A School In Zion

Late last winter I was feeling pretty blue about something or other that didn't seem quite right at the university and found myself wondering if all the effort was really worth it. As is so often the case with such monumental matters, I don't even remember now what it was, but whatever it was it made those winter days a bit darker than usual.

That led to a question I found myself asking late one night in the darkened study of the President's Home: "Should the Church even have a university at all?" Does what we do here justify the effort, the expense, the toil, the tithing; and is it worth the pain? After all, the Church has disengaged in recent years from a number of operations, including not only hospitals and hotels but, of far more interest to us, schools as well. Should the Church, I wondered, continue to fund BYU if resources are limited, and an increasing number of students cannot attend, and if individuals at the university--or in any way the university collectively--do not measure up to the expectation that so many generations have had for us?

I sat there that night thinking of what I said at my first university conference in 1980--that I was gambling everything I had on one single and preeminent principle. That cardinal supposition, that consuming vision, was that we could be an excellent university, indeed a truly great university, "an educational Mt. Everest" if you will, and still be absolutely, unequivocally, forever faithful to the Gospel of Jesus Christ and to His restored Church which sponsors us. In fact, we would accomplish the one because of the other, never in spite of it. My presidential belief at that time, the only one that seemed to me to justify BYU's existence, was that we could have it both ways, that superb scholarship and rock-solid faith are as inextricable in our future as they are essential to it. I spoke that day of "scholar saints" who could make this university one of the latter-day wonders of the world.

From that first meeting to this very hour I have believed that such idealism, such passion for the ultimate possibility, is incumbent upon us all. "It's but a base, ignoble mind/That mounts no higher than a bird can soar," Gloucester reminded Suffolk (Henry VI, Part 2, II.i.13). I believed we could somehow, someway mount higher, and I was certain God expected our minds to soar. Henry Thoreau had mused by the side of his woodland pond that "in the long run, men hit only what they aim at" ("Economy," Walden, p. 18). So, not failure but low aim would be the most severe indictment of a Latter-day Saint fortunate enough to be at BYU.

Surely we of all people are moved by that "indomitable urge" to expand life, to enlarge it, to improve it. That is our hope, our heritage, our theology. From the beginning ours has been a soul stretching belief. "Thy mind, O man!" said the Prophet Joseph Smith, "if thou wilt lead a soul to salvation, must stretch as high as the utmost heavens, and search into and contemplate the darkest abyss, and the broad expanse of eternity" (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, p. 137). Only then, he said, could we "contemplate the mighty acts of Jehovah in all their variety and glory" (Teachings, p. 163).

The mighty acts of Jehovah? I have believed that BYU should be one of the "mighty acts of Jehovah." To be less than that for His purposes and His people seemed to me a blasphemy.

With such aspirations for us all, I suppose it isn't surprising that sometimes in the dark of the night I feel we are not measuring up. Soaring is, after all, difficult work. And yes, I do remember that Nauvoo, the city of Zion, had been laid out to feature two Latter-day Saint monuments: a temple and a university. But I also know that scholastic tension between the sacred and profane has marked most of this world's history, and if the dream isn't really attainable, then why have a BYU at all?

The fraction of the Church's youth we can serve decreases dramatically each year; we have a fixed BYU student numerator and an exploding church membership denominator. So the only challenge we can ever address is the qualitative one. And if we can't win that war--if Jerusalem really can't find and fellowship Athens and seal her firmly into the family group sheet--then let's stop holding all these cottage meetings in Provo.

Would it not, I wondered that night, be better to use the tithing resources of the Church in a more fundamental way--for missionary work or temple building or humanitarian aid--and let our students attend any one of a thousand other universities that don't pretend to such millennial aspirations? If BYU were ever to look and act just like any other university, who needs it? Not, I am certain, the tithe payers of the Church.

Those are awfully dark thoughts but then I've learned that most thoughts at 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning are pretty dark (Thank heaven for sleep. Surely the Lord knew what He was doing when He put a night between two days).

