The Books of My Life: The Lord's University

Once I learned what BYU was like when I arrived in Provo, Utah as a doctoral student in sociology in the early 1990s I soon realised that I, an agnostic if not atheistic non-Jewish Jew with Quakery and Anabaptisty social ethical leanings, was not BYU material. Don't get me wrong, I liked aspects of my life at BYU and in Provo. I took some interesting courses, particularly on Mormonism, in the Sociology, History (Marvin Hill), and the Church History (Donald Cannon) Departments at the Y. I made some great friends who I talked with a lot about American religious history and Mormonism. I taught Social Stratification and had some wonderful and very interesting students. I attended many of the films the Humanities College showed via their wonderful International Cinema programme, films, by the way, which were, in my opinion, unfortunately sometimes censored. And perhaps most enjoyably I worked for several years at Walt West Books near Deseret Industries in Provo owned and run by the amazing Walt West.

During my years at BYU, I got into or almost got into cold and hot water on several occasions. I showed, at the suggestion of one of my students, the R rated film Raising Arizona in my Social Stratification class in the Joseph Smith Memorial Building. I had members of VOICE, the BYU feminist campus club, come to my class and talk about their personal experiences of inequality and inequity in Mormon culture. I attended the VOICE men can't walk on campus alone protest and supported it. I acted as liaison with the Sociology Club and when the club wanted to bring gay Mormon parents who were sympathetic to gays to campus I worked with Larry Young and David Knowlton to make it happen. Larry was magnificent at the forum. I was turned into the chair of the Sociology Department for bringing a copy of the Tanner's book on changes in the Mormon temple endowment ritual to campus. I went up to the Tanner's Utah Lighthouse Ministry in Salt Lake with John and Rob. I went down to Quaker weekend during the Easter season to protest nuclear weapons testing in Las Vegas and Mercury, Nevada with Larry, Melanie, Rob, and Denise and afterwards, along with Larry, Melanie, Rob, and Denise, helped found the Mormon Peace Gathering, a Mormon group that went down to Las Vegas and Mercury to witness against nuclear weapons testing during the Easter season the next year. I visited a Mormon fundamentalist community down from the bench between Salt Lake Valley and Utah Valley. I drank 3.2 beer and beer beer, which I bought at the exorbitant price of eight bucks a six pack at the state liquor store in Provo. I frequented a coffee house on the border between Provo and Orem. I let my hair grow. I wore too short shorts. I walked during the playing of the US national hymn on campus. I whinged about the paternalistic and patriarchal attitudes of the general authorities in Salt Lake and Provo and especially about their rhetoric about gays and women. I opined against the firings of Knowlton and Cecilia Konchar Farr in the Utah County Journal (though they got my first name wrong) and the Student Review and argued that BYU needed once and for all to make a decision as to whether it wanted to be a seminary or Notre Dame. I engaged in ethnographic experiments which I probably shouldn't have. I was, in other words, a naughty boy, a sometimes very naughty boy. But then I was and am a Gentile. Needless to say, I left BYU behind somewhere around 1993 or 1994 though I didn't leave Mormon Studies behind. 

The Lord's University: Freedom and Authority at BYU (Salt Lake: Signature, 1998) by Bryan Waterman and Brian Kagel is a history of the BYU I knew and the BYU and Mormon history that I lived through. Waterman and Kagel cover the history of BYU from where Gary Bergera's and Ronald Priddis's history of BYU, Brigham Young University: A House of Faith (Salt Lake: Signature, 1985), leaves off, from the 1980s to the end of the 1990s. Waterman and Kagel explore the BYU right wing Bircher fellow traveller, paranoia ridden, conspiracy theory ridden, and apocalyptic ridden Ernest Wilkinson, who was president of the Y as it "modernised" between 1951 and 1971, built. Waterman and Kagel explore Wilkinson's battle for dress and grooming standards, Wilkinson's surveillance of "liberal" and "left wing" faculty, Wilkinson's strategy to put some student-controlled practises, such as the honour code, and publications, like BYU's "student" newspaper the Daily Universe, under greater administrative and faculty control. Waterman and Kagel also explore the periodic purges of politically, economically, and culturally incorrect BYU faculty, BYU administrative oral policies, and the attempts of the BYU administration to clarify freedom of speech at the university, a university that, on the one hand, was a little bit Bob Jones and, on the other, a little bit Notre Dame, after Wilkinson retired.

Waterman's and Kagel's excellent, well researched, and very readable history of BYU in the 1980s and 1990s argues that the BYU that emerged in the wake of World War II was the product of a re-emerging American conservatism, the impact of intellectual American conservativism with its condemnation of communism, socialism, the counterculture, feminism, and gay and lesbian activism in Mormon culture and among Mormon political elites (e.g., J. Reuben Clark, Ernest Wilkinson, Boyd Packer, Merrill Bateman), and the culture war that emerged between these conservatives, neo-conservatives, and right wingers and "modernist" "secular" liberals.

Waterman and Kagel are certainly correct when they argue that the post-World War II culture war had an immense impact on Mormons and Mormonism. However, they don't, I would argue, take this culture war back far enough. Mormon and some Mormon elite were impacted earlier by culture wars over anti-evolution, which Waterman and Kagel do mention, over modern biblical criticism, over the New Deal, something which, in the long run, merged Dixiecrat states rights rhetoric, laissez rhetoric, and Bircher anti-communist rhetoric and which took over the Republican Party in the wake of Richard Nixon's George Wallace like Southern strategy and which also impacted Mormon culture in ways similar yet different to how they impacted American White right wing Protestant culture throughout the twentieth century and which increasingly tied them to White Protestant right wing evangelicalism and fundamentalism and right wing and conservative Catholicism in the late twentieth century. Local factors like the Mormon doctrines of continuing revelation and living prophets, doctrines which make Mormonism inherently authoritarian, the Mormon Correlation programme, which brought with it greater conformity in the Mormon community, Mormon patriarchalism, and Mormon paternalism also wove and threaded their way through these various battles in the twentieth century culture wars from evolution to Bolshevism to feminism.

I know there are some, including many Mormon elites and Reformed Christian historian George Marsden, who want to make BYU the hero and victim of a culture war on religious universities in postmodern America. However, by ignoring the way Mormon authoritarianism, inquisition, and a right wing and conservative political, economic, and cultural or ideological correctness, an economic and political correctness grounded in an ideology of revelation that polemicises for modern liberal laissez-faire capitalism and right wing and conservative politics and intolerantly makes these central for a Christianity that is, historically speaking, pre-modern, they seem to miss what BYU is really, empirically, like. What BYU is really, empirically, like, is that it is a place where academic freedom is limited and undermined by an authoritarian ideology of revelatory authority and power. For this reason alone one can readily raise questions about the continuing re-authorisation of the accreditation of BYU by the Northwest Association of Schools and Colleges and about whether BYU's continuing and, ironically, worldy attempt to bring a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa to campus, should succeed. There are certainly students at the Y who are worthy of membership in Phi Betta Kappa. I am not sure the university is worthy of a Phi Beta Kappa chapter, however.