activist university: FIMY reviews BYU

“Activism: The policy or action of using vigorous campaigning to bring about political or social change”

Oh BYU, my alma mater. I just finished reading a damning report of BYU’s run-ins with academic freedom—The Lord’s University. The verdict: BYU only cares about academic freedom insofar as they can get away with keeping liberals out of the university while satisfying the accreditation committee that they’re not doing so. If it were up to the administration, they would require every faculty member and student to subscribe to their traditionalist worldview. But as the virtue of a university is universally recognized (outside Utah County) as being a sanctuary of free inquiry, the administration must use underhanded tactics to enforce their thought control.

This is what I feared as a Cougar. But a couple things surprised me as I read The Lord’s University. First of all that I was right, that there was a systematic effort in place to marginalize those who threatened the relationship between the university and Republican values and worldview. Secondly, that it was coming from the top. The First Presidency, as members of the university’s Board of Trustees, played intimate roles in everything from articles published in the Daily Universe to the firing of controversial teachers.

Back to the aforementioned underhanded tactics. The university over the years has fired faculty members who don’t fit the administration’s view of what a university professor should be. Is this acceptable at a private university? Sure. But in these firings there was (and still is) a pattern of a lack of due process and giving dubious reasons as the official causes of termination. You can’t exactly fire a professor by saying “We don’t like what you teach” without legal repercussions. So the pretense of poor performance is used bald-faced against professors with stellar records.

Who exactly gets fired at BYU? Feminists, primarily, and those with postmodern worldviews. Boyd K. Packer targeted feminists as enemies of the Church, along with gay rights activists and “so-called intellectuals and scholars.” But really, anyone who ruffles any feathers up the chain of command is dismissed, as evidenced by the firing of Todd Hendricks, a student employee who wrote an editorial critical of the BYUSA election process. Naturally, his performance was cited as the reason for his termination. Later, when it became clear that all of his performance reviews called him an excellent employee, the administration faulted him for not going through the proper channels.

And this brings us to the Machiavellian nature of BYU. Such things as “proper channels” exist for employees, not the university. The university is beyond reproach, for example, for faulting a professor for violating a policy that had never been implemented. Academic freedom, as it turns out, is to be enjoyed by the administration and not by the faculty or students.

Interesting, then, that the university’s statement on academic freedom reads:

“Individual freedom lies at the core of both religious and academic life. Freedom of thought, belief, inquiry, and expression are crucial no less to the sacred than to the secular quest for truth. Historically, in fact, freedom of conscience and freedom of intellect form a common root, from which grow both religious and academic freedom.”

Despite the official position citing no conflicts between religious and academic freedom, the freedom of thought, belief, inquiry, and expression is quickly curtailed when it runs up against the thoughts, beliefs, inquiries, and expressions of the administration and Board of Trustees. Needless to say, an unprotected freedom of dissenting thought is no freedom at all.

More double standards: liberal protests are deemed a childish embarrassment to the university, yet conservative protests earn an attentive ear. The university is supposedly not run by popular will, yet the administration frequently refers to the letters of complaining tithe-paying members in justifying its decisions. The university decries the politicization of academia, yet is one of the largest activist institutions for conservatism in the country.

Ernest Wilkinson, when he was president of BYU, campaigned to institute a policy through which bishops of student wards would keep tabs on “troubled” students. Faced with resistance from bishops and stake presidents, he promised that these lists would not affect their attendance at the university. With the policy in place however, Wilkinson denied registration to over 200 students based on supposedly confidential interviews.

This shouldn’t be surprising, as the university encourages anonymous snitching on Honor Code violators (and Wilkinson recruited students to spy on liberal professors). When a complaint is filed against you, even anonymously, you are treated as guilty, sometimes resulting in academic probation or expulsion, without so much as hearing. In a theology that claims free agency as a requisite for spiritual progression, how can a university that claims to subscribe to this theology use such Gestapo tactics?

To refer back to the academic freedom statement, the university’s defense lies in this clause: “a limitation is reasonable when the faculty behavior or expression… contradicts or opposes, rather than analyzes or discusses, fundamental Church doctrine or policy.” The question over what exactly composes “fundamental Church doctrine or policy” is the source of concern both for BYU faculty and the accreditation committee, who complained that such language was too vague.

What kind of agenda might the university have that would justify occupying such ethically shady ground? Naturally, it would be protecting the university from the danger of secularization. That’s right, multiculturalists, feminists, and gay rights activists everywhere are trying to get into BYU so they can pollute the doctrinal purity of the university with their diabolical propaganda. Even the appearance of evil might weaken the university and make it vulnerable to adverse influence, hence the Honor Code with its emphasis on a clean-cut, modest appearance. We wouldn't want young Mormon kids looking like those liberal rabble-rousers at Berkeley.

In the university’s defense, the Church has suffered intense persecution of all kinds from its inception. Adding to its tenuous position, though, is its mission of proselytizing the world. We want to simultaneously be left alone and have everyone agree with us. In a university setting, we want to be universally regarded as a great university, but without acquiescing to the world’s standards of greatness.

Additionally, our narrative of a secure Zion that is under threat of infiltration jibes with the neoconservative Cold War worldview. Once the Cold War ended, the political right needed a new subversive enemy to unite around, and that enemy became the tenured radicals of the university, the multi-culturalists and other supposed enemies of the foundations of Western civilization. Conservatives, with the unlikely alliance of Brigham Young University, became the self-appointed defenders of our country’s moral foundations.

President Bateman specifically targeted moral relativism as the poison that threatens the pure well water of BYU. Out of this mindset comes the rationalization for all of BYU’s shadowy activism.

But what’s so wrong with this worldview? I will answer that question in part II.