Deseret Magazine - September 2022

SPECIAL ISSUE

THE FATE OF THE

R E L IG IO U S

UNIVERSITY

DARE TO BE DIFFERENT

WHY RELIGIOUS SCHOOLS MATTER

BY CLARK G. GILBERT

THE REFORMER BEN SASSE’S PLAN TO FIX HIGHER ED

BY SARAH ISGUR AND DECLAN GARVEY

ZINE UPC REFERENCE APRIL

MAY

IS IT TOO LATE TO SAVE THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT? A CONVERSATION WITH

JONATHAN HAIDT

SEPTEMBER 2022 VOL 02 | NO 17

SEPTEMBER

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CONTENTS

DAR

F RE

E

BE DIF

E

56 T O

E

CANP BEN SASSEU AND E S CI AL IS THE REPUBLICANS FIX HIGHER ED? S

DIFFERENT

66 THE WORLD IS OUR CAMPUS A CONVERSATION WITH SHIRLEY HOOGSTRA, DAVID BROOKS AND ANNE SNYDER.

DARE TO

by sarah isgur and declan garvey

S P E C I ASCHOOLS L I SS U E MATTER WHY RELIGIOUS

D BE IF

40 INTRODUCTION BY GUEST EDITOR CLARK G. GILBERT

ERENT F

Adventure starts where the road ends.

NT

THE REFORMER

SPECIAL 46 OF BODY AND SPIRIT PETER WEHNER

SPECIAL ISSUE

48 THE CONSUMER VS. THE COVENANT ARI BERMAN

DARE TO BE 49 BE YOURSELF FREEMAN A. HRABOWSKI III

70 THE INNOVATIVE UNIVERSITY

49 STANDING AS ONE LIZ DARGER

A SOLUTION TO RISING DEBT AND SINKING GRADUATION RATES.

50 A LIFE WORTH LIVING PHILIP RYKEN

51 A REASONABLE PROPOSITION PETER KILPATRICK

ISSUE

51 FRIEND OR FOE? ROBIN BAKER 52 BUILDING BRIDGES EBOO PATEL

DIFFERENT

53 DISCOVERING TRUTH DERRICK ANDERSON

53 THE PURPOSE DRIVEN UNIVERSITY JOHN S. K. KAUWE III 54 BRINGING LIGHT TO THE WORLD LINDA A. LIVINGSTONE

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THE WAR AGAINST FAITH

EDUCATION’S END

CHANGE AGENT

RELIGIOUS SCHOOLS ARE UNDER THREAT. CAN THEY SURVIVE?

WHY EXPLORING LIFE’S MEANING HAS LOST ITS HONORED STATUS.

by eric baxter and maría montserrat alvarado

by anthony t . kronman

A TRAILBLAZING EDUCATOR ON THE LINK BETWEEN PROGRESS AND CLARITY OF PURPOSE. by jennifer graham

SEPTEMBER 2022

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CONTENTS

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Bedding | Bath | Apparel

THE WEST

A LAST NOTE FOR THE TRUMPETER’S FATHER EIGHTY YEARS AFTER UTAH’S JAPANESE INTERNMENT CAMP OPENED, A SON STILL LOOKS FOR ANSWERS. by ethan bauer

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THE LOOMING CATASTROPHE

BONES

IS THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT DOOMED? A CONVERSATION WITH JONATHAN HAIDT.

DINOSAURS, DESERTS AND A GUY NAMED “DR. BOOM.” BUCKLE UP.

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HOW CAN WE PUT ONE OF AMERICA’S MOST BROKEN MARKETS BACK TOGETHER?

by ethan bauer by jacob hess

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BETTER TOGETHER

84

LESSONS IN COOPERATION AND UNDERSTANDING FROM ONE OF NEW YORK’S ELDER STATESMEN.

by mary m c intyre by lois m . collins

SEPTEMBER 2022

7

THE VIEW FROM HERE

I

n the far reaches of Canada’s British Columbia, nestled along a boggy lake outside of Vancouver is a modestly sized Christian college aptly named Trinity Western. The school’s motto is a Latin rendering of Martin Luther’s hymn “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” The university offers a smattering of degrees and competes in collegiate athletics. But in recent years, Trinity Western has become better known for its legal battles over accreditation and its community covenant — a once mandatory campus code of conduct rooted in biblical teachings on sexuality and traditional marriage.

The Supreme Court of Canada issued two separate rulings on the question of whether Trinity Western’s programs were properly denied accreditation due to the school’s community covenant. In 2001, the school won the first case involving its teaching certification program, but in 2018, Trinity Western lost the second case involving its proposed law school. Other religious colleges and universities throughout Canada and the U.S. couldn’t help but take note — after all, they could be next.

But it’s not just issues surrounding accreditation that are causing concern within religious circles. “Outside of academia I faced more problems as a Black,” sociologist George Yancey once told then-New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. “But inside academia I face more problems as a Christian, and it is not even close.”

For religious faculty like Yancey, problems can range from peer disapproval to impacts on publishing prospects or, by extension, tenure decisions. For students, it can sometimes mean having your religious club kicked off campus.

In this special issue of Deseret Magazine, Eric Baxter and María Montserrat Alvarado of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty detail the contemporary legal landscape regarding faith and the First Amendment 8

DESERET MAGAZINE

on campus (see page 62). One cannot examine religion and higher education today without confronting this context.

But, to suppose religious colleges and universities are operating from a place of fear or defensiveness would be a mistake. The contributions to this issue from the presidents of Baylor, Catholic University, George Fox, Wheaton and Yeshiva, among others, demonstrate as much. They represent a thoughtful cohort of leader-scholars eager to find ways to work through disagreements cooperatively to build pluralistic spaces rooted in a common search for truth.

As students return to campuses across the country, this issue examines the rich tapestry of higher education and its mounting challenges.

Essays and interviews from religious leaders, writers and public intellectuals such as David Brooks, Anne Snyder, Shirley Hoogstra, Clark G. Gilbert, Jonathan Haidt, Eboo Patel, Robert Abrahms and Peter Wehner underscore all democracy stands to lose if different perspectives, religious or otherwise, are pushed out of the public square, as well as what we gain when the safety of vines and fig trees allow them to flourish.

Staff writers from The Dispatch — Sarah Isgur and Declan Garvey — profile Sen. Ben Sasse’s role as the right’s reformer of higher education (see page 56). And award-winning sports journalist Eric Adelson unpacks the ever-changing world of college sports (see page 80). Finally, former Yale Law School dean Anthony Kronman calls for campuses to once again ask big questions about the meaning of life (see page 76).

Though education and faith are sometimes framed as foes, they share a yearning for illumination. Education, the philosopher John Dewey once wrote, is what transmits the past and helps light a path for the future. But faith is what we need to take the step forward.

—HAL BOYD

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Informed by our heritage and values, Deseret Magazine covers the people and culture of that territory and its intersection with the broader world.

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OUR READERS RESPOND

BRENNA VATERLAUS

(“Finding Our Roots: Why Rural America Matters”) explored what the United States loses when its open spaces are taken for granted. “It’s easy to exploit places we don’t know, places we believe to be unimportant,” Grace Olmstead wrote. “It’s easy to think the soil can last forever if you know nothing of it.” The essay, adapted from Olmstead’s book, “Uprooted,” pointed out that less than 2 percent of Americans work on a farm these days. “I like how she points out that many rural towns are suffering not because they didn't ‘keep up,’ but because they did — and it has undermined their agency and ability to keep their towns and communities strong and resilient,” wrote Tony Pippa of the Brookings Institution. “I can’t remember the last time I read an article that told me so much about an important issue about which I knew so little,” added reader Jim Vespe. Also in the June issue, former staff writer Benoît Morenne, wrote about troubling projections for the future of the Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone National Park (“The Fate of Old Faithful”).

Many readers expressed skepticism with the article’s premise that “the big hand of climate change is turning off the spigot.”

Reader Michael Shriver said, “I was just there last month. Old Faithful was faithfully spewing every 90 minutes, same as when I visited in 2005. I don’t see the cause for another climate alarm. The sun will swell up and swallow the earth in four billion years, give or take a billion years. Now there’s a real climate concern to make you lose sleep over.” An article

by Mike Leavitt, former Utah governor and U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services, on the future of health care (“Code Red,” co-authored by David Muhlestein), also generated debate among readers. Roger Terry wrote: “This is not rocket science. The U.S. is the only advanced country (if we can call ourselves that) with a moronic, profit-based health care system (if we can call it that). There are at least 20 different models out there that other countries have worked most of the kinks out of. None are perfect, but they are all light-years ahead of us. Let’s pick one and implement it. It’s about time we joined the 20th century.” Articles from past issues continue to drive the ongoing debate over addressing drought in the West and climate change. Retired Idaho Supreme Court Justice Robert E. Bakes cited Eric Balken’s article in the May issue on the demise of Lake Powell (“When the Desert Runs Dry”) in a Deseret.com op-ed arguing that the “best science” puts a positive spin on a warming climate. “What ‘the best science’ could be telling us,” Bakes wrote, “is that a warmer climate combined with higher carbon dioxide levels will produce more food, which will be necessary to feed the increasing population in this century.” Balken’s article was also the focus of the August 4 episode of KUER’s “RadioWest” on NPR. J U N E ’ S COV E R STO RY

A Modern Family article titled “Inside Out” in the July/August issue misidentified neuroscientist Lisa Barrett Feldman. Her name is Lisa Feldman Barrett.

The Last Word titled “A Not-So-Distant War” in the July/August issue misidentified where Mariya Manzhos’ father was a church leader as Gdansk, Poland. He served in Donetsk, Ukraine.

CORRECTIONS:

SEPTEMBER 2022

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CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

CLARK G. GILBERT

PETER WEHNER

Gilbert, a General Authority Seventy for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints since April 2021, is commissioner of the Church Educational System. He previously served as president of BYU-Pathway Worldwide and BYUIdaho, and as president and CEO of Deseret News. His commentary on preserving the distinction of religious universities is on page 40.

A contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and a contributing editor for The Atlantic, Wehner has served in three Republican administrations and was the deputy director of speechwriting for President George W. Bush. The Washington Monthly has called him one of the most influential reformminded conservatives. He writes about the history of religiously affiliated schools in America on page 46.

ANTHONY T. KRONMAN

Kronman is the Sterling Professor of Law and a former dean of Yale Law School. He teaches in the areas of contracts, bankruptcy, jurisprudence, social theory and professional responsibility. An excerpt of his book “Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life” is featured on page 76.

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MARÍA MONTSERRAT ALVARADO

FREEMAN A. HRABOWSKI III

SHIRLEY HOOGSTRA

EBOO PATEL

PETER K. KILPATRICK

ARI BERMAN

Alvarado is the vice president and executive director of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. She is a lay consultant to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Religious Liberty Committee and a member of the President’s Advisory Counsel of the Fellowship of Catholic University Students. She and Becket Fund senior counsel Eric Baxter explain the war against faith in education on page 62.

Hrabowski recently retired as president of the University of Maryland. He graduated from Hampton Institute and received a master’s in mathematics and a doctorate in higher education administration/statistics from the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign. In 2012, he chaired the president’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for African Americans. His essay is on page 49.

Hoogstra is president of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities. She is also a member of American Council on Education, the National Association of Evangelicals, Trinity Forum, Evangelical Immigration Table and Washington Higher Ed Secretariat.

Prior to her career in education, Hoogstra was a lawyer. Her interview with David Brooks and Anne Snyder is on page 66.

An advocate of religious diversity, Patel is the founder and president of Interfaith America, which works with governments, universities and private companies to make faith a bridge, not a barrier, of cooperation.

He has written five books including, “We Need to Build: Field Notes for Diverse Democracy.” His essay is on page 52.

Kilpatrick is president of Catholic University of America. Previously, Kilpatrick held administrative roles at the University of Notre Dame and the Illinois Institute of Technology. A chemical engineer, Kilpatrick is affiliated with the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, American Chemical Society and American Society of Engineering Education. His essay is on page 51.

Berman is president of Yeshiva University. He studied at Yeshiva College, received his doctorate in medieval Jewish philosophy from the Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish studies and was ordained from the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary. Berman has served as the rabbi of the Jewish Center in New York Center. His essay is on page 48.

SARAH ISGUR

HENRY J. EYRING

LINDA A. LIVINGSTONE

PHILIP RYKEN

ROBIN BAKER

MARY HAASDYK

MARY MCINTYRE

Isgur is a staff writer at The Dispatch and host of the legal podcast “Advisory Opinions.” A Republican political adviser and commentator, she previously served in the Justice Department as director of public affairs and as senior counsel to the deputy attorney general in the Trump administration. She and Declan Garvey write about U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse’s efforts to reform higher education on page 56.

