Dark days: New rules have BYU professors running scared

Midway through Jeffrey R. Holland’s hotly disputed “musket” speech — in which he admonished Brigham Young University’s faculty to take up metaphorical arms in defense of the faith’s opposition to same-sex marriage — the Latter-day Saint apostle pointed to a less familiar face: Clark Gilbert, the church’s “budding new commissioner of education” and his “traveling companion for the day.”

Music professor Jason Bergman was sitting 10 feet away in the Marriott Center that August day in 2021. He could not have predicted then that the popular apostle’s uncharacteristically harsh rhetoric was an omen of the next three years under Gilbert’s leadership, yet Bergman felt a growing unease.

Bergman, who had been teaching trumpet at a prestigious Texas university in 2018 when BYU recruited him, bristled at the increasing clampdown on LGBTQ+ activism he saw on the Provo campus (which eventually would include shutting down Y Mountain to rainbow colors) and at the denial of racism and misogyny that still existed.

“I had LGBTQ students and saw how they suffered,” Bergman said. “I started to pay attention to how people of color and women were treated. It was and continues to be hard for them.”

Then, in 2022, came a new employment contract, a sort of “loyalty oath,” in which faculty members (incoming and current) were expected to attest to their support of the church’s position on marriage, family and gender. To many, like Bergman, who felt pressured to agree, it went beyond the church’s own stance and seemed to carry an implicit threat: You can’t advance if you don’t sign off.

A convert and former bishop in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Bergman began to wrestle with his faith but feared discussing it with his local ecclesiastical leaders or fellow congregants. What if he said something in a Sunday school class that was seen as challenging on, say, polygamy, and it got back to his BYU superiors? He decided, “I can never speak up at church again.”

The whole point of the gospel “is to bring people to Christ through repentance and pastoral care,” Bergman said. “But when you make those people who can offer that care also control your job, you shut down the ability to be honest about concerns or problematic issues in virtually all settings.”

In the end, it seemed to him that faculty members were being asked to be “un-Christlike at a Christlike institution to keep our jobs.”

So, like many others, Bergman remained silent. He later found a position at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music.

BYU is “not safe,” Bergman said, “for anyone who doesn’t fit the orthodox mold.”

That seems to be a sentiment shared by a sizable number of faculty members who feel demeaned, disrespected, powerless — and afraid.

To many of them, the environment represents a throwback to the era of Ernest Wilkinson, BYU president from 1951 to 1970, who worked with conservative apostles and future church Presidents Joseph Fielding Smith and Harold B. Lee to remold church education.

“They targeted instructors they believed unorthodox, tightened the curriculum, and transformed the processes of hiring to favor teachers who shared their own ideas about orthodoxy,” Latter-day Saint historian Matthew Bowman writes in his latest book, “Joseph Fielding Smith: A Mormon Theologian.”

A pre-meme quip from the time mocked Wilkinson’s approach with the jab: “Free agency — and how to enforce it.”

Today, the threat of retribution apparently is so real that after dozens of interviews with present and former BYU faculty and administrators across many disciplines, not one current professor (including those with tenure, known as “continuing status”) would go on the record for this story.

“Low morale is pretty universal,” said a veteran teacher. “The default position is not to trust anybody.”

For their part, Latter-day Saint leaders in the global faith of 17.2 million members are ditching checklists in favor of choice and personal accountability on how to be a righteous member.

Church founder Joseph Smith famously taught that the best way to manage people was to teach members “correct principles” and they then “govern themselves” — an approach the faith’s latest “For the Strength of Youth” booklet follows along with its new design-it-yourself “ministering” program.

Even Clark Gilbert, who declined to be interviewed or comment for this story, espoused the freedom to choose and encouraged what he called in a recent speech at BYU-Idaho “moral agency.” But under his leadership, interviewees say, the Church Educational System seems to favor obedience to rigid doctrinal interpretations over personal choice.

If the school continues on this path, some academics warn, BYU may look less like a Latter-day Saint Notre Dame and more like Liberty University, an evangelical school founded by Jerry Falwell in Lynchburg, Virginia, which requires faculty members to agree to a lengthy list of Christian doctrines and policies, including opposition to same-sex marriage and transgender rights.

