My School

98 comments for “My School”

1. Your experiences and feelings about BYU are very similar to mine. I did undergraduate and graduate work in the history department there and then went on to a top-rated Ph.D. program in the history of religion. I felt very well prepared by my academic experiences at BYU, and to be frank I found that the universities with which I have been associated since leaving Provo are no more or less “open” than BYU–they are simply closed-minded about different things. I did hate the tunnel singing crowd though (speaking collectively and not necessarily individually).

2. So what is the deal with tunnel singing?

3. Thanks for this, Nate. Strangely enough, I went to BYU largely to be contrarian — most of my high school friends were going to the U of U. But once there, my experience was generally similar to yours. The philosophy major put me in contact with engaging and generous professors, as well as other students who cared deeply about both faith and reason. I felt well prepared for law school. I mostly opted out of BYU student culture (again, the contrarian thing), but it certainly was an eye-opener. I sometimes, though not frequently, criticize BYU, mostly on the basis of the tenure decisions Nate referred to, but I recognize I only have one side of those stories. And I can deal with the occasional hamfisted handling of, say, l’affair Rodin, in exchange for the rare chance to learn from well-trained thinkers who share my basic faith.

4. I wasn’t that fond, all in all, of the undergraduate experience, but I really enjoyed the law school at BYU.

   Though, I have to admit, I enjoyed Flammer and my other Book of Mormon teacher.

5. My department may not have been the strongest, but it wasn’t weak (chemistry). I felt academically prepared for graduate school and medical school even to the point of being underwhelmed at many of the “Ivy League” students in my medical school. Other BYU graduates who were in my class felt similarly prepared, coming from different majors (music and spanish among them). I didn’t take advantage of resource that were available at the “Y” such as Honors courses and therefore feel that my education wasn’t broad enough (this was due to my own choosing, unfortunately).

   Additionally, as costanza mentioned, although BYU is narrow-minded in many respects, it is so in different ways than other institutions.

   I too am glad for the opportunity to interact with fellow students who were very bright and professors who were inspiring.

6. Well put, Nate. Your experience was much like mine. Perhaps fortunately, perhaps not, I didn’t miss the ROTC deadline, and so I spent a year in Cambridge at a deservedly well-regarded school before realizing (a) I didn’t want to be an engineer just yet, and (b) there is more to be desired from a school than fame and cutting-edge researchers. By the time I found myself half by accident at BYU I was pretty sure that BYU’s oddities and narrownesses were not particularly more odd and narrow than those of other schools, just quite different. And the differences were sometimes annoying, but sometimes very refreshing.

7. I did not realize what a great education I had received in English Lit at BYU until I had the experience of working with someone who had received a First in Literature at Oxford. Whether it was Shakespeare or Donne or Milton or Dryden or Browning, etc., I could run rings around him. And he even admitted he hadn’t studied American literature that much.

   Kudos to BYU. I have nothing but the highest respect for the education I received there.

8. I went to BYU mainly for social reasons. Growing up in Illinois, I really was ready to swim in a sea of Mormons, and I loved it for that reason. Thatt was pretty much the focus of my freshman year. But after my mission, I buckled down, and received an absolutely top notch undergrad education there. You have to know who to take, but once armed with that knowledge you can obtain as fine an undergrad education at the Y as in any university. I studied classics: small classes, taught by profs, not TAs, very rigorous material and lofty expectations. Good stuff. And I had friends in philosophy who also got just what they were looking for. I’m sure there are other great pockets on campus, but those were the two I was most familiar with in my time there (early 80s).

9. I’m old, admittedly. But here’s my greatest regret about BYU. And it’s probably as much a regret about the time, as about the school. And about me, as about them.

   I loved BYU. I thought I was totally on my intellectual and spiritual edge there. But then, a good girl, in the early 70’s, I became engaged to marry. I was the top student (or perhaps the next to stop student) in my graduate school department at BYU. I had earned all the rewards in my department. A geeky girl in the Honors Program, hard core. I was moving to Seattle, to the home of a fine university, because my soon-to-be husband was going to continue his education (he wasn’t yet in graduate school). Not one person in my department suggested that I should continue my education at the University of Washington. Not one person asked if I intended to continue. Not one person offered to write a letter of recommendation. Everyone, including me, assumed I would quit school, get a job, support my husband–and within a year or so have kids. I certainly don’t regret the kids. But I was as short sighted as my professors. It never occurred to me that I could continue going to school. That I was bright, that I might have a future, in addition to the husband and the kids.

   Certainly it was partly the time. But keep in mind, this was the early 70’s–the revolution had begun. But not at BYU. I just look back and wish just one person had said: Susan, you should apply to the University of Washington. I’ll help you.

10. I am not the person who posted as “Mark Butler” above. But when my niece was in high school she used to go down Sunday evenings and sing in the tunnel between the S.O.B. and the Marriott Center with a bunch of other people. I suspect that the hard walls and ceilings made them sound better, sort of like your shower.

    Then she went to Bryn Mawr, and, for all I know, splashed naked in the fountain like Katherine Hepburn. So much for tunnel singing.

11. I apologize for the confusion, Mark B. I found more information about BYU tunnel singing in a BYU Magazine article

    Excuse me. That’s http://magazine.byu.edu/bym/1999/99winter/pages/after_all.shtml

12. Given both the psychic work of self-definition central to adolescence and the tremendous emphasis on college admissions imposed on high-schoolers, I think it’s almost inevitable that smart LDS teenagers with family or cultural ties to BYU will at least experiment with rejecting BYU. I certainly did; I got it in my mind that I wanted to go to Brown, of all places, although when the time came I didn’t apply anywhere except BYU. I think I chose BYU because, in the end, it felt safe but exciting—and, yes, because I wanted to get married (that’s not all I wanted from college, but that was certainly part of it).

    As an undergraduate, I presented a paper at a conference on, what was it, something like Althusserian interpellation in “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead”. If I do say so myself, it was a pretty alright paper for an undergrad, and after my presentation I had a number of faculty members tell me how surprised they were that BYU “allowed” its faculty and students to study Althusser. Like Nate, I found that if I selected my professors and courses carefully, I enjoyed a stimulating and entirely open intellectual experience. And when I got to grad school straight out of BYU undergrad, I found that I had no problem swimming in the shark-infested high-theory waters of the department.

    And like Nate, I found a real lack of intellectual curiosity in the undergrad students I taught at UCSD: my experiences TAing for Griggs’ and Keele’s History of Civ class (and a number of other honors classes) as an undergrad at BYU were far more satisfying than my teaching experiences at UCSD. BYU undergrads had to be taught to read critically, but once they had acquired this skill, I found most of them to be genuinely interested in ideas and implications—something I could not, to my great boredom and frustration, ever say about most of my UCSD students. (It doesn’t help that I was teaching a required composition course to non-majors, about the worst imaginable pedagogical drudgery in the entire academic-industrial complex, to my mind.)

13. One of the problems with BYU is that in the world at large certain degrees from there are seen as a joke—particularly anything in the biological sciences, but also those degrees in family science or whatever they are called.

14. I know of many molecular biology and biochemistry majors who had no trouble getting into high quality graduate programs. The high level of research may be missing, but the education and the processing of information is there.

15. “Griggs’ and Keele’s History of Civ class” Pen and the Sword was one of my favorite classes at BYU, and I actively evangelize people about it when they’re looking for classes.

