar place? Think about your first trip to a foreign country, your first time camping under the stars, or your first night in a new home. The colors are more vibrant, the contrasts are more clear, the sounds are more distinct. This is a real effect—when we see or experience something for the first time, it often has a more profound impact on us than if we have experienced that thing many times before.

When I started teaching at BYU Law School in 2018, this place was unfamiliar to me. I had never been a student at BYU, and because I was experiencing the university for the first time as a member of this community, it was easy to appreciate just how special this place was. I saw that I could teach differently here—that I could blend spiritual and secular learning in ways that were not possible at other schools. I saw that I could develop deeper and more transformative mentoring relationships with my students. And I also saw that when I presented papers and sought to have a positive impact with my research, there was something different—and more meaningful—when BYU was the institution I represented. It did not take me long to love being a BYU professor and to feel that I had found a home here.

You might be surprised to learn that there was a time when I didn’t feel entirely at home here. In fact, I was literally on the opposing team, playing outside hitter for the men’s volleyball team at Stanford University and against BYU. And even though Stanford has always had a strong volleyball program, there was a long stretch during my college career when BYU was victorious in the matches we played against each other—a fact that I definitely didn’t love at the time. I also had to get used to some good-natured heckling from the student section at the Smith Fieldhouse when they learned I was a member of the Church. Comments like “Hey number eight, you picked the right church but the wrong school!” were not unusual when I went back to serve.

I could not have anticipated then that, after years of pursuing graduate studies and working as a young lawyer in New York City, BYU would become my home. But the Lord works in mysterious and marvelous ways, and my path has helped me recognize and appreciate what a special place this university is.

The Power of BYU’s Double Heritage

As a latecomer to BYU, there’s one observation that has struck me most about this institution: BYU is uniquely positioned to change the world and strengthen the kingdom of God at a scale and in a manner that is truly extraordinary.

It starts with you—the students. When I began teaching, I quickly saw that the students at BYU are remarkable. You are talented artists, engineers, musicians, and athletes. You are fluent in multiple languages, and your missionary service has blessed you with wisdom and depth. You have the brainpower to engage in complex critical analysis and also the humility and faith to remain anchored in Christ. You inspire me with your goodness. All of you are filled with incredible potential.¹

I also saw that by seeking “the balanced development of the total person,”² BYU can maximize your potential.³ Unlike secular universities, at BYU we can light within you, our students, the fire of testimony and a commitment to serving the Lord and His children.⁴ And unlike Church institute programs and seminary programs, we can train you to excel in academic disciplines that increase the scope and scale of your impact when you go forth into the world.⁵ This combination, applied across a campus of more than 35,000 students and 1,300 full-time faculty, is a potent force for good in the world and a source of strength for the Church.⁶

Just two months ago, Elder Clark G. Gilbert, commissioner of the Church Educational System, highlighted the power of this combination when he boldly issued a challenge to BYU’s 2025 graduating class to simultaneously heed the call for academic and professional excellence and the call for discipleship in their postgraduation lives. Elder Gilbert explained that when BYU graduates are “excellent in [their] professional and community engagement” and “balance an expectation for professional and academic distinction with integrity to [their] faith,” they can be powerful lights to the world who serve and strengthen those around them.⁷

Elder Gilbert’s charge to the 2025 graduates was very similar to a directive that President Spencer W. Kimball gave BYU faculty a half century ago. He said:

As scholars [BYU faculty] must speak with authority and excellence to [their] professional colleagues in the language of scholarship, and [they] must also be literate in the language of spiritual things.⁸

President Kimball called these dual calls for academic excellence and spiritual literacy BYU’s “double heritage,”⁹ and under President C. Shane Reese’s leadership, this double heritage has been elevated as one of the top strategic priorities of the university today.¹⁰ BYU faculty have been given urgent instructions “to instill our double heritage ever more compellingly into the minds and souls of our students.”¹¹