Thanks to my wife, I long ago established the habit of reading at least some scripture every night before retiring, however late it might be. So after those dark thoughts, I turned a lamp back on and reached for my scriptures. For whatever reason, I decided not to pursue the sequential reading that I do most nights. I simply felt to open the scriptures at random and find something fresh and unfamiliar. Now I don't believe that every time anybody opens to a scripture it is necessarily an inspired act. Sometimes it is, but I am equally confident that sometimes it isn't. Certainly on those evenings when the book has fallen open to the book of Numbers or the Bible dictionary I have felt less than inspired. But this night I opened the book without prejudice and with, I think, a special measure of hope in my heart. Literally and truly the first words on which my eyes fell were these in Section 97 of the Doctrine and Covenants: "Behold, I say unto you, concerning the school in Zion, I, the Lord, am well pleased that there should be a school in Zion" (D&C 97:3, emphasis added).

The words hit me like a jackhammer. I chilled and blushed and chilled again. I stood up and walked around the room. I'm not embarrassed to tell you I was emotional (you know me well enough to have assumed that--I blubber if the sun comes up). And there across the street just a few yards from our home I thought I saw the statue of Karl G. Maeser smile. (Karl wears a pretty stern look all day there atop his pedestal, so perhaps he smiles every morning at about 1:30 just to relax, but I hadn't seen him do it before!)

So I took something of a lightning strike that night, and I almost felt required to apologize: "Lord, I really don't harbor doubts about why we have BYU, even on the bad days. Think of it as a joke, a kind of bad joke I was playing on my neighbor over there, President Maeser. Please don't garnish my wages or my salvation. And please don't send me with President Cluff to search on horseback for Zarahemla." I even considered singing the school song. "There has to be a 'school in Zion,' you idiot, because there can be no Zion without it!" By this time I suspected that the Brigham Young statue was smiling too.

Now I know the school referred to in Section 97 is technically not BYU. But BYU is, nevertheless, a legitimate academic descendant of the School of the Prophets, and I got a pat on the backside that night that suggested I stop whining and go to work--that there is an inheritance to be claimed.

My purpose today, then, is to answer in some detail my own dark and fleeting question. I would like to suggest why I think the Lord is well pleased that there be a "school in Zion," why His servants have kept a Brigham Young University when almost all other Church academies are gone, why I think we need it yet, and why I am committed more than ever to its rightful destiny, a university worthy to place before the all-searching eye of God.

As I have already said, the most conspicuous and fundamental reason for a "school in Zion" is plainly and simply because it is our theology. You know the verses: "Do the work of printing and selecting and writing books for schools in this church, that little children also may receive instruction before me as is pleasing unto me" (D&C 55:4).

"Teach ye diligently and my grace shall attend you, that you may be instructed more perfectly in . . . things both in heaven and in the earth, and under the earth; things which have been, things which are, things which must shortly come to pass; ... a knowledge also of countries and of kingdoms" (D&C 88:78-79).

"Seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning even by study and also by faith" (D&C 88:118).

"Study and learn, and become acquainted with all good books, and with languages, tongues, and people" (D&C 90:15).

Our knowledge will rise with us in the resurrection, we are told, and most sobering of all is the warning: "It is impossible for a man to be saved in ignorance" (D&C 131:6), for "the glory of God is intelligence, or, in other words, light and truth," and "Light and truth forsake that evil one" (D&C 93:36, 37).

So part of the message of that restored gospel of Jesus Christ, part of the light now shining into what have been dark ages indeed, is the divine counsel that "to be learned is good if we harken unto the counsel of God" (2 Nephi 9:29).

Surely the most powerful and compelling of all the glorious principles to reenter the world by way of Palmyra is the doctrine of inherent deity. Dare we think it? Could we say it? Would we be labeled blasphemers and heretics for believing it--that we are all literally the spiritual offspring of God, His rightful daughters and sons, who through a kind of divine DNA and the atoning mediation of that greatest of all heirs, the Lord Jesus Christ, have been given the chance to somewhere, someday by "diligence and obedience" (D&C 130) know what God knows and do what God does? From those most humble beginnings in Fayette to the magnificence of the final Follett sermon, the Prophet Joseph kept rolling back the firmament, kept letting us glimpse, however myopically, into the vast expanse of our own eternity.