Eyring is the 17th president of Brigham Young University-Idaho where he has served in different roles since 2006. He previously worked as a strategy consultant at Monitor Company in Massachusetts and as MBA director at BYU in Provo. He writes about innovation in higher education on page 70.

The president of Baylor University, Livingstone is an advocate for American higher education faith-based institutions. She was previously a dean and professor at the George Washington University School of Business and Pepperdine University’s Graziadio School of Business and Management, and an associate dean and tenured faculty member at Baylor’s Hankamer School of Business. Her essay is on page 54.

Ryken is president of Wheaton College, where he previously studied English literature and philosophy as an undergraduate. He continued to study at Westminster Theological Seminary and University of Oxford, earning a master’s of divinity degree and a doctorate in historical theology. Before becoming president at Wheaton, Ryken preached for over a decade at Philadelphia’s historic Tenth Presbyterian Church.

His essay is on page 50.

Baker is president of George Fox University, the largest private university in Oregon, where he previously served as provost for 18 years. He was a professor at Wheaton College and John Brown University, and senior vice president at Grand Canyon University, where he also graduated in history and political science. He holds a doctorate degree in history from Texas A&M University. His essay is on page 51.

Haasdyk is a Calgary-based illustrator whose work has been featured in The Washington Post and other publications. She was honored in American Illustration, Society of Illustrators West, Applied Arts and Communications Arts.

After spending her childhood in South Africa as the daughter of Christian missionaries, Haasdyk went on to work for Africa-based nonprofits. Her work is featured on page 66.

A Utah-based photographer and writer, McIntyre’s work appears in Patagonia Journal, Backcountry Magazine, Powder Magazine and Outdoor Journal. She combines a love of travel, history and personal connection to share stories of people and places. On page 20, McIntyre explores issues facing the American meat industry and the woman working to solve them.

SEPTEMBER 2022

13

OPENING SHOT

COSMIC CLIFFS THE EDGE OF A YOUNG, STAR-FORMING REGION IN THE CARINA NEBULA

NASA’ s James Webb Space Telescope

launched in December and in July began providing snapshots of the farthest depths of our universe, peering into its past some 13.7 billion light-years. Darin Ragozzine, a professor in BYU’s department of physics and astronomy, has researched what the telescope might be able to tell us about small objects in the outer solar system and served on a review panel that decided where to point the telescope within our solar system during its first year of operation. “Like everyone, I was filled with awe and wonder and reverence upon seeing the first images,” Ragozzine says. “They are beautiful and powerful. ... (These images are) but the first of many, many exciting scientific images and results to come out of now the most-coveted telescope in the world.” That’s still true even after a larger-than-expected meteoroid caused “significant uncorrectable change” to part of the telescope’s mirror; luckily, according to NASA, “the effect was small at the full telescope level.”

IMAGES COURTESY OF NASA

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SEPTEMBER 2022

15

THE

DES ER ET INTERVIEW

THE LOOMING CATASTROPHE IS THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT DOOMED? A CONVERSATION WITH JONATHAN HAIDT

BY JACO B H E SS

F

ew have done more to raise national awareness about the potential implications of the hyperpartisan death spiral we are in than Jonathan Haidt, the wildly popular social psychologist and New York Times bestseller. A professor of ethical leadership at New York University Stern School of Business, Haidt has been named one of the “top global thinkers” by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines.

Haidt’s recent essay in The Atlantic captivated the chattering class by comparing what has happened in the U.S. over the last decade to the biblical Tower of Babel — how we’ve become disoriented and “unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth” to the point of “becoming like two different countries” with divergent ideas about “the Constitution, economics, and American history.”

If an image from the Old Testament is an especially fitting metaphor for current worrisome trends, it’s not hard to see Haidt himself as filling that ancient, unpleasant role of standing up on the wall to raise some warnings that we can only hope are not prophetic.

He recently wrote, “If we do not make major changes soon, then our institutions, our political system, and our society may 16

DESERET MAGAZINE

collapse during the next major war, pandemic, financial meltdown, or constitutional crisis.”

Although always pointing to possible steps we might take, Haidt adds that there is “little evidence to suggest that America will return to some semblance of normalcy and stability

THE FEAR OF SAYING ANYTHING BECAUSE YOU’LL GET DARTED BY SOMEBODY — THAT IS NEW AND THAT HAS TRANSFORMED OUR COUNTRY.

in the next five or 10 years.”

We all love expressions of hope. But sometimes it’s refreshing to hear some plain talk about the dangers ahead. Beyond raising concerns alone, however, Haidt has also helped lead the way toward specific actions that can help.

In the short space of seven years, Haidt’s Heterodox Academy has gathered a diverse coalition of more than 5,000 professors, administrators, graduate students and staff that

span every imaginable demographic. What unites them is a concern that “viewpoint diversity” and “open inquiry” is shrinking in the academy — the very place where we should be encouraging it the most.

SINCE AMERICANS HAVE DISAGREED PROFOUNDLY ABOUT LOTS OF THINGS, ALL THE WAY BACK TO 1776, WHAT IS IT ABOUT OUR POINTED NATIONAL DISAGREEMENTS TODAY THAT SEEM ESPECIALLY PERILOUS?

It’s certainly true that we’ve always had bitter debates and that goes back to the revolutionary and constitutional period. What’s new is two things: One is the simple acceleration of “affective polarization” since the 1990s — the tendency for partisans to dislike and distrust those from the other party. The degree to which we hate each other has gone up more or less steadily and continuously. You might just think of this as a continuation of the same polarization we’ve had before, only it’s worse. It’s more intense. And the more we hate each other, the more thrilled we are to find any story about how or why the other side is terrible (even if we would otherwise know that it was false). The quantity of polarization is part of the story.

But there is something new, which is the I LLUSTR ATI ON BY ALEX NABAUM

SEPTEMBER 2022

17

LEIGH VO GEL/WIR E IMAGE VIA GE TTY IMAGE S

JO N ATHAN HAI DT

I’M NOT SAYING WE ARE GOING TO FAIL. I’M SAYING IF WE DON’T MAKE BIG CHANGES, THEN I BELIEVE WE WILL FAIL.

fear of each other. We were not afraid of the person sitting next to us in 2008. Professors were not afraid of their students in 2008.

Managers were not afraid of their employees in 2008.

Social media gave everyone dart guns, and a small number of people began shooting darts like crazy. The fear of saying anything because you’ll get darted by somebody — that is new. That simply was not there before.

And that has transformed our country, it transformed our institutions and has transformed higher education.

I do suspect that this is happening in other countries. We know it’s happening to kids in universities in English-speaking countries.

There’s a lot of interest internationally, and what I’ve picked up is that everyone recognizes that America is particularly sick, that we’re worse off than other countries. But on the other hand, they see the signs in their own country. And so there’s a lot of interest in what’s happening in America, because it’s clear this could be a problem that many liberal democracies are going to face — or are beginning to face — in the social media age.

I’M CURIOUS IF ANYTHING HAS STOOD OUT TO YOU ABOUT THE PUBLIC RESPONSE TO YOUR MOST RECENT WARNINGS?

IN READING YOUR DESCRIPTIONS OF A PUBLIC SQUARE “GOVERNED BY MOB DYNAMICS” WHERE THOSE WHO DISAGREE GET POUNCED ON IN A WAY THAT MAKES US MORE COLLECTIVELY “STUPID,” I COULDN’T HELP BUT THINK, “WHO REALLY WANTS TO BE A PART OF THAT?”

The biggest surprise in the reaction to my Atlantic essay is that fewer than 10 people criticized it — which is pretty close to zero.

Hardly any mean tweets. Instead, I’ve got more than 100 emails from ordinary people saying thank you for the essay. Because almost everyone is exhausted and hates what’s going on. So, I think there is clearly a large majority — the middle 80% of the country — that is sick and tired of what is happening, and that could be a potent force for whichever party or movement is able to attract them.

IT SOUNDS TO ME THAT YOUR CAUTIONS ARE RESONATING WITH PEOPLE AND THEY ARE TAKING THEM TO HEART.

Yeah, in fact, I worried that the recent piece was too dark — and I thought about giving it a more uplifting ending. And I didn’t.

It just has a slightly uplifting ending — and I thought maybe I should do more. But I was strongly advised that no, this needs to be a dark piece. People know something’s wrong.

They want to hear the diagnosis. I can write a later piece with a more inspiring message, but people need and want to hear the diagnosis.

Like when you go to the doctor, you know, most people actually do want to know they have cancer. They don’t want to hear, “Oh, you have cancer, but don’t worry, things tend to work out.”

But yes, the public response has been incredibly hopeful. And I’ve also been interested in the international response. I deliberately didn’t say anything about other countries.

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Standing up and defending others is hard for most. Everyone is afraid for their reputation. Everyone hates being shamed. What we most need is for leaders of institutions to stand up. That has been the spectacular failure of the late 2010s — that leaders of universities, of The New York Times, of our knowledge-centered institutions, have failed to stand up for the mission of their institutions. I don’t expect everyone to care about the whole truth, but professors should — and any academic institution should. They have a duty to stand up for the end or purpose of their institution. And if they can be made to know that the great majority of people support them, I think they would be more likely to stand up.

At Heterodox Academy, we are devotees of John Stuart Mill. We believe that “he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.” So, we believe that a morally or politically homogenous group simply cannot find the truth.

YOU’VE BEEN TRYING HARD TO SEND A MESSAGE THAT FOSTERING VIEWPOINT DIVERSITY IS NOT A PARTISAN ISSUE. YET CRITICS ARGUE THIS IS AN EFFORT TO DEFEND THE POLITICAL RIGHT. HOW DO YOU RESPOND TO THAT CONCERN?

Well, President Trump has certainly made our work harder. But we are not pro-right or pro-left, we’re pro-university. And if you’re pro-university, then you must have viewpoint diversity and open inquiry. Unfortunately, we are doing our advocacy in the midst of a culture war, in which the “friend of my enemy is my enemy.” So, if we say we need more conservatives, many people on the left will assume we are therefore allies of conservatives — and therefore we are the enemy. I am a centrist, and if you remember your elementary school geometry class, that means I am right-adjacent. So, yes, it’s hard to do this in a culture war, but if there wasn’t a culture war, we wouldn’t have to do this.

LIKE YOU, I’VE HAD MANY FRIENDS WITH VERY DIFFERENT SOCIALPOLITICAL VIEWS WHO HAVE ENRICHED MY LIFE. DO YOU THINK THAT COULD BE ONE PRACTICAL PLACE PEOPLE (AND ORGANIZATIONS) COULD START — TURNING AWAY FROM THE ONLINE CENTRIFUGE AND PROACTIVELY REACHING OUT TO PEOPLE WHO HAVE DIFFERENT VIEWS, TO FORGE NEW AND MORE VIBRANT RELATIONSHIPS?

Oh yeah — if that’s your desire, there’s all kinds of organizations that can help with that and magnify your desire into impact.

One that I co-founded with Caroline Mehl is OpenMind. If you run or are a member of any kind of group — a classroom, a soccer team, a nonprofit, a company — try OpenMind as a group. This platform actually teaches you the skills of understanding others, appreciating why we often can’t understand others, and how to talk across divides. I’m also on the board of Braver Angels, a group that brings people on the left and right together in towns around America. Because away from the coasts, away from the elite circles, most people are pretty reasonable and moderate and willing to talk with each other.

GIVEN THE GOODNESS THAT CLEARLY STILL EXISTS ON BOTH SIDES OF THE POLITICAL SPECTRUM, DO YOU THINK WE COULD FIND IN OUR MORAL IMAGINATION A FUTURE VISION OF LEFT- AND RIGHT-LEANING VIRTUES THRIVING TOGETHER IN SOMETHING NEW?

The mind easily goes to the binary. So, it’s been very hard in America to have a third party. All previous efforts have failed, although I guess actually the Republican Party was a third party at one point. Ten years ago, I would have said that’s hopeless, but now I think perhaps the time has come. If it’s true the middle 80 percent is horrified by the extremes and the nastiness, I do think that there is room now and a need for a third party, if we have “final five voting,” which means an open primary in which the top five finishers move on to a general election determined by ranked choice voting. With that system, a third party isn’t a spoiler. So that’s one reason it’s so important to get electoral reform that incentivizes politicians to appeal to moderates, rather than picking a side and trying to make it angry.

HOW ABOUT ON A COMMUNITY LEVEL? IF A POLITICAL PARTY ISN’T POSSIBLE, WHAT MORE CAN WE DO TO MOVE BEYOND THE PARTISAN RUTS?

