Brigham Young University - Mormon Academic Central

Friday, November 08, 2019
Provo, Utah, United States
Many U.S. institutions of higher education are affiliated with religious institutions, mostly the Roman Catholic church or various Protestant denominations, including Duke University, the school I went to as an undergrad. In some cases, the ties to their churches have weakened or more commonly the religions themselves have changed over time with modern culture to make the religiously-connected schools barely different in academic and social atmosphere from entirely secular ones.  Is there really much difference nowadays between Georgetown, Duke, and Oberlin on the religiously-affiliated side and Yale, Stanford, or Northwestern on the completely secular one?
The exceptions are some schools affiliated with very ideologically conservative churches like Bob Jones, Oral Roberts, and Liberty to name a few of the larger ones that come to mind.  I was briefly on campus at Bob Jones University in Greenville, SC about five years ago to go to their art museum too and shortly before on the same trip just off-campus of Liberty in Lynchburg, VA. At those schools the atmosphere is very different from the bastions of ultra-“progressive” leftism that most American universities have nowadays become.  
Ditto from Brigham Young University in Provo, UT, the largest university run by the Mormon (LDS) church.  It is my understanding that tuition at Brigham Young is free for students whose families are in good-standing with the church, which includes tithing 10% of their incomes to the church, sort of like a long-term prepaid tuition.  This makes a lot of sense for large families or a church that encourages them.  While a family’s income (and thus tithing requirement) doesn’t necessarily rise with having more kids, there are no additional tuition costs per additional child. This contrasts with most middle-class people who fret about being able to afford more children partly because of the costs of putting them through college.
The BYU campus is overall quite attractive but mostly modern. In fact I saw very little in the way of older buildings on campus and many strikingly modern new ones.   And they even let visitors park free on campus in special lots!  Architecture aside, though, walking around campus feels like an America of a different age, maybe that of the late 1980s when I was in college or maybe even one I haven’t seen in person myself, that before the radicalization of the 1960s around the time I was born. 
I couldn’t help but think, “OMG, it’s like an entire university without any SJWs!”  Where are the kids with dozens of face piercings, clown-colored hair, bountiful body art, and buttons on their backpacks promoting the latest faddish radical cause? Maybe at the University of Utah?  There’s no strict dress code like at Bob Jones where women have to wear skirts and men collared shirts with ties, but the general rule seems to be modesty and normality – don’t look like a freak!  
Being a few days before Veteran’s Day the ROTC programs were also having a holiday commemoration ceremony outside the student center during my visit. There are probably more students in ROTC on this campus than anywhere else other than the military academies.  That’s a nice contrast to most college campuses nowadays where you are more likely to run into some kind of a protest or rally in support of one or another extremist left-wing cause.
My main stop on campus was the art museum which I found to be reasonably impressive for a university collection. Except for a few big ones like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford, most university art museums tend to be quite small and feature mostly temporary exhibitions of very contemporary stuff. BYU’s, though, shows off a significant spread of paintings from its permanent collection, mostly American works and some European religious are by lesser-known painters but a few well-known names too. Many are by Mormon artists and some paintings on events from early Mormon history.   
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