“Come, Let Us Anew Our Journey Pursue”

We have just sung “Come, Let Us Anew Our Journey Pursue.”¹ Perhaps no metaphor for mortality is more ubiquitous than that of life as a journey. The image takes many forms and colorations. Some regard the journey from birth to death as an accident of biology, a purposeless passage into oblivion “full of sound and fury / Signifying nothing.”² For believers, the journey through mortality is purposeful. It does not lead merely to the grave but constitutes a pilgrimage to a promised land. And for Latter-day Saints, this pilgrimage marks a journey home, a return to a loving Father who sent his children to learn what could be learned only through trial.

Trials along the Trail

Trials are an inevitable and necessary part of our journey home. We knew this before we came to earth. Even so, when “fiery trial” befalls pilgrims along the way, it can feel “as though some strange thing happened unto you,” as Peter wrote to the Saints facing persecution under Nero (1 Pet. 4:12). It is one thing to know in principle that trials are part of the journey and quite another to experience them in practice. As Shakespeare quips, “There was never yet philosopher / That could endure the toothache patiently.”³

This has been a trying year for me, and I fear that I have not always endured my toothaches patiently. I’ve sometimes felt weary in the journey, even though the difficulties we have faced at Brigham Young University pale in comparison to those experienced by American higher education generally. Many, if not most, universities have experienced furloughs, forced program reductions, deep budget cuts, and layoffs. If you read the Chronicle of Higher Education or even our local newspapers, you don’t need me to inform you that public and private universities across the country, including those in Utah, have taken big hits. Even the richest universities, such as Harvard, have had to engage in painful belt-tightening because so much of their operating revenues comes from their endowments.

That BYU would also face challenges ought not to have taken us entirely by surprise.⁴ For two years running I have called your attention to a statement by President Spencer W. Kimball. He predicted: “It will take just as much sacrifice and dedication to preserve these principles in the second century of BYU—even more than that required to begin this institution in the first place.”⁵ This is a sobering statement when you recall the sacrifices made by those who built BYU and who were sometimes paid in produce and promises.

Now, in context, President Kimball was probably speaking more of the spiritual sacrifices necessary to preserve BYU’s ideals in a sea of secularism than of financial sacrifices necessary to sustain its basic operation. But whatever the nature of the trials we are called upon to face in our days at BYU, as President Kimball predicted, they will require a spirit of sacrifice and dedication. Maintaining this spirit at BYU has been a concern for all those who have guided BYU—whether in times of adversity or in times of prosperity.

It has also been a concern for me. As I said two years ago when discussing President Kimball’s prophecy: “For BYU to meet this impending test, we must keep alive the spirit of sacrifice and consecration.”⁶ Similarly, last year, in speaking again of President Kimball’s prophecy, I said: “I am persuaded that sacrifice and consecration are vital in preserving the Spirit of the Y.”⁷ The current challenges test our level of consecration.

Trials as a Test

Now I do not think for a minute that the hiring freeze, budget cuts, and other small sacrifices we have been asked to make have been artificially concocted by our leaders as a test. Nonetheless, they do test our spiritual mettle. They bear spiritual as well as temporal implications for us on our journey heavenward. For just as there is no such thing as a temporal commandment (see D&C 29:35), there is no such thing as a merely temporal trial. These current challenges test not only our ability to manage but also our willingness to hearken.

Given this, what has BYU’s response to the current exigencies revealed about its spiritual health? From my vantage, what has been revealed to date is very heartening. In the main, BYU has met the test remarkably well so far—beginning first and foremost with the president. As always, he has acted with complete fidelity to the mandates of our trustees, whose trust constitutes one of BYU’s most precious assets in good times and bad. His iron determination to follow prophetic guidance without evasion and with exactness has increased this asset for us all.

I’ve seen a similar spirit of obedience, gratitude, and sacrifice among the faculty and staff. It’s been quite remarkable and heartwarming. I don’t believe there is another major university in the world where one would find such a spirit of commitment to the common good.