If you just want to get people together to talk, I think that would be awkward. But if you get people together to achieve something in the town, and then you deliberately achieve political diversity, then I think it’s extremely powerful. That’s what has so impressed me about the Village Square and Liz Joyner’s efforts. They were originally very focused on Tallahassee, which as the state capital means you have a lot of people who want to solve problems. So, then, if you get together, it’s not just, “Hey, let’s talk,” it’s like, “You know, let’s fix this problem, what do we do?” — while drawing on the benefits of viewpoint diversity.

And the thing is, it works — it works really well in Tallahassee. I do think it’s hard to scale. Everybody thinks we want, like, an app or a platform that can then be rolled out to millions. But I think what Liz has found is that it takes a lot of hours, a lot of hard work, from a lot of people. So, she and I both think it can scale, but it can only scale slowly.

SO MANY OF US ARE IN THE “EXHAUSTED MAJORITY” YOU DESCRIBE AND TIRED OF THE PARTISAN HOSTILITIES. WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN YOU GET TIRED OF ALL THIS?

I’m very stoic about it. But yes, I am also extremely alarmed at the trajectory we are on.

We are on a path to catastrophic failure of our democracy if we don’t change things. Let me be clear — I’m not saying we are going to fail.

I’m saying if we don’t make big changes, then I believe we will fail. But in the bottom of my heart, I don’t feel depressed. I feel like it’s dark times. But actually I feel very engaged with life these days.

AS A PARENT OF YOUNG CHILDREN MYSELF, I’M CURIOUS IN WHAT WAYS YOUR OWN APPROACH TO PARENTING MAY HAVE CHANGED SINCE WRITING “THE CODDLING OF THE AMERICAN MIND?”

In a number of ways. Meeting Lenore Skenazy (the author of “Free-Range Kids: How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children”) really changed my family. We encouraged our kids to go out to the store earlier. We live in Manhattan, which, until recently, was extremely safe. We also had them walk to school younger than almost anybody else in our neighborhood. And we’ve kept them off social media until high school. My son is now a sophomore, and he opened an Instagram account when he joined the track team because they all were on the platform. And I said that’s fine, because he had earned my trust.

He’s been very responsible. But we told both kids in sixth grade, you’re not getting an Instagram account until at least high school. So, basically, more free range, less social media.

That’s the bulk of it. Lenore and I co-founded an organization to help families give their children healthier childhoods; I hope your readers will visit LetGrow.org.

JAC O B H E S S S E RV E D O N T H E B OA R D O F T H E NAT I O NA L C OA L I T I O N O F D I A LO G U E A N D D E L I B E RAT I O N A N D H AS WO R K E D T O P R O M OT E L I B E RA L - C O NS E RVAT I V E U N D E R STA N D I N G S I N C E H I S B O O K W I T H P H I L N E I S S E R , “ YO U ’ R E N OT AS C RA Z Y AS I T H O U G H T ( B U T YO U ’ R E ST I L L W R O N G ) .” H I S M O ST R E C E N T B O O K W I T H C A R R I E S K A R DA , K Y L E A N D E R S O N A N D T Y M A NS F I E L D I S “ T H E P OW E R O F ST I L L N E S S : M I N D F U L L I V I N G FO R L AT T E R- DAY S A I N TS.”

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W H EN ANNA BO R G MAN F IR ST ENR O L L ED IN CUL INARY S CH O O L , S H E CO UL D BAR ELY S CR AMBL E EG G S .

NOW, S H E IS A F UL LT IME BUTCH ER AT AMST ER DAM MEAT S H O P IN AMST ER DAM, MO NTANA. “IT F EEL S L IKE I’ M BACK TO BEING W H O I ALWAYS WANT ED TO BE O R T H O UG H T I WO UL D BE,” S H E SAYS .

CHOPPED THERE’S A BIG PROBLEM IN AMERICA’S MEAT MARKET. SHE’S WORKING TOWARD A SOLUTION

BY M A RY M C I N TY R E

D

uring her second year of school at Cascade Culinary Institute in 2017, Anna Borgman decided to take a butchery class. “Something in that class clicked with me,” she says. “I like cooking, but my brain just doesn’t work that way. But butchery. … It was in my bones. I was like, ‘This is what I have to do.’”

When Borgman, 35, chose to pursue a career in butchery, her mom pointed out that the work was, literally, in her DNA. Her great-grandma Gladis was a butcher in California’s Bay Area nearly 70 years ago. “Mom remembered her coming home from the butcher shop with blood on her, and her hands would be cold because they were cutting in the cooler,” Borgman recalls. “It made me question where my desire was coming from.”

That year, Borgman’s mother gifted her Gladis’ union card — dated 1954 — for her birthday. It serves as a reminder that past generations of family who we never met are still somehow part of us. “It gave me goosebumps,” she says. “That little piece of something I could grasp onto, some lineage that I felt without knowing it.”

Butchery — a job that might seem like a trade of yesteryear — has taken on new importance in 2022. Meat processing, which includes slaughtering and butchery, is key in the food supply chain. It’s how a rancher’s cattle become food for the dinner table. But now, possibly more than ever, we need more butchers like Borgman.

Due to corporate consolidation, four 20

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conglomerates currently control 85 percent of the nation’s beef processing — leveraging a chokepoint in the industry by increasing costs of meat products for consumers while simultaneously lowering rates for the animals they buy from ranchers. And after decades of increasing consolidation, the fate of family-owned beef ranches — and grocery store prices — are reaching a point of crisis.

National Farmers Union. It’s become untenable for many ranchers to simply break even.

According to an Open Markets Institute report on agriculture-related monopolization, America has lost an average of 17,000 cattle operations per year since 1980.

The manipulation of the market is also felt by those scanning grocery store aisles, trying to feed their families. Last year, prices for wholesale beef increased more than 40 percent, and some steak cuts by more than 70 percent, according to the Department of Agriculture. Grocery store food prices shot up 7.9 percent between February 2021 to February 2022, and are forecast to continue rising up to 4 percent in the next year. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it’s the biggest annual spike that’s been seen since 1981.

Bringing back local and regional processors and butchers to the industry creates options for buyers and sellers so prices become competitive again.

That’s where Amsterdam Meat Shop comes in.

In a largely Dutch community 30 minutes west of Bozeman, a windmill marks the entrance to the Amsterdam Meat Shop. Amsterdam isn’t a town as much as an area, and the shop (once a grocery store) is surrounded by rolling hills and dairy farms. Above the hills stretch distant mountains, the Bridgers and the Tobacco Roots. A few tall pines and old cottonwoods line the road.

Walk into the red-and-white shop today and you’ll pass corrals out front, where the animals that are scheduled to be slaughtered that day are held. Inside, a large cooler is filled with orders of beef halves and quarters awaiting pickup, alongside an offering of local organic lamb, pork shoulder, grass-fed beefsteaks and homemade Italian sausage for anyone who wants to buy it.

role butchery plays in the game of food economy, but Borgman and her co-workers in Amsterdam, Montana — a person and a place that you’ve likely never heard of — are striving to be a small spark of a desperately needed solution to a very big problem. A problem that affects every link in the chain, whether you’re living on a family farm on the brink of bankruptcy or you’re craving a burger for dinner. four meatpacking corporations — Tyson, National Beef, JBS and Cargill — began buying out smaller, regional meat processors and butcheries. Over the next four decades, these corporations’ margins widened, allowing them to continue buying out bigger and bigger regional processors. This slow and steady march toward consolidation was marked by changing prices — for both ranchers and retailers. To put it in its simplest terms, meatpacking companies buy cattle, hogs and chickens from farmers and ranchers, process the animals, and then sell the beef, pork and poultry to retailers (aka grocery stores). As these four corporations grew, they became better equipped to control the market — and the dollars — on both ends of the deal.

Prior to the consolidation we see now, ranchers could count on getting more than 60 cents of each dollar consumers spent on beef, according to a report from the White House.

Today, they’re often getting about 39 cents. In 2021, ranchers were paid $1.98 for a top sirloin steak retailing for $10.49, according to the

DU RING T H E 1 9 8 0 S ,

BORGMAN AND HER CO-WORKERS IN AMSTERDAM, MONTANA, ARE STRIVING TO BE A SMALL SPARK OF A DESPERATELY NEEDED SOLUTION TO A VERY BIG PROBLEM.

During a speech at the White House in January, President Joe Biden noted the problem, stating, “Capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism. It’s exploitation. … Small, independent farmers and ranchers are being driven out of business — sometimes businesses that have been around for generations. It strikes at their dignity, their respect and the family legacies so many of them carried for generations.”

It’s easier as consumers scanning grocery store shelves to not think about the important

PHOTOGR APHY BY BECCA SKI NNER

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In the back, you’ll see Borgman — dressed in Carhartts, a T-shirt and muck boots, all hidden under a long waterproof black apron — on the “kill floor,” where animals are slaughtered, washed, butchered and prepped for the cooler.

She started at Amsterdam Meat Shop in August 2021, knowing how to process lambs and pigs, but only having done beef a few times. Now, she processes 10-11 beef cattle every Monday with the team at Amsterdam. “At first, I was intimidated,” she says. “Tom, our head butcher, is known to be kind of a grouch and doesn’t talk to anyone, but he has taught me so much.”

There seems to be an unspoken understanding that the industry needs those with the skills to step up. “They just need people to work. If you’re into it, they’re going to teach you,” Borgman says.

A few miles east of the shop, 25-year-old Albert Koenig grew up on a beef ranch in Belgrade. In addition to ranching, he also works as a communications specialist for Montana Beef Council, and says the last handful of years has been “a roller coaster.” In the fall of 2020, Koenig brought a group of calves to auction and got just $1.12 a pound, losing money on the deal.

“It’s difficult as a rancher who has increasing costs and weather and all those other issues to deal with, seeing that some of the big meatpacking companies are making record profits on their end. We all would like to see it be fair and be an industry where everyone can survive.”

In nearby Manhattan, Montana, third-generation rancher Lee Van Dyke, of Van Dyke Angus, has weathered years of the consolidation’s squeeze, too. “It’s tough everywhere you go,” he says. “The cost of everything has risen so dramatically and the income is staying the same. We don’t have a say. The packers are controlling everything.”

If things don’t change for the meat industry, the country will continue to see family farms and ranches fold while being held captive in a cycle of price fixing and folks getting penny-pinched in grocery stores. But only a few miles away as the crow flies, Borgman is on the kill floor, hoping to provide a sliver of that change ranchers like Van Dyke so desperately need.

“It’s hard not to feel defeated and terrified of the consolidation and the way it’s screwing people over,” she says. Anti-consolidation is the reason the Amsterdam Meat Shop is in business. In 2020, Chuck and Carol Feddes, and Jake and Alyssa Feddes (all of the same Feddes family, which has been raising cattle and producing beef in the Gallatin Valley for 22

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95 years) bought the shop to provide area ranchers a choice other than the big corporations, with the aim of supplying locally raised, fairly priced meat to the Gallatin Valley.

From the beginning, the process of selling animals at Amsterdam Meat Shop looks different than it does at a corporate auction.

Producers know what price they’re getting before they bring their animals in, or often, “they dictate the price,” Borgman says. “When we’re buying John Smith’s pigs to butcher and sell at the shop, he tells us the price per pound, and that’s when the manager decides ‘OK, we’ll take five.’” Then, Amsterdam Meat Shop can sell directly to consumers to keep costs down.

There was a time early in the pandemic when grocery store shelves were empty and consumers bought directly from local farmers and ranchers. However, most buyers who have a choice have fallen back into “normal” buying habits of picking up packaged meat products supplied by goliath companies such

IF THINGS DON’T CHANGE FOR THE MEAT INDUSTRY, THE COUNTRY WILL CONTINUE TO SEE FAMILY FARMS AND RANCHES FOLD WHILE BEING HELD CAPTIVE IN A CYCLE OF PRICE FIXING.

as Tyson and National Beef to chain grocers.

Currently, the Sentience Institute, an American interdisciplinary think tank, estimates that over 70 percent of beef comes from factory farms. With beef, pork and poultry combined, the figure is 99 percent. A report by Utah State University found that 68 percent of the state’s consumers would prefer locally raised ground beef, but only 15 percent of available processing is done by small or regional meatpackers, funneling sales back to corporate meat processors.

The issue isn’t consumer behavior, however; it’s creating opportunities for smaller regional and local butchers and meat processors to come back into the picture. Koenig agrees that market options and diversity are the “key to maximizing the product and the best way to get money back into the rancher’s pockets.” Through his job at the Montana Beef Council, he aims to help create a robust

market “for me, my fellow producers and hopefully our kids and grandkids to sell into.”

B U T H OW C AN a monopolized market break free? Since 2019, Tyson, JBS, Cargill and National Beef have faced lawsuits filed by ranchers, grocery chains and wholesalers that alleged price fixing. JBS has already paid out numerous settlements to avoid antitrust lawsuits, including $52.5 million this February in a case that includes accusations against Cargill, National Beef and Tyson Foods, without admitting any wrongdoing. In 2021, Tyson settled several private lawsuits for $221.5 million.