"God has created man with a mind capable of instruction," he wrote, "and a faculty which may be enlarged in proportion to the heed and diligence given to the light communicated from heaven to the intellect" (Teachings, p. 51). No wonder we would be "ardent seekers after knowledge," as President George Q. Cannon described the Latter-day Saints. No wonder we would be "the inseparable friends of truth" (Juvenile Instructor, April 1, 1892). No wonder Joseph would leave the warning, "A man can be saved no faster than he gains knowledge" (Teachings, p. 217).

It is axiomatic that some truths matter much more than others, but an educated LDS mind would know that and, having circumscribed all truth into one great whole, would order and integrate and prioritize truth, mixing knowledge with virtue, love and the saving ordinances of God. In reflecting on the atrocities of the Holocaust, George Steiner observed, "We now know that a man can listen to Bach at sundown, read Goethe in the evening, and the next day . . . gas his fellowmen. What grows up inside literate civilization that seems to lead to barbarism? What grows up," he says, "is information without knowledge, knowledge without wisdom, and wisdom without . . . compassion." A Latter-day Saint, on the other hand, would listen to Bach at sundown, read Goethe in the evening, and the next day die for his fellowmen, if necessary.

"The Lord requireth the heart and a willing mind," Joseph taught (D&C 64:34). Your mind and heart must expand together. "You must enlarge your souls towards each other," he pied, "Let your hearts expand [as you learn], let them be enlarged toward others" (Teachings, p. 228).

And what of Brigham Young? The longer I live and the more I read, the more fitting I find it that this largest and nearly last remnant of the academies established under his pioneer leadership still bears and perpetuates his name. As his advocate Hugh Nibley says, "There never was a man more undeviatingly consistent and rational in thought and utterance."

Brigham Young's principal schoolmaster was his beloved Joseph Smith. Of Joseph he said, "He took heaven figuratively speaking, and brought it down to earth; and he took the earth, brought it up, and opened up, in plainness and simplicity, the things of God; and that is the beauty of his mission" (Journal of Discourses, 5:332).

How plain was that view of life? How simple? To Brigham Young, quite simple. "What are we here for?" Brigham asks and answers. "To learn to enjoy more, and to increase in knowledge and experience. The object of this existence is to learn . . . " he taught. "How gladly would we understand every principle pertaining to science and art, and become thoroughly acquainted with every intricate operation of nature . . . What a boundless field of truth and power is open for us to explore! We are only just approaching the shores of the vast ocean of information that pertains to this . . . world, to say nothing of that which pertains to the heavens" (JD, 14:228; 9:167).

His metaphor for life was the academy. "The treasures of the earth are merely to provide us with room and board while we are here at school," he said, "being made for the comfort of the creature, not for his adoration. They are made to sustain and preserve the body while procuring the knowledge and wisdom that pertain to God and His kingdom, in order that we may preserve ourselves, and live forever in His presence."

"And when we have lived millions of years in the presence of God and angels . . . shall we then cease learning? No, or eternity ceases."

"We shall never cease to learn, unless we apostatize . . . Can you understand that?" he would exclaim (JD, 8:135; 6:344; 3:203).

Obviously that kind of effort would require a struggle, but it was a struggle Brigham was always willing to ask of the Saints. Indeed, he was quite specific about his expectations: "After suitable rest and relaxation there is not a day, hour or minute that we should spend in idleness, but every minute of every day of our lives we should strive to improve our mind and to increase our faith in the holy gospel." And, "The more knowledge the elders have, the better" (JD, 13:310; 8:54).

And of course for him knowledge meant knowledge of everything. "Learn everything that the children of men know. Every true principle, every true science, every art and the knowledge that men possess, or that they ever did or ever will possess, is from God. We should take pains and pride to . . . rear our children so that learning and education of the world may be theirs. Teach the children, give them the learning of the world and the things of God." To the mothers he said, "we will appoint you to a mission to teach your children their duty; and instead of ruffles and fine dresses to adorn the body, teach them that which will adorn their minds" (JD, 14:210; 14:220).

