Bryan Waterman

Wilkinson instituted a practice of beginning each fall semester with a "crisp statement" to all students: rioters would be expelled, no questions asked. Students unfailingly answered with a standing ovation.

Operating within an understanding of national events that saw both "campus unrest" and Democratic party victories as signs of a looming socialist state, Wilkinson returned to BYU from his failed political venture. In May 1965, at the end of his first semester back in office, he delivered an apocalyptic commencement address: "The Decline and Possible Fall of the American Republic." Citing rising rates of crime, juvenile delinquency, immorality, divorce, and public welfare, the president blamed these "evidences of moral decay" on the steady increase of federal power beginning with Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and extending to Lyndon Johnson's views on social security. Together with the "confiscatory" nature of income tax, an increase of Supreme Court influence, and the federal government's "deficit financing," these proofs (in Wilkinson's mind) of federally funded moral decline spelled the end of cherished American freedoms.

Wilkinson based his address largely on the words of Mormon leaders from Joseph Smith to the current church president and ardent cold warrior, David O. McKay. In particular he emphasized a "prophecy attributed to the Prophet Joseph that the Constitution of the United States would hang by a single thread, but be saved by the Elders of Israel," meaning church leaders and Mormon men generally. Having failed in his bid for public office, Wilkinson sought to act on "the duty of a university president" in "times of national and world crisis ... to speak forth boldly in behalf of what he considers to be the truth." Confessing his belief that "my generation has failed you [graduates] in preserving and strengthening the Constitution," Wilkinson vowed that he would mail copies of his talk, along with a compendium of anti‑communist "prophetic utterances," to every graduate, "with the hope that you may help stem the tide that is now engulfing our country."

Twice a day at Brigham Young University the campus stands still while the American flag is raised or lowered, the national anthem ringing out from loudspeakers mounted atop campus buildings. The patriotic display is, typically, the only disruption at the Mormon church‑owned school—rated "Most Nostalgic for the Reagan Era" by the Princeton Review—whose sprawling grounds are nestled against the Wasatch Front of the Rocky Mountains. A single student refusing to stop for the flag ceremony can generate a mild stream of protest letters to the official campus newspaper, the Daily Universe.

The student protest came in response to morning headlines announcing the firings of two controversial but popular faculty members: Cecilia Konchar Farr, an English professor who had reportedly upset church leaders and much of the BYU community with her public pro‑choice activism, and David Knowlton, an anthropology professor specializing in Latin American studies, who had critiqued the LDS church's American image in South America, pointing out reasons the church's full‑time proselytizing missionaries—most of whom come from the United States—were common targets for terrorists.

[The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Economist both] pointed out the unusual nature of the campus demonstrations, which included not only public protests, but also spray‑painted graffiti ("Farr should teach here" was scrawled across a south campus stairwell) and a large swastika burned into the administration building's carefully manicured lawn. (Student organizers denied responsibility.)

The Mormon tradition of celebrating the church's educational endeavors has some roots in pre‑Utah Mormon history, but dates most certainly from turn‑of‑the‑century debates over public schooling in Utah territory. When church leaders realized that the non‑Mormons among them had enough political power to make public schooling inevitable, they threw their weight into the public school movement and launched a public relations campaign to portray Mormons as "friends of education." In the early 1890s, following the church's disavowal of polygamy, leaders invited a number of prominent American educators, such as Harvard president Charles Eliot, to Utah to see for themselves if Mormonism's success depended on ignorant masses, as newspapers of the day claimed. Forgetting that Utah's public schools would not have existed without "gentile" (non‑Mormon) prodding, church leaders welcomed the praise the state's schools received during a 1913 National Education Association conference in Salt Lake City. In 1915 Mormons marked the entrance to Utah's exhibit at the Panama‑Pacific Exposition in San Francisco with Brigham Young's aphorism: "Education is the power to think clearly; the power to act well in the world's work, and the power to appreciate life." The church's reputation also benefitted from attention given to the "Utah Plan," a model educational system ("social uplift with a vengeance," in one historian's view) for the national Progressive Education movement in the 1920s. By the 1947 centennial of the Mormon pioneers' entry into the Salt Lake Valley, high claims for Mormon education (or Utah education) were commonplace among church members; mid‑twentieth‑century Mormon leaders pointed to LDS and Utah educational success as a sign of the church's divine nature, claiming that "the Latter‑day Saints present a picture of educational achievement second to none in Ame