While lawsuits provide one track toward equity, there are others currently at play. The Department of Justice currently has an open investigation on price fixing. Congress has recently introduced several bills aiming to increase market competition and price transparency. The USDA launched a website where producers can submit complaints about suspected antitrust violations, and is also reworking the Packers and Stockyards Act. Koenig believes that “enforcing the laws that are on the books to protect producers and markets … is a good first step.”

In January, the Biden administration allocated $1 billion to increase independent meat and poultry processing to stimulate competition and reduce costs for consumers. To do this, the USDA is providing $375 million in grants to independent processing plants, to quickly address the issue. In June, a bipartisan bill proposing the Cattle Price Discovery and Transparency Act, which would set minimum levels of cash-market purchases for packing companies and limit their ability to use alternative marketing formulas to set prices in advance, was approved by the Senate Agriculture Committee. That bill is now headed to the floor.

Even if legislative and corporate changes are on the horizon, they take time to impact the market and individuals. While producers wait for the Department of Justice to finish its two-year investigation, more family ranchers teeter at the edge of tenability and call it quits.

The $1 billion in federal subsidies to grow independent meatpacking need time to trickle down to farmers and consumers.

The most important thing to do now, for the entire food chain, is to keep small businesses in operation and to provide options for ranchers and consumers — which Borgman has her sights on. “That’s why I have this job,” she says. “This is how I can contribute.”

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BONES FOSSILS UNEARTHED IN THE DEPTHS OF THE DESERT COULD CHANGE HOW WE SEE THE PAST — AND THE FUTURE

BY E TH A N B AU E R

M

ost animals are destined for the same fate. When they die, scavengers will consume their flesh and organs, while a combination of bacteria and soil acid will spoil away their bones. Eventually, as God tells Adam in the book of Genesis, “to dust you shall return.” They vanish, leaving no trace of their existence, no record of ever having drawn breath, consumed by the recycling system that allows new life to rise. According to Bill Bryson’s reporting in “A Short History of Nearly Everything,” this is the case for over 99.9 percent of living organisms. Yet sometimes, when conditions are just right — either wet enough for a body to make a perfectly preserved stamp of itself or with sediments deep enough for decomposition to take place without the interference of oxygen — traces of life long-dead can endure. If only we can find them.

“Only a very tiny percentage of species that ever existed on Earth have been fossilized,” according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Of those that have, only a fraction have been discovered. That’s in part due to accessibility; many fossils are likely buried so deeply that they’re unreachable. But it’s also because paleontology, as a science, remains fairly new. Nevertheless, it persists, thanks to people willing to visit often-remote wilderness with shovels and pickaxes, playing Earth’s most elusive game.

Deep in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, a ragtag bunch of 24

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scientists and volunteers have arrived bearing those exact tools. They range in age from 22 to 70, and they’ve pitched their tents atop a grayish-brown soil that turns to clouds of powder with each step. They’ve come here, to the Kaiparowits formation, in search of dinosaurs. A dream of so many children (myself, a few decades ago, included), realized.

They’ve found them. This particular site, now known as T2, is the confirmed resting place of a tyrannosaur, which may be the

THE FOSSIL RECORD CAN BE CYCLICAL, ILLUMINATING HOW THE UNPRECEDENTED CHALLENGES WE HUMANS FACE ARE LIKELY NOT UNPRECEDENTED AT ALL WHEN TAKING A PLANETARY PERSPECTIVE.

first complete adult specimen of an incredibly rare species. And the fact that it lies under 10 feet of ancient sandstone conglomerate in the Utah desert is no coincidence.

Utah has been known as a paleontological treasure chest since the late 19th century.

In fact, the Utah History Encyclopedia says the state boasts a “prolific fossil record that

spans the entire ‘Age of Dinosaurs.’”

That came as a surprise to me after I moved out West. Back when I was somewhere in the range of pre-kindergarten through first grade, my school had a large, sandy playground. One day during recess, my friends and I started digging a hole in front of a plastic playhouse. We were searching for dinosaur bones. When we hit something big and hard — likely a chunk of the limestone undergirding Florida — we were convinced we’d found a dino skull. That same spirit, it turns out, animates the folks who go out and look for the real thing.

Amber Stubbings, of Midvale, Utah, a 35-year-old former bureaucrat with a buzzcut and a dopamine molecule tattooed on her wrist, is one of six volunteers here for this excavation. As biting gnats buzz about everyone’s heads, she explains that for her, it began with the 1993 film “Jurassic Park.” In the movie, scientists extract prehistoric DNA from a mosquito preserved in fossilized tree resin, or amber, and use it to clone dinosaurs. Scientists have never actually extracted dinosaur DNA using this method, but the mere mention of the word amber — i.e. her name — captured her imagination, and still does.

Randy Johnson, a retired explosives chemist nicknamed “Dr. Boom,” started volunteering about a decade ago. Since then, he’s logged some 15,000 hours in the lab and in the field and even has a dinosaur named after him. With a khaki getup and a white, 70-yearold’s beard, he looks like the archetype of the PHOTOGR APHY BY ELLI OT R OSS

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T Y LO R B IR THISE L, PA L EO N TO LO GY L AB MA N AGE R AT T HE N ATUR A L HI STORY MUSE UM O F U TA H, C UTS A T R E NC H THR O UG H A PI LE O F T- R E X B O N E S, A MO R E D E L I C ATE TASK T HA N IT SE E M S.

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aging adventurer who’s still got it. Another bearded 70-year-old named Paul Boyle, who wears special knee pads for hammering away at rocks, traces his interest to the dinosaurs of the Disney classic “Fantasia.”

Whatever the reason, explains expedition leader Randy Irmis, the common thread uniting the folks who do this work is curiosity. Behind frameless spectacles, 40-year-old Irmis is an understated Renaissance man. Knowledgeable about everything from arachnids to photo composition to pilot-caused plane crashes, his main area of expertise is fossils.

As the curator of paleontology at the Natural History Museum of Utah, he’s been digging for dinosaurs since 2002 — and earlier, if you count those childhood forays in the backyard. Out here, he does more or less the same

work as the volunteers. But in the lab, he’s also responsible for analyzing the specimens hauled back. It’s his job to understand what they tell us about where the Earth has been and where it might be headed. “By having this perspective on Earth’s past, we can speak a bit to where we’re going in the future,” he explains. “The big question is, how is climate change going to impact us? … If we want to understand where we might be going in the next couple of centuries with climate change and greenhouse gasses, the only way we can answer that question is by looking further back in time.” The fossil record can be cyclical in that way, illuminating how the unprecedented challenges we humans face are likely not unprecedented at all when taking a planetary perspective.

B O N E S E E K E R S FR O M across the country visit Grand Staircase in search of treasure. The Kaiparowits formation, in particular, features a wealth of skeletons from the Late Cretaceous Period — a time when the land that is now Utah desert was wet and humid and full of life — some of it (at least thus far) found nowhere else on Earth. Studying that life can help scientists paint a more complete picture of what was. In this case, the dig’s specimen is believed to be a species of tyrannosaur called “Teratophoneus curriei” — a 30-foot meat-eater with serrated teeth whose scientific name translates from the Greek to “monstrous murderer.”

Tyrannosaurs existed as the apex predators of their environments, and studying them can tell paleontologists about those environments: about animal diversity, abundance, growth and metabolism, and how tyrannosaurs served ecological roles similar to (or different from) the apex predators of today. Such skeletons also contribute to a scant fossil record; the first of this species wasn’t discovered until 2011 (and it was a sub-adult), so the more specimens scientists have available, the more they can test their hypotheses about aging, population variation, diets, etc. In fact, Irmis and his colleagues hope to learn whether this tyrannosaur is actually a new species. Since the Kaiparowits formation contains sediment encompassing about two million years, answering that question could help scientists understand whether multiple species of tyrannosaur occupied that space at different times during that span — or, perhaps more interestingly, at the same time.

An ecosystem can’t usually sustain more than one apex predator, so if this one did, it could raise new possibilities about the environment that once enveloped southern Utah.

Studying specimens like this one also offers clues about climate change, given that many dinosaurs lived in an era when elevated levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were orders of magnitude higher than they are today.

That’s a big leap for the modern benefits of paleontology, a field of study that was once considered scandalous.

Paleontology entered a world unaccustomed to the idea of a planetary existence that predated humans and featured mass-extinction events. “This made (God) seem not so much careless as peculiarly hostile,” writes Bryson. Indeed, the word “paleontology” wasn’t used in the scientific community until 1822, and Charles Darwin’s landmark treatise “On the Origin of Species” was not published until 1859. Many of the first specimens discovered were not recognized for

what they were. But once they became known, the idea of creatures that were “big, fierce, and extinct,” as the late child psychologist Sheldon White once observed, inspired generations.

Paleontology, for many children, became a gateway science.

Natural history scholar Keith Stewart Thomson noted in 2005 that dinosaurs exist today as a cultural phenomenon — as something both “half real and half not real,” and therefore fascinating. And the more we can learn about them, the more we can bridge that gap. “Whatever conclusion you reach, that’s always just a new hypothesis,” Irmis tells me just before everyone at the camp in Grand Staircase retreats to their tents beneath the star-spattered (and mercifully gnat-free) night sky. “So that’s why it’s important to keep coming out here.”

T H E PR O C E SS O F extracting bones starts with finding them. While I rest under a shady juniper tree at the tyrannosaur digsite, a volunteer named Dave — who looks like the quintessential vacationing dad — calls me over to an embankment about 50 paces away, where he’s found what he thinks are a few chunks of bone. To test them, we lick them — a common practice, because if it’s bone, it’ll stick to your

tongue. These stick, so we know they’re bone (if you’re wondering what dinosaur bones taste like, they’re much like pasta: They taste like whatever “sauce” they come in). But finding a site worth excavating requires more than bone fragments alone. Rather, it requires a refined sense that most folks will tell you can only be developed with practice. Luckily, the perfect person to explain happens to show up.

Taylor Barnette, a trim, fit guy with a sleeveless shirt and a fanny pack, happens to be trail running in the area and stops by to take a look at his handiwork. He discovered this site back in 2018 while prospecting for the Bureau of Land Management. Originally from New Mexico, he worked in Manhattan for about two decades before deciding to move back to the Southwest, “van life around,” and look for fossils. “It was always a fantasy of mine to find a dinosaur. I didn’t think I was going to,” he explains. “I just thought it would be cool.”

He honed the skill of fossil finding over two fruitless years, describing the process almost like machine learning: The more data you put in, the more accurate the results. “It’s just an accumulation of experience,” he says. “It’s like hunting an animal. You pick up instincts about where to go and where not to go.” His instincts told him this spot looked like a good one, and

S C I E N T I STS LI K E R A N DY I RMIS R EG UL AR LY US E PAINT BR US H ES TO DUST O F F T H E B O N E S T H E Y' V E U N E A R TH ED, S INCE T H EY CAN Q UICKLY BE R E-COVER ED IN DUST.

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BOTTOM: PAU L B OY L E , LEFT, AND RANDY J OHNS ON DU ST OF F A BON E T H AT 'S B E E N PLACE D IN A P L AST E R MOLD, RE ADY TO B E HAULED OU T OF THE FIE L D.

he turned out to be correct. He’d hoped to find one dinosaur, but earlier this week, the museum team confirmed that he’d actually done more than that: This excavation site, they’d confirmed, houses at least two tyrannosaurs.

Like deep-sea mysteries arising out of the dark, the tyrannosaur’s bones surface: a tibia, a femur, a metatarsal, a single tooth as big as a stapler. All of them cracked and reddish-brown, as one might expect given that they haven’t seen the light of day in some 76 million years.

The process of getting to bones like these starts with heavy-duty digging — usually several feet into hard rock. Once reached via jackhammers and sledgehammers, a more delicate touch is required. Scientists and volunteers use tools as large as pickaxes and as small as screwdrivers sharpened like pencils to chip away at fragments of rock, hoping that with every piece of stone they break off, a new bone will reveal itself. They’re constantly dusting their newly created surfaces with wood-handled paint brushes, trying to make sure nothing gets missed.

On this day, the crew breaks out additional artillery: a gas-powered concrete saw named “DEWEY,” scrawled across the instrument’s orange hull in thick permanent marker. Tylor Birthisel, paleontology lab manager at the museum, fires up the saw and begins cutting a trench through the main pile of bones, wearing a mask and goggles (a measure taken to specifically prevent the risk of the lung disease silicosis). He orders everyone to stand back. His sawing throws a cloud of talc-like dust all over the site. “It just gets into everything,” Boyle observes. So back to the brushes the crew goes.

