BYU’s Newest Reforms - Identity Crisis? The Battle Over Its Soul

BYU professor Dr. Ralph Hancock talks about the new reforms at BYU: Anonymous resistance, hidden tensions, and a deeper structural problem Why critics say the new curriculum could hurt students—and why that might be the point. It’s not about efficiency—it’s about reclaiming mission and meaning. Can a university serve two masters—or must it choose? Why BYU’s “Great Books” Push Is So Controversial The clash between disciple-scholar ideals and modern academia. Curriculum reform reveals a deeper battle over truth and purpose

 Raw Transcript:

All right, welcome to this quick media production of The City and the Soul presented by host and friend Dr. Ralph
Hancock. He will be putting out several of these episodes that really focus on his life's work on the real fundamental
basics of what is love, what is the good, uh, and talking about several other things. This episode is about BYU
reforms and what many of you may not know and what is going on there at this time. He's got an inside look on this and and presents this to us. Uh and I
think you're really going to enjoy this type of a series. Now, Ralph is very one of the smartest men that I know. So, if you really want to dig into these
fundamental basics of life and so society, political philosophy, etc., I you're really going to like this. So,
look for these episodes maybe a couple times a week. This episode is brought to you by Fathom the Good, which is a high
school curriculum, also adult curriculum for homeschooling and personal use. It's built on the principles of the founding
of America on focusing on the good. And something that doesn't really happen anymore in public education, critical
thinking. If you want your teenagers or you yourself want to learn how to think critically and really find the good and
help in your decisionmaking and learn an awful lot, then check out Fathom the Good at fathomtheg good.com.
Here we go with the city and the soul with Dr. Ralph Hancock. The city and the soul.
Hello, I'm Ralph Hancock and this is the city and the soul.
As you know, here on the city in the soul, we try to connect um questions about uh our personal lives, moral and
spiritual, religious and ethical questions with the most timely political and social questions, ideological
questions. We want to explore uh this interface uh between our own quest to
live a good life and the norms that um obtain in our political society. And uh
today we want to take a look at a a quite interesting article recently uh appearing in the Salt Lake Tribune. I've
been wondering uh when the press would take an interest in uh quite a momentous development at Brigham Y Young
University in Provo. And that is the uh proposition of a rather complete
overhaul of the general education system. And we see that on March 23rd,
the Tribune uh did indeed uh publish an article, BYU pumps the brakes on sweeping curriculum overhaul after
faculty feedback. Well, naturally, the Tribune has a point of view, a rather predictable point of view, and their
point of view is uh essentially taking the side of those who are
resisting uh Vice President Justin Collings uh attempts to overhaul or
propositions to uh overhaul the general education curriculum um in the name of
Well, we're going to see uh what the um the substance of their objections is.
But in in any case, the Salt Lake Tribune is uh more than attentive to any uh faculty who would uh object uh and
resist. And they report um interviews with 12 faculty members. They say from
the hard sciences to the humanities. Uh all of whom have asked that their names be withheld for fear of retribution. Uh that sounds rather daunting, doesn't it?
uh uh but these interviews uncovered widespread uh weariness over the proposal. Well uh that seems altogether
plausible and not too surprising. But let's uh examine the uh the cause of this weariness and uh the reasons um
that the Salt Lake Tribune and um its friends uh among BYU faculty have to
resist the proposals of uh uh Justin Collins uh for GE reform at BYU. Uh
let's first look at the basic point of these reforms. Um
there are two main two main elements and these come out in the article. Uh one is you might say uh purely formal and a
matter of u let's say curricular efficiency. Uh the the uh objective would be to streamline general education
to simplify it and to reduce uh a complicated uh web of options to uh
eight main required courses that would be required of all uh students. So that's the the um let's say the
imperative of a kind of formal efficiency. But in terms of uh of uh content or substance
uh the uh the callings reforms aim at um and this has been a focus at BYU in
recent years as many of you know in terms of content the aim is to uh align
BYU's general education more specifically with BYU's mission and therefore the aim is precisely to have a
shared curriculum that is distinctive uh of uh BYU's mission, which mission of
course is supposed to be grounded in uh the gospel of Jesus Christ and the the mission of the restored church.
Um well, let's uh let's come to uh some of
the objections that were gathered by the uh by the Salt Lake uh Tribune. Uh the
first objection is uh very predictable and uh by no means illegitimate.
uh and that is simply that many faculty are objecting that they uh wish to teach in their expertise and the courses
proposed were not designed and proposed by them and uh seem not to conform to
what they call their expertise to their disciplinary training. Uh so none of this can be uh surprising. Um one can
say one could dismiss this objection as just a matter of vested interests. Here are faculty who are used to doing things a certain way, who have been, you know,
7 minuteshired and paid and promoted to do things a certain way, who have a vested interest in the way that things have
been done before. And naturally, uh it it is costly in many ways for them to be expected to do things uh differently. So
there is an understandable and even I would say to a point legitimate um concern that they're being asked to
do something uh that they've not been trained to do that uh is not in their expertise that does not suit uh their
understanding of their role as professors. Uh the second and related uh objection is that uh the new curriculum
uh might be considered uh uh idiosyncratic is the term that is used.
Um that um here's a here's a a nice
8 minutesquotation from the Tribune. Um the the concern is that the proposal's uh potential would be to devalue
diplomas and hurt would be transfer students by saddling transcripts with idiosyncratic classes likely to raise
the eyebrows of human resource and admissions officers. Uh well idiosyncratic and that that's really the
nub of the problem, isn't it? that any uh attempt to align BYU's curriculum more fully with the gospel mission is
likely to be considered idiosyncratic uh by some uh uh one might respond the the
whole point is in a way to be distinctive or uh idiosyncratic. You can you can use the positive term uh
distinctive or the more negative term uh idiosyncratic.