    Second, my wife’s BYU degree was Molecular Bio/Chem. emphasis, and her undergrad education has not been treated by a joke in the lab where she works. Quite the contrary, she has made the University of Chicago undergrads who temp there look quite bad by comparison.

16. Like Rosalynde I felt my BYU undergraduate education left me well prepared to do well in my graduate work in a very good department. Actually, in some ways the early parts of my PhD program felt like a step back, because I was able to work as a research assistant, helping with publishable research at BYU, and then at ND went back to “just” writing papers for courses for a couple of years! In my case it would have been nice if at BYU I could have gotten a slightly fuller sense of what the wider world of contemporary academic philosophy is like. But since very few of the students in my philosophy classes were headed in that direction, it is probably best that they focused on providing a very good undergraduate education.

17. I probably shouldn’t attempt to put all this into a comment, but what the hell. Most of you know it all already anyway.

    I arrived at BYU in 1987, and immediately got involved in Student Review, a student newspaper that over the years both embraced and was condemned to the political, religious, and social margins of BYU life. I stuck with them pretty much until the end. In that time we wrote, published, and promoted a lot of worthy things, but most of what we gained notoriety for, and consequently most of what we volunteers constructed our identity around, was (I realize now, and really kind of knew at the time) juvenille, contrarian and mildly–and sometimes not so mildly–blasphemous. I’m more embarrassed by than proud of what we “accomplished” over those years, and often wish I’d been more involved in other, more intellectually challenging, spiritually edifying, or socially broadening aspects of campus life. That said, it is what I chose, and it was far and away the single most defining aspect of my BYU experience: my closest and oldest BYU friends are mostly Student Review people; the first real job I ever had and the first real job I was ever fired from both were consequences of my Student Review involvement; it shaped my view of Provo, BYU, and the church; it shaped my relationships with my professors (sometimes for better, but often for worse; there were probably only a couple of teachers I ever took classes from, Jim Faulconer being one of them, with whom I had actual intellectual exchanges not colored by university politics); it had a very pronounced influence on my romantic life and my eventual courtship of Melissa. And it was pretty much impossible to be an SR guy during the early 90s, during the time of several controversies which Nate alludes to, and not develop a certain amount of paranoia and contempt for the BYU administration. Again, not something that I’m proud of, but nonetheless something that turned me into an occasional BYU critic, which has had costs (spiritual and perhaps material) which I’m still trying to live down.

    The summer before I married Melissa, I was visiting her family in Ann Arbor, and I spent a day wandering around the University of Michigan campus. The realization that U of M was exactly the sort of environment that, for good or ill, I’d positioned myself as an advocate for during my BYU years came crashing down on me, with such force that I very nearly bailed on my M.A. program, convinced that I didn’t belong at BYU and that it was dishonest and unethical for me to continue to occupy a place there. In some ways that was kind of a turning point for me; I found the more I distanced myself from BYU, literally or otherwise, the less obsessed I was by various (mostly imaginary and in any case generally unimportant) complaints, and the happier and more balanced my spiritual life became. It’s taken a lot of years to get most of it out of my system, and I probably never will get rid of all of it. Nonetheless, 10 years after leaving the place, I can recognize that it has improved a great deal in the few areas where our old criticisms were actually valid, and will likely only continue to improve further; as for the rest of the stuff we whined about, it was either false or else just a variation on the same old stuff students everywhere whine about. The fact is, entirely aside from the religious-cultural aspect of attending BYU, it’s a fine undergraduate institution, one that provides a great education and is increasingly known for doing so. I’d be delighted to have my children attend BYU if that was their choice, and I’d be even more delighted by the chance to teach there (though I suspect that door has closed for me, and perhaps for my own good).

    I’ve sometimes wondered when or by what path I would have come to these realizations, or if I would have come to them at all, if I’d attended a different school than BYU. But that’s a fairly pointless inquiry. My years there helped make me who I am; the fact that various circumstances at BYU gave me and many (though certainly not all) of my Student Review fellow travellers occasion to feel (almost always unjustifiably) oppressed or marginalized or unhappy doesn’t mean I can assume that I would have been more fulfilled elsewhere. On the contrary, if I’d gone to a different school, I’d be a different person, though probably with no fewer humiliating memories: it just would have happened differently, that’s all. So I’m grateful to BYU, and the weird, often self-important, occasionally controversial, always intense path I found myself taking though it. I met a lot of great people, learned a lot of important things, developed some important skills (like how to smuggle copies of a banned student paper into restricted areas of campus) and got brought up short in some very needful ways; all of which probably would have happened most anywhere else, but I didn’t go anywhere else, I went to Provo, and so that’s my story, since I don’t have any other, and can’t imagine any other story anyway. Which I guess means BYU is my school too. (Boy, I’m sure the alumni organization is simply delighted by that prospect.)

    I knew this was too much to put in a comment.

18. RAF, I’m glad you wrote all that. I’ve seen brief references to all of this but never really put too much of it together. It’s an interesting story.

19. For whatever reason, in conversations where BYU is criticized I often end up defending it–not against valid, constructive criticism, I hope, but certainly against the two-dimensional caricatures that annoy me as much as anything about my BYU experience itself. (Perhaps I’m more annoyed than I should be when they come from those who didn’t even attend BYU.) Thanks for pointing out, Nate, that BYU is not simply a monolith. I suspect there is a more nuanced spectrum of BYU experiences than a binary, “two BYU” paradigm–divided between the “know-nothings” and “my” experience–but that’s an interesting place to start a taxonomy.

    I agree with other commenters that BYU is no less “open” to critical thought than other universities; perhaps it’s less “open” in idiosyncratic ways, but no academic setting offers an idealized context for unrestricted critical thought. I think it’s the fact that the academic culture at other universities masquerades as neutrality against which deviance should be defined that really bothers me.

20. As a native Provoan and the son of a member of the BYU administration it was my most fervent desire not to attend BYU in particular and college in general, mostly because of the type of students who would go tunnel singing (no offense to any tunnel singers, hopefully time has tempered some of my animosity to the singers). Imagine my dismay when my father was called as a mission president during my senior year. He informed me, to my horror that I would get free tuition and that I should therefore apply. Being an obedient son I did so, praying that I would not get in so that I would have no plausible academic alternative to my chosen post high school pursuit: the hedonistic life of a heavy metal musician.
    To my surprise I was accepted and could not realistically turn down the prospect of a free education. Of course, I did not appreciate what I had (I never do) and my BYU career was ultimately doomed by my inability to understand that occaisionally you were supposed to show up for tests. But I had a great time and made a ton of friends who were not entirely sure that they should be associating with the likes of me. After their missions they were certain of this fact.
    I will say this, as the attender of 3 other schools of higher learning, including graduate and law school. BYU unquestionably has the most earnest and stimulating intellectual environment. The quality of the other students, the intellectual rigour of certain professors far surpassed the dowdy bunch of prudes that I expected. So I am currently an ardent defender of BYU, even though I am not a graduate and I loathed it growing up. It is true I have not gone to the greatest schools, thanks in large part to my academic misadventures in my year and a half at the “BY,” (which is what the old school locals call it) but I think I can recognize quality when I see it, and BYU is quality.
    Besides I met my wife while I was there and if you can’t count on BYU for that then what can you count on it for?

21. That was too long for a comment too.

    But like it or lump it, BYU is my school, too.