Once they’ve isolated the pieces they want to collect, they place the smallest bones and bone fragments into clear Ziploc bags while covering the larger ones with wet paper towels. Then they mix up a tub of plaster, slather strips of burlap, and wrap the exposed fossils with their bare hands. The plaster leaves behind an unmistakable white tint on everyone’s palms, reminiscent of the white-powdered war boys of “Mad Max.” Once the plaster hardens, they chisel away at the rock underneath until the bone can be flipped upside down, with another plaster coat destined for the underbelly. And once the bone is fully plastered, they can haul it away — by hand if it’s small enough, but more often by helicopter, since these chunks of bone and rock can weigh over a thousand pounds.

That’s the most common type of work at this site: hammering away to extract bones

that have already been found; digging trenches; encasing them with plaster; repeat. It’s important, given that a skeleton (now skeletons) of this size can take several years to dig up. Yet the real thrill, anyone here will tell you, is in the enticement of discovery. paleontologist’s playground.

Geologist John Strong Newberry was the first person to find dinosaur bones in the state.

In 1859, he and an expedition team from the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers came across a mass of large, ancient, reptilian bones near what is Canyonlands National Park today. Newberry and his colleagues thought they were looking at an ichthyosaur — an ancient marine reptile that was not, in fact, a dinosaur. But 18 years later, a paleontologist identified the bones as belonging to a Triassic dinosaur. That was later revised to a Jurassic dinosaur, which is now known as “dystrophaeus.” Newberry’s find is the only known example of this species, and work on his original skeleton — as well as the area it came from — continues to this day. It was the first of many such discoveries in Utah, which contains an unusually extensive fossil record, starting one billion years ago and continuing through a few thousand years ago with few gaps.

“Utah’s fossil record of the diversification of early animals (Cambrian Period), the age of dinosaurs (Mesozoic Era), and diversification of modern mammal lineages (Eocene) is particularly noteworthy,” Irmis adds. Which makes it all the more enticing for amateurs, too.

Irmis hands me a hammer and screwdriver to give this digging thing a try; I promptly earn three blisters on my right index finger. But I also manage to remove (probably) a few dozen pounds of rock, including one with a curious red fragment lodged into it. “Is this anything?”

I ask Irmis. “Yep, that’s a piece of bone all right,” he says.

From what, he can’t say. Perhaps a fragment of a tyrannosaur rib, or maybe a piece of an unrelated prehistoric turtle. I don’t care. It’s bone — my childhood fantasy fulfilled. This makes me that much more eager to keep digging because with each new piece of rock chipped away, another red fragment — maybe a bigger one! — might reveal itself. Hunting dinosaurs can be addicting in that way. “There are always the scientific reasons for why it’s exciting, because you’re always learning new things, and that’s fine. But then there’s just the emotional thrill of exposing a bone for the first time, and you’re the first human to ever see that fossil,” Irmis says. “Like, this is an animal that was alive 76 million years ago, and this is its actual

U TA H I S A

shinbone right there! And I just start thinking about, like, ‘Wow, how big was this thing, and what did it look like when it was alive?’”

Those questions can lead to other big answers.

Dinosaurs, after all, lived in an era when the doubling or tripling of atmospheric greenhouse gasses wasn’t uncommon, thanks to massive volcanic eruptions. The fossil record tells us that when that happens, “life does take a hit.” (Read: massive extinction.) But there’s an even more relevant component to that story. “Oftentimes, these organisms and the ecosystems they live in take a long time — hundreds of thousands or even millions of years — to recover,” Irmis explains. “So I think the frightening thing is that if we don’t do anything right now, it’s not like we can decide to totally stop emitting carbon dioxide 200 years from now. The effects of what we’ve already emitted are going to last for thousands, tens of thousands of years, minimally.”

The good news, he says, is that we haven’t reached that point. That’s obviously important and valuable to know. Yet those

more inscrutable questions — How big was it? What did it look like? — are the ones that drive such discoveries.

“The thing that makes me most sad is when I meet adults that have lost their curiosity,” Irmis says. “And I’m like, ‘What happened?’

I’m so sorry that it did.”

This dusty, dry bowl of desert gives you no choice but to exercise your imagination. You just have to look around to find something that will capture it. Literally. In the distance, several hundred feet away, we can just make out a blue drum of water — a marker of another tyrannosaur site. And just as we’re packing our bags to hike out for the day around 5 p.m., Birthisel and Randy Johnson return early. “I have good news and bad news,” Birthisel says, stomping up more gray plumes of dust.

“The bad news is we have to be gone another day.

“The good news is we have a fully articulated gryposaurus skull” — which is science-speak for an intact duck-billed dinosaur skull.

They’ve returned to pick up Dewey, because they need a saw to get it out.

TAYLO R B A R N E TT E DIS COVER ED T H IS T-R EX S IT E IN 201 8 W H I LE PR OS PE C TI NG F O R T H E BUR EAU O F L AND MANAG EMENT.

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A LAST NOTE FOR THE

TRUMPETER’S FATHER

AFTER HIS DAD DIED, MUSICIAN MARK INOUYE LEARNED OF HIS IMPRISONMENT AT UTAH’S TOPAZ WAR RELOCATION CENTER, WHICH OPENED 80 YEARS AGO THIS MONTH. TODAY HE’S STILL TRYING TO UNCOVER THE STORY HIS FATHER NEVER TOLD HIM

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PHOTOS BY

ETHAN BAUER

MARK OWENS

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MARK PERCEIVED A MISSING PIECE OF HIMSELF AS HE ROSE THROUGH THE MUSICAL RANKS: KNOWING WHO HIS FATHER ACTUALLY WAS.

TAKARA INOUYE

M A R K I N O U YE I S N E V E R W I TH O U T T H E D O G TAG S O F H I S LAT E FAT H E R , TA KA R A , W H O, A FTE R B E I N G I M PR I S O N E D BY TH E U. S . G OV E R N M E N T, W E N T O N TO S E RV E I N I TS M I LI TA RY.

They hadn’t jumped the barbed wire fences or slipped past the guard towers under cover of darkness; rather, they — like so many imprisoned at Topaz — were allowed outside the prison encampment’s borders to provide cheap labor. Tak and his pals worked at a sugar beet farm, tearing the wrinkled, white vegetables from the soil for 10 cents an hour.

With crinkly black hair, bushy eyebrows and two dark-brown pearls for eyes, Tak was a hard worker who spent his high school years at Topaz interested in math and who’d go on to study chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. But on this afternoon, he and his friends tried to relax. They often did at the end of their shifts, before retiring to their “guest house,” which looked more like a ramshackle shed. There was a canal near the beet field, so the quintet stripped and went swimming. At least until two white girls from nearby Delta High School rumbled by in a pickup truck, grabbed their pile of clothes and drove away.

Luckily for Tak and his friends, the girls returned and offered their clothes back — on one condition: One of the boys would have to get out of the water to fetch them.

Eight decades later, Tak’s son, Mark Inouye,

often recalls that scene. He can almost see it in his head; almost feel the desert sun on his skin.

He does his own pondering to fill in the gaps: Where was this beet farm and this canal exactly? Was Tak the one who collected the clothes?

Exactly 80 years ago this September 11, Topaz opened. After the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese military, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had signed Executive Order 9066, resulting in the rounding up of 120,000 people of Japanese descent from America’s West Coast. The majority were American citizens who had never been to Japan. Topaz was one of 10 camps that would imprison Japanese Americans for years, in Utah, California, Wyoming, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho and Arkansas. Tak and his fellow Topaz inmates — over 11,000 in all — were not free to control their futures.

The country is a much different place in 2022 than it was in 1942. Yet Japanese American imprisonment haunts the nation’s legacy.

It haunts us as we try to understand our current, injustice-filled world. It haunts us as we continue to piece together the horrors of places like Topaz. And it haunts Mark Inouye as he searches for the stories that will bring him closer to the father he has come to realize he never really knew.

must’ve stared up at the sun and pondered where he was.

He must’ve. Foremost because on the dusty outskirts of Delta, Utah, under the bleaching rays of the West Desert, there isn’t much else to do. Takara — “Tak,” his friends called him — was a boy then. A teenager who, like other Japanese Americans caught in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor, had been forced out of his home in Oakland, California, and away from his life. He’d endured a multiday nightmare on a creaky, dusty, mechanically compromised train just to get to his new residence, the Topaz War Relocation Center, where on one summer afternoon in the early 1940s, he and three friends had escaped.

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M A R K IN O UY E O N THE SITE O F THE TO PA Z WA R R E LO C ATIO N C E N TE R , WHE R E HIS FATHE R WAS IN C A R C E R ATE D AS A TE E N AG E R .

TODAY, Mark is the principal trumpeter with the San Francisco Symphony. He’s performed from Belgium to Oklahoma to Taiwan. The 51-yearold has been a guest of the New York Philharmonic and played with The Who at Carnegie Hall. His hometown of Davis, California, features an entry for him on its Wiki page, and he was inducted in 2008 into his high school’s hall of fame. Yet for all his professional success, he perceived a missing piece of himself as he rose through the musical ranks: knowing who his father actually was.

Mark was invited to Utah this past May to play in a concert commemorating Topaz and its history — yet for him, that history has felt largely incomplete. Sure, by now he knows about as much as anyone regarding the camp — about the barracks without running water; about the crude coal heating stoves; about the place Topaz survivor and author 34

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number, upon unearthing his discarded dog tags from the Korean War. Why Tak volunteered to serve in the military of a country that imprisoned him without cause, Mark wasn’t sure. But he started wearing those dog tags, and started reading the old books. Many of them concerned the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II — a phenomenon Mark had never heard of.

He visited a library and discovered that these camps were indeed real. He did some quick arithmetic in his head. His dad, he realized, would have been about 15 at the start of World War II — the same age Mark was at the time. And given that he lived in Oakland, that meant his dad was almost certainly sent to one — just in time to start high school, no less. He soon discovered that, yes, Tak had been imprisoned in a Japanese internment camp. But Mark was still a teenager with teenager obligations. For the next 10 years, he thought little about his dad’s past.

Then, in the mid-1990s, as a student at Manhattan’s Juilliard School for the performing arts, Mark was the trumpeter and frontman for a four-piece ensemble performing a show at The Iridium jazz club. When he finished, a middle-aged Japanese woman approached. “I really loved your set,” she told him. “Is your father Takara Inouye?”

Yoshiko Uchida called the “City of Dust.” But he learned all that by searching for memories of his dad, who died when Mark was 15. That urge — the one that beckons us to understand where we came from — roared out of him over time, but he hasn’t been able to fill in all the blanks of a life erased when he was still too young to understand what that meant. If only, he often tells himself, he had started earlier, back when Tak’s death seemed as straightforward as a teenager’s tragic loss of a parent.

Back then, in the summer of 1985, Tak had been losing weight. A heart attack had forced him to commit to his cardiovascular health, but his regimen wasn’t working. Mark and the rest of his family saw him slipping away slowly.

On the morning of July 20 — Tak’s 20th wedding anniversary — Mark’s mother charged into the bedroom he shared with his brother in Oakland. “Boys, get up,” she told them. “Your father’s dead.”

Though the country was in the midst of a renewed conversation about Japanese

internment — that fall saw the 40-year anniversary of Topaz closing, and in 1988 President Ronald Reagan would issue a formal apology and $20,000 of reparations to remaining survivors — Mark didn’t pay attention. His dad had never mentioned anything about Topaz or Japanese internment. Come to think of it, he hadn’t really told Mark anything about himself. All Mark knew was that he enforced the rules and expectations of their home; he was, in Mark’s own words, an “authoritarian.”

Mark also knew he worked in the soil science department at the University of California, Davis, and that he had a friend from work who he’d sometimes shoot hoops with. That was it.

Only after he died did Mark realize there must be more to him.

His questions began simmering when he and his two brothers started sorting through Tak’s things. They found piles of old books, often marked by a mysterious four-digit number — “I-5011.” They soon discovered that was part of Tak’s American military service

TAK WAS KNOWN to almost everyone by his American name, Steve. Yet here was this woman, calling his father by a name he hadn’t heard in years. Mark froze. So far from home, so far from his dad’s death, who at this random club would possibly recognize his name, or perhaps even his face?

Yes, he told her, Takara was his dad, but he’d died some 10 years ago. “I was interned with him at Topaz during World War II,” she

explained. “He was really good friends with my older brother.” The brother lived in Delaware.

Mark called him up the next day. “Hello, this is Mark Inouye,” he said, and didn’t have to say anything else. The long-ago classmate cut in, “You’re the son of Tak.” They arranged to meet in Rhode Island, where Mark conducted his first interview with a Topaz survivor — and, more importantly, with a friend of his dad’s.