While the dual pursuit of academic excellence and discipleship at BYU is a timeless and prophetically inspired combination, I would venture to say that this combination has never been more important than it is today. A few data points help to illustrate why. Sources indicate that it took about seven years for the Internet to reach one hundred million users in the 1990s¹² and four and a half years for Facebook to reach the same number of users in the 2000s.¹³ How long did it take ChatGPT to achieve one hundred million users from its launch in 2022? The answer is just sixty days.¹⁴ In 2023, Instagram’s Threads app accomplished the same feat in only five days.¹⁵

The rapid pace of technological advancement and adoption has given these platforms unprecedented influence on our lives. Generative AI in particular has already begun to shape our narratives, create our content, automate our decision-making, and influence our behavior at every level of society. Now, more than ever, if BYU graduates are going to bless the world,¹⁶ we must aspire even higher in our learning and anchor our spiritual identities even more firmly so we can adapt to these changes and direct them for good.

Answering the Dual Calls for Academic Excellence and Discipleship

So what can you do now, students, to prepare to be the kinds of graduates that Elder Gilbert described? How can you answer the dual calls for academic and professional excellence¹⁷ and for discipleship? I have two invitations.

Establish and Maintain a Rock-Solid Foundation of Faith

First, I invite you to establish and maintain a rock-solid foundation of faith.

Before a skyscraper can be built, an engineer must ensure that the foundation will be strong enough to support the building. The deeper and stronger the foundation, the taller the skyscraper can be.

Similarly, the deeper and stronger your spiritual foundation, the better prepared you will be to walk the path of academic and professional excellence with unshakable faith in Jesus Christ and inspiration from heaven. Without a strong foundation, there is a real danger that you will lose sight of what really matters and succumb to pride¹⁸ as you climb the ladder of success. If that happens, all your achievements and work will profit you nothing.¹⁹ But with a firm foundation,²⁰ there is no limit to the good that you can do—or the heights you can ascend—when you combine academic and professional excellence with committed discipleship.

For these reasons, nothing you do here at BYU will be more important than working to establish and maintain a rock-solid foundation of faith, testimony, and covenant-keeping. So before anything else, I invite you to make a plan for how you will prioritize personal prayer, studying the scriptures and the words of the living prophets, temple attendance, and meaningful service in your schedule. Take advantage of the many opportunities BYU offers to build your faith and maintain positive spiritual momentum.²¹ As you build your life around these foundational habits and the covenants you have made, and as you seek to be excellent in your discipleship, you will be building your foundation on the rock of Christ, and the devil will have no power over you as you strive for excellence in the other areas of your life.²²

Aim High in Your Academic and Professional Goals

Second, I invite you to aim high in your academic and professional goals.

While it is true that the most important thing you can do at BYU is build a solid foundation of faith, if you stop there, you will be missing an essential part of what makes this place unique. The full extent of BYU’s power to transform students and change the world is only unlocked when the pursuit of discipleship is coupled with the pursuit of rigorous learning and academic excellence.

The pursuit of academic excellence is a key part of the core organizing principles governing BYU. The university’s mission statement describes the educational experience at BYU as “a period of intensive learning in a stimulating setting where a commitment to excellence is expected” and boldly sets forth the expectation that “students who graduate from BYU should be capable of competing with the best in their fields.”²³

President Kimball offered an even more expansive view of BYU’s potential when he proclaimed his hope and expectation that “out of [BYU] . . . there will rise brilliant stars in drama, literature, music, sculpture, painting, science, and in all the scholarly graces”²⁴ and that BYU’s excellence will increase “till the eyes of all the world will be upon us.”²⁵

President Gordon B. Hinckley issued a pointed call for the pursuit of excellence when he told the BYU student body:

A vast amount of the tithing funds of the Church is required to make it possible for you to receive an education at this remarkable institution. How great is your responsibility, how compelling your trust, to give your very best effort during the season that you are here.²⁶

He went on to say: “You are good. But it is not enough just to be good. You must be good for something. You must contribute good to the world.”²⁷

Students, it is not my intention to weigh you down with the burden of these great expectations. Rather, I hope it excites you to be reminded of what you are capable of. Prophets have foretold the incredible things that you and your classmates will accomplish, and there are extraordinary resources available here to aid your pursuit of academic excellence.