"We are trying to teach this people to use their brains . . . " he would plead. "Whatever duty you are called to perform, take your minds with you, and apply them to what is to be done" (JD, 11:328; 8:137).

Apparently Brigham had an experience or two when someone must have forgotten that. "In things pertaining to this life, the lack of knowledge manifested by us as a people is disgraceful. . . . I have seen months and months in this city when I could have wept like a whipped child to see the awful stupidity of the people" (JD, 11:105; 2:280).

That pain was the pain of a prophet, not merely a pedagogue. He knew why we needed to be intelligent. "All our educational pursuits are in the service of God, for all these labors are to establish truth on the earth . . . that we may increase in knowledge, wisdom, understanding, . . . [in] the power of faith and in the wisdom of God, that we may become fit subjects to dwell in a higher state of existence and intelligence than we now enjoy . . . If men would be great in goodness, they must be intelligent," he would say to any who would listen (Manuscript History of the Church, in LDS Church Archives, Salt Lake City, Sept. 22, 1851, vol. 21, p. 88).

That is our theology. But surely one need not have a school to learn. No, and many didn't (and won't), including Joseph and Brigham themselves, who knew that not having a school would make education harder and maybe a lot less likely. They wanted structure and synergism for their young scholars. They needed, in short, a place in which to assemble and intensify their education. Ergo, reason number two: they needed a "school in Zion"--like we need BYU. It may be too much to call ourselves Zion in the 1980s, but we can be a place of gathering, not only for an academic family five times the population of the Southern Utah city in which I was born, but a gathering place for (in Brigham Young's words) "the [knowledge and] treasures surviving in the earth from every age and culture."

Immediately after arriving in the valley, President Young initiated such a gathering. "Secure at least [one] copy of every valuable treatise on education," he told the saints, "every book, map, chart, or diagram that may contain interesting, useful, and attractive matter, to gain the attention of children, and to cause them to love to learn to read."

This would include, he said, "every historical, mathematical, philosophical, geographical, geological, astronomical, scientific, practical, and all other . . . useful and interesting writings" (Millenial Star, 10:85).

"The business of the elders of this church," he said, " . . . is to gather up all the truths in the world pertaining to life and salvation, to the gospel we preach, to mechanisms of every kind, to the sciences, and to philosophy, wherever they may be found in every nation, kindred, tongue and people and bring it to Zion" (JD, 7:283).

"All . . . science and art belong to the saints, and they . . . [must] rapidly collect the intelligence that is bestowed upon the nations, for all this intelligence belongs to Zion. All the knowledge, wisdom, power and glory that have been bestowed upon all the nations of the earth, from the days of Adam till now, must be gathered home to Zion" (JD, 10:224; 8:279).

And, of course, gathering the stuff of learning, the things of learning or even the students of learning was not enough. So, reason number three. What any true Zion would need--and the present world needs even more--are those educated and spiritual and wise who will sort, sift, prioritize, integrate and give some sense of wholeness, some spirit of to great eternal truths. At the turn of the 20th century, Josiah Royce, writing about the great intellectual achievements of our time, observed that man has, "through the richness of the intellectual quest, become more knowing, more clever and more skeptical." But we have not, Royce warned, "become more profound or more reverent. Nor have we found a way to put our learning in the context of the eternal."

Everyone even remotely associated with education knows as well as I that from Royce's day to this, the problem with higher education has been the perpetuation of dividedness, separateness, departmentalization, specialties, subspecialties and subspecies of subspecialties. Universities in this nation are informational Nagasakis, higher educational Hiroshimas. The "watchmen on the tower" cry out for those who will integrate, coalesce, clarify, and give both order and rank to important human knowledge. This generation has students who will not dare to ask the great human questions because the answers may appear to be somewhere in the bottom of an academic dumpster, one nearly exploding at the seams from curricular cramming. "The connectedness of things is what the educator [must pursue]," said Mark Van Doren. "No human capacity is great enough to permit a vision of the world as simple, but if the educator does not aim at the vision no one else will, and the consequences are dire when no one does" (Liberal Education, 1950, p. 115).

