Boundary Maintenance at Universities

Stephen C

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Every year or so there’s some post or article about BYU performing boundary maintenance, and another one just dropped. I’ve already said most of what I have to say about this issue elsewhere, but I just wanted to point out that if you applied for a US sociology faculty position and it was discovered that you, say, were against gay marriage, or were even a vocal pro-life proponent, even if it had nothing to do with your research (not that that should matter), it would have significant implications for your employability, and people who claim otherwise are either completely clueless or insincere. This is symptomatic of a broader dynamic operating in the background; diversity statements, for example, a standard piece of employment applications, are thinly veiled (at best, sometimes not even that) ideological litmus tests about your position on affirmative action.

So you can’t have your cake and eat it too. BYU is at least open about having hiring filters based on something besides objective qualifications, and that’s their right, even though I’m sure they’re a juicy target as one of the last institutions left that purportedly smell like the old-timey stereotype of the evil archconservative educational institution repressing liberating free thought and inquiry. I’m not going to pivot here to a discussion about cancel culture, but suffice it to say things are more complicated than the caricature, and the far-left doesn’t have a whole lot of moral authority to lecture conservative religious institutions about ideological litmus tests in higher education. 

Comments

20 responses to “Boundary Maintenance at Universities”

  1. ji

    article is behind a pay wall

  2. enterprisecaptain

    Sounds like the boundaries are going to start contracting to exclude current teachers. Goodbye reputation. I think this will end up being a move that pleases no one in the long run. Conservatives are already suspicious, progressives will now stay clear, fewer qualified professors will apply. It’s a race to the bottom. If the church wants a seminary, then stick to seminary. At the current rate, it won’t be long before the administration will have to stop pretending they are running a world-class university, and it’s really just religious education masquerading as job preparation.

  3. Stephen Fleming

    Here is a video of Peggy giving a summary https://youtu.be/_zx4CAx0NSE?feature=shared

    I do see your point about different kinds of ideological demands from universities, Stephen C. Still, I’ve heard lots of stories of many professors feeling like such current regulations feel pretty draconian. Maybe it would be nice to shoot for a happy center: a little more freedom of thought at BYU (within certain boundaries) seems like a good thing (and at other universities too!)

  4. Liz Busby

    Just to back up Stephen’s point about DEI being an ideological litmus test, see the recent extensive report by the New York Times on the lack of free speech at most universities:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/16/briefing/university-diversity-programs.html

  5. Jonathan Green

    I read the article. It’s comprehensive, but doesn’t contain much new information. A few thoughts, likewise not new.

    Boundary maintenance is good and necessary. Where to draw that boundary is a headache, but you can find numerous examples of organizations getting taken over in some form and heading places they hadn’t intended because they skipped that step. I don’t know if the current approach draws the right boundaries or uses the right tools, but the article itself provides more speculation than information in that regard.

    It will never be tenable for BYU faculty not to broadly support the Church’s mission. There are enough people who would like to work there but can’t. Just like it will never be tenable for Amazon employees to be fundamentally opposed to e-commerce – and universities aren’t different from other organizations when it comes to this.

    If you’re an adjunct, your job description includes staying out of the news and not causing administrative headaches. If you fail at this basic part of your job, don’t be surprised at the consequences. As an adjunct, it’s a law I live by.

    The tenured faculty are the ones who need to be exploring the boundaries. The last time I visited one such friend in Provo, there was a Pride flag and a BLM sign prominently displayed outside the house. There have been no career repercussions.

    Maybe you’ll discover that BYU isn’t the right employer for you. That’s completely normal. The adult response is to get a new job or, if necessary, switch careers. The illusion that you can’t possibly do that, that your only option is to stay where you are, is false and only hurts you. People leave academia all the time for many reasons.

    I’ve taught at BYU(-Idaho), and then at another school I decided to leave full-time teaching, and I know people who have had similar experiences with careers after BYU and careers after academia. There can be some genuinely crummy moments (or months), and I sympathize, but things get better and life goes on.

    Some of the BYU faculty who provide anonymous quotes (or use entirely unsubtle images of a fasces to illustrate their anonymous complaints) aren’t doing their cause any favors. Some of them sound unhinged, and if they don’t get the chance to teach my child, well, that’s okay with me.

    No, BYU will not cease to function as a university if some of their faculty move on to other jobs. BYU’s recent drop in rankings has much more to do with USN&WR’s change in methodology.