‘Unique and compelling’ mission

Spokesperson Carri Jenkins defends BYU’s policies.

The school has a “unique and compelling faith-based mission to develop disciples of Jesus Christ. Our employees and students come to BYU because they want to contribute to the university’s spiritual mission,” Jenkins wrote in an email. “We are grateful to have employees who are deeply committed to the values and aims of a BYU education.”

To that end, Gilbert, who previously laid off 43% of the staff at the church-owned Deseret News, has worked to “disrupt” faculty systems long in place at BYU and to make it more overtly orthodox.

Secular pressures “threaten to limit the valuable contribution of religious universities,” Gilbert, who supervises BYU campuses in Utah, Idaho and Hawaii as well as Salt Lake City’s Ensign College and a global online offering called BYU-Pathway Worldwide, argued in a 2022 essay for Deseret Magazine.

Another danger, he wrote, is “decoupling of faculty hiring from religious mission.”

In his first year as CES commissioner, Gilbert undertook an informal study of BYU faculty members and grouped them into four categories:

• The Faithful Core: They teach with the Holy Spirit and weave in church tenets as they understand them.

• The Supportive Center: They support the church but are not as enthusiastic as church leaders think they ought to be.

• The Secular First: They put “truth” from any source on an equal footing with the Latter-day Saint gospel.

• Open Foes: They write an article or take a public position contrary to that of the church.

When presenting this to a Salt Lake City dinner group of prominent Latter-day Saints, Gilbert said that the faith’s governing First Presidency “will not stand for a contrary opinion by professors at BYU,” according to several attendees, and that he would find a way to “get them out.”

Gilbert did not respond to a specific Salt Lake Tribune question about how he would remove them.

“I honestly don’t know any ‘open foes’ among the faculty,” said a senior professor, “or a single ‘bad apple.’”

Gilbert’s groupings “fail to recognize a variety of spiritual strengths that professors bring,” a female instructor wrote in an email. “They just don’t capture the thoughtful, heartfelt and spirit-filled ways that faculty approach their faith, their academic disciplines, the church and its leaders, or their stewardships at BYU.”

It’s “pretty hurtful to think that faculty might be being lumped into some of these categories,” she said. “So it’s probably not surprising there are tensions and distrust on all sides.”

The clearance office

The Ecclesiastical Clearance Office, which Gilbert leads as a general authority Seventy and as CES head, has say over hiring and firing. It is intended to “assist in the process,” said Jenkins, the BYU spokesperson, of ensuring that “employees in the Church Educational System commit to maintain gospel standards as part of their employment, including an annual ecclesiastical endorsement from their local bishop.”

The university “has been clear about its commitment to these expectations, which are consistent across [all church schools],” Jenkins said, and communicated to all prospective BYU employees.

It’s not clear, however, to everyone.

The guidelines about what is — and isn’t — church doctrine can be ambiguous, said Taylor Petrey, a Latter-day Saint religion professor at Kalamazoo College in Michigan. “What Clark Gilbert and some church leaders think is fixed and unquestionable church doctrine is not what others think.”

Take the new contract, which professors say goes beyond established protocols of belief and behavior.

On top of the traditional “recommend” standards, which are required for entrance to any of the faith’s sacred temples, lay leaders must affirm that candidates: have a “testimony” of church doctrine, including its teachings on marriage, family and gender; support current church policies and practices; have “demonstrated an exemplary and extended pattern (at least one year) of avoiding pornography.”

The Utah-based faith opposes same-sex marriage, for example, but does not necessarily penalize members who support it. Could a BYU professor who writes in support of LGBTQ+ rights or wears a rainbow pin be seen as bucking the church and in danger of workplace discipline, even dismissal? Could attending a same-sex wedding be seen as rebellion? Is saying that you are a feminist taking a stand against church leaders? Is discussing Heavenly Mother tacit disobedience? Will studying Brigham Young and slavery put you in jeopardy? Is criticizing Donald Trump against the church’s policy of political neutrality?

The administration recently appointed three BYU-Idaho teachers to the religious education department in Provo, including Ross Baron, co-author of an anti-evolution book. But the church has not taken a position on evolution and the flagship school has been teaching it for more than 50 years.

