The Legacy of the Founders

In honoring those who founded this school, we would like to stress qualities more than names. Not that names are unimportant, but qualities may be more widely shared. Few of us may carry the names of those who had the determination and foresight to establish this school, but we can all know the same determination and foresight in our own lives. In fact, I suspect that the men and women memorialized in our campus buildings would be less interested in the fine edifices bearing their names than they would be in the students and faculty who use these buildings. Whatever our modern advantages, I trust that the current members of our university community are still imbued with their forebears’ basic virtues, for certain qualities are neither diminished by time nor increased by circumstance. The vision that blazed before the founders of this school must continue to light our way, but the quality that turned vision into reality was not the ability to dream so much as the capacity to work. The founders were determined to build foundations under their dream castles—and they knew how much concerted effort a good foundation takes. Perhaps they hoped that easier ways might be found, yet no thought of future ease compromised their immediate labor. They knew how to work, and they were willing to work.

The founders’ commitment to work is their legacy to us. No legacy could more profitably guide the faculty, students, alumni, and friends of this university, for the qualities that mark institutional greatness are equally becoming and necessary to individuals. Today, we hear warnings from all sides that the time is fast approaching in which we will not have to work, that the cybernetic age will take the opportunity to work away from most people. From all sides comes the cry: “What will we do with the leisure time that modern technology will not only provide but actually force upon us?” Universities are exhorted to prepare themselves for an avalanche of adult students who will have the majority of their time free to indulge hobbies or pursue recreation.

With its long-term commitments to continuing education, Brigham Young University would welcome adults whom technology had freed from labor that did not use their human potential. But we are not gearing our future effort to a nation constantly at play. A serious fallacy underlies all prophecies about the dire consequences to be expected when the ten-hour week is upon us. That fallacy is the assumption that leisure and play are synonymous. Recreation is only meaningful as a change of pace that follows work. If work disappears, the very roots of the word “recreation” are contradictory.

We face no real danger, however, that work will disappear. Technology is the author of work, not its enemy. Manifestations of work may change, but the subduing and ordering of the world continues, accelerated by humanity’s inventive genius. No prognosis of tomorrow’s world threatens a truly creative mind. As the campus on which we stand today is the result of techniques unthought of in Karl G. Maeser’s time, so the BYU of the future will probably take its direction and destiny from concepts that have yet to twitch the cerebrum of any living soul. But great creative thought is work of the most demanding kind. The right, the necessity to employ the mind’s full resources has always been the human response to seemingly overwhelming forces. And education provides the matrix in which our brain becomes a mind. We salute those whose sustained effort began and nurtured this school. I sincerely believe that an impressive number of faculty and students here are imbued with the same willingness to work that characterized the founders. No American university of comparable size, either public or private, has so few administrative affairs. We have no faculty club or faculty lounge, for example, on this campus. Our faculty members work hard, and I am very proud of them.

Our students measure up to the faculty’s example. Consider, for instance, how many students work to support themselves while attending the university. They do not do so by reducing their classwork. Specifically, they must take about sixteen hours of coursework each semester to graduate in four years. Nevertheless, most have jobs, some of which require forty hours or more per week. In addition, of course, faculty and students staff campus wards almost totally.

A second quality, closely aligned with this devotion to work, that the founders bequeathed to us is a deep appreciation of excellence. That appreciation was ours in the difficult, early days when we had to view the word excel in its narrow, original sense: to raise oneself. It is still ours when we are now able to compete with the finest institutions in the land for both faculty and students. It is ours in our fine athletic program, our College Bowl team, our superb debate teams. Those who represent BYU in any competition are expected to excel, and they rarely disappoint us.

I am especially pleased that we have kept our perspective and have not tried to achieve excellence at the expense of wholeness. Specialization is a persuasive delusion, for no university can become all things to all people, but specialization is a delusion nonetheless. If the function of an institution receives continuing priority, the whole begins to be coerced by the past. Consider how easily BYU might have been turned into a theological seminary in the very beginning. Teaching would have been essentially pronouncement, and many problems besetting modern universities might have been avoided. But those who founded this school were not afraid of the truth, wherever found. People do not think themselves out of the Church, and no one has been cursed with too much education. The Book of Mormon explicitly states the implicit philosophy undergirding BYU: “To be learned is good if [we] hearken unto the counsels of God” (2 Ne. 9:29). BYU tries to provide both an environment and coursework that will enable every student to synthesize the spiritual and temporal, a synthesis that marks the gospel’s wholeness. Of course, the words wholeness and holiness share the same root.