  6. A

    Boundary maintenance is one thing–and certainly within the purview of a private institution like BYU.

    Requiring the faculty to adhere to uncertain and changing standards that go beyond doctrine to policy proclivities and personal predilections that are complicated by leadership roulette is something entirely different.

    The faculty at BYU are held to a standard higher than that of the temple recommend. The students and faculty are asked to live up to an Honor Code that has nothing to do with doctrine in many respects–to use the most obvious example, men being prohibited from having beards is not doctrinal and does in fact is not a requirement for entry into the temple. That is putting hedges around the hedges around the law (yes, I meant to say that).

    The article referenced above by Peggy Fletcher Stack is an accurate representation of the environment at BYU currently. The concern among faculty about their employment is real. I have written before about the fact that I have not spoken a word in either Gospel Doctrine or Elders Quorum in nearly two decades because something I say might be misconstrued and eventually get back to the ECO or Gilbert. Professionally, I have turned down countless opportunities to enhance my career by writing op-eds in my area of specialty or making media appearances for the same reason.

    Moreover, there is a palpable and obvious lack of trust of the faculty emanating from Gilbert’s office that trickles down through his minions in the administration. This lack of trust is not earned; well over 99% of faculty I have encountered in more than two decades at BYU fully support the university, its sponsoring institution, and their missions. The jeremiads about “woke” faculty undermining testimonies are simply not accurate, based as they are on a handful of anecdotal complaints to people like Holland; indeed, many faculty do everything they can to keep students in the Church when they are questioning its doctrines and policies. But when the Commissioner of Church Education has a child leave the Church after attending BYU, this sort of approach is probably not surprising…even if it is highly disappointing.

    I could provide specific details about hiring processes including the use of spousal behavior and actions to eliminate potential candidates (effectively a violation of the second Article of Faith). I could provide specific details about candidates who were disqualified for opaque and highly questionable reasons. Suffice it to say that the article gets virtually everything right about the current state of affairs at BYU.

    And, sure, there are egregious problems with ideological boundary maintenance at public and private universities around the country as well–but that is no excuse for turning BYU into a bastion of consternation and countenancing a reprise of the 1960s and 1993 debacles.

  7. Hoosier

    I’m just reading through this article
    and I can’t say I feel very sorry for the people who left BYU to go work at IU or get a tenured position at OSU. Just about everything described in that article would not be out of the ordinary for the average university when it comes to faculty falling on the wrong sides of hot-button issues in numerous areas of politics, from the Israeli-Palestinian war to the Summer of Floyd to the political viability of the Orange Man to, yes, gender issues. This is not, and cannot, be a process complaint, just a choice of orthodoxy. The people wrongfooted by BYU don’t seem to have much trouble finding places to land. The same is not true for their opposing numbers.

    Really hard to take all this hand-wringing from members of a very high-status, comfortably remunerative and socially privileged profession who don’t seem to lack for options.

  8. CJ

    How does one seek pastoral care from a leader of fear of losing one’s employment a a possibility? How do you feel about very real leadership roulette that members face? How would you feel if you could be denied employment based upon the decision of a faceless committee that owes no one an explanation? If rank and file membership faced this the Church population would wither.

  9. A

    @Hoosier:

    “Very high-status”? Highly debatable, especially in this anti-intellectual moment.

    “Comfortably remunerative”? Only at the *very* top end of the profession (i.e. endowed chairs, law & business faculty). Unless, of course, you are comparing faculty salaries to minimum wage jobs.

    “Socially privileged”? Debatable, especially in this anti-intellectual moment.

    “Lack for options”? Absolutely. The plummeting number of faculty positions in academia is well-known. The ability for even a mid-career faculty member to move is questionable at best, especially if they want to move laterally rather than taking a non-tenured position. Sure, some can do so…but the vast majority of faculty who were fortunate enough to win the lottery for a university position will struggle to find a second such job. And despite the article’s subjects, many BYU faculty cannot even get in the door at other institutions because of the negative way BYU is perceived in the academic world; the “stink” of BYU is difficult to overcome.

    ************

    @ Jonathan Green:

    Repercussions are very much a function of leadership roulette and where one lives (i.e. the ideological proclivities and religious orthodoxy–or their interpretation of orthodoxy–of your neighbors/ward). I have no doubt your friend can advertise his political/cultural positions without immediate danger; they are fortunate indeed.

