Brigham Young
University has continually shown itself to be intolerant
and small-minded—not what you would expect from what
is supposed to be an institution of higher learning.
The recent
decision not to rehire part-time instructor of philosophy
Jeffrey Nielsen as a result of his dissenting editorial on
gay marriage in The Salt Lake Tribune
reiterates issues of intellectual oppression at
Brigham Young University and in higher education generally.
Four years ago,
in the fall of my senior year of high school, BYU brought
me to its Provo campus on a recruitment trip along with a
number of other high-achieving applicants. Even before
that trip, I had become familiar with “the
Y” on my many family vacations to the university to
see my cousins and brother off to college. In high
school I ranked in the top 5% of my class at a
competitive public preparatory high school, earned a
near 5.0 GPA by BYU’s weighted standards, played on
the varsity tennis team, won league and state
championships in speech, and served on the board of
education of my local school district. I was a seminary
graduate, an Eagle Scout and senior patrol leader of my
troop, and a former president of the deacons and
teachers quorums of my ward; my bishop’s
ecclesiastical endorsement, it is fair to say, was glowing
and unabashed.
I received my
offer of admission from BYU only two days after I submitted
my application online: The letter was dated November 22,
2001, and I had submitted my application on November
20. Along with the offer came a Millennium Scholarship
from the university, which was a very attractive
package considering my family’s financial situation
at the time. Nevertheless, I passed on BYU. Over my
last four years at Amherst College in Massachusetts, I
have come to the conclusion that it was the best
decision I could ever have made and the same decision that I
would recommend to hundreds, if not thousands, of
other students.
You see, even
when I was visiting BYU, I already knew that one thing
about me would never fit in (besides the fact that
BYU’s predominantly blond-haired, blue-eyed
student body made me feel racially marginalized as an
Asian-American): I am gay, and I am not ashamed of it. In
the field of history and American studies that I have
decided to pursue, nothing is more important than the
ability to engage evidence critically and
analytically. History and humanities in general require a
healthy dose of skepticism and, implied in that
skepticism, a degree of toleration for the viewpoints
and lived experiences of other people.
This was a kind
of progressivism that I knew I would never find at BYU,
and thus BYU was the least academically attractive of all of
the schools I applied to. To confirm this point I
needed only to look at the school’s
“Honor” Code: “Advocacy of a homosexual
lifestyle (whether implied or explicit) or any
behaviors that indicate homosexual conduct, including
those not sexual in nature, are inappropriate and violate
the Honor Code.” Aberrant behavior includes,
among other things, cross-dressing. Would BYU then shy
from working with William Shakespeare’s The
Twelfth Night because of its gender-bending
themes?
Academics at
“Christian” institutions like BYU will never
be challenging or serious enough because it cannot be
a real pursuit of knowledge until the administration
is willing to relinquish its stodgy control over what
is and is not a kosher interpretation of the world. Writ
large, institutions such as BYU cannot truly advance
until all of their students are allowed to live and
learn in the full creative energies endowed them by
God. True education requires at least a minimal degree of
acceptance and liberalism; it requires room to make
and learn from mistakes. These institutions allow no
such room for intellectual curiosity and
experimentation, and they suffer for this narrow-mindedness.
These universities will continue to produce
theoretically second-rate work. They will continue to
lose out on the best secondary academic talent in this
country. Their most brilliant and dedicated scholars young
and old will never achieve their full potential. And
the members of their community who recognize and
oppose this system of heteronormative oppression will
continue to regard the university as a miserable
confining place. That is not the way the Lord imagined
schools, and that is surely not the way the Lord
envisioned education.
I know full well
that I do not have the academic or professional
credentials to make some grandiose claim about the
philosophy of education. I write only as a recent
college graduate who loves education and
enlightenment, who has experienced firsthand the pain of a
fascist and misguided “moral” policy,
and who cringes at the thought of the two being
combined in a university. The BYU administration’s
response to Professor Nielsen’s editorial as
well as the reception given the Soulforce Equality
Riders in spring 2006 demonstrate just how unwilling
supposedly “Christian” colleges and
universities are to at least listen to, if not engage
in, any real dialogue about the discrimination that
lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer students
face. Scholarship at “Christian” schools
has hidden long enough under the intellectual squalor
and hypocrisy of bad religion. It is time for the disguise
of academic respectability to finally give way to real
learning.
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