A third quality, exemplified both by the founders of this country as well as the founders of this school, is independence. If economic and political developments of the past half century have emphasized programs of mutual dependence, we have too often paid for these programs by continually eroding individual or institutional freedom. Independence is not the right to be unconcerned so much as it is the right to be concerned in one’s own way. If, for example, our highest standard is administrative neatness, then forced agreement on educational goals offers obvious advantages. Using more thoughtful criteria, however, we would conclude that diversity adds richness and texture to the rather drab fabric of American education. Unfortunately, standing apart when the rallying cry is togetherness calls into question a university’s academic loyalty and competence. Each year the ranks of those who resist the blandishments of government subsidy under the pressures of special-group dictatorship waver and break. Among major universities, we at BYU are beginning to feel a bit lonely. We are aware of the dangers of becoming merely eccentric. We try to guard against letting independence degenerate into more ego-inflation or mindless opposition. We happily accept government research contracts through which we can provide a legitimate service in return for support, but we draw the line at governmental indulgence.

We are pleased that the appropriate agencies have accredited both BYU’s individual programs and the entire university, but we must face the fact that all our objectives may not be widely shared. Rather than merely asserting our right to be different, however, we hope to demonstrate that we can compete brilliantly on the world’s terms while adding a special ingredient that not only sets us apart but above. We do not intend to become an eddy in the mainstream of American higher education. Indeed, we are determined to exert such influence as to cut a new channel reflecting BYU engineering. Our independence will not lead us away; it should draw others to us.

What might be termed responsibility—but what I like to call accountability—is surely another attribute that should not have lost its luster over the years. I like to stress accountability because the word suggests something as objective as a bookkeeping balance sheet. If we have losses, they show; if we have debts outstanding, they are recorded. Fortunately and fairly, our assets are just as clearly in evidence. Explanations may be in order, but they are rarely as convincing as the figures themselves. As members of the BYU academic community, we must personally accept our strengths and weaknesses—not disguising the one by false modesty or blurring the other through rationalization. As a university, we must accept limitations as well as opportunities. The fact that some limitations, such as enrollment caps, may become opportunities for qualitative rather than quantitative growth is encouraging, but such opportunities should not lead us to discount our problems. Our relative isolation from major libraries or sophisticated research centers, for instance, is a continuing frustration for faculty. Student nerves fray a bit when they seem to be caught between landlords and city officials. Townspeople sigh when student cars block driveways or hurtle past elementary schools. For all of us to be truly accountable, we must do more than understand the problem of which we are a part. We must be committed to finding solutions.

One of BYU’s distinctions is its willingness to accept some responsibility for student behavior—both on and off campus. We pay our students the compliment of expecting them to appreciate, not resent, our concern and to order their lives so we neither have to coddle or coerce them. Part of the responsibility we assume for students is to provide understanding of their difficulties, and we hope they sympathize with ours. Beyond such mutual understanding, we hope to encourage everyone to stand fearlessly and skillfully for what they believe, to accept the commitment to action that is always a corollary of belief, and to have the patience and resourcefulness that convert belief into faith. We encourage these virtues because the first principle of the Gospel—faith—is the first principle of everything. Faith provided the impetus to establish this university, and faith continues to drive us today. Our willingness to work, our diligence, may be without direction. Our feeling for excellence may turn into dilettantism or lack a meaningful standard. Our independence can become truculence, mere unthinking stubbornness. Our accountability can degenerate into painful self-consciousness. Without faith, all of these failures can happen, probably will happen. We need divine sanction to support our best effort.

I hope all who are associated with this university will never forget that it was started by a prophet of God and that prophets still guide its destiny. What university can make a similar claim? Where else in the entire world can one find scores of men and women who spend all week teaching young people and all weekend counseling these same students as their Church leaders? Where else can almost every vocational interest be discussed with men and women who add the inspiration of God to superb academic training? No statement that I can make to you today gives me more satisfaction than to say that BYU is now the university many of us dreamed it would become. What it yet may be will be limited only by the vision of those who now shape it as alumni, faculty, friends, and students.