22. Thanks, Nate. A needed post. And some absorbing comments.

    BYU is my school too, in more than one way. My experience is from the international perspective, and the other way around compared to those who see BYU mainly as undergraduate platform and then move on. I had a BA and an MA from Belgian universities – with high honors. But I was hoping to get a Ph.D. from BYU because I wanted this Mormon imprint on my later career. Of course people advised me against it. They predicted such diploma would be worthless, certainly in Europe. It turned out the other way. My doctorate was recognized as equivalent after evaluation by a critical Belgian interuniversity commission. One month after my BYU graduation, I was appointed to teach at the U of Antwerp.

    My doctoral student years at BYU, 1972-1974, still under Wilkinson, were very rewarding. I found excellent mentors, brilliant minds, Steven P. Sondrup, Todd A. Britsch, J. Reuben Clark III. The library services were superior to anything I had experienced elsewhere. I was challenged to enter new domains, which proved very helpful for my application to the U of Antwerp in 1974.

    But more than anything, I experienced BYU as the academic place where I could also live my religion in unique ways. Prior to BYU, I had been a student in totally different circumstances, lived through the European campus turmoil of 1968, witnessed student life in its depraved facets, and did postgraduate work at the Catholic U of Louvain (where Catholicism was marginal and a virtual non-issue for faculty and students). In the early 70s I worked at Lovanium in Kinshasa (Congo), a crumbling university under a degenerating political regime. I was the only Mormon there. Then to be able to leave Africa and go to that magnificent campus, surrounded by thousands of Church members, with the fullness of Mormon culture at your fingertips, makes you realize the privilege.

    After 25 years of academic career in Europe, I came back to BYU to teach. The mission to bring out the best, both among students and faculty, is more pronounced than I have ever experienced elsewhere, the encouragements and incentives are plenty, the quality of the students is comparable to what I’ve seen in other places. It does not mean I am blind to what can still be improved, e.g. (my hobby horse) BYU’s function towards international students and towards the worldwide Church. I also recognize that an institution of this dimension, and because of its unique character, will never be able to please all and will often face peculiar challenges. But overall, I don’t know any comparable accomplishment, able to combine religion and academia.

23. I transferred to BYU for the last two and half years of my undergraduate period. Like others, I found the faculty to be uneven in their intellectual commitments so I found that I had to take a more active approach. Overall there were more hits than misses, at least on my scorecard. Theory in the humanities was spitting teeth when I was there (early to mid 90s) so apart from a few faculty like Dan Muhlstein, Brian Evensen (before he left), it wasn’t easy to come by. Which left me playing some catch up in grad school. One of my favorite classes (audit) was a comp lit/law course team-taught by Geddicks and Sondrup. I don’t think I ever got a good sense of how faculty attempted to engage the spiritual and the intellectual beyond perhaps their efforts in preparation for class. Explicit mixing of church discourse and the texts under discussion seemed to misfire, the several times I witnessed it. I wonder how others saw this?
    The social scene was fine (even for someone like myself from California). No tunnel-singing but lotsa of racquetball dates (not especially recommended for first-time dates).

24. “I found that my education [at BYU] had – with one or two notable exceptions – prepared me exceedingly well for what I encountered [at HLS].”

    What were the notable exceptions?

25. The first time I thought about BYU was when my 9th grade seminary teacher told a story that involved him as a BYU student training missionaries. The aspect that lodged in my mind was that BYU serves the missionaries, what a sacred thing to do. Later I heard of the devotionals and recognized that at no other college could a student receive so much instruction from apostles.

    The engineering education I received was solid and set me up well for things to come. One of the highlights of my education was a real number theory course that, because it only had three students, could have been cancelled but wasn’t, and I appreciate the university and math department devoting its resources to me in that way. Mostly though, I was fortified by dealing with so many people with a strong commitment to seek righteousness and build up the kingdom of God.

26. Yet another Pen and Sword testimonial: I ended up at BYU more by default than by any serious intention. Griggs and Keele’s History of Civilization class saved my spiritual bacon, so to speak, when my BYU ward experiences were leaving me with serious doubts as to whether or not this whole Mormon thing was worth it. That class was my refuge and eventually, I ended up TAing. (Hi to the Spackmans and Frandsen blogging out there — I think you were around when I was.) My experiences in that class were so fulfilling that I found this enthusiasm overflowed to other subjects and thus made BYU one of the best things I’ve been lucky enough to do. I’m finishing up my PhD in London now, and I find that my BYU education is certainly competitive, and often superior to that of my peers. I still recommend that class whenever I get the chance; it was not only academically fascinating and a joy to study for, it was by far the best temple preparation class I could have had.

27. One minor note re: Wilfried’s post–Pres. Oaks came to BYU at the beginning of the 1971 academic year, so Ernest Wilkinson would have been a shadow receding into the distance when you arrived the next year. That doesn’t mean, of course, that Wilkinson’s imprint on the University wasn’t everywhere apparent, from the unfortunate architecture (can’t we blame dirty Uncle Ernie for that?) to the unevenness of the academic departments.

    Yossarian’s reference to “the BY” brings back memories, but mostly from those who attended in the first quarter of the 20th century. I remember my grandmother referring to “the BY,” sort of like old Brooklyn folks referring to “going over to New York” when speaking of Manhattan.

28. Reading the above comments solidifies my impressions of who comments on T&S. Serious intellectuals. All in all, it seems that most have found BYU to be a great institution, with stimulating and rigorous training. Many of you speak of seeking out certain classes and professors, of getting the information to know how to structure your academic careers at BYU. You reflect on honors courses that you both took and then TAed for. And certainly, I think that it is BYU’s best interest to capture the interest of the 10% of students who are like you in these ways.

    However, I wonder about what the other 90% (or 75%) of the student population’s experiences are like. Perhaps these students aren’t in the know about the classes to take, aren’t actively seeking to shape their educational path and are just going along trying to find themselves. Most students do not enter college with a clear idea of what they want to study. BYU’s general education requirements are, I suppose, a way to give students instruction across a broad spectrum of disciplines. I think that political thought is certainly limited at BYU, both in formal and informal settings. Unless you know you’re looking for something different, you don’t know you’re missing anything.

29. I TA’d Pen & Sword too, after having a similar experience to Lisa’s re: Mormonism and the life of the mind. (In fact, I TA’d with Lisa, if memory serves.)

    I’m in a PhD lit program at a Big 10 school now and find that my preparation in the comp lit (under Sondrup, Pratt, Lee, and many others) at BYU was worth far more than I paid for it–for one, even my cursory knowledge of the Bible brings so much to my study of the Americas and (hemispherical) American literatures. Most (read: almost none) of my fellow students have ever read the Bible, and you’d be surprised how often I end up explaining some major reference or other.

    I also got as good (with a few exceptions) an exposure to theory and philosophy as anyone in my program now.

    (BTW, I’m envious, Comet, as I was there too late to take Sondrup & Gedicks’ class but heard great things; I tried to cajole them into teaching it again my whole time there, but alas.)

30. Indeed, Mark B (#28), who pointed out that Pres. Oaks had taken over in 1971. Memories fade. I visited BYU campus for the first time in 1970, hence this image in my mind of Ernest Wilkinson walking across campus. He sure was visible. And, as you said, his imprint was still strong, even in 1972.

31. “I think that political thought is certainly limited at BYU, both in formal and informal settings. Unless you know you’re looking for something different, you don’t know you’re missing anything.”

