Secular forces in the media, government and academia are thwarting religious expression and freedom on college campuses, the education commissioner for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints warned, vowing it wouldn’t happen at Brigham Young University or any of the faith’s other schools.
The address Friday night from general authority Seventy Clark Gilbert to the J. Reuben Clark Law Society Annual Fireside came in the wake of a Salt Lake Tribune special report detailing the extra level of scrutiny BYU faculty members have faced under Gilbert’s leadership since 2021.
Gilbert, who oversees all of the faith’s seminaries, institutes and schools, declined to be interviewed or to answer specific questions for The Tribune story about his approach to hiring and firing at BYU.
In his speech, however, he reaffirmed his insistence on church governance at religious educational institutions. Many universities, including Harvard, were founded by religious groups, but they eventually lost their spiritual moorings, Gilbert said, due to three factors:
• Outsourcing funding to “donors, state and federal government, and other nonreligious entities.”
• Ceding the choice of school leadership to nonbelievers, “who increasingly felt less accountable to their sponsoring religious institutions.”
• Allowing peer review of scholarly work to “increasingly [come]…from people who did not support or, in some cases, were even antagonistic, to the religious priorities of the university.”
Such dependence on outsiders will not occur at Latter-day Saint schools, pledged Gilbert, because the church’s entire education system is primarily self-funded and BYU’s board of trustees includes the faith’s governing First Presidency.
All BYU faculty candidates “are interviewed either by the president of the university or the academic vice president,” Gilbert said, which can include as many as 200 interviews a year. This system is meant to guarantee that all those who work there are committed to its religious mission.
For BYU to become “the Christ-centered, prophetically directed university of prophecy,” Gilbert said, “our people must feel both a personal and an institutional stewardship to God. This stewardship includes civic, intellectual and ministerial accountability.”
(The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) Clark Gilbert speaks at the J. Reuben Clark Law Society 2025 Annual Fireside. He says there are efforts afoot to "suppress religious viewpoints and practices.”
He cautioned his listeners that “there are concerted efforts to shame and intimidate believers who have traditional moral values and to suppress religious viewpoints and practices.”
Latter-day Saints “must be prepared to counter skeptical audiences with persistence, confidence and rigor,” Gilbert said, “as well as grace and humility for our voices to eventually be heard.”
Gilbert has offered these insights in other venues, including an essay, “Dare to Be Different,” he wrote for church-owned Deseret Magazine after he became education commissioner.
He did not mention in the article or his recent speech the additional requirement that faculty members have a “testimony” of the church’s teachings on “marriage, family and gender,” a demand that goes beyond what the Utah-based faith expects of its 17.2 million members worldwide.
Members can support same-sex marriage, for instance, without fear of losing their “temple recommends,” which permit participation in the faith’s most sacred ceremonies, but BYU faculty cannot.
That extra requirement cuts to the heart of the issue with a number of BYU faculty members — including whether professors or prospective instructors embrace the church’s stances on these culture war issues in the same way some in the hierarchy and lay bishops do. That is worrisome to employees because those ecclesiastical leaders are among the school’s employment gatekeepers.
Former BYU administrator speaks out
(Ben Schilaty) Ben Schilaty worked in BYU's Honor Code Office from 2019 to 2023.
Two days after Gilbert’s address, Ben Schilaty shared his experience as an openly gay administrator in BYU’s Honor Code Office from 2019 to 2023, saying it was “incredibly wonderful” to work at the Provo school.
“I did not want to work anywhere that I couldn’t be open about my orientation,” Schilaty, who declined to be interviewed for this story, wrote on his website. “I literally jumped for joy when I was offered the job.”
In 2020, when the school’s Honor Code briefly allowed same-sex romantic behavior on campus and then quickly reverted to the original prohibition, many students stopped by Schilaty’s office, he wrote, “crying tears of anger and fear.”
He was invited to a few meetings to share his perspective that same-sex dating should be allowed, and, while that position didn’t prevail, “I was never reprimanded or disciplined for holding and sharing that position.”
A “high-level administrator” even shook Schilaty’s hand, he recalled, and told him, “We are so blessed to have you here at BYU.”
That all began to change after 2021, Schilaty said, when Gilbert arrived as church education commissioner.
That summer, Schilaty received a two-page letter complaining about an article he had written in Y Magazine. The correspondent said he “was deeply concerned that BYU would employ someone like me.”
The letter writer “stated that he was a longtime donor,” Schilaty said, “and would no longer be giving money to BYU because of me.”
After apostle Jeffrey R. Holland’s controversial “musket” speech in August 2021, Schilaty “felt like the world shifted underneath me that day. I was no longer sure what I was allowed to say about my orientation at work.”
From there, it got worse for the administrator.
‘You might get fired’
A few months later, Schilaty said, he was warned not to “say anything that could be interpreted as you not sustaining the brethren.”
When he applied to three jobs on campus, the Ecclesiastical Clearance Office, which Gilbert leads, called his congregation’s bishop each time to ask about him.
After the third call, the lay leader told the office not to phone back, Schilaty explained in his essay, “that he had already told them I was worthy to work at BYU.”
Schilaty found himself sobbing in his car, he wrote, “overwhelmed with panic that someone was trying to get me fired.”
He sought advice from a therapist who worked at BYU and, by the second meeting, Schilaty recounted, the therapist said bluntly, “Ben, the truth is you might get fired.”
As Schilaty braced for the worst, he was asked to meet with a school vice president he barely knew. He said the administrator explained the importance of BYU employees being committed to Jesus Christ, focusing on the Savior, and understanding that their job was to strengthen students’ testimonies.
Finally, Schilaty interrupted him and said, “I don’t know why we’re having this conversation. I am deeply committed to the gospel of Jesus Christ and the mission of BYU. I don’t know where you are on Thursday evenings, but I’m working in the temple every week.”
He was told, Schilaty wrote, that the “commissioner of church education” (his essay did not name Gilbert) had reached out to BYU’s president to express concern about something the gay employee had said in a presentation at a BYU gathering on religious freedom.
During the Q&A portion of the forum, he was asked why “so many” LGBTQ+ people leave the church, Schilaty wrote. “As part of my answer, I said that some members are excommunicated for marrying same-sex partners.”
The vice president then instructed him “not to share this anymore,” Schilaty recalled. The man then added; “It might be true, but it’s not helpful.”
Two months later, Schilaty quit.
He is now happily employed at Utah Valley University in neighboring Orem, he wrote, where his guidance and mentoring of LGBTQ+ students are welcomed and appreciated.
Friends told him if had just not talked about his orientation or shared his lived experiences, many of these painful moments at BYU would not have happened.
“But I would have felt a worse kind of pain,” Schilaty wrote. “The deeper pain of hiding.”