Other professors wonder why Baron’s position on evolution is not seen as disqualifying, while those who explore feminist ideas about priesthood, for example, are considered suspect.

‘A black box’

Like at most universities, BYU’s hiring begins in academic departments, where candidates are vetted, interviewed and then recommended up the ladder to deans.

Potential faculty members must already have an “ecclesiastical endorsement” from their local lay leader. After they are approved by the dean, they must meet with a Latter-day Saint general authority and, finally, be approved by the Ecclesiastical Clearance Office.

In the past, most candidates put forward by a department sailed through the other levels. During Gilbert’s administration, however, the ecclesiastical office has overruled those decisions, professors say, leaving many wondering whether it was vetoing general authority sign-offs.

Jenkins, BYU’s spokesperson, insists that is not happening.

“Neither the [CES] commissioner nor the Ecclesiastical Clearance Office can override a general authority interview,” she said. “The final arbiter of all hires is the church Board of Education [made up of the First Presidency and other top church leaders] and not the commissioner nor the Ecclesiastical Clearance Office.”

She added that the most recent statistics on ecclesiastical clearances “indicate that the overwhelming majority of employees (greater than 95%) are cleared for employment.”

Even so, these unspecified rejections can breed speculation and paranoia. And, because a few female candidates were rejected after all other interviews appeared to go well, faculty members said, some have asked if women were being singled out.

Before Gilbert came along, the history department “had been able to cobble together women faculty at a higher percentage than most,” said Ed Stratford, who recently left the university, where he had taught ancient Near East studies for 15 years.

The history department had recommended several female candidates who were “canceled without explanation or deemed ineligible,” Stratford said. “Women were more exposed than men.”

The reason given — “not a mission fit” — for rejecting prospective hires or denying advancements felt like an “umbrella euphemism,” the former history professor said. It’s a “cloak under which a number of measures that could not be explained out loud can be hidden.”

It is unclear who exactly made all these decisions and why, Stratford said. “It is a black box that doesn’t seem open to anyone but Clark Gilbert.”

He said BYU’s atmosphere under the CES boss was “a contributing factor” in his decision to change careers.

These days faculty members are also noting another worry.

Previously, spouses were “invited” to accompany a prospective hire to the general authority interview. In some cases, according to several candidates and faculty members, that now has become required.

It is “absolutely unprecedented” at other schools, said Petrey, the Kalamazoo College professor. “I have never heard of that.”

On top of that, some lay leaders have threatened to withhold candidate or continuing faculty members’ ecclesiastical endorsement if their spouses stop attending church.

A number of faculty members pin this on Gilbert.

Indeed, a longtime professor said he is “the most proactive and interventionist commissioner we have ever had. We’ve never seen anyone this aggressive.”

‘Creepy and Orwellian’

Frederick Gedicks was a professor of constitutional law and legal theory at BYU’s J. Reuben Clark Law School for 34 years, enjoying a successful career before retiring in the spring.

During the summer, though, one of his junior colleagues asked Gedicks to return as a part-time adjunct to team-teach a seminar on natural law and natural rights. Gedicks agreed and thought all it would entail would be a call to his bishop for “clearance.”

To his dismay, Gedicks discovered he was required to open an account with a “background investigating firm,” which advertised its expertise as “scraping” off the internet every bit of information about a person.

He asked a senior administrator about it and was told the company was checking only for criminal convictions in the past seven years and whether he had earned the degrees he claimed. The official denied any knowledge of what the Ecclesiastical Clearance Office might be looking for, Gedicks said, and closed by saying, more or less, “that if I didn’t like the process, I shouldn’t apply.”

Without specific details, Gedicks assumed the firm would prepare an in-depth report on him and his life’s work. “There is actually no disclosure of what the ECO is interested in,” he said, “so I can’t say, for sure, what it’s looking for.”

The legal expert began to wonder if there were items on his curriculum vitae that “could be seen as liabilities, my work with the ACLU and Obergefell [the landmark Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage],” he said. “I have gay relatives so we have hung a pride flag.”

These were aspects of his career that he is proud of, Gedicks said. “It just irritated me that the process was making me worry about them.” It also bothered him that “strangers were going to look at a report and make a decision about my spirituality without having met me.”

The process is “creepy and Orwellian,” Gedicks said. “They are operating on standards of spirituality that are not disclosed.”