  10. RLD

    Yes, boundary maintenance is necessary, but what boundaries? There’s a long history of conservatives failing to distinguish between their political preferences and Church doctrine, especially at BYU (looking at you, President Wilkinson).

    According to the video, “opposition to same sex marriage” is a key litmus test, but that’s a particularly murky issue. “The Church should not perform same sex marriages” is a very different proposition from “The Unites States should not grant legal recognition to same sex marriages.” If you focused on Prop 8, you’d conclude the latter is an official Church position. But if you focused on the Respect for Marriage Act, then you’d reach the opposite conclusion. Add in the chronology, and you can tell a story about Church leaders shifting their priorities to emphasize religious freedom and pluralism, and deemphasizing using the law to encourage the general public to live according to some gospel principles. But Church leaders rarely come out and say they’ve changed their minds, so that remains supposition.

    I don’t know to what extent this is actually what’s going on at BYU, but the ambiguity does seem to create a situation where leadership could impose their preferences and faculty could feel that it’s unclear what’s expected of them.

  11. enterprisecaptain

    I think we also need to refocus on an important point of the article. It’s not really about boundary maintenance and a few extremes. NONE of the current professors were willing to go on the record.

    Most professors are just trying to do their jobs, but are now working in a culture of fear and low morale. If the average teacher doesn’t feel like they can speak up in church Sunday School, or go to their bishop with ANY problem, or have a spouse who is questioning, without losing their job, that’s a sick culture, and it will die.

  12. your food allergy

    Clark’s approach to BYU is unfortunate and will accomplish two things. First, it will slowly degrade the academic quality of the university. Over time, you’re not going to recruit and retain the best and brightest (students or faculty) with this culture. Second, it will produce graduates with more brittle faith. It misses an opportunity to show students examples of how it is possible to be both faithful members and have social and political views that vary from the stereotypical orthodox. This not going to keep more people in the church over the long term.

    The whataboutism regarding DEI statements is an interesting point, considering that Harvard, MIT, and likely soon other universities are dropping these requirements.

  13. Jonathan Green

    How does one get pastoral care at risk to one’s employment? Ask the people who were willing to accept a prison sentence as the price of their pastoral care. Yes, people I know personally. Risking employment is a real cost, but it’s also something that happens to other people who discover that they can’t function effectively in the job they were hired to do for whatever reason. And if you can’t be a living example of faithful engagement with a discipline or profession, then you can’t be an effective mentor to BYU students.

    I don’t know if the current approach is right, or if it’s looking at the right criteria, but in every job everywhere, someone else will periodically have to decide if you’re worth keeping around. I’m prepared to believe that more transparency would be beneficial. I’m certain that paranoia about being fired for voting Democratic isn’t helping anyone.

    How would I feel about my employment being at the hands of a faceless committee? I would feel…exactly like I’ve felt for the last 25 years, because that’s what academic hiring is like everywhere. There’s probably an anonymous administrator or two in the mix as well.

    It’s silly to claim that BYU professors don’t enjoy high status jobs. Professors’ opinions get treated with respect in all kinds of high-prestige outlets. I have first-hand experience with employment at BYU-Idaho and several other schools, and the claim that BYU doesn’t pay well seems simply false to me. When I moved there for a temporary position, it meant a major salary increase – I would be earning nearly the same as what the tenured program head at my former employer, an R1 state flagship, was making. And saying you have no other employment options isn’t a great argument for why BYU should keep employing you, or why it should keep your program running. I also think it’s false: You do have useful skills and you do have options, but inside and outside academia.

    But if you think BYU stinks, please move on to greener pastures. When I was at BYU-Idaho, I was pretty d*rn proud of the program I built and my students and the institution I represented and its values. And I confess that I was also jealous of the institutional support and substantially greater resources available a few hundred miles to the south. If you don’t appreciate it, someone else will – someone who might find that healthy enrollments and institutional financial stability and the quality of life in Utah County is exactly what they always wanted. There’s a lot of LDS faculty members at colleges that aren’t doing nearly as well these days. Academics like to think that we are unique and irreplaceable, but we are not. If BYU has trouble attracting the kind of faculty it’s looking for, the most likely outcome is that it will have to offer somewhat higher salaries, not that a large number of positions will go unfilled.

  14. Hoosier

    @enterprisecaptain

    “It’s not really about boundary maintenance and a few extremes. NONE of the current professors were willing to go on the record.”