Tak, he learned, was an intense man. Rigorous.

Thorough. Driven and uncompromising. He also learned that his dad was a good student, and that he loved baseball — something that escaped him when Tak volunteered to coach Mark’s Little League team back in the day. But he had many more questions than this one guy could answer.

In 2003, Topaz High School’s class of 1945 published a book — “Blossoms in the Desert” — featuring vignettes from surviving members.

For Mark, the book was a revelation. Here was an up-to-date collection of people who could tell him about the dad he never knew. And, what’s more, they were accessible. “The funny thing about 60- and 70-year-olds,” Mark says, “is that they’re really easy to find on the internet. Addresses don’t change, and they have landlines.” He started cold calling. He worried that many of them wouldn’t want to talk due to lingering shame or resentment; his own uncle, though Mark asked several times, never wanted to talk much about Topaz. And unfortunately, few remembered his dad anyway. But some did — and they were willing to chat.

He also had his dad’s yearbook. From it, he learned that Tak was in the Hi-Y club, a YMCA-affiliated organization. He learned that, despite an official listing of 5-foot-5 and 138 pounds, Tak was a quarterback on the Topaz Rams football team. One teammate even signed his picture with a note about it: “To Tak,” it read. “A swell Q.B.” And he learned that the school’s vice principal, a white man named J.E. Smith, announced with glee that the students of this high school-within-a-prison were “that much nearer our goal of peace and living

LIKE EVERYTHING INVOLVING TOPAZ, THE REUNIONS WERE COMPLICATED

BY THE CIRCUMSTANCES THAT BROUGHT THE CLASSMATES TOGETHER.

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“THAT’S ONE OF THE GREAT GIFTS MUSIC CAN GIVE:

as usual once more.” But one name stood out from the rest.

It was written all over. “Loads of luck to the other half of Yum,” reads one entry in blue marker. Everyone called her Yum or YumYum, but her real name was Yumi Tsugawa — Tak’s barbed wire, guard tower, barracks-living high school sweetheart.

The yearbook held more clues about Yumi.

Most notably in the section titled “Senior Will,” where the graduating class offered tongue-in-cheek remembrances. Most used it to tell a final joke. One young woman wrote that she “wills her mellow voice to Joe Goto,” for example. Tak told a joke, too, but one that seemed to indirectly reference Yumi: “Takara Inouye wills his ability to go steady to the Topaz casanovas.” Yumi herself took a more serious approach. “Yumi Tsugawa,” she wrote, “leaves herself for Takara.”

Mark knew they didn’t end up together long term, since Tak had married Mark’s mother, who was not Yumi Tsugawa. But he figured if anyone could tell him about his dad’s younger self, it would be Yumi. Her old yearbook photo shows a young woman with thin eyebrows and a modified pompadour; he hoped he would be able to meet her, to talk to her. Unfortunately, once his search for her began, he quickly discovered she had died several years earlier.

She had a younger sister who was still alive, though, so he met up with her instead.

The sister confirmed that Tak and Yumi were indeed a couple, but that was pretty much all she could say. At least until about six months after their final meeting, when she called Mark and said she’d found a box of Yumi’s old things — including a heart-shaped locket.

The gold-colored pendant is inscribed with what appears to be a little bell and some leaves on the front, alongside a pair of letters difficult to decipher. Inside, squeezed into a rusted 36

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frame, is Tak’s cracked, stained yearbook photo, chopped out with scissors. “Holding that in my hand was a pretty powerful and profound moment,” Mark recalls. “This was roughly 2010.

My dad passed away in 1985. And this locket was given in 1944. I mean, it’s 70 years of history.”

Yet the locket still couldn’t answer Mark’s burning questions about Yumi. Perhaps the most vexing of all comes from the yearbook, back among the signatures. Because even though Yumi opted to profess her love for Tak in the Senior Will, it seems something had changed by the time the books arrived and it was time to leave Topaz. “I hope you aren’t disappointed, though I can’t blame you,” reads Yumi’s cryptic entry, written in thick black ink. “I hope you are doing okay. Take it easy. Just, Yúm.”

Sometimes, even now, Mark grips that locket and curses himself for not starting his search earlier. If only he had begun tracking people down a few years sooner; if only he could’ve asked Yumi how they met, or what happened, or what she remembered. If only. The empty space between what he knew about his father and what he wanted to know seemed as wide as ever. But surely the answers were out there.

He just needed to keep looking.

HE UNEARTHED some helpful information in the early 2010s.

After interviewing several dozen Topaz survivors, he discovered that the Class of 1945 met up for annual class reunions. So in 2014, Mark headed over to a golf club in the East Bay, where the same guy he’d spoken to in Rhode Island years earlier was a member and had secured a banquet room. About 20 people

FRO M T HE B EN TSUCHIDA CO LLECT IO N, TO PAZ M U S E U M, D E LTA, U TAH

TO TRANSPORT PEOPLE BACK TO TIMES IN THEIR LIVES.”

showed up, and that was more than enough for Mark, who found himself stricken with a strange sense of déjà vu.

He’d studied these folks. Knew their pictures from the yearbook. Knew their nicknames. He’d even interviewed some of them.

They looked different now, of course, with wispy white hair and jowls; with hunched backs and wheelchairs and canes. But what a lively sight, to hear these 80-year-olds come alive with stories — not of the dark, dayslong train ride that brought them to the middle of the Utah desert, where dusty, Army-issued wool blankets awaited them — but of teenage joy. To hear them laugh at the absurdity of pet rattlesnakes in aquariums. Some might share memories of their mothers’ work as a mess hall waitresses; of reheating old food on a modified hot plate from Montgomery Ward. Someone might joke about his terrible teachers, or that one time during a science demonstration that he and three friends — seated at the back of the classroom — urged their instructor to add more sodium to a beaker of water until finally, the beaker exploded and splashed the first three rows of the class with sodium hydroxide.

Oh, how they laughed and laughed.

Mark joined the conversation soon enough.

He brought out the yearbook and found the daughter of a friend named Harry who wrote a note to his dad. She recognized her father’s handwriting immediately and shared stories about him. The next year, he found another guy nicknamed Tubby, who used to play the trumpet at Topaz. Mark later surprised Tubby at a San Francisco nursing home with his own trumpet, and even goaded him into blowing out a few notes. He sensed that they enjoyed his presence as much as he enjoyed theirs; he was almost a stand-in for Tak. “When they found out that I was the son of Takara, they embraced me immediately,” he says. “As if I was a member of the Class of 1945. I mean, it’s very odd. Here I am kind of hobnobbing with these 80-year-olds, and I felt like I had known them already.”

Like everything involving Topaz, the reunions — which ended with the 70th anniversary in 2015 — were complicated by the circumstances that brought the classmates together. “Those three years were both incredibly bad and incredibly good,” explains Daisy

JAPANES E AMER ICANS IMPR IS O NED AT T H E TO PAZ WAR R ELO CAT IO N CENT ER IN 1 944.

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“IT’S REALLY ABOUT A PROFOUND EXPERIENCE OF SITTING DOWN FACE TO FACE WITH THESE HUMAN BEINGS AND HEARING THEIR STORIES.”

( LE FT) M A R K I N O U YE PE R FO R M E D W I T H S H I R LE Y M U R A M OTO FO R A TO PA Z M U S E U M B E N E FI T CO N C E R T I N M AY 2022. ( B E LOW ) M U R A M OTO, A N OTH E R D E S C E N DA N T O F TO PA Z PR I S O N E R S , STA N DS AT TH E D O O RWAY O F T H E B U I LD I N G W H E R E H E R FA M I LY WAS I N C A R C E R AT E D.

Satoda in her “Blossoms in the Desert” entry, “and it never should have happened.” That dichotomy of something good coming from something so bad was chiseled into relief at the 70th reunion, when Mark used his trumpet skills to blast out some big-band classics that would have played at the proms and dances of his dad’s youth.

With the soothing melody of Bunny Berigan’s 1937 hit “I Can’t Get Started” blaring from his lips, Mark watched his dad’s old classmates relive exactly what Satoda remembers: “You just swayed to the music and took a few steps to turn around in circles.” Some of them even managed to jitterbug. “Thankfully that’s one of the great gifts music can give: to transport people back to times in their lives,” Mark says.

“And this is a horrible, hideous moment in their lives. But they also have all this joy remembering the school dances and the live music.”

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One can only imagine what they might have seen had they closed their eyes. Maybe one of them might dredge up a memory of Tak and Yum swaying to a scratchy vinyl record. Or maybe it would be something more complicated. Stepping outside into the desert night and seeing the outline of a barbed-wire fence against the Milky Way, with that same scratchy tune still humming along, fading into the background.

By talking to them, by watching them relive high school in ways good and bad, Mark came as close as he had been yet to seeing the dad he never knew. Only one other place offered such promise.

THE CONCERT that’s brought Mark back to Delta marks his fifth time in town. He’s here alongside Shirley Muramoto — another descendant of a Topaz prisoner — who plays a traditional stringed Japanese instrument called a koto. Mark’s brought various brass horns. The concert will take place at the high school auditorium, but no trip down this way would be complete without an excursion to that hallowed desert.

So that’s where Mark heads first.

The land won’t tell you much these days.

You can only piece together fragments, and only if you know where to look. A pile of rusty nails. An overgrown row of rocks. Even then you’ll only find little bits of what was, and

you’ll be left wanting more. An occasional gust of desert wind provides the lone soundtrack for this barren stretch of greasewood desert.

The silence is its own kind of sound. You can almost hear the sun pummeling the bonewhite alkali soil that turns to slop with the slightest mist. It’s hard to imagine a settlement existing here — let alone one that amounted to the fifth-largest city in Utah at the time. Yet Mark knows it did. He’s heard the stories. He’s asked the questions.

Some part of him still hopes more could be revealed; that secrets about his dad could be lurking. But if they’re out there, he knows he’s running out of time to find them. The desert gusts sweep up more and more of this place and its memory each day.

Mark returns to Delta High School about an hour before the concert. He needs to change out of his sandals and cargo shorts into something more formal. While he’s gone, the first guests arrive, mostly sporting gray hair. But soon, the auditorium is overrun with parents and kids. It feels like the whole town is here by the time Mark reemerges, now wearing a white button-down with a patterned tie and baggy, beltless brown slacks. Even though Mark has played all over the world, he admits that tonight is something new — for a few reasons.

Musically, he’s never heard of a trumpet and koto duet. He also never imagined he’d perform a quick truck ride away from where his dad spent his high school years incarcerated.

He and Shirley are here to honor and offer their thanks to Jane Beckwith, director of the town’s Topaz Museum, for the decades she has spent preserving rather than forgetting that history. Yet for much of the evening, history is hardly mentioned. Mark changes that up when introducing his second number. “So my connection to Delta and Topaz is that my father lived in Oakland during World War II, and he was interned and sent here to Topaz. When I was a kid growing up, he spoke not a word. I knew nothing about it,” he says, flugelhorn in hand. He explains his long-standing quest of trying to know his dad; of interviewing anyone

who may have something to say about him; of clinging to whatever pieces of him he could, like the dog tags jingling, at that very moment, from his neck. But eventually, he tells the crowd, the scope of his project changed. “The point of this quest I was on was really to learn about this history, which included my family,” he explains. “And it’s really a profound experience to sit down face to face with these human beings and hear their stories. What they had to go through. And it brought me here, to this evening, to you fine folks.”

After one final duet Mark is, for once, the one answering questions in a Q&A with the citizens of Delta. Most of them focus on music. (“Does it take a fair amount of time to tune the koto?” “What’s the lowest note you can play on the trumpet?”) But about half an hour into the session, a young woman finally addresses Topaz directly. “So a lot of us have grown up in Delta and have heard a lot about what went on there,” she says, “but could you share something like a story that maybe you know about your family that was in Topaz?”

“What a thoughtful question,” Mark answers. The story he chooses is the one about his dad’s clothes getting stolen by the local high school girls in the pickup truck. He doesn’t mention all the questions surrounding it; all the answers he wishes he had. Like who, for example, emerged from the canal wearing only his birthday suit to fetch the clothes. The story he had was enough.

At least until the next person to raise a hand — a white-haired fellow with a bright-red T-shirt. “My father,” the man explains, “was one that hired fellas from the Japanese camp.

They were only three miles east of there, and there was a canal.”

“Holy smokes, sir. We might have to talk,” Mark says, pondering, like his father before him, the absurdity and power of this place and moment. The crowd laughs, but he’s not kidding.

“I’m serious,” he says. “We might have to talk.”