Since the freeze was announced in December, over and over again I have heard heartfelt expressions of gratitude from you for the remarkable resources we enjoy, and I have witnessed your willingness to do more with less. You have come up with creative proposals to find ways to accomplish the work with reduced resources. I’ve seen departments transfer staff to help units who have lost personnel to the freeze. I have seen faculty volunteer to teach introductory classes in other departments and assume duties formerly discharged by an advisement center. I have seen faculty forego leaves, take on heavier teaching assignments, reduce travel, and accept restructuring plans—all with good grace. And the staff has been equally magnificent. They, too, are doing more with less. Moreover, they continue to transfer permanent positions from their side of the ledger to ours. We received three more slots from them this year, for a total of thirteen over three years. Their “Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal” is to transfer twenty-five slots from administration to faculty. When the freeze is lifted, the positions from these transfers will be deployed to help us meet critical needs.

In short, the economic downturn has awakened an upturn in the spirit of sacrifice on campus. This has made my heart swell with joy to sojourn among such Saints. While our trials to date have been relatively modest in comparison with those of our forebears, it appears to me that their pioneer spirit still lives on today among a little band of pilgrim professors in Provo. I have worried in past years that our academic success might make us proud and that our generous support might make us complacent—that we weren’t prepared to walk in the footsteps of those who have gone before us. After this year, I feel more sanguine that, were we called upon to do so, we might be able to pull our wagons back to Missouri after all.

What is more, I suspect that many of you would even do so with a smile. You have frequently responded to the current conditions with good humor and good cheer, as the Lord commands: “In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). An example of your finding humor in adversity is a poster that one of John Rosenberg’s chairs prepared for him. It wittily captures a conversation he and many faculty leaders have been having with you over the past year: “Hope? Nope. Cope!” After the poster was mounted in the hallway, faculty have continued to have fun with its gallows humor. They now pin on the poster news clippings about conditions elsewhere in the academy as reminders that it could be worse. We’re coping. And we need to plan on continuing to cope. This is a time for all hands on deck.

A Catalyst for Good

The freeze has thus functioned not only as a test but also as a catalyst for good at BYU. Latter-day Saint sojourners know that opposition is required for growth (see 2 Ne. 2:11) and that we are better off owing to a “fortunate fall.” Even bitter adversity can have its sweet uses.⁸ Likewise, as a result of the hiring freeze and the reduction in travel budgets, requests to fill vacancies, attend conferences, and expand programs are receiving more rigorous scrutiny than ever before. This strict scrutiny is a good thing. It needs to continue in perpetuity.

Stricter scrutiny, however, has tended to occur ad hoc rather than systematically. So I have asked every college to complete comprehensive workload analyses for each department and faculty member. Most deans report that this has been a revealing exercise, even for deans and chairs who thought they knew their units well. It will help units deploy resources more effectively and equitably, as well as hold individuals more accountable. It will also enable the central administration to respond more knowledgeably to resource requests. We are better off because we have been forced to rigorously examine our resource deployment. There is more transparency, more strategic decision-making. Many college councils now regularly discuss position vacancies and frequently recommend moving positions around rather than simply proposing to continue the status quo.

Current conditions have also prompted us to look for ways to realign programs to strengthen natural synergies and to streamline administrative costs. The most dramatic example of this involves the programs in Health and Human Performance, which have been realigned with other colleges. We need to continue to look for more efficient and effective ways to accomplish critical tasks. This is not easy or pain free, but if we meet the challenge wisely, this period will have been a fortunate fall for BYU. Like Adam and Eve, we’ll be better off for it. Like Christian, the hero of John Bunyan’s allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress, we’ll be encumbered with fewer burdens on our backs and a clearer vision about the way to the Celestial City.⁹

To summarize, I believe that substantial good has come out of our efforts to cope with straitened circumstances. Being forced to ration resources has required us to be more reflective about what we’re carrying in our wagons and more creative in how we’ve organized the wagon train and distributed the load. It has brought our community together in a spirit of shared sacrifice. When some are stuck in the mud or are in dire need of food, others pitch in to pull them out and then share provisions. However, we can’t continue indefinitely to lose members from our little band. I am grateful that the board has been willing to consider limited exceptions to the freeze to meet the most dire needs. To this point the freeze has not frozen BYU in the snows of Wyoming on its journey toward a rendezvous with its prophetic destiny.