    There’s a couple of possible ways to read this comment of yours, Mimi. That BYU’s student body is very homogenous in terms of political ideology is indisputable, and that does lead to a certain amount of complacency and narrow-mindedness insofar as political discussion and instruction is concerned, though not quite as much as some allege. In any case, two points: 1) you’d probably experience similar amounts of complacency and narrow-mindedness at most any highly selective institution, whatever the basis of their selectivity (the sort of people who fit the profile for likely acceptance at small, private, Massachusetts liberal arts school probably won’t generally speaking be any less uniform in most of their attitudes and preconceptions than those who fit the profile for likely acceptance at a big western Mormon university like BYU); and 2) there is a great deal of depth and complexity that can only be experienced and appreciated once you immerse yourself in a tradition and a community, and that means getting past merely circumstantial or political “diversity.” The first point is one that I and most of my crowed were always aware of; with few exceptions, none of us campus “dissidents” were under the illusion that BYU was uniquely homogenous. But the second point is one that I, at least, didn’t come to realize until it was much too late. As Nate says, BYU provides for a lot of deep and rich conversations that simply aren’t possible elsewhere, and it’s a shame more people don’t realize that.

    Of course, this goes to the heart of your comment: how to help the 90% or 75% of all the other BYU students to figure out the value of their education when, being surrounded by so much apparent certainty and circumstantial uniformity, they may not realize the deep and rich currents beneath the surface? Clearly, the most important factor here is how teaching and the cirricula are managed at BYU, and that’s something that I know the BYU faculty (most of them, anyway) care a great deal about. However, I also tend to believe, despite all the reservations I expressed about my experiences above, that the presence of numerous “alternatives” on campus–even if merely cosmetic alternatives, like different and sometimes conflicting publications, newspapers, clubs, organizations, student fora, etc.–need to play a role as well; I don’t think (at least I don’t now!) that many of those things add up to anything valuable on their own terms, but they do serve as reliable, accessible, visible access points for leading otherwise uninvolved students into a deep engagement with their own education. I think the experience of many other religious schools shows that it is by no means impossible for a university to promote a variety of alternative venues for student activity and expression without, at the same time, losing their ability to promote a common religious-cultural core.

32. Before my mission I was at Ricks. I was convinced I’d do my second year at Ricks after th mish and then transfer to Art Center in Pasadena. On the mission a Ricks friend wrote me and said he was going to go to BYU instead and that I should go too because “BYU is better”. It sounded logical, so I applied, got in, and went.

    I knew the graphic design department was pretty good, I didn’t know it was one of the best in the United States. This was made very clear to me when our class came out to New York and were told over and over by New York’s top designers how great BYU students were. (I didn’t even have to show my portfolio or a resume to get my internship here. In fact, I’ve been working here for two and a half years and still haven’t officially shown my portfolio). The point was crystalized during grad school at the School of Visual Arts where I realized that 90% of my undergrad class was better than almost everyone in my graduate class. SVA is a top 3 school.

    BYU was a great experience, though my academic pursuits were different than most people that post here. I have no complaints whatsoever (except the stupid rule that you have to wear BYU issued clothes in the racquetball courts).

33. Jared: Through a combination of a heavy continental emphasis in both philosophy and poli sci, as well as my own mistakes in choosing courses, I arrived at HLS without ever having seriously read Rawls or his critics. If you are interested in the interaction of law and policitical philosophy in the English speaking world, this is a very serious handicap. FWIW, I had enough exposure to serious philosophy while I was at BYU that I don’t think that I had too much trouble working through _A Theory of Justice_ and Sandel et al on my own. Also, I had philosophy of law from Reynolds, and it was an excellent class. However, I now realize that it was mainly organized around Reynolds’ research interests and wasn’t really a survey class. There is no harm in that, and it is still probably one of the one or two most influential courses I took at BYU. Still, it would have been useful to have had a class that marched through the basic story from Austin to Kelsen to Hart to Fuller to Dworkin to Raz to Colement, etc.. As it happened, Noel was primarily interested in Fuller, and so I got a very Fullerian view of the legal philsophy. Finally, despite continuosly being encouraged to do so by Noel Reynolds, I never really did any serious study of statistics or game theory while at BYU, which I wish I had done. It would have served me well in Bebchuk’s seminar.

34. I went to BYU kicking against the pricks the whole way. My problems weren’t intellectual. I could have given a mike fink about that sort of thing. My problems were social and corporate. I didn’t like Mormon people, especially en masse. But one thing and another happened and the next thing I know, having had a non-LDS friend of mine convince me over a long afternoon in the back of his pickup truck that it wouldn’t be so bad (thanks, R.D.), here I am being dropped off at Deseret Towers by my Dad who gives me 40 bucks to tide me over until I can find a job. And it turned out to be wonderful.

    For me, it was the people who were the most educational, and things like tunnel singing, racquetball dates, and Social Dance and home teaching. In some way it was as if, with all these Saints concentrated into a critical mass, I was finally able to percieve the fruits of the Spirit.

35. Adam,

    I thought you went to Harvard and went inactive? I am very confused now.

36. Nate,

    You should take comfort in knowing that the Poli-Sci department has either finalized or at least is seriously considering adding a statistics class of some sort to their degree requirements. It will likely not be what we require in the Econ department, but I expect it will be light years better than the two-week version they now get in their footnotes class (200).

    As for game theory, perhaps we should teach a 200 level version of that class here in the Econ department. Val Lambson teaches a great senior level class in game theory but that probably scared you off because it required intermediate micro and calculus as a minimum.

    Also, I got a great education both from my minor in philosophy and from my econ degree. I got to be a TA and an RA– neither of which is a real option at a lot of big name schools. I never had classes taught by grad students. They were all taught by professors who cared very much about undergraduates. All of this has a lot to do with the fact that their was no graduate program at BYU to draw attention and resources away from the undergraduates. This makes a huge difference. Many a student goes to a big name school as an undergraduate and gets very little interaction with the world class professors. In the end, I got a fantastic preperation for grad school– better than I would have gotten at many schools with much bigger names.

37. Nate: I also wish I had studied more stats and econ (especially game theory) prior to law school, but wouldn’t you agree that this probably reflects our own choices rather than the quality of undergrad education at BYU? As I recall, there were many other history/english/poli sci majors from Ivy League schools at HLS who were just as ignorant of game theory as I was.

    I had no idea you were so familiar with Fuller prior to law school. You must have been thrilled when you purchased our Contracts casebook (not that I ever detected any Fullerian jurisprudence in that awful casebook).

38. Frank: I am not really sure how to package this in such a way as to get students to take it seriously, but there is a certain bundle of economic skills that would be extremely useful for pre-law students, particularlly those bound for top schools who have a serious intellectual interest in law. In law and economics, macro and econometrics are basically useless, but a very solid understanding of micro and game theory would be very, very useful.

    I think that there are a number of BYU students who would quite enjoy being law professors. The problem is that they don’t have exposure to law professors as undergrads and so don’t know that they might be interested in doing it. More generally, they get interested in the possiblity after they have arrived at law school, by which time it may be too late. It goes without saying, of course, that the pre-law advising center at BYU is pretty much useless on this front. I have long thought that the philosophy, political science, and economics departments ought to come up with some way of pointing out legal academia as a possible career option for their students and provide them with some early counseling. I would love it if BYU started sending students into the law schools with the ambition to become law profs and some understanding of what will be required to get a job. We could fill the law schools with LDS professors.

