- Elder Clark G. Gilbert says Latter-day Saint schools will not diverge from church governance.
- Church financial support is one way BYU, other schools will prevent drift.
- The recent update to CES hiring policies also help maintain alignment of faculty.
The long history of American colleges and universities drifting away from the religions that launched and sponsored them won’t repeat at BYU and its sister schools, one of their leaders said Friday night.
“The loss of administrative governance will not happen in the Church Educational System of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” said Elder Clark G. Gilbert, a General Authority Seventy and Commissioner of Education.
His message reiterated one he gave at BYU in February 2022. He also directly tied the recent update to the church’s hiring policy, announced in January 2022, to the effort to ensure all Latter-day Saint colleges and universities remain aligned with their sponsoring church.
Speaking at the annual J. Reuben Clark Law Society fireside at the Church Office Building in Salt Lake City, Elder Gilbert said the church faces “modern authoritarian forces that would deny religious expression.”
“In my role as the Commissioner of Education in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, these threats come from secular agendas in the media, regulators and even from peers and other academic contemporaries,” he said.
Three trained attorneys serving as senior church leaders attended the Law Society event — President Dallin H. Oaks, first counselor in the First Presidency and himself former BYU president, and Elder Quentin L. Cook and Elder D. Todd Christofferson of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.
The church’s general counsel, Elder Alexander Dushku, also a General Authority Seventy, introduced Elder Gilbert.
The Law Society is an international group of local chapters of faith-based attorneys and law students.
Why universities decouple from religions and BYU won’t
Elder Gilbert said an analysis found three major reasons for the decoupling of universities from religious sponsors. The work was done by James Burtchaell, author of “The Dying of the Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from Their Christian Churches”:
- Funding sources diversified away from religious sponsors as costs rose.
- Subsequently, university leaders were selected by new stakeholders unaffiliated with the original sponsoring religions.
- Specialization of academic disciplines made it difficult for university leadership to review much of the scholarly work of the faculty.
Elder Gilbert listed the ways church leaders and the Church Education System maintain a stable tie with BYU, BYU-Idaho, BYU-Hawaii, Ensign College and BYU-Pathway Worldwide.
“For example, the primary funding of BYU comes from the church, and not through grants, government funding, donors or student tuition,” he said. “Similarly, the selection of the university president is made by the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.”
Additionally, the CES Board of Trustees is led by the church’s First Presidency and chaired by church President Russell M. Nelson.
“Our growing religious freedom and aligned governance provide critical protections for the modern religious university,” Elder Gilbert said.
The church and CES continue to assert their ability to review faculty alignment through an updated 2022 hiring policy, which requires each new CES hire who is a Latter-day Saint “to hold and be worthy to hold a current temple recommend,” a certificate given to church members who meet personal worthiness standards that show alignment with the faith’s doctrines.
The schools still can hire people who are not church members if they agree to follow the honor code.
“All BYU faculty candidates are interviewed by either the president of the university or the academic vice president, as well as by a general authority, and must be approved by the Board of Trustees,” Elder Gilbert said. Those two interview about 200 candidates per year.
Elder Gilbert has said previously that, “No institutional decision is more important to us than the selection of employees, including faculty, as it has the greatest potential to impact our students.”
The accountability BYU and its sister schools have given the religious freedom they enjoy
Elder Gilbert argued that full expression of religious freedom by Latter-day Saints includes stewardship to God. He called for “a deeply embedded personal and institutional stewardship” and said it was necessary for full religious expression to flourish.
He noted that Elder Quentin L. Cook of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles has said that Latter-day Saints will be held accountable to God for the religious freedoms they’ve received and that the Church Educational System would be held accountable for the aligned governance it has been provided.
Elder Gilbert said stewardship requires the church schools to avoid insularity and seek wider engagement with the broader community. They also must ultimately bless others.
“We ... benefit from the clear and aligned governance provided by the Church Board of Education,” he said. “... For BYU (and the entire Church Educational System) to become the ‘Christ-centered, prophetically directed university of prophecy,’ as President Shane Reese has said in his talk, ‘Becoming BYU,’ our people must feel both a personal and institutional stewardship to God. This stewardship includes civic, intellectual and ministerial accountability.”
Civic stewardship
Elder Gilbert said that the Church Education System has tried to demonstrate how diverse religious institutions can work together.
For example, he has co-chaired the newly launched Commission on Faith-based Universities at the American Council on Education with the outgoing president of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities.
“This effort has brought together faith-based university presidents from Catholic, Jewish, Latter-day Saint, Baptist and other religious schools,” he said, adding, “We must be prepared to counter skeptical audiences with persistence, confidence and rigor, as well as grace and humility, for our voices to eventually be heard.”
Intellectual stewardship
At the launch of the Commission on Faith-based Universities, the Rev. John Jenkins, past president of Notre Dame, called on religion-based schools “to gather and to talk about what that dimension of faith-based vision adds to the educational enterprise.”
Rabbi Dr. Ari Berman, president of Yeshiva University, said that the ways Jewish communities elevate social work has been hard to replicate in purely secular studies.
Baylor President Linda Livingstone said, “We want [our faculty] to speak to us about how their faith does or might animate their research and their teaching.”
Ministerial stewardship
Elder Gilbert said religious freedom comes with a responsibility to minister to others.
“BYU’s greatest impact will always come through the lives of its graduates,” he said. “At over 400,000 strong, the BYU alumni association is making a difference. BYU alumni are nearly four times more likely to volunteer than the average American. They are nearly twice as likely to have donated to charity.”
“The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints created BYU-Pathway,” he said, “because we believe we have a heaven-directed responsibility to care for our brothers and sisters.”
He noted innovations at BYU-Idaho (three-semester track) and BYU-Pathway Worldwide (certificate-first curriculum) and said the source of the innovations was the pastoral call of duty of the CES religious mission.