Teaching Each Other along the Way

In preparation for this talk, I reread John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. (Well, actually, I listened to it while participating in a hundred-mile bike ride around Utah Lake.) I was struck by how much of the allegory is devoted to conversation. Bunyan’s pilgrim Christian is constantly engaged in teaching and learning from others he meets along the way on his journey to the heavenly Jerusalem. So should we on our journey home. Latter-day scriptures repeatedly enjoin the Saints to “teach one another . . . doctrine” and “words of wisdom,” “according to the office wherewith I have appointed you” (D&C 88:77, 118; D&C 109:7; D&C 38:23). Last year I mentioned that the injunction to “teach one another” had impressed itself on my mind. I felt that we needed to think more about this as faculty. This impression has remained with me throughout the year—hence our conference theme.

I discovered last year that Karl G. Maeser had developed an explicit plan for teaching and learning at Brigham Young Academy. You may remember that he adopted as “the guiding rule for the teacher” in the Academy that “whatever can be done by the pupils, the teacher should never do himself.”¹⁰ Thus this institution promoted active learning and peer teaching well before it became fashionable in academe. Active learning and peer teaching are part of our institutional DNA.

In fact, the practice of collaborative learning among Latter-day Saints goes back well before Maeser ’s Academy to the earliest school in the Church. By revelation the School of the Prophets envisioned a porous boundary between student and teacher. As described in Doctrine and Covenants 88:122, every learner was expected to become both student and teacher at different times, “that all may be edified of all.” This has profound implications for us. So does the phrase “and that every man may have an equal privilege.” This, too, has deep significance for us. I sense that there is important wisdom for us yet to mine that has been deposited in such revelations about teaching one another.¹¹

Faculty Teaching One Another

Teaching each other entails more than faculty teaching students or students teaching students. It goes beyond what we categorize under “teaching” in our annual stewardship reports. We fulfill the scriptural mandate to teach one another when faculty teach and learn from other faculty. Certainly we teach one another when we publish scholarship, especially in high-impact journals. Faculty also teach one another when they share and discuss research and creative work among departmental colleagues. I have noticed that departments with strong research cultures are generally places where faculty share and critique works in progress. They engage in lively conversations about each other ’s research and creative work. In such departments, faculty mentor not only students but also each other. They engage in robust conversation about developments in the disciplines. I strongly encourage this form of teaching one another here at BYU.

I also encourage and commend your efforts to learn from each other across college boundaries. I was heartened to hear in resource planning several deans speak about plans they have to collaborate with other colleges. I have long believed that this sort of collaboration ought to be more prevalent than it is at BYU, in both our teaching and our research. We ought to look for ways to learn from each other across our silos. Advances in knowledge often take place at the intersection of the disciplines.

Taking Stock of Our Progress

In The Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian and his fellow travelers frequently take stock of their progress toward the Heavenly City. We’re also taking better stock of our progress toward our goal of helping students achieve stated learning outcomes. To this end, we’re talking a lot more with each other about what our students are actually learning, not just about what we think we are teaching them. Assessment is no longer a hiss and a byword on our journey; it’s merely a rubric for the many ways we’re trying to measure our effectiveness. Some colleges have instituted assessment days and retreats. One college calls its retreat “Camp Assessalot.” We are in the middle of a paradigm shift from teaching to learning. Our focus is shifting from “my course” to “our program.” We are beginning to reconceptualize teaching as a public part of our profession—like our research—rather than as what we do in private behind closed classroom doors.