So I am convinced that the Lord needs a "school in Zion" now, even more than a century ago, to help a generation, indeed to help an entire Church membership, sort through much intellectual nonsense that is inevitably in an inert swamp of facts. More than any time in human history our students need--like Matthew Arnold needed--a Latter-day Saint Sophocles to teach them, to whom they would gladly give " . . . special thanks, [for an] even-balanced soul,/Who saw life steadily and saw it whole" ("To a Friend").

How might we at BYU cultivate this larger sense of connectedness and community? I do worry about faculty, staff and administrative segmentation that keeps us from being a full-fledged "school in Zion." Fortunately the aspirations I spoke of earlier work in our favor. The ennobling climb toward an Everest allows us--indeed requires us--to take the high ground, gives us a place to view the broader, more liberating, more eternal "general" education, if you will, which is so fundamental to the growth of the human mind and development of the human soul.

That is the real merging we someday have to do here--not only organizing and pruning and prioritizing the world's knowledge all about us but also fusing gospel insights and gospel perspectives into every field and discipline of study.

I would quickly note that some disciplines probably lend themselves a little more directly to gospel insights and influence--to the connections and balance that BYU ought to offer--than others, so please spare me the sardonic questions as to whether there is a Mormon mathematics or a consecrated chemistry. There probably isn't, but I would say there are Mormon mathematicians and consecrated chemists and endowed engineers and historians. And that should be an advantage in our integration of truth.

I am making an unabashed appeal for a distinctly LDS approach to education--an approach best featured on this campus by our present university-wide efforts in religious, honors and general education.

Now I do not want my next statement misunderstood. (Please, do not misunderstand.) I do not believe that Brigham Young University, at least with current policies governing both funding and mission, will or should ever aspire to be a great research university as the world defines research universities. I do believe, however, with all my heart that we should aspire to become the finest undergraduate university on the face of the planet. Now the misunderstanding I don't want is a knee-jerk, unwarranted assumption that we will therefore have no serious scholarship required of us nor have a significant, albeit careful selection of graduate and professional programs. I did not say we would be a four-year college. I said we would be a university.

But we will never, I think, be an M.I.T. or a Cal Tech, nor should we. However, to be a world-class undergraduate teaching university we have to be a lot smarter and a lot better than we are now. For the purposes of an absolutely unequalled liberal arts, general and religious education, we have to have teachers who investigate and integrate and know something, who are ambitious about Godly growth--what Joseph Smith would call "enlargement." We have to have teachers who are growing in precisely the same manner we expect students to grow--and that requires significant scholarship.

In this day and age of lamenting the state of public education, and laying the blame squarely at the feet of the universities and their colleges of education who train and place teachers in those public schools, isn't there something here that BYU can uniquely do, some way we not only can but should "stand and shine," to use John Masefield's description of a true university? Don't we have both the advantage and the duty to step forward and rally the whole country in this time of national challenge?

If BYU is to lend something unique to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in this last dispensation, something we can do that makes us a city set on a hill, a light that cannot be hid, wouldn't it be to produce just such an unequalled, and unfragmented and undivided, "school in Zion?" To be known as the place where one can obtain a grand, consummate, unparalleled and integrated undergraduate education, with whatever other graduate and professional programs we can afford, is a reputation I confess to coveting. That is the mission we wrote for BYU eight years ago, and it is our mission today.

Then why aren't we doing better than we are? In many ways, actually, we are doing superbly. I am thrilled, for example, with the increasingly vigorous contributions in Religious Education. Our colleagues there have developed a strong core curriculum grounded on the Standard Works, they have been very diligent in not letting it get watered down, they have a truly dramatic array of symposia and publications coming out of the Religious Studies Center and, perhaps most gratifying of all, they have designed an absolutely scintillating Book of Mormon seminar for transfer faculty in various disciplines who teach that course.

As for the Honors and General Education programs, I consider them to be precious jewels in the BYU crown and at the very heart of the most important contributions BYU can make to the world of higher education. A great deal that is very exciting to me is happening in these university-wide programs, and more will happen. Our sisterhood and brotherhood and gospel-based goodwill here give us a distinct GE advantage at BYU in our ability to cross disciplinary and departmental lines. We simply have a very muscular leg up on the rest of the academic world that way. We must seize that advantage. Having focused for several years primarily on structural arrangements, curricular issues and winning faculty support, we are now free to pursue informed, inspired, liberating education.

