Academic Freedom at BYU? (Matthew Bowman 5 of 5)

In our final conversation with Dr Matthew Bowman, we'll talk about the tensions between LDS Church leaders and BYU faculty. Is there academic freedom at BYU? Should there be more academic freedom for faculty if BYU wants to become the Harvard of the West? Sign up for our free newsletter at https://gospeltangents.com/newsletter to check out our conversation...



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Academic Freedom at BYU

Interview



GT  00:28  One last topic I want to cover and then I'll let you go. There was an article in the Salt Lake Tribune earlier this year that talked about a crackdown at BYU. I know Casey Griffiths wrote an amazing article on The Chicago Experiment, it was called. Basically, in summary— Casey talked about it on one of my interviews, but [here is] just a brief summary/thumbnail. It seems like the LDS Church was embracing Divinity School for seminary teachers. And they sent a few to the University of Chicago, a liberal theological school. They didn't like the results. J. Reuben Clark came in, cracked some heads, started firing people that were way too liberal and  pulled back [the Church] towards anti-evolution, things like that. It seems to me there's been this roller coaster of, okay, we'll allow some liberal. Now we're going to go conservative, liberal, conservative. And it seems like and tell me if you agree with the statement. At BYU right now, and I love that you're an outsider, that you're at Claremont and can look at this from a faraway position. There's a little bit like this J. Reuben Clark time where they're retrenching. We're going more conservative at BYU. Can you comment on that?



Matthew  02:03  Yeah. So the first, and this may not be a surprise at this point. The first thing I would say is I push back on the liberal/conservative polarity there.



GT  02:11  I can't help it, I'm sorry.



Matthew  02:13  Yeah, there's a lot of things going on. And I think with the Chicago Experiment. It wasn't simply kind of liberal versus conservative. It was outside scholarship versus no outside scholarship. The question being, when we talk about religion, when we teach about religion, do we rely on these Protestant Divinity School professors who have written books about the Bible? Or do we rely on prophets and revelation? Now for many, I think, Latter-day Saints today, and even over the past 100 years, the equivocation there might be, if we rely on just repeating what the prophet said in revelation, then that must mean we're going to be against evolution and for creationism and all of that. But that's not necessarily the case. There were a lot of Church leaders in the early 20th century, who were pro-evolution and who...



GT  02:16  Widtsoe, Talmage. They were all non-American though. Right?



Matthew  02:42  Yeah, who were really interested in this. And it's an interesting accident of history, that within the LDS Church, that the idea of orthodoxy came to be associated with conservative...



GT  03:23  The opposite happened in the Community of Christ. They're all liberal, and they kicked out all the conservatives.



Matthew  03:27  Right, again, simplification. But, nonetheless, this shows that the idea that you've got maybe two vectors here, the idea of friendliness to the outside world, the idea of loyalty to church leadership. Those two things cross in interesting ways, and then go in one direction in the LDS Church, as you say.