    None of the professors who Stack talked to, I think you mean. Did she quote a single professor in favor? Did she try? If the situation was truly so Orwellian, surely at least one professor would take the opportunity to get himself some cover?

    What WOULD an acceptable boundary maintenance policy look like? Could discomfited professors discredit that too just by refusing to go on record about it?
    ____

    @ your food allergy

    “The whataboutism regarding DEI statements is an interesting point, considering that Harvard, MIT, and likely soon other universities are dropping these requirements.”

    Gratefully. I should note that ideological litmus tests are not limited to DEI statements. Far stronger than such formal statements are the informal incentive structures created by ideological uniformity among the professoriate. Reputation is everything in academia, you need reputation to make it past discretionary journal editors and hiring and tenure boards. This creates a very powerful, distributed incentive structure capable of producing ideological convergence independent of any central institution.
    ___

    @A:

    Professors on average make a healthy middle- to upper-middle class income, so “comfortably remunerative” rather fits actually. If you don’t recognize that academia is a pretty comfortable and socially respected industry, particularly among wealthy and influential tastemakers, I don’t know what to tell you. Do you take the deference which academia has traditionally been afforded as some kind of right?

  15. Your food allergy

    Hoosier, the discussion is about ideological litmus tests imposed by a university’s leadership, and whether left-leaning universities have any moral authority where ideology and academic freedom might conflict. In my department at an eastern US university, there are two faculty members with outspoken right-wing views. One of them recently had a column printed in the WSJ that called out her own university and field. She remains on the faculty because the university knows that it must allow diversity of opinion to be a credible university. This is not the only such case that I know of.

    The point is that, to some extent, left-leaning universities do actually have moral authority in navigating conflict between ideology and academic freedom. BYU can do whatever it wants, but there will be costs to its functioning and status as a respected university.

  16. Stephen C.

    yourfoodallergy: Yes, it’s true that once you have tenure you are fairly secure (even though even there some are trying, see Amy Wax), but the litmus tests kick in at multiple junctures before you get to that point, so that is analogous to what BYU is doing with their background checks in the hiring process. I can list a dozen good researchers off the top of my head that wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting a TT position now with the social views they have. At BYU, despite what some are trying to claim, I’d bet my life that no tenured professor is going to be fired for supporting gay marriage, the point is putting in more safeguards so you don’t have people intentionally subterfuging on the Church’s position on sex and gender.

    Finally, one thing that is particularly galling about this is that many of the same “will nobody think of freedom of thought” people would be the first ones to drop a warning hint to a friend on the hiring committee if they knew a social traditionalist was applying, or just plain discriminate against social conservatives in general. So please, spare me. (Not saying this applies to everybody who has an issue with BYU’s policy, but enough).

    Also, to follow-up with Jonathan’s point, it’s interesting seeing people who have had tenure for years and who have become detached from the non-academic world (not that the two always go together) try to get sympathy. “But I might have a committee over me that decides on my employment, and that will cause anxiety, why are you not upset about this….” My dudes, welcome to the real world.

  17. Jack

    Let me tell you my opinion as a blue collar type–

    For all of the good that it does today’s academia is, sadly, the main vine from which the whole of Babylon springs. The western university is the grandchild of the Great and Abominable Church. Its “black robes of the false priesthood” and its four-tiered system of graduation come right out of the temple–and, in fact, replaced the original temple worship.

    So when I see the church trying to maintain its boundaries at BYU I give it my thunderous applause–because I know the GaAC is not going to win this round.

  18. Jonathan Green

    Jack, no, universities are awesome. They do a lot of great things. They’re going through a bit of a rough patch lately, but there’s a reason a lot of people want to work at a university. It’s just that universities aren’t special in all the ways that people sometimes think they are. Employers still want deliverables on schedule and at specified quality, even if the employer is a university.

  19. Anon

    I love the gaslighting. Stephen, you’ve had great entries in your oeuvre before, but this is the best I’ve ever seen.

  20. Anon

    A data point:

    BYU has reached out to me multiple times to apply for faculty jobs. I politely decline and note that my unorthodox views aren’t a good fit for BYU. For one of the openings they ended up hiring a friend of mine who doesn’t have my level of academic success, but still does good work and fits the culture of BYU. Did BYU’s culture cause them to sacrifice academic status? Yes, but they were still able to hire a quality faculty member who is also a good fit.

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