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SPE CIA L ISSU E

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— SPECIAL ISSUE —

a s a yo u n g p r o f e s s o r at h a r va r d u n i v e r s i t y , i h a d o c c a s i o n to v i s i t m e m o r i a l c h a p e l f o r p e r s o n a l p r ay e r a n d m e d i tat i o n . i t s e e m e d l i k e a s o l e m n s a n c t u a r y i n a n ot h e r w i s e s e c u l a r l e a r n i n g e n v i r o n m e n t . a s i wa l k e d o u t o n t h e s t e p s o f t h e c h a p e l i s ta r e d a c r o s s t h e c o u r t ya r d to t h e w i d e , i m p o s i n g c o l u m n s c r e at i n g t h e b u lwa r k e n t r a n c e to w i d e n e r l i b r a r y . i t wa s a s i f i wa s s ta r i n g f r o m t h e t e m p l e o f fa i t h to t h e h a l l o f r e a s o n . t h e s e t w o i d e a l s s e e m e d to b e fa c i n g o f f i n a c o n f l i c t t h at , at l e a s t i n t h i s f o r m i da b l e s e c u l a r e n v i r o n m e n t , w o u l d a l m o s t c e r ta i n ly e n d f o r m a n y w i t h t h e v i c to r y o f r e a s o n .

This all or nothing Hobson’s choice between faith and reason was antithetical to everything I had learned (and experienced) in my undergraduate studies at Brigham Young University. The most profound insights happened when secular and spiritual truths were brought together in inspired and reinforcing ways. As John Donne penned, “Reason is our soul’s left hand, Faith her right, By these we reach divinity.”

Today, I find myself serving as the commissioner of education for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a system that includes BYU, as well as BYU-Idaho, BYU-Hawaii, Ensign College and a global online offering called BYU-Pathway Worldwide. Too often I have felt external forces trying to reassert on these institutions that same Hobson’s choice I experienced standing on the steps of Memorial Chapel. I now recognize that these and other religious schools across the country enjoy a huge strategic advantage, but only if they dare to continue with and strengthen their religious identity — only if they dare to be different from their peers.

Harvard University’s founding was decidedly religious. Its organizing “Rules and Precepts” from 1646 declare that “the maine end of (a student’s) life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life.” Veritas, Harvard’s universally recognized motto, was originally, Veritas pro Christo et Ecclesiae, translated from Latin as “Truth for Christ and the Church.”

It would take two centuries for the motto (and the university) to drop “Christ and the Church.” The initial drift was not one of hostility but rather redirected focus. By the late 1800s, President Charles Eliot had firmly entrenched the philosophy that the way 42

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to serve Christ and the church was not through the founding ideal of knowing God, but rather through cultivating open inquiry. Eliot proclaimed, “It is thus that the University in our day serves Christ and the Church.” But by decoupling spiritual learning from secular inquiry the path to secularization had been set.

The purpose of this article is not to criticize Harvard’s path to secularization. In fact, the road that Harvard modeled has made it the envy of the world. Thousands of universities seek to replicate Harvard’s scholarly excellence. Indeed, Duke and Vanderbilt University had early aspirations as the “Harvard of the South.” Stanford University has also been referred to as the “Harvard of the West.” As the flagship institution within the system of higher education for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, some are pushing BYU toward the same aspiration.

And it is not irrational for BYU to consider that path. It recruits superb students and faculty, evidenced by its number of national merit scholars and Fulbright scholars. The incoming freshman GPA averages nearly 3.9, and its admissions yield rate is among the highest in the nation. BYU is also a top five producer of students who go on to earn doctoral degrees. National media regularly identify BYU as a leader in quality and value. Forbes named BYU No. 1 in value based on its cost and quality ratio.

But even if it were to purely seek secular standing, would the world ever accept BYU solely on its academic merits? Moreover, if its sponsoring religious institution further expanded its already significant investment in the university, would BYU receive equal standing in the academy? BYU’s undergraduate mission is well supported by its sponsoring religious SEPTEMBER 2022

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accreditation pressures, there remain deeper cultural and social pressures on religious schools. I used Harvard’s path to secularization as an example, but their story is not unique. Yale and Dartmouth also had Congregationalist origins. Princeton was Presbyterian, Brown was Baptist and Columbia was Anglican. In his book “The Dying of the Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from Their Christian Churches,” James Burtchaell provides an in-depth analysis of the path to religious disengagement. His study draws on the experience of universities with religious founding. His findings should give pause to any college seeking to preserve its religious identity. In most cases, the challenges to faith did not come from overt attacks on religious practice but rather from redirected priorities.

Burtchaell’s conclusions can be summarized in three recurring mechanisms that lead to religious disenfranchisement: Decoupled leadership.

Decoupled funding.

Decoupled faculty hiring.

First, instead of the sponsoring religious organization choosing leadership, many religious schools are encouraged to have their leaders chosen through outside search committees, donors or faculty associations. The justification is that the school will benefit from outside expertise and prominent stakeholder buy-in. Unfortunately, this can indirectly lead to a decoupling of the institution from its most

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foundational stakeholder — the sponsoring religious organization. but it does mean that the selection criteria should include strengthening Second, as the cost of running a college or university continues to the religious mission of the institution. In our own academic governance climb, the burden on religious organizations does as well. Many religious across five separate education institutions, that leadership decision is institutions worry whether they can continue to maintain their core ecmade by our church leadership and not by outside search committees or clesiastical responsibilities while funding increasingly costly academic powerful external stakeholders. institutions. These realities lead many religious institutions to increase Preserving educational investment is difficult in an era of growing student tuition, seek government assistance or lean on outside donors. operating costs. It might be unrealistic to ask sponsoring religious orgaEach of these come with increasing risk of religious disengagement. nizations to underwrite all of the costs associated with running religious Third is the decoupling of faculty hiring from religious mission. On universities. I hope, however, that religious schools will courageously the surface, this does not seem so daunting — don’t universities control seek more sustainable and less cost prohibitive approaches to the modwho they hire and more importantly who they promote? But as Burtern university. Self-reliant cost models may be one of the only ways relichaell points out, with increasing disciplinary specialization, some acgious universities maintain their viability and independence. Regardless, ademic departments feel they cannot evaluate faculty without outside the more aligned a university is with the mission of its sponsoring reliexpertise. In so doing, many religious colleges are effectively outsourcgious institution, the greater the justification for ongoing financial suping faculty evaluation and promotion to the academy. port from that sponsoring institution.

In this climate, it is important for religious schools to assert the Finally, a word about faculty hiring and promotion. Elder Holrights of their students and their communities to learn and land, who chairs the executive committee of our Board of EduBE DIF F O work in a religious setting. Freeman Hrabowski, noted sciencation has said that the hiring of faculty is the most important T tist and university president, while speaking to Loyola Unidecision a university makes. Religious mission benefits enorversity Chicago, taught faculty and staff that their Jesuit mously at institutions that emphasize their faculty code of values are the “foundation of everything at the university” conduct or even their covenant commitment as part of facand that faith is their “ultimate advantage.” Catholic Uniulty hiring and governance. For example, Wheaton College’s P versity President Peter Kilpatrick spoke on the importance faculty contract includes a covenant commitment. Baylor U E S CI S I of religious identity stating: “We are serious about who we are.”

University has a similar faculty code of conduct in both hiring AL President Linda Livingstone describes how Baylor University is and ongoing employment. We have similar expectations of facul“unapologetically Christian”. ty at BYU and other colleges and universities in our church educationAt BYU, Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, former university president and al system. But to shape internal hiring and promotion across an entire university requires leadership that goes far beyond baseline ecclesiastinow an apostle in the church, recently proclaimed: “BYU will become an cal standards. To avoid outsourcing critical faculty decisions requires ‘educational Mount Everest’ only to the degree it embraces its uniqueSPEC I A L aI SS U E knowledge of faculty scholarship, and teaching deep inside the academic ness, its singularity. We could mimic every other university in the world culture and administration. ... and the world would still say, ‘BYU who?’ No, we must have the will to The intent of this article has been to help religious universities be different and to stand alone, if necessary, being a university second to and faith-oriented faculty to deepen their confidence in the power none in its role primarily as an undergraduate teaching institution that of religious strength identity. From Baylor to BYU, from Catholic is unequivocally true to the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.” Leaders who can articulate a clear vision for religious identity are needed more University to Notre Dame, and at Pepperdine, Yeshiva, Wheaton than ever.

College and so many other institutions, there are nearly 1,000 reliIS SPECIAL giously affiliated colleges and universities in the United States with over 1.5 million enrolled students. Colleges and universities across LE T M E N E XT offer a word of encouragement to the administration and the country are preserving the light of religious mission. As secular faculty of religious schools. While religious identity requires couraforces sometimes bear down and make religiously affiliated schools geous leadership, it also calls for deep structural alignment. Take steps is E increasingly important to understand that relito ensure that religious governance remains strong at your college or S P E C Ifeel A isolated, L I S Sit U gious identity is not only important to a religious community, but university, beginning with the selection of university leadership. Our it strengthens the academy and society more generally. Do not hide ecclesiastical leadership has encouraged our presidents to be the “chief your light under a bushel. Carry it with strength and conviction. moral and spiritual officers” of our schools. That may not mean that a Dare to be different in ways that areDARE true to your distinctive president has to have the formal religious standing of priest or rabbi, D TO BE light.

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distinct strengths of religious universities? I will group these into three broad categories: 1) research and scholarly inquiry, 2) character development and 3) innovative institutional design.

For Sarewitz, research and inquiry at religious universities have direct implications for research policy. Without religious engagement, a whole category of distinctive research questions might be excluded or minimized from the academy. For example, Sarewitz has encouraged BYU to invest in areas of genetic markers for disease and inheritable traits that draw on our faith’s extensive genealogical data. Similarly, he points to proprietary data sets that draw on the church’s extensive efforts in humanitarian aid and poverty alleviation. Derrick Anderson, at the American Council on Education, looks beyond specific topics to a more general approach to science that he calls “humble inquiry.” Anderson believes religious scholars often have a built-in respect for the moral and ethical implications of scientific exploration. He argues that belief in deity can provide a modesty and a thoughtfulness needed in science.

Second, many of my colleagues have articulated the unique ways religious schools teach moral character. Philip Ryken, president of Wheaton College, argues that religious education cultivates informed and engaged citizens. New York Times columnist David Brooks and Comment Magazine editor Anne Snyder point out how a Christian education develops the “whole person,” inspiring not only intellectual but also social and community engagement. Rabbi Ari Berman, president of Yeshiva University, highlights how preserving religious identity preserves religious community. This can also be connected to broader measures of societal flourishing. Where religion wanes we also see declines in social engagement, philanthropy and family stability. Thus, religious schools play a critical role in preserving civil society.

Third, religious schools often facilitate innovative institutional design.

Distinctive religious purpose can provide the identity and confidence W H AT A R E THE

needed to transform traditional universities. Henry J. Eyring, president of BYU-Idaho, articulates how religious identity can help address the cost and completion crisis facing American higher education. Keoni Kauwe, president of BYU-Hawaii, has shown how religious identity can focus institutional design toward greater access for first generation students.

Despite these important social and academic contributions, mounting secular pressures threaten to limit religious universities’ differentiating role in American higher education. Eric Baxter and Montse Alvarado at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty articulate some of the legal pressures facing religious universities — from housing to honor code commitments to hiring practices. Standing by religious identity can risk loss of funding, exclusion from federal contracts or loss of student aid.

Even with a strong legal defense and clear constitutional protections, perceived pressure for compliance in accreditation can be significant.

Fortunately, most regional accreditors appropriately recognize distinctive mission and simply require that the religious expectations be transparent and broadly communicated. Presidents of religiously affiliated universities who also serve on regional accrediting boards, including Robin Baker (George Fox University) and Kevin Worthen (BYU), repeatedly remind religious schools that their religious missions are not only protected but even encouraged by accreditation.

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organization with over $500 million in annual operating funds coming from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But even with such a stable financial footing and the strongest student academic profile in the Intermountain West, attempting to replicate Harvard or any secular model is not a strategy for long-term success.

Religious schools must differentiate on their unique spiritual purposes, even as they strive to tie into the broader academic community. I had a conversation recently with Dan Sarewitz, former editor of Issues in Science and Technology, the journal published by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Sarewitz said, “The academy needs BYU. But we need BYU to be BYU, and not a watered-down version of every other secular university.” In other words, simply trying to replicate other models hides the very sources of differentiation religious universities can (and do) bring to the academy.

THE MORE ALIGNED A UNIVERSITY IS WITH THE MISSION OF ITS SPONSORING RELIGIOUS INSTITUTION, THE GREATER THE JUSTIFICATION FOR ONGOING FINANCIAL SUPPORT FROM THAT SUPPORTING INSTITUTION.