Increasingly, faculty are also taking stock of their courses in medias res by soliciting formative midcourse student feedback. The new tool developed by the Center for Teaching and Learning has made this easier than ever. It is proving to be effective in raising student teaching evaluations. Evidently, students like to know that we care about what they think. More to the point, midcourse evaluations are helping faculty make adjustments that actually improve learning—which is the whole point. We assess not merely to understand, nor to increase popularity. We take stock to improve learning, to get better.

One of my favorite lines in The Pilgrim’s Progress occurs when Christian encounters Mr. Talkative. As his name indicates, Mr. Talkative loves to talk, especially about salvation. Everything for him becomes an occasion to expound the gospel, but never an occasion to repent and live it. Bunyan shrewdly observes: “Some cry out against sin, even as the Mother cries out against her Child in her lap, when she calleth it [a] naughty Girl, and then falls to hugging and kissing it.”¹²

Likewise, it is not enough for us to gather assessment data only to excuse familiar faults by saying, “Oh, students always complain about my organization. I’m just a free spirit. They need to learn to roll with the punches when there is no syllabus or I don’t return assignments.” We must use what we learn from program and course assessments not like a fop to preen and admire ourselves but like an engineer to measure performance and improve it.

Remembering Those in the Last Wagon

In our interactions with students and colleagues, we need to remember those in the last wagons.¹³ The president has detailed what remarkable students we have at BYU, and indeed we do have great students. The best could go anywhere and no doubt will go places after they leave us, places that we and they scarcely dream of, bringing honor and renown on themselves and their alma mater. But there will always be some who don’t finish first, indeed, who struggle to finish at all. I do not advocate lowering standards for stragglers, but I do implore us all to assist those who plod along in the last wagons just hoping to complete the trek. You and I would also struggle in some classes. We admit only students who can succeed, but not necessarily who can succeed equally in every subject. Each student has different aptitudes. As Eliot Butler used to say, quoting Will Rogers, “Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.”¹⁴ Likewise, everybody has something to teach us if we are willing to learn from one another.

Some of our students will not go on to become prominent professionals in law, medicine, or business, much less follow our paths to graduate school and the professoriate. They won’t grow up to be just like us. Imagine that! Yet they too are beloved sons and daughters of the King we serve and whose throne is the object of our pilgrimage. What is more, they have equal potential to grow up to become like him. We therefore ought to value and attend to the needs and futures of all those we travel with. For, to paraphrase Chaucer, “pilgrims are we all.”¹⁵

I commend and encourage the initiatives that I am beginning to see bubble up all across the university to pay attention to those who don’t immediately go on to a career or graduate school in their major disciplines. Attention to them is a healthy effect of the economic downturn. As financial storms rage and cold economic winds blow, it is important to consider what lies in store for those who don’t have the prospect of immediate shelter in the form of a career or graduate school. Well might we echo King Lear’s words in the storm as he confessed his failure to notice the downtrodden: “O, I have ta’en / Too little care of this!”¹⁶ It is salutary for us to turn attention to the needs of all our students, not just the high achievers. It is also the prudent thing to do. More often than not, our future donors will come from the ranks of those who haven’t gone on to pursue academic careers but who loved their experience with us at BYU nonetheless.

Conclusion: Stones and Storms

In conclusion, let me tease out lessons for our journey from one of the great epic journeys in scripture. The Book of Mormon tells of many migrations to the promised land. None is more evocative than the exodus of the Jaredites. Lehi’s group evidently crossed the sea in sailing ships that could be steered and were open to the light of day (see 1 Ne. 18:22). The Jaredites, by contrast, crossed the fearful deep in barges that could not be steered but were completely at the mercy of the tempests and tides. As if this weren’t terrifying enough, the Jaredites also faced the prospect of traveling in darkness for a journey that would last almost a full year (see Ether 6:11). The Lord solved these twin challenges of light and steering in two very different ways—through stones and storms.