May I suggest, however, that we must do a better job of communicating the very practical value of general education to our students and to the public. I think it is very important for us not to create an unnecessary cleavage between the world of the academy and the world of work, especially not in the minds of tuition-paying parents and higher education's increasing number of critics. We need to do a better job of showing the crucial link between general education and profession or vocation.

"If members of a democracy are to be . . . effective contributors [to the community]," writes Professor Stephen Cahn, "each should be provided with the necessary skills, social orientation, and intellectual perspective to succeed in some wide fields of occupational endeavor. But such [true] vocational education must not be confused with narrow job training. Animals are broken in and trained; human beings ought to be enlightened and educated. An individual [trained but not educated] is unable to adjust in the face of changing conditions and is thus stymied in a world of flux.

"Sidney Hook [adds]: 'There is a paradox connected with vocational training. The more vocational it is, the narrower it is: the narrower it is, the less likely it is to serve usefully in earning a living . . . '

"[Therefore,] broadened vocational preparation is not only of use to the future worker himself; its benefit to society is apparent to anyone who has ever been forced to deal with the mechanized mind of a bureaucrat" (Education and the Democratic Ideal, p. 11).

Lastly, across the breadth of our university effort we must respect and elevate the status of the students themselves. They must be seen as more than what Henry Rosovsky called at Harvard "the lumpenproletariat." She is someone's perfect daughter, he is someone's precious son--and they are certainly brothers and sisters to us all. Furthermore, they are coming to us better prepared than ever before, so we need to expect more of them and of ourselves while they are here. Missionary-like, we need to make this the best four years of their lives.

I have always loved Elder Marion D. Hanks' telling of the John Trebonius story. John Trebonius used to take off his hat upon entering the classroom when it was the Germanic custom of the day for professors to keep them on. When asked why he was so needlessly kind to his pupils, he replied, "These little boys will some day be men, and I do not know but that there sits among them one who will change the destiny of mankind. I take off my hat in deference to what they may become." Sitting in his classroom, watching the ways of that gentle man, was the young Martin Luther. (See The Gift of Self, p. 126.)

A fourth and, for today, final reason for a "school in Zion" is essentially a symbolic one, but a symbol with genuine substance. Elder John A. Widtsoe once wrote: "The whole of life is education . . . No wonder, therefore, that in the correct philosophy of life, schools and other devices for the training of man's powers are foremost. Education is and must be carried onward fully and abundantly in the church of Christ. The support of education is, indeed, one test of the true church" (A Rational Theology, p. 174).

That is a stunning affirmation of the earlier comments about the LDS doctrine of learning. But what happens when the true church grows so large and has such call upon its resources that it can perhaps support only the idea, only the concept of education, rather than actual schools in which to provide it?

In such a time of growth and need, could not the one true Church profit magnificently from at least one gleaming evidence of the Church's "support of education," one university sparkling, however distantly, for those saints who now cluster in their localities, with a somewhat altered sense of gathering than Zion once had? Could not BYU, both symbolically and substantially, be an unparalleled, incomparable blessing to every one of those saints, from Nigeria to Newfoundland, who may never, ever set foot on BYU soil, let alone dream of having one of their own? Could it not be a house of hope and glory to every member of the Church everywhere who is trying to grow, trying to learn, trying to be strong and safe and spiritual in a very secular world? I should surely think so. We could, for the whole Church, provide what the doughboys called "pride in the outfit." And we could provide an increasing array of leadership, example, service and protection in the process.

Without deifying him prematurely, consider what our own Hugh Nibley has done to strengthen faith for people far, far away from Provo--a place from which he almost never travels. And consider, if you will, his fairly biting indictment of some of the rest of us as he praises the university's namesake: "[We are] only . . . too glad to settle for the outward show, the easy and flattering forms, trappings and ceremonies of education . . .