With this in mind, please do not underestimate yourselves when setting academic and professional goals for your life! Remember that you got into BYU, you belong here, and you can achieve great things. Whatever your major or your ultimate postgraduation path, when you are willing to work hard and when your motivations are righteous, God can help you do more than you think you are capable of.²⁸ By making the most of the talents the Lord has blessed you with and aiming as high as you can, you give Him more ways to use you in the kingdom of God and to magnify your impact.²⁹

The First Presidency, Quorum of the Twelve, and general officers of the Church are ­outstanding role models in this regard. If you study their backgrounds, you will find servants of God, male and female, who have spent their lifetimes actively acquiring education and developing talents that have made them useful both to the world and to the Lord. You can do the same.

Almost thirty years ago, President Hinckley extended the following blessing to the BYU student body:

I invoke the blessings of the Lord upon you, my dear friends, to reach for the stars. If you touch them, great shall be your reward. If you stumble and fall while reaching upward, you will be happy knowing you have made the effort.³⁰

I am confident that the same blessings and promises apply to each of you today.

The Pursuit of Academic and Professional Excellence and the Pursuit of Discipleship Can Be Mutually Reinforcing

Sometimes the pursuit of academic and professional excellence and the pursuit of discipleship are framed as being in tension with each other. Is being excellent in the world—especially in competitive and demanding fields—at odds with the humility and compassion the Lord expects of His disciples? Does accepting a Church calling deplete the time and energy needed to excel in school and work?

While navigating this path may not always be simple,³¹ my experience is that these dual pursuits can reinforce each other in important ways when we keep our eye single to the glory of God.³²

First, when you are spiritually grounded, it helps ensure that your pursuit of academic and professional excellence is directed toward things that really matter. President Russell M. Nelson has told us that “we educate our minds so that one day we can render service of worth to somebody else.”³³ But if your life largely consists of uninspired and unreflective striving for the next award or the next bonus, there’s a good chance that your ultimate impact will be of limited usefulness.

The pursuit of academic and professional excellence becomes infinitely more meaningful when it is coupled with a sustained commitment to excellence in covenant-keeping, spiritual growth, and seeking the Lord’s guidance. This combination is the core advantage of BYU. When your education has accomplished “the balanced development of the total person,” as the mission statement says, you will be prepared not just to strive but to strive for things that really matter.³⁴

You will also have the perspective to know that the pursuit of excellence is not a race against others, that it is okay to fail sometimes (especially when you’re aiming high), and that excellence comes in many forms and is not solely reflected in test scores, GPAs, and job offers. The Lord can help you know what excellence means for you and how to measure whether you’ve been successful.³⁵

Second, it is my experience that our greatest spiritual growth usually happens when we go outside our comfort zones. As I approached the end of my graduate studies, I had a choice to make between starting my legal career at a law firm that was near my hometown and starting my career in New York City. The former was comfortable, closer to family, and had shorter hours. The latter was thousands of miles from family and required longer hours but would provide top-notch training in my field and would likely put me in a better position to eventually transition to legal academia.

After praying for the Lord’s guidance, my wife, Sarah, and I felt drawn to New York, so we moved forward with faith. Our nearly ten-year stay in the New York City area—during which four out of our five children were born—was a sacred experience for our family. It was not easy or comfortable. I worked longer hours than I had ever worked before, but I also prayed harder than ever, and I saw the Lord extend His hand to our family in many tangible ways and eventually open doors to a highly attractive research fellowship for me.

New York also provided Sarah with remarkable opportunities to advance her business consulting career, and we learned to communicate and coordinate our timing so that we could support and complement each other in our professional roles and our parenting roles. Life in New York was very demanding, and Sarah and I needed to be aligned in our priorities as we made decisions. But as we consulted with the Lord and held fast to our covenants, our testimonies were refined, our faith was strengthened, and our family was blessed by all that New York offered and by the many memories we made there together.