39. Didnt go to BYU, and do have a couple of minor beefs with the people who go there:

    1) by virtue of the large number of LDS kids who want to go there and the relatively limited number of seats available, the entrance requirements have been made artificially high. Its as hard to get into BYU as it is to get into major top notch research universities, which is kind of contrary to the initial purpose. Now, the Church is trying to deal with this, theyve made Ricks into a 4 year BYU-Idaho and are investing a lot of time and effort into Institute programs at non-LDS colleges to make it more appealing to go to local schools and so forth, but that doesnt address the artificially high entrance requirements for BYU. I cannot help but wonder at the broader social impacts of setting up BYU as the most culturally acceptable place for smart Mormon kids to go. This while we complain about how liberal college campuses are. It only takes a little leaven to leaven the whole lump, but if all the leaven congregates in one place, there isnt much leaven going to those liberal schools, who get to go on unchallenged. Divert the 1000 top ranked kids from BYU to Harvard and lets see what happens.

    2) the tuition is artificially low at BYU because its is subsidized by the Church. This is an obvious factor for some, as evidenced by the authors comments, and thats fine. But, there are plenty of people who go because its the culturally accepted place to go, not because of price, and their parents can afford to pay top dollar. I’d like to see the tuition go up to comparable rates for a private university, and then have an aggressive need-based financial aid system subsidized by the Church. I dont see any point in giving a kids parents low tuition, and then they go out and buy the kid an suv to ski at Park City. Use the differential from the tuition hike to build BYU-Latin America.

40. ARJ,

    I think you got confused on that other thread. Adam never said he went to Harvard. His claim was that he was adrift and so would have done poorly (religiously) at Harvard though he enjoyed and perhaps thrived at BYU. Or something like that.

41. I went to BYU after spending time at UoU and Weber. Frankly, I went to the UoU out of HS cuz all my classmates were going to BYU (only 6 out of 400 seniors at my HS in Davis County (Clearfield) went to UoU [one of which was Kevin Dyson]). I thought BYU would be this shallow, LDS filled, non-education. However, going to the UoU showed me that the UoU wasn’t any different, except in the opposite direction, with profs trying to brainwash you to their way of thinking. In any event, if you have to choose a bias in this post-modern world, one might consider either a bias that one personally agrees with, or is willing to put up with for some other reason (reputation of the school, etc).

    Nate: Who is this Raz guy. Is he that important? One of the BYU law profs (Scharfs) had him over to his house to speak to our seminar class on Fiduciary Duty. Frankly, I’m not an intellectual and had a hard time following him, even having read the papers he was going to base his comments on. And if Raz is big stuff; then…maybe that does say something about the quality of a BYU education?

    p.s. what is it about racquetball dates? Is/was there a stereotype? I did several of those; although I remember one girl was hesitant, like she thought they were a make-out excuse/location? Still (in memory) vaguely confused by that.

42. I adopt Nate Oman’s #39 and Frank McIntyre’s #41 completely and by reference.

43. “In law and economics, macro and econometrics are basically useless”

    I agree with the macro, but I am inclined to disagree on the econometrics. I see law people all the time wanting to bring in empirical support to buttress their claims. They do this badly because they lack the background to know what to make of the empirical regularities. Not that this stops them– it just means they get it wrong a lot. Enter econometrics…

44. Jared: I have studied some the first edition of Fuller’s contracts case book. It is a real masterpiece and is one of the few case books that was also a major intellectual contibution to the field. One of his key inovations was to structure the course around remedies rather than formation; hence the book opened with damages. Unfortunately, Melvin Eisenberg thoroughly screwed the book up and transformed it into a completely pedestrian collection of cases. Hence, it now begins with consideration, many of Fuller’s original notes have been deleted, etc. No doubt, by draining the book of much of its intellectual content, Eisenberg increased its sales. It is the ideal book for a professor who got assigned a first year contracts course and doesn’t really study contracts. The first edition, however, was like Hart & Sacks, or Hart & Wechsler — a case book that made an real intellectual contribution. For my money, the most intellectually ambitious contracts cases books (coming from two very different directions) are Krause & Scott and Macauly. Randy Barnett’s book is self-consciously structured around Fuller’s basic design, but it definitely is Barnett’s book and not Fuller’s — references to Austrian economics, etc..

45. Adam,

    I was just poking fun at you since I had repeatedly asked you to clarify what your experience was and you never responded to the questions. Though I didn’t think you went to Harvard, you did seem to be allowing the readers to be under the impression that you didn’t go to BYU and it hurt your faith in some way. I am glad that the detail of your personal example has come out, even if in a roundabout way. I also think that the truth makes a much less compelling arguement that what you had allowed me to imagine, but such things are bound to happen when minor details such as what school you went to are left out.

46. Did Scharffs really have Joseph Raz (professor of philosophy at Oxford University) speak at the law school?!?! If so, it was a major, major coup for the school. Raz is generally regarded as one of the three or four most important English speaking legal philosophers of the last fifty years.

47. Pretty campus. Nothing like walking across the quad at sunset when birds are crying and winging their way home. Students talking quietly in the grass, one ballsy longboarder click-click-clicking by. Laughter. The mountain all red and gold.

48. Yes, Nate. I was there for Raz.

49. Cool. Philosophy of law at HLS is a joke, and I would very much liked to have gone to a lecture of two by Raz. Good for Scharffs!

50. Is everyone who wants to see the demise of BYU a “BYU-hater”? I agree with much that has been written here about the positives of the school, but still would rather see the church make steps to abandon it, purely from a cost-benefit perspective. It takes a lot of tithing funds to make it as cheap as it is, and I’ve long believed that those funds could be put to better use in other areas. And I’m not sure the benefit we receive as a church from it are particularly significant to the overall growth and happiness of the church (which is difficult to quantify, I know). Curiously, however, the Brethren haven’t ever asked me what I wanted done with my donated tithing money. Perhaps I should go make sure my phone is still working.

51. You have to have one of those special red phones for the Brethren to call you on any matter, not just tithing.

52. Sorry about the confusion, ARJ. I assumed that everyone in the conversation knew I’d gone to the Y–I don’t hide it–so I thought you were trying to get me to prove a counterfactual.

53. I thought the red phones were for calls from the other side (or underworld, rather).

54. All calls from Bruce R. McConkie are taken through a cup with a string attached.

55. Adam,

    The only thing I know about your bio is what is on the site here. I do appreciate the clarification. I wasn’t trying anything fancy, I just wanted more detail on your experience.

56. RE #40

    My experience with the entrance requirements at BYU is that they are inversely related to one’s travel distance from Provo– the farther away one is from Provo the lower the entrance requirements. I grew up out West but finished my senior year of high school in the Midwest. One young lady with whom I graduated high school was, to by blunt, not exactly the sharpest knife in the box. She scored below the 50th percentile on her ACT but through some hard work manged to graduate in the 75th percentile of our class. She applied to BYU and was accepted early. One of my cousins who lived in Utah scored in the 80th percentile on his ACT and graduated in the 80th percentile of his class and was rejected. This same pattern held for all of my six younger siblings who lived in Missouri and, later, Alabama and my cousins who lived in Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. The standards seem inordinately high only if you live in Utah. Otherwise BYU basically has an open-admission policy.

57. I was passionate about not attending BYU – so much so that when BYU came to Colorado Springs to play football against Air Force, I was known to prowl the stands with a large “Mormons For Air Force” sign.