"As a result, whenever we move out of our tiny, busy orbits of administration and display, we find ourselves in a terrifying intellectual vacuum. Terrifying, of course, only because we might be found out. But that is just the trouble: having defaulted drastically in terms of President Young's instructions, [some of us] stand as a brainless giant, a pushover for any smart kid or cultist or faddist or crank who even pretends to have read a few books . . . We stand helplessly and foolishly by, dangling our bonnet and plume, while hundreds of students and missionaries, [hundreds] of members and enemies of the Church alike, presume to challenge and reject the teachings of Joseph Smith on evidence so flimsy that no half-educated person would give it a second thought . . .

No one has ever told them what it means to lay a proper foundation essential to any serious discussion of the things they treat so glibly and triumphantly . . .

"Whether we like it or not, we are going to have to return to Brigham Young's ideals of education; we may fight it all the way, but in the end God will keep us after school until we learn our lesson" (Nibley on The Timely and the Timeless, p. 251-52).

And defending the faith intelligently is only one kind of aid we might offer our far-flung brothers and sisters, albeit surely the most important one. There are, it seems to me, scores of other kinds as well, in virtually every discipline of the university. And it will not require our physically going to them or bringing them physically here to us. We cannot do much of that. No, in most cases it means writing--good writing, strong writing, in all of our disciplines.

Let me close by returning to that original "school in Zion" and in so doing, come full circle. To do that we have to go to the upper room just moments before Gethsemane and Golgotha.

As part of the strengthening preparation the Savior provided for His apostles, apostles who did not and could not comprehend what lay immediately ahead of them, Christ rose from that paschal meal and, girding Himself with a towel, poured water into a basin. He then knelt, alone, and washed the feet of the Twelve.

There is, of course, a profound gesture of humility and love in this act on the very face of it. During what would be the most anguished evening in human history, when someone might well have attended a bit more to Him, the Prince of Peace knelt serving others, leaving an unforgettable lesson on the real meaning of "Master."

But there was something else going on in the performance of that ordinance, hinted at when Peter tried to resist the Lord's selflessness, "Thou shalt never wash my feet," he recoiled. To which Jesus simply replied, "If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me." And of course marvelous Peter then pleads, "Lord, not [then] my feet only, but also my hands and my head" (John 13:1-9).

"If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me." What could that possibly have to do with schools and education and learning? Maybe everything.

As the Lord issued the commandment to organize the School of the Prophets, He prefaced it all with what must have been the first of the worthiness interviews that are still a part of the BYU tradition for faculty, staff, administrators and students. You must "sanctify yourselves," the Lord said. "Yea, purify your hearts, and cleanse your hands and your feet before me, that I may make you clean" (D&C 88:74-78).

No one was to have been in that apostolic academy unworthily. "Ye shall not receive any among you into this school save he is clean from the blood of this generation; And he shall be received by the ordinance of the washing of feet, for unto this end was the ordinance of the washing of feet instituted" (D&C 88:1389).

Commenting on that experience, the Prophet Joseph Smith said. "We have not desired as much from the hand of the Lord through faith and obedience, as we ought to have done . . .

"We must . . . call our solemn assembly as the Lord has commanded us, that we may be able to accomplish his great work, and it must be done in God's own way. [Remember he is speaking, at least in part, of an educational work.] . . . It [washing of the feet] is calculated to unite our hearts, that we may be one in feeling and sentiment . . . that our faith may be strong, so that Satan cannot overthrow us, nor have any power over us here" (Documentary History of the Church, 2:308-9).

Gathering, uniting, learning. Community, cleanliness, communion. One in feeling and sentiment and purpose--a basin, a circle, a bond. Humility and service. Strong faith and order. The house of the Lord. A school.

Why have "a temple of learning"? How dare I even ask, "Why?" I will tell you exactly why, " . . . so that Satan cannot overthrow us, nor have any power over us here." Remember "the glory of God is intelligence; or in other words light and truth. [And] light and truth forsake that evil one" (D&C 93:36, 37).

This article is adapted from an address given by BYU President Jeffrey R. Holland

at the annual University Conference

August 22, 1988.