As you will recall, he touched with his finger clear stones presented to him for that purpose by the brother of Jared. As a result of the Lord’s touch, the stones shone forth welcome light to illuminate the dark passage across the deep. We generally remember this divine intervention that helped the Jaredites on their epic voyage. But what about the lack of steering? The Lord addressed this problem with a rougher remedy. He “caused that there should be a furious wind blow upon the face of the waters, towards the promised land; and thus they were tossed upon the waves of the sea before the wind” (Ether 6:5). The Lord’s hand was in the storms that buried the barges “in the depths of the sea” (Ether 6:6) just as it was in the stones that lighted them.

Brothers and sisters, I believe that God is likewise in both stones and storms on our pilgrimage to the promised land. We take with us on our journeys bright memories of times when his finger touched our lives. These testimonies light the dark way home, warming us with memories of sacred encounters with a personal God who cannot withhold himself from those who love him. The touch of his finger in our lives provides both a promise and a foretaste of the Lord’s full embrace. God is in these glowing stones.

But God is also in the storms. He says to the brother of Jared that the winds and the rains and the floods “have gone forth out of my mouth” (Ether 2:24). He sends his “furious wind” to blow the little band of Jaredite pilgrims toward a new and better home (Ether 6:5). It takes faith to find God in the tempests, but he is there too.

The Book of Mormon records that “the wind did never cease to blow towards the promised land while they were upon the waters” (Ether 6:8). In a moving epilogue to a very wise book entitled My Grandfather’s Blessings, the Jewish physician Rachel Naomi Remen refers to this verse in the Book of Mormon. She writes:

In the course of any lifetime there are times when one has to sail into the unknown without map or compass. These can be times of despair and terror; they can also be times of discovery. Having accompanied many people as they deal with the unknown, I find that the most moving part of the Mormon exodus story is a single line. Despite the challenges and great difficulties of this sea journey, “the wind always blows in the direction of the promised land.” I have seen many people spread their sails and catch this wind.¹⁷

I pray that we can be wise and faithful enough to catch this wind.

Our closing musical number is entitled “Pilgrim Song.” The Apostle Paul says that we are to teach one another not simply through words but through hymns and spiritual songs: “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord” (Col. 3:16).

In the closing song, I hope you feel the grace in our students’ hearts as they sing of their faith that we are going to live forever.

Someday we shall reach the harbor and be “out of the swing of the sea.”¹⁸ Someday God shall wipe away every tear. This is the promise every pilgrim clings to and holds in his heart, as recorded so beautifully in the book of Revelation:

And one of the elders answered, saying unto me, What are these which are arrayed in white robes? and whence came they? . . . And he said to me, These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. Therefore are they before the throne of God, and serve him day and night in his temple: and he that sitteth on the throne shall dwell among them. They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat. For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters: and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes. (Rev. 7:13–17)

Brigham Young provided a similar perspective for our early pioneer pilgrims who suffered so much on their mortal journeys. He said:

We talk about our trials and troubles here in this life: but suppose that you could see yourselves thousands and millions of years after you have proved faithful to your religion during the few short years in this time, and have obtained eternal salvation and a crown of glory in the presence of God; then look back upon your lives here, and see the losses, crosses, and disappointments, the sorrows . . . , you would be constrained to exclaim, “But what of all that? Those things were but for a moment, and we are now here.”¹⁹

I am grateful for the knowledge shared by pilgrims and pioneers alike, that in eternity “all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”²⁰ The choir shall now sing “Pilgrim Song,” whose chorus supplies a coda for these remarks:

My soul doth long to go where I may fully know the glory of my Savior.
And as I pass along I’ll sing the Christian song: I’m going to live forever.²¹