    My parents moved to Missouri at my mission mid-point, and not knowing anything about Missouri colleges and not having Colorado residency, I opted for BYU. For some strange reason I was accepted despite my incomprehensible application essays. Portuguese wreaks havoc on English writing abilities.

    With the exception of student financial aid employees who felt they were called of God to slow down my loan applications, my experience at BYU was, for the most part, memorable.

    Yes, it is my school. The only time I deny it is when an opposing quarterback comes down the line, pitches the ball to the half-back, and is not immediately buried in the turf by the BYU defensive end. Some actions are simply unforgivable.

58. Re: #57

    Recently a BYU admissions guy came to speak with the youth of our stake. He was asked about geographic discrimination in the admissions process and said that it consists solely in giving anyone living east of the Mississippi a few points in their total application “score.” (I can’t remember the exact percentages). Other than that, he said there is no formal mechanism to foster diversity in the admissions process. He did acknowledge that personal essays serve this function to some extent.

59. Regarding #57, I personally know kids with good grades who were turned for BYU in the past few years, and we’re on the East coast.

60. Scharffs was a Rhodes scholar himself and so perhaps he had some Oxford connections at work in getting Raz to pay a visit. Just a hunch.

61. This is in response to an early comment (#14). I’m not sure where Steve-o gets the impression that degrees in the biological sciences are regarded as a joke. BYU has the greatest amount of external funding for the the Tree of Life project than any other institution, which suggests that the NSF at least, feels BYU is capable of high quality research in the biological sciences.

62. To discuss BYU admissions and their selectivity, it would help if we had some facts to work with. Does anybody really know, or do we only have anecdotal evidence?

    Holy Cow! I’m sitting in the middle of a public library! There are reference works all around me! The Princeton Review’s 2000 edition of “The Best 331 Colleges” and Peterson’s 2005 “Four Year Colleges” will take 10 seconds to retrieve. Let’s see what we find…

    2005: 9300 applied, 7227 admitted, 5331 enrolled. Acceptance rate of 78% (2000: 71%). Enrollment rate of 74% (2000: 80%). 72% are from outside Utah. (2000: 71%)

    SAT verbal > 600: 54%; SAT math > 600: 60%
    SAT verbal 500-600: 37%; SAT math 500-600: 34%
    SAT verbal < 500: 9%; SAT math < 500: 6% ACT > 30: 22%; ACT 25-30: 61%; ACT 18-24: 17% (2000 average ACT: 27.4)
    Average high school GPA: 3.71 (2000: 3.45)
    For 2000, 54% of freshmen were from the top 10% of their high school class, 87% from the top 25%, 97% from the top 50% of the high school class. (No comparable figures in Peterson’s.)

    Some thoughts: The 2000 and 2005 GPA figures look odd to me. Otherwise, there doesn’t seem to be any indication that BYU is getting more difficult to get in to, but rather the opposite. Admission seems within the reach of any student who shows up to high school, and quite manageable for those who make a consistent effort. If you know someone with good grades and test scores but was rejected, that person might want to make sure that any kind of application essay, if there is one, doesn’t set off any red flags (“My Ten Favorite Seances”) and that the ecclesiastical recommendation is positive.

    I also was very well prepared for grad school by BYU, at least in one program, and I also have a little experience with the advantages of teaching BYU students. The most rigorous selection process, however, seems to be the self-selection of the students who decide to go there.

63. I thought I’d chime in on this thread as well, if only because one might think that one of BYU’s weak points might be in preparing students for careers in film and television.

    I double-majored in Theater and English at the Y and I felt both departments did excellent jobs at preparing me for pursuing a career in popular storytelling. The Theater Department in particular was committed to producing the original work of its students on their stages, something which I believe is a rare thing among most university theater departments and invaluable to young writers. I learned enough at BYU to get accepted to some of the top film schools in the country and as I entered an MFA program at USC I found out I was way ahead of many of my peers in understanding dramatic storytelling. Much more importantly, I had developed sufficient discipline to see writing projects through to completion and this was a direct result of playwrighting classes at the Y where I was required to write full-length plays in one semester.

    It’s my estimation that I learned about fives time as much at BYU for about one-fifth the price. It has been my experience that at any academic program anywhere you have to choose your instructors and classes wisely to get the most out of your education. BYU, of course, is no different. Like Nate, I also consider it my school. It gave me the training which gave me the courage to follow my dreams, and I’m very grateful.

64. jimbob–For the most part I liked my BYU experience, regret not taking more complete advantage of it, and found/felt (like others here) that I was well-prepared for a top 10 graduate school in my field (in spite of my lax undergraduate work). Nonetheless I have wondered if BYU and the other church schools shouldn’t be disbanded and have institute programs worldwide strengthened instead (the fairness issue, the tithe funds issue, the international church issues…) I know that strong institute programs could never replicate many of the good things about BYU. But I still have wondered…

    Ben H.–So how did you end up at BYU?

65. When I was a high school senior, I met then-president Rex Lee at a social function. My dad introduced me by saying, “President Lee, I’d like you to meet my son Greg. The only way he’s getting in to BYU is in a jar of formaldehyde.” So I applied mainly to prove my dad wrong. No regrets.

66. This entire thread seems to be one long rationalization of why all BYU graduates did not waste four years of their life. It is pathetic…admit it, so your children dont make the same mistakes. Fess up to the fact that going to a better school will make you individually smarter than if you went to BYU (money issues aside–that is another thing). Of course, you may be comparable leaving BYU to graduates from ivy league schools, but no logical conclusion for that observation can follow–obviously something not taught very well at BYU–oh how people despise Logic 205, and it shows! You cannot say you yourself would be as well of, if you yourself had attended a better academic institution. Your comparisons are flawed. I attended BYU undergrad, and now am attending an a top 3 law school–and your comparisons dont make sense–those BYU grads who worked hard are smarter than those ivy league grads who were lazy–but that does not mean BYU is as good as the HYS/P. There are some many more opportunities to find intellectual people at the school I am attending now–even the bookstores in the area are better–none of this namby, pamby desert book crap!
    Dont get me wrong–I dont think an academic institution is what makes you smart–or where you get a degree determines your success–but that is exactly why this whole thread is flawed–the people who have been posting are those who worked hard, studied on their own, read the option lists–now put these people at a better school–a wow, then you have something!! Easy example, look at the law school faculty at BYU–mostly from YHS–why dont they look for BYU law school grads–?? Okay, that is enough–if people want to delude themselves into thinking they got the best education they could–then that is fine–but it is a shame for BYU academically because it will never force them to become something they are not right now–a real academic institution on a comparable level with the ivys…

67. Comment #67 persuades me that BYU does leave at least some of its undergraduates under-educated, and without the character formation that is supposed to be its comparative advantage.

68. Mitch: I think that you are missng the point, at least of my original post. My claim was not that BYU was just as good as other institutions. I would be the first to admit that it is not, and I can go on ad nauseum at what I see as BYU’s limitations and failings. For example, I have posted before on what I see as problems with BYU law school. I certainly don’t think that BYU should rest on its modest laurels and congratulate itself on having achieved perfection.