I’ll also note that Sarah and I treasured—and will always treasure—our experience in the Church in New York. It was a place where ward members treated each other like family because most of us did not have extended families nearby. And in every calling, ranging from deacons quorum advisor to stake Young Men president and many others in between, every ounce of service that I could give was a needed and valued contribution there.

The experiences I had in New York also prepared me to be more effective as a BYU law professor in ways I never could have foreseen. I gained experience in an area of the law that was a fruitful subject for research and that raised policy questions that would become increasingly consequential in subsequent years. Little did I know then that my experience in New York would eventually help put me in a position to contribute to national policy dialogues about important securities law initiatives that would take shape after I became a professor and that would be highly relevant to many of my future students’ careers.

I learned many things in New York that would make me a more effective teacher, and I also formed connections that would later help me support BYU Law students in launching careers in the city. Shortly after arriving at BYU, I was able to use my experience to create—with help from many, many others—an annual program in New York City called the Deals Academy that opens recruiting doors for first-year BYU Law students and connects them to local Church members. It has been thrilling to watch many of those students return to work in New York and help strengthen the Church there. As one example, I was touched to hear that one of my former Deals Academy students was recently called as elders quorum president in the same ward my family attended when we were there, contributing strength to a place that has given so much to us.

Looking back, I am deeply grateful for this choice to follow the Spirit and go outside my comfort zone by moving to New York—both for the refining effect it had on my testimony and for the amplifying effect it had on my ability to have an impact.

The Power of Mentors Who Model Academic Excellence and Discipleship

What will answering the dual calls for academic and professional excellence and for discipleship look like in your life? Sometimes it helps to have examples who have successfully charted this course and whose lives, habits, and attitudes you can emulate.

I was blessed to have a mentor who modeled this combination for me when I was at Stanford. Elder Robert M. Daines, a General Authority Seventy who was then a professor at Stanford Law School, was the bishop of my young single adult ward. As his executive secretary, I saw that he walked the walk in his Church service and in his responsibilities as a father and husband.

I also worked as a research assistant for Elder Daines and took a class from him, and I saw the positive impact of his research in the academic and policy realms. In effect, even though Elder Daines was not at BYU, he was taking a double-heritage approach in teaching me—he showed me what it meant to “speak with authority and excellence” in his academic discipline while also modeling literacy “in the language of spiritual things.”

Watching this example at a pivotal time in my life had a powerful impact on my vision of who I wanted to become. Not only did Elder Daines’s life provide me with examples of laudable goals worth shooting for, but I also felt more confident setting challenging goals for myself because I had a mentor who believed in me and who had a track record of achieving excellent things himself. I felt more inspired to aim high in my academic and professional goals—and to keep my spiritual foundation strong—with someone like Elder Daines in my camp.³⁶

Sarah had a similarly influential mentor in her life when she attended BYU. As she navigated through a history major, graduate school, and her early career, Dr. Paul Kerry inspired her to seek her highest potential both in her studies and in her discipleship. Dr. Kerry—who has appointments in the BYU History Department and the International Center for Law and Religion Studies and who has held visiting fellowships at schools including Princeton, Cambridge, the London School of Economics, and Oxford—has spent much of his career seeking to build bridges for the Church and BYU in the world and creating opportunities for BYU students to excel.

Wanting to recognize his far-reaching influence, Sarah calligraphed a quote for Dr. Kerry on her graduation that reads, “There comes that mysterious meeting in Life when someone acknowledges who we are and what we can be, igniting the circuits of our highest potential.”³⁷ This piece still hangs in Dr. Kerry’s office today.

I am grateful that Elder Daines and Dr. Kerry are both still part of our lives, providing counsel, support, and friendship many years later.

Finding Mentors at BYU Who Inspire You to Pursue Academic Excellence and Discipleship

Looking back, I can appreciate now that the odds of finding a faculty mentor at a non-BYU school who was so effective at modeling discipleship and academic and professional excellence were pretty slim. I was very blessed. But here at BYU, every faculty member has been given a charge by a prophet of God to live this double heritage.