Uh but the the tension is predict predictable and really uh structural uh
between a faculty whose main regard is to uh peers in the
general academic world and institutions that have their own idea of the meaning of education on the one hand and BYU's
commitment to its distinctive uh mission uh on another.
On the other hand, uh Justin Collins's uh justification of what the Salt Lake
Tribune calls idiosyncratic features uh is as follows. Um citing again from the Tribune article,
too many general education courses, he lamented overindex on disciplinary content and underindex on the virtues and dispositions of disciple scholars.
thus obscuring our uniqueness and making our general education difficult to distinguish from programs at other
institutions. So there you see the number of the problem. U many faculty and the Salt Lake Trabune
want BYU's uh curriculum and its overall orientation to fit very comfortably with
the mainstream of academia. And Vice President Collins has been so bold as to undertake uh a
reform of general education which would emphasize uh uh our uniqueness and would
uh welcome uh distinguishing our program from uh from other institutions.
Well, uh once you frame the question in this way, we can we can see the legitimate concerns of on both sides of
this uh argument. The underlying structural problem and one can have uh great sympathy
11 minutesfor the faculty who are concerned with uh this rather um idiosyncratic or
distinctive uh proposal. this major chain being proposed one one can understand uh the
faculty's attachment to the ways they've been doing thing and their own ideas of the discipline. Uh at the same time u
one can understand Justin Collins uh determination to align the core
education at BYU more fully uh with the gospel. The structural problem uh that comes to light here is that the faculty
uh who have been hired at BYU have been hired largely under broadly generic uh academic terms.
They've been hired as uh temple bearing temple recommend bearing latter-day saints at the same time. But in terms of
their uh professional formation and their uh educational background, they've been hired uh mainly according to uh
mainstream uh understandings of the disciplines and that includes the the worldviews that tend to uh infuse mostly
implicitly uh the uh the standard uh disciplines,
the con the conventional disciplines in which our faculty we are are educated.
It's uh let's take a look at one class uh in particular that I think uh if I
can find the right description here. uh one class in particular in which the the stakes of the argument become uh
especially clear uh and that is a class entitled Out of the Best Books.
Here's the description.
Out of the Best Books, Preludes to the Restoration.
This class explores how women and men across time and space have wrestled with the great qu questions of the soul through art, music, literature and
philosophy. It also pro provides how the longings uh it also provides I suppose a view of
how the longings of the millennia have found luminous answers to the restored gospel of Jesus Christ or
seems to be a misprint there in the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. Well, uh, in other words, uh,
the this the idea of this, uh, one of the, uh, building blocks, uh, of the new general education proposal is, uh,
essentially a a liberal arts class that includes music, literature, and philosophy,
uh, the great questions of the soul as a prelude to the restoration. This class would be essentially a class that uh
would seek to recover a an old-fashioned liberal arts or great books understanding of higher education
uh in connection with a an openness to the uh truths of revelation.
So such a class would in a way uh bring together uh the greatest uh reflections
on the soul and on the human community over centuries of civilization.
uh the questions it would bring together the questions from that uh uh from the great conversation of the great books
with the the let's let us say the answers proposed uh in uh in the scriptures by the prophets uh by by revelation.
Well, that to me is a a very ambitious uh and attractive uh proposal.
But again the question would be how many faculty have been trained uh in the liberal arts have been trained in the
great conversation of art literature music and philosophy let us say in such a way as
to be able to connect these with the uh central insights of the restored gospel.
Alas, I think one must say that uh it would be rare to find faculty whose academic preparation in the conventional
disciplines would prepare them to do that. So this is the the nub of the structural problem at BYU and one can have sympathy uh with both uh sides.
There are complaints of distrust uh on the part of the faculty. They feel that
u the uh uh the recent u commissioner of
church education Clark Gilbert and the the BYU administration have not shown sufficient trust in the existing faculty.
uh and I think that's a uh that points to the fact that there is this uh structural mismatch between what the
faculty have prepared to do, what they've been trained to do and what u they might be
asked to do uh under a new regime of uh general education.
uh faculty complain of uh a sense of being distrusted by the uh administration and by church authorities
perhaps. But the administration Justin Collings could uh express the same concern that uh his initiatives are do
not receive sufficient uh uh trust and are not uh uh not uh do not meet the the
goodwill and willingness to uh accommodate of the faculty that they might. Well, uh my point is to say that
uh one can understand the mutual distrust really because there is a
structural problem here and as um Justin Collins uh takes his proposal u back to
the drawing board so to speak or when as he considers revisions to try to accommodate some of these concerns and
objections. uh I it seems to me that what has to be faced is the this basic
structural problem the problem of uh somehow acquiring the faculty
that is needed to teach a kind of education uh for whom the present faculty was not
hired. Of course there are exceptions and I'm painting with rather broad brush strokes but that's really the heart of
the problem. We want a let's say a a transdisciplinary general education that is grounded in
the best books, the great books on the one hand, the liberal arts tradition on the one hand, and the uh the truths of
the restored gospel on the other. But that is not the kind of education that our faculty have been prepared to offer.
So there's going to be no overnight solution to this kind of problem. And uh uh I'm glad it's not my problem. I
wouldn't be sure exactly what to recommend. But I think the beginning of wisdom is to uh be attentive to to
properly weigh the challenge of this mismatch between the conventional disciplinary background of the faculty
which is not without its worldview baggage not to say its ideological baggage on the one hand and uh the
distinctive mission of BYU and the other. Uh so that's my perspective today. I'm Ralph Hancock. This is the city and the soul.
The city and the soul.