    Rather, my point was that BYU has its own set of virtues and opprotunities that are not available elsewhere. I certainly don’t see anything pathetic about pointing this out. There are, of course, a whole host of things that I think could be done better at BYU. I think that BYU is a “real” academic institution. I think it is of quite uneven quality. It does some things and some disciplines quite well, and does others — from what I gather — quite badly. This doesn’t make BYU into some sort of academic Potemkin village, it simply makes it into a solid middle-tier school with room for improvement.

    One of the things that you might have picked up from Philosophy 105 or Philosophy 205 is the principle of charity, ie one ought to respond to the best possible version of the argument you are taking on. Name calling and snide innuendo may make for cathersis or rhetoric, but they are poor substitutes for argument.

    I, of course, have to agree with you about the rather horrible level of quality among Utah valley bookstores….

69. Nice rhetoric, now, how about some argument to back up the ad hominon attack…

    And character formation–because I disagree that BYU is less of an academic institution than others, my character is not well-formed? Once again, a little more logic to the argument would be appreciated??

70. Nate:
    Okay so I appreciate you calling me on some of the name calling–but I think my core argument still stands on its own–if you put those hard working students at better institutions they will thrive more. The environment is merely better–it is not rocket science! Instead of having discussions about BYU football, you talked about recent developmnents in politics, science, what people have been reading (and this is not your the latest harry potter). That is what I see now, and it frustrates me that I missed out on that during my undergrad, so when I hear people lauding BYU for its academic value, I just want to scream out–that there is something more–not that BYU is horrbile, but that there is something better!

71. Mitch: As an emperical matter I suspect that what counts as a better enviroment varies a great deal from person to person. I think that there are people who do better at BYU than they would have done elsewhere, and I think that there are people who would do really badly at BYU and would do much better at other schools. Also, what you missed as an undergraduate may have as much to do with you as with any particular institution. Obviously this is not entirely true, but there is enough truth in it that you needn’t scream at those who might disagree with you or assume that only faulty logic or ignorance of the big wide world accounts for their differing opinions.

    For my part, at BYU I did talk about recent developments in politics and what people had been reading, which included not only Plato or Popper but also Orson Pratt and Richard Bushman. (Also, don’t go dissing Harry Potter ;->) When I went to “a top three law school” I enjoyed talking with my fellow students, most of whom were interesting, well-read, intelligent, etc. etc. On the other hand, I found that I had to work a lot harder to have any interesting discussions of religion and Mormonism. I found them and I learned a great deal from them. The availability of such discussions matters to me. It is something I put a great deal of effort into and I don’t view it as something that I do rather than having “real” intellectual discussions.

    People have different experiences. You seem to find your “top three law school” liberating and exciting, while you seem to have seen BYU as rather second-rate and parochial. Fair enough. There is certainly second (and third and fourth) rate stuff at BYU, and “top three law schools” are intellectually exciting places (or at least some of them are). For my part, I found life at a “top three law school” intellectually exciting and intellecutally frustrating. I am certainly very, very glad that I got the legal education that I did. However, I am less inclined that you seem to be to see these things in terms of a single, fully comparable scale of quality.

    I don’t think that BYU does anything like what it could and ought to do. I think that it can be a much better school than it is. However, there is a mix of possiblities at BYU that is simply not available elsewhere. This doesn’t make it better, or make it the one true school. It does, however, mean that it has something to offer that ought to be recognized, celebrated, and cultivated. It is something that makes BYU uniquely valuable. “Top three law schools,” on the other hand, are more or less interchangable — or at least about half of the seven or eight schools that claim to be in the “top three” are intellectually interchangable.

    My wife didn’t go to BYU for college or graduate school. She had a marvelous experience, and she has a superb education in her field (speech pathology). I am fully aware of the virtues of other univiersities. I simply deny that these virtues are so great or overwhelming that they make the correct or superior course a foregone conclusion. If my son wants to go to Harvard when he grows up and gets in, I would be thrilled if he went. If he wants to go to BYU, I would also be thrilled. I would hope that he has some sense of the virtues and limitations of both.

72. Mitch,

    You are evaluating BYU based solely on what you call “academic value,” which appears to be a much more narrower criteria for judgment that what Nate and others have used. It seems to me that you are basing your definition of “academic value” on the proportion of students that are snobbish bookworms holding their noses at pop culture and sports. If all you care about is “academic value,” then if you got in to [insert name of obscenely expensive prestigious institution here] you should probably have gone there.

    Nate is judging the quality of education based on a much broader criteria, especially the “Mormoness of the intellectual life” at BYU, which he missed at Harvard Law.

    I for one sorely missed the quality of BYU football when I attended my first game in Cambridge.

73. Suffice it to say that discussing law and Mormonism with Jared Jensen was one of the things that made law school so much fun…

74. Mitch, I was sorry to read your reaction, not because some valid criticism would not be welcome to counterbalance the surprising BYU apologetics in earlier comments, but because it seemed so vindictively formulated and seemed to express much personal frustration. Others have meanwhile engaged in the discussion and I concur with their responses.

    I just want to remark how cheap and perhaps even snobbish it is to sneer at Harry Potter (see #71). When an author succeeds in getting millions of TV-and-videogame-addicted-children to actually read thousands of pages and develop a love for books, we must at least wonder with some respect. I suggest to read the collection of essays The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter: Perspectives in a Literary Phenomenon, ed. Lana Whited, at the University of Missouri Press, or any other serious analysis.

75. I don’t know that law schools can be accurately divided at the “top three” line. Now the “top five” line, that’s different . . .

76. Kingsley, I like your comments best. The red mountains, the laughter of the students. At times, the BYU campus is truly beautiful.

    Mitch, heaven help you at your “top 3” law school if you don’t learn your grammar! And no, that’s not an ad hominon attack.

77. and Nate: Harvard as a top three school? Come on, man! It’s just a feeder to the NY firms.

78. Were you kidding, Steve?! It’s “ad hominem”. You probably were kidding, but, sorry, couldn’t resist. My law school was especially particular about corect spelling.

79. um Elisabeth…. wow. Yeah, I was kidding.

80. Steve – I was joking – sorry, maybe my humor doesn’t come across very well. Could be lack of tone (or maybe humor).

81. Nate,

    I did not attend BYU. Yet I spoke with others (mostly non-members) about my faith all the time, with very little effort. I doubt that I would have talked about more had I atteneded BYU. I certainly would have testified less at BYU. While I haven’t gone to law school, my understanding is that relationships between students there are different and there is certainly less opportunity for hanging out in the hall at 2am chatting about things than in undergrad.

    As you say, people can have great experiences in a variety of places.

82. Elisabeth, you and I are of one mind — nobody can tell when either of us are joking. Of course, you have the pleasure of having people assume you are serious, whereas I am cursed with an undeservedly jokey stereotype. Adam Greenwood is to blame.

83. I haven’t read the entire thread, so maybe someone has already talked about this, but I’m wondering how different the BYU experience might be for those who only attend as a graduate student, as I did. I actually spent one fun, sun-baked summer session living in one of the DTs, but that was it for my exposure until after my mission for my M.A. My grad classes were all small-ish, I had good and frequent access to professors, and excellent teaching opportunities as a T.A. I never lived in a dorm or apt. complex, so I may have missed out on some things there. I was in a variety of wards, some frustrating and hollow-feeling, others more spiritually satisfying, and that’s probably universal. Oh – and I had no religion course requirements. Maybe this is the biggest difference.

