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.
2025-02-15