Gedicks believed he would have been cleared but didn’t want to be part of the process so he called his colleague to say he would pass on teaching that summer.

“It betrays a deep lack of trust in the faculty who are already there, in people who apply,” he said, “and in bishops and [regional] stake presidents.”

The LGBTQ+ conundrum

Of all the issues that seem to raise the most red flags for faculty, any support of LGBTQ+ rights seems to be the most common.

After the new contract required employees to support the church’s stance on marriage, family and gender, a number of adjunct professors — including some with decades at BYU campuses — were dropped without explanation.

Like all universities, BYU does not have to cite why adjunct contracts went unrenewed, but many, including Sue Bergin, assume it was for their LGBTQ+ advocacy.

Bergin was let go in 2022 after teaching writing at the Provo school for 28 years. She suspects it was for wearing rainbow pins, telling her students that she believes in love for everyone, and for stating she has two gay brothers.

Because Bergin had worked for BYU’s public communications office when now-apostle Jeffrey Holland was the university president, she contacted him after she was let go to ask if someone at church headquarters “had a problem with me” since she didn’t know anyone at BYU who did.

She said the apostle wrote back to say, “it was not a board of trustees matter per se,” so he was going to “step out of this circle,” and urged her to contact Gilbert. She said he passed her along to another administrator, who offered no explanation.

Brock Kirwan, who taught neuropsychology at BYU for 15 years, was turned down to direct a study abroad program in Budapest, Hungary, as he had done in 2022.

Having a temple recommend, having “opted in” to the new contract, and having a temple-worthy wife were apparently not enough. Senior administrators gave him no idea what the problem was.

“Maybe I posted a few rainbows on social media,” quipped Kirwan, who took a job in May at the University of Pennsylvania as executive director of the Ivy League school’s MindCORE neuroimaging facility, “on behalf of my two queer kids.”

Jeff Dotson, who had taught in BYU’s Marriott School of Business since 2013, faced a conflict. Because of close family friends and relatives, he wondered how he could endorse the church’s position on same-sex marriage, while supporting his LGBTQ+ loved ones? He said he felt he would have to lie about his beliefs to keep his job.

Dotson began to suffer panic attacks, especially since his wife had recently stepped away from the faith over the issues, and turned to his bishop for counsel.

“I was forthright about my personal struggles, my family’s challenges, and my feelings about recent policy changes at the university,” he explained. “Despite what I believed to be a productive discussion, the bishop elected to revoke my endorsement a couple of days later. This decision initiated a chain of events where I was placed on probation and told I would be terminated in 90 days unless I resolved the issues with the bishop.”

He ultimately resigned at BYU, effective at the end of the 2023–24 academic year. Later, after a second interview, the bishop reinstated his endorsement, allowing him to finish out his employment.

Dotson ended up securing a tenured faculty position at Ohio State University.

“The shift from behavior-based to belief-based standards raises theological and practical concerns,” Dotson said. “I personally struggled with the idea of being required to have a testimony of policies, which are subject to change, as opposed to doctrines.”

Distinctive or diminished?

In his 2022 essay, “Dare to Be Different,” Gilbert outlined the ways universities that started as religious institutions lost their way. That, he vowed, would not happen at BYU on his watch.

“While religious identity requires courageous leadership, it also calls for deep structural alignment,” Gilbert wrote, taking “steps to ensure that religious governance remains strong… beginning with the selection of university leadership.”

All these changes, observers say, may have contributed to BYU’s decline in rankings by U.S. News & World Report from 61 in 2017 to 109 today. They are “already affecting BYU’s reputation,” Petrey said, “in the broader academic world.”

The new strategy “is a classic purity campaign to root out undesirable people and ideas and to create homogeneity,” he said. “But purity campaigns are always dangerous. They create division, stifle thought, and prioritize fear over faith.”

Some say they also undermine the worldwide church’s shift toward principle-based living and personal responsibility.

Jesus did not list “a dozen administrative steps they had to take…,” Holland said in a 2018 General Conference sermon. “No, he summarized their task in one fundamental commandment: ‘Love one another; as I have loved you. … By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.’”

The problem BYU faculty members are confronting is: What makes someone a true disciple — and who gets to decide?

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