https://latterdaysaintmag.com/betrayal- ... +5%2C+2022“Some people in the extended community are feeling abandoned and betrayed by BYU. It seems that some professors … are supporting ideas that many of us feel are contradictory to gospel principles… Several parents … no longer want to send their children here or donate to the school.” Elder Jeffrey R. Holland read these words from a letter he had received to an annual conference of all BYU faculty, administration, and staff on August 23, 2021. Elder Holland went on discuss the Church’s doctrine of marriage and family as a critical area of concern and cited then Elder Oaks and Elder Maxwell on the need for BYU faculty, like Nauvoo temple workers who had to defend as well as build, to take up intellectual “muskets” in defense of the Restored Gospel. He went on to cite President Kimball’s 1975 “Second Century” address at BYU in order to remind the university of its need, not just to be an excellent university by common academic standards, but to be truly unique as a Latter-day Saint University: “[W]e must have the will to be different and to stand alone, if necessary,” Elder Holland emphasized, even at the cost of certain “professional affiliations and certifications.”
Elder Holland’s words were a clarion call to refocus on BYU’s true and unique mission. Happily, they have not gone without effect. Those eager to criticize Elder Holland’s counsel to BYU seized upon his references to “musket fire,” some even pretending to fear for their lives in the supposedly hostile environment that Elder Holland’s words had created. But Holland’s critics overlooked what may prove to be the most consequential part of his talk, that is, the moment when he introduced Elder Clark Gilbert, Commissioner of Church Education, and asked him to visit the campus often and essentially to preside over the process of mission realignment that the apostle was effectively calling for.
A Time of Reckoning
Elder Gilbert has certainly taken on the assignment of BYU mission realignment with energy and conviction. His messages to the whole university and to meetings for leaders and officers have made it very clear that he will assure that Elder Holland’s concerns, and those of many BYU parents and donors, regarding the university’s mission-drift are addressed.
Lauding an ousting...hell hath no fury and all that.
So get on with it, break with the educational establishment and pursue your one-eyed bigoted abusive agenda without the halo of being part of a wider educational system that fosters equality and understanding.In other instances, we must be willing to break with the educational establishment (not foolishly or cavalierly, but thoughtfully and for good reason) in order to find gospel ways to help mankind. Gospel methodology, concepts, and insights can help us to do what the world cannot do in its own frame of reference.
Gilbert is clearly the LDS enforcer, come to do what Worthen was incapable of doing, bringing BYU to heel. There's hope yet that FARMSIAN attack dog apologetics will once more ring around the corridors of BYU. What right-minded individual would want to work at an institution that fires people for being openly sympathetic to the plight of the LGBQT community? George Orwell was unwittingly writing about BYU.
The educational establishment needs to jettison BYU. It will be better for both parties.In some ways the Church Educational System, in order to be unique in the years that lie ahead, may have to break with certain patterns of the educational establishment. When the world has lost its way on matters of principle, we have an obligation to point the way. We can, as Brigham Young hoped we would, “be a people of profound learning pertaining to the things of the world,”32 but without being tainted by what he regarded as “the pernicious, atheistic influences”33 that flood in unless we are watchful. Our scholars, therefore, must be sentries as well as teachers!”