    Mostly I agree with Nate that BYU offers unique opportunities for engaging with the combined life of the spirit and the mind. Some professors (and administrators) obviously do not seem able to take full advantage of this opportunity. Others do. And some students have good out-of-class experiences (in wards, dorms, etc.) that also make the best of both realms. Like others have expressed, I didn’t realize until I left BYU how much I valued the shared foundation of Mormonism with my fellow students and teachers, and our shared desire to combine intellectual with spiritual pursuits.

84. That’s not true, Steve Evans. Apologize.

85. As a student I was at BYU only for graduate work, Kirsten. See my comment # 23.

86. One other quick comment: what do others here think about BYU’s practice (I don’t think it’s policy.. yet) of hiring moslty (only?) LDS faculty? In every field, and drastically so in some, this obviously severely limits the candidate pool (which is not at all meant to denigrate the top-rate teachers and scholars at BYU). One chairperson I know there told me that he stopped doing national searches sometime back, since it was clear that the church leadership only wanted LDS scholars, so it just got frustrating to read applications from and then interview excellent young academics who wouldn’t be hired (or, if hired, wouldn’t be tenured) because they weren’t LDS.

    Not that non-LDS faculty are dying to work at BYU, and not that it would be easy to keep them even if we hired them (I know at least two who taught there and loved the students but couldn’t handle the ‘culture’). Of course I also understand the reasons for wanting all or or mostly LDS teachers there. But does anyone else think there might be some advantage to having more non-LDS faculty there? Just curious. There are many differences between BYU and Notre Dame, obviously, but I’ve wondered about the BYU faculty question a bit more after five years’ experience at a Catholic institution that cares deeply about its Catholic identity–and promotes it vigorously in student life outside the classroom–but that hired faculty based only on excellence and their willingness to support the institution’s goals.

87. Maybe there’s a happy medium, Kirsten Christensen, but my impression was, and many of my Catholic friends agreed with me, that Notre Dame’s Catholicism was tepid. Real but tepid.

88. Yeah trust Kaimi to draw a line that includes him :)

    ok, but seriously…if we were to talk about the top 33 (or so) law schools…

    :)

89. I think I would also call Notre Dame’s Catholicism tepid, but I don’t think it’s because there are so many non-Catholic professors there. (I’m not sure if that’s what you were implying, Adam…). My understanding is that Catholic students have some advantage in the admissions process, and certainly more Catholics than non-Catholic students apply. I think it’s about 80/20 Catholic/non-Catholic among undergrads, and vastly different, maybe even flip-flopped among grad students. Of course even if 100% of the students were Catholic, that wouldn’t insure their belief or devotion (just as membership doesn’t at BYU). The whole concept of being “active” in our church is just so different than in other churches, and this, I think is what makes BYU’s religious environment fervent and makes some other (notably Catholic) religious schools look tepid in comparison.

    But to get back to my original question, would having more non-LDS faculty necessarily dilute the religious experience at BYU?

90. Random John: I don’t mean to imply that one cannot have meaningful religious discussions with non-LDS students and faculty. On the other hand, if you want to arrange a reading group to discuss spirit fluid, the conflict between Brigham Young’s and Orson Pratt’s interpretations of exaltation and Joseph Smith’s statements about polytheism, and their relationship to contemporary theories of jurisprudence (don’t laugh; I organized a reading group at HLS and we once had exactly this discussion), it helps to have a group of Mormons who have done some reading about Mormon theology and whose primary religious question is not “Does God exist?” This sort of discussion, of course, is probably not much in the way of a missionary tool, but it is a celebration of part of what makes Mormonism worth converting to.

91. I am not sure, but I think BYU professors have to live church standards (just like BYU students). This severely limits the candidates of non-LDS people to fill positions. As we have learned from non-LDS students, sometimes non LDS think that we don’t really enforce the standards or they really don’t mean much. But BYU is serious about its church standards. It is hard to believe someone who was not a member would really put up with that much control from just an employer.

92. Kirsten (#90): I don’t think that having more non-LDS faculty than we have (assuming we could find those willing to work here) would dilute “the BYU experience.” I know several of those presently on our faculty who are not LDS, and they are among the finest faculty we have, not only in terms of their academic preparation and scholarly work, but also in terms of their dedication to BYU and its mission. The Board of Trustees has clearly said that a significant majority of our faculty should be LDS, but I don’t know whether the decision about what that means in real terms, i.e., numbers, has been theirs or our administration’s. My suspicion–but only a suspicion–is that it is more the latter than the former and that, in principle, we could hire more non-LDS faculty than we do without an objection from the Board. There are a number of good reasons for doing so, and I’d like to see that happen, but I don’t expect to in the near future.

    JKS (#92): Yes, BYU professors, including non-LDS professors, have the same standards that BYU students have. But those who’ve chosen to stay at BYU have been willing to “put up with that much control from just an employer.” In fact, I think that, in general, the non-LDS professors take the standards and the mission of BYU more seriously than the average LDS professor–which is not to suggest that the average LDS professor doesn’t care about them.

93. I’m sure you’re right about the church expecting all of its faculty to abide church standards, JKS, and I’m sure you’re also right about few non-members being willing to put up with them. I would suppose that they’re not also really very enforceable for non-members. (No one’s going to ask if that’s latte or herbal tea in your travel mug, are they?) Even if non-member faculty members have to have an ecclesiastical endorsement interview with a church leader (do they??), I can imagine that they would have an easier time fudging answers if they didn’t believe that the person was God’s representative or that the activity in question affected their ability to do their job well.

    I just believe that non-member faculty members–even if they don’t abide by strict LDS standards–could still contribute greatly to BYU’s mission. I know of a non-member professor who taught at BYU for several years (hoping his position would become tenure-track). During his last year, he told me, with great sadness, that he loved the students, that he deeply respected the church and its members and that he would have been happy to continue his career there had he been offered a position and had he been allowed the religious freedom to live his life as he saw fit. I dare say he influenced many students for the good during his years there. Seems a genuine loss to BYU.

94. Didn’t see your post before I sent mine, Jim. Thanks for the information on the diversity of the faculty and their contributions.

    And I should clarify for all that I didn’t mean to impugn the integrity of any existing non-member faculty members when I suggested how a non-member might react to a standards interview. It was purely hypothetical.

95. Re: Kaimi’s #76. Are there really any law schools other than the top one (Chicago)? I thought all the others were just diploma mills–except for Elisabeth’s alma mater and its corect [sic] spelling, which sounds as if it’s a feeder for the National Spelling Bee.

96. Now now Mark, one can have a good law school anywhere there is a readily accessible, high quality golf course.

97. I do think that the large number of non-Catholic professors at Notre Dame is a partial cause of its tepid Catholicism. Perhaps BYU could have more non-LDS profs than it has without causing problems, I dunno.

    I think, though, that pushing for more gentiles on the BYU faculty *could* makes us more tepid. The sorts of people who think that the most important thing to know about a person is whether they are baptized or not provide important ballast. When they get beat down, institutions start to slide in the other direction.

    Arguing against myself though, I admit that I was one of the more vociferous defenders of hidebound and unapologetic Catholicism at Notre Dame. I always thought it was silly that people were trying to water things down to protect my tender sensibilities. Me and a couple of protestant fellow travelers and some Opus Dei catholics sure left a mark on the law review. On the other hand, though, the ‘Catholicism’ I fostered was a non-Catholic’s view of what was important in Catholicism. I didn’t contribute at all, for instance, to the law school’s liturgical life, because it just didn’t matter to me.

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