I believe our “dual heritage”³⁸ gives my faculty colleagues and me a special opportunity to seek to bless you, our students. The two-pronged influence of a BYU professor is different from the influence of a seminary or institute teacher, different from the influence of a professor at a secular university, and different from the influence of a bishop or Young Women president. I view the faculty-student relationship at BYU as a sacred relationship and a sacred and distinct opportunity for faculty to help strengthen the Church and deepen the impact that our graduates are having in the world.

Students, if you have not already done so, I invite you to carefully seek out faculty mentors here at BYU. Don’t be shy about approaching them for guidance. Look for faculty who can lead by example on both sides of the double heritage. I can tell you that you will find them across the university, in every department. As part of my preparation for this devotional, I sampled associate deans across the university, asking for examples of extraordinary mentoring and excellence across campus. The response left me both amazed and inspired. Seek out faculty whose approach to discipleship inspires you and whose research and teaching excite you and make you want to strive higher. As you do this and as you listen to the Spirit’s promptings, there is no telling what your future path will look like in this place where the Lord is in the details and where faculty and student lives are “intertwined in nonrandom ways.”³⁹

One of the most important lessons that I’ve learned during my time here is that if I am going to be an effective mentor in the double-heritage approach, I need to lead by example. I cannot expect to strengthen my students spiritually if I am not seeking to walk the path of discipleship in my own life.⁴⁰ Similarly, I can only hope to inspire my students “to reach for the stars” and pursue academic and professional excellence if I am seeking to excel academically and professionally myself, and if I am seeking to do the work needed to “speak with authority and excellence” in my field as a researcher and to teach rigorously in the classroom.⁴¹ Though I do it imperfectly, seeking to model both elements of the dual heritage and seeking to light a spark in you, our students, to do the same has been my greatest and most sacred privilege as a BYU faculty member.

I echo the testimony of so many others that we are engaged in a great work here at BYU—I’ve seen it, I’ve felt it, and I’ve been inspired to dedicate my life’s work to it. This place has “the courage to be different,”⁴² it is “Christ-centered” and “prophetically directed,”⁴³ it is “a covenant community”⁴⁴ focused on the student experience, it is enhanced by “gospel methodology,”⁴⁵ and it is excellent.⁴⁶ We are blessed to play a role in its rolling forth. One thing that is clear is that accomplishing these objectives takes work. As President Kimball admonished the BYU community fifty years ago:

We must do more than ask the Lord for excellence. Perspiration must precede inspiration; there must be effort before there is excellence. We must do more than pray for these outcomes at BYU, though we must surely pray. We must take thought. We must make effort. We must be patient. We must be professional. We must be spiritual. Then, in the process of time, this will become the fully anointed university of the Lord about which so much has been spoken in the past.⁴⁷

I love BYU, and I am humbled to be part of this inspired work alongside so many excellent and faithful students and faculty.

The Most Important Mentor of All

As important as faculty mentors can be in your journey toward academic excellence and discipleship, there is one mentor whose influence exceeds and outshines all others: Jesus Christ. He is the perfect example of one who achieved excellence while maintaining perfect obedience to His Father. Christ demonstrated mastery in many roles, including “healer, mediator, counselor, peacemaker, advocate, lawgiver, . . . judge,”⁴⁸ and even the Creator of the world,⁴⁹ yet He never deviated from His divine mission or His role in His Father’s plan.⁵⁰ His path is the most excellent path.

The Savior’s invitation to “follow me”⁵¹ is extended to each of you personally. I know that if you will learn to “hear Him”⁵²—in the scriptures, in the temple, in the words of the prophets, and in personal revelation—He will speak to you. He has guided me in decisions big and small, and I know He will do the same for you. As you strive for excellence, He can help you discern which opportunities align with His purposes for your life and provide the wisdom you need to move forward with confidence. He is the perfect mentor.

I testify that He lives, He loves you, and He wants you to prepare yourself here at BYU so you can give the very best you have to assist in His work. I say these things in His sacred name, Jesus Christ, amen.

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