DARE TO

THE CHALLENGES TO COLLEGES PRESERVING THEIR RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES DO NOT COME FROM OVERT ATTACKS ON RELIGIOUS PRACTICE BUT RATHER FROM REDIRECTED PRIORITIES.

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OXFORD WAS FOUNDED MORE THAN A MILLENNIUM AGO. ITS FIRST KNOWN LECTURER WAS A THEOLOGIAN. AND SOME MUSLIM CENTERS OF LEARNING DATE BACK EVEN FURTHER. RELIGION WAS CENTRAL TO THE CORE IDENTITY OF THE WORLD’S EARLIEST UNIVERSITIES. AND, IN COLONIAL AMERICA, A STUDENT ENROLLING AT YALE, PRINCETON OR COLUMBIA WOULD HAVE HAD A VERY DIFFERENT EXPERIENCE THAN WHAT HE’D EXPECT TODAY. HE WASN’T THERE TO DO SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH OR GET CREDENTIALED FOR PROFESSIONAL SCHOOL. HE WAS THERE TO SHAPE HIS SOUL.

And yet, today American universities may be some of the most secular places in the country. Faith is an afterthought, if that, in most of American higher education. And that’s a pity, because the two grew up together, deeply influenced each other and still have much to learn from each other. Religious higher education isn’t obsolete; properly conceived, it’s more important than ever.

Harvard, the first college in the United States, for example, was established by Puritans. Ten of its first 12 presidents were ministers. The early Harvard motto was Veritas pro Christo et Ecclesiae — “Truth for Christ and the Church.” For many of America’s first colleges — Brown, Dartmouth, Georgetown and others — the Christian faith was central to their core identity.

By the mid-19th century, a religious organization founded almost every university and college in the U.S. and Europe. According to the eminent historian George Marsden, until well into the 19th century, “higher education remained primarily a function of the church, as it always had been in Western civilization.” A strong relationship between religious faith and learning was a given, and by the early 1860s, 262 of 288 college presidents were clergy.

After the Civil War, Ivy League educators gradually began distinguishing between “religious” and “scientific” forms of knowledge.

“For both practical and ideological reasons, they put religious ways of knowing outside the bounds of academic study,” says Baylor’s Benjamin

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P. Leavitt, whose research focuses on religion’s place in the history of American higher education.

The historian Mark Noll describes the period between 1870 and 1930 as one of profound change “in assumptions about intellectual life and in conceptions of higher education itself,” including colleges and universities becoming more secular and skeptical, more oriented toward research and moving away from the task of shaping the character of students. “(T)he new university was far too secular, far too skeptical of Common Sense reasoning and Victorian conventions, to retain the Christian rationalism that had defined the intellectual life of American colleges since their beginning.”

Since then, the gap between secular and Christian higher education institutions has widened. The overwhelming influence the Christian faith had on the broader higher education project dramatically diminished — including, in part, because Christians voluntarily ceded the ground to others.

In an effort to reclaim some of that ground, we witnessed the rise of evangelical liberal arts colleges in the 20th century. But the drifting apart continued, including on matters of teleology. Especially since the 1960s, the trend in higher education was toward fragmentation; Christian colleges, on the other hand, “strove to maintain a synoptic vision,” according to Thomas A. Askew, a historian at Gordon College.

In the past, it was widely assumed a liberal education encompassed a theological education. That is hardly the case today. One way to think about it is that colleges and universities that started out with a Christian foundation but have become secular now form the mainland while Christian colleges and universities — especially evangelical liberal arts ones — are the smaller islands dotting the coastline.

So in this third decade of the 21st century — almost 400 years after the founding of Harvard — what does Christianity have to contribute to higher education?

To start with, first-rate scholarship, including in fields beyond biblical studies and found on campuses where Christianity is not considered core to their identity. Marsden says Protestants and Catholics are “producing intellectually rigorous work in just about every academic field.” In a

forthcoming essay, Marsden writes that “at no time in history has there been so much fine scholarship from traditionalist Christians concerning so many subjects.” He added, “This renaissance of Christian scholarship, especially among traditionalist Protestants, is largely a development of the past quarter century or so.” (This renaissance in Christian scholarship is occurring at precisely the same time that anti-intellectualism is spreading in certain parts of American Christianity, particularly within the evangelical subculture.)

The influence of Christianity can also create a richer and more diverse intellectual culture since much of contemporary higher education lacks a spiritual center. In many places the intellectual dimensions of faith simply aren’t taken seriously. Academics in non-Christian colleges and universities may or may not be outwardly hostile to the Christian faith; mostly they find it an alien concept. But Christian thought clearly has something important to contribute to academic discourse. And as an alternative to naturalism and materialism, Christianity rightly understood is at least worth considering, since it strengthens the case for human rights and inherent human dignity.

One of the greatest documents in American history, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” articulates the grounding for human dignity beautifully. The epistle can’t be understood apart from King’s Christian faith. Neither can the role of faith be pried apart from Augustine’s “Confessions,” Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” or C.S. Lewis’ “The Chronicles of Narnia,” the poetry of John Donne and T.S. Eliot, the paintings of Rafael and Michelangelo, the music of Bach and Handel. Religious faith has inspired excellence in so many different areas.

But that hardly exhausts the list of contributions the Christian faith can make to human life and contemporary higher education. Christian higher education institutions are essential to conserving and transmitting the best of Christian thought. ago, over breakfast with a renowned social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, I asked him what constructive contribution Christians could make to public life. An atheist who finds much to admire in religion, Haidt answered simply: “Humility.”

Humility is a virtue in many realms, including epistemology. Because we have all fallen short, because our judgements are distorted, we “see through a glass darkly,” in the words of the Apostle Paul, knowing only in part.

A FE W YE A R S

This doesn’t mean objective truth doesn’t exist; it merely means we have to hold lightly to our ability to perceive truth. The philosopher and theologian Cornelius Van Til said that there is no such thing as a brute fact. Our presumptions alter the way in which we interpret things. True humility allows us to alter our views based on new information and circumstances, to refine and recalibrate our positions, to open the aperture of our understanding rather than go in search of evidence to confirm what we already believe.

Intellectual humility — openness to learning and correction — is needed everywhere, but one would hope it would be found most conspicuously within the walls of academia. Right now it’s not, and Christianity, when it’s most faithful, can model what it means to search for truth with integrity.

Along similar lines, and in important respects, Christian colleges and universities now model what it means to be a university better than their secular counterparts. I have in mind facilitating and encouraging free inquiry and expression.

Many students at non-Christian colleges are being shielded, or shielding themselves, from words and ideas they find disrespectful or wounding. They are treated like porcelain dolls, fragile and easily breakable, and therefore in need of safe spaces, trigger warning and protection from microaggressions.

Prominent colleges and universities, whose very purpose should include exposing students to competing points of view and allowing intellectual debate to flourish, have instead become institutions that do the opposite. Efforts are made to scrub campuses of words, ideas and subjects that might challenge preexisting beliefs and cause offense. And professors themselves are self-censoring, afraid that they might be brought up on charges for even raising questions that are deemed threatening.

Christian universities can be on the forefront of creating a culture where free expression is valued. They are hardly perfect in this regard; they have their own challenges to face, their own pressures to resist, doctrines they need to conform with. And unlike secular campuses, the pressure on Christian colleges is often coming from the right rather than the left. Still, the stifling conformity of thought we see in much of American higher education today tends to be less pronounced among Christian colleges and universities, according to a recent National Survey of Student Engagement that found that Christian college students feel they have the most freedom to talk about the most issues.

But there’s something even more fundamental that Christian higher SEPTEMBER 2022

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Jewish tradition serve as a call to action, to look forward, continue the grand narrative of the Jewish people and bring our values out into the world.

Our students are the leaders of tomorrow because they contextualize their lives within our covenant of faith. Faith is a reminder that your life is part of a larger story. Faith is a reminder that your life has a story. When people ask me when Yeshiva University began, I answer that we began 3,000 years ago when Moses received the Torah at Sinai.

And it is our deeply rooted story that ensures that our children will not only survive history but drive history as we move history forward towards redemption.

A R I B E R M A N I S T H E P R E S I D E N T O F Y E S H I VA U N I V E R S I T Y.

BE YOURSELF WHY HIGHER EDUCATION — AND AMERICA — IS STRENGTHENED BY AUTHENTICITY

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F R E E M A N A . H RA B OWS K I I I I I S T H E FO R M E R P R E S I D E N T O F T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F M A RY L A N D, B A LT I M O R E C O U N T Y.

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important, we are producing the kind of leaders we desperately need at this moment in our nation’s history — like Kizzmekia Corbett, now a professor at Harvard, who co-led the team that developed Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine.

The promise of higher education — to guide us through the darkness of history and into the light of progress — has never been more important than now. All types of institutions have a role to play in solving the challenges we face. We need the radical innovations that originate from elite technical institutions; the life-changing opportunities created by accessible public universities and community colleges; the focus on critical thinking and civic-mindedness of small liberal arts colleges; and the moral and ethical perspectives offered by religious institutions.

As colleges and universities reclaim what makes them unique, so will they strengthen public confidence in education’s transformative potential. By rediscovering a sense of purpose grounded in authentic values, our institutions of higher learning can be guiding lights not only for their students, but also for a nation in need of hope in a moment of weariness.

BY FREEMAN A. HRABOWSKI III

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education can provide, which is to embody the liberal arts ideal at precisely the moment when much of the rest of American higher education is moving away from it. Non-Christian institutions of higher education increasingly view a college education as a commodity. Market-based THE CONSUMER thinking is dominant, and higher future earnings is the mark of success.

VS. THE COVENANT At its best, Christian higher education institutions appreciate the fundamental purpose of education, which is to shape the human soul, to purHAS A RELENTLESS FOCUS ON OUTCOMES sue the moral good, to love the right things. It is a deeply integrative view.

STRIPPED THE ACADEMY OF PURPOSE? Christian colleges are almost alone today in intentionally developing

BY ARI BERMAN students who, in the words of the Hebrew prophet Micah, “act justly and love mercy and walk humbly with their God.” They do this imperfectly, of course, but more than any other institution in American higher education, they have the best chance to do it. Playing a redemptive role in the world — producing students who will be voices for justice, for modernity poses a challenge. We begin to think of our own lives exclutruth, for reconciliation — is something about which Christian colleges sively through the lens of a consumer rather than as a covenant. There and universities are explicit. But they also fall short, in some cases drais a comfort in being a consumer. One knows the product, reads the inmatically short, and that’s important to acknowledge. struction manual and checks the warranty. Very little risk. In a covenant, Kristin Du Mez, professor of history and gender studies at Calvin however, there is exposure, vulnerability, uncertainty and great risk. But University and author of the bestselling book “Jesus and John Wayne: the upside is different as well. The consumer is only transactional, the How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation,” covenantal is transformational. told me that in the last couple of years in particular, she has witnessed One of the primary challenges in living in a consumer culture is firsthand “the utter intellectual impoverishment that characterizes confusing the two modalities and approaching covenantal matters as many siloed Christian academic spaces.” consumers. This deeply impacts fundamental aspects of our culture, According to Du Mez, “They’re essentially engaging in propaganda including the rising divorce rate, an alarming increase in mental health rather than seeking truth, misconstrue actual academic arguments, and struggles and the way we think about our own education. So long as are either unwilling or unable — due to coercive pressure or deficient higher education is exclusively focused on information, we will always be academic training — to engage in rigorous, good faith conversations outpaced by technological change. Information drives consumer deciabout things that matter. And this sort of pseudo-intellectualism is resions, and there are better ways to access information than just the halls warded in their spaces. For a faith that claims to hold to truth, this funof a university. But the covenantal model of faith will always provide valdamentally distorts the faith and destroys their witness. And it imperils ues for the lives of our students. Covenant creates community. A conour democratic system.” sumer mindset is utilitarian — information precedes commitment. In This doesn’t mean — nor would Du Mez argue — that the a covenant, however, commitment precedes information — the BE DIF core mission of Christian colleges and universities is wrong or relationship is a product of the commitment itself. And this F O T that the academy, comprised of around 5,300 colleges and is the enduring value of faith based communities — particuniversities, wouldn’t benefit from the truths and insights ularly in higher education. Faith nourishes, strengthens and that Christian institutions of higher education can provide. enriches life. As our students construct their lives, faith is But it requires individuals to personify that mission in how a reminder that their lives are part of a larger purposeful they conduct themselves, in ways that are faithful and winstory.

And through covenantal commitments, we create new P U E S CI some, that manifest integrity and honor. A mission statement chapters in that great story, remaining deeply rooted and forAL IS without those willing to carry it out is meaningless. ward focused.

For C.S. Lewis, who held academic positions in English literature at This is a moment for faith. As the world evolves with unprecedented both Oxford University and Cambridge University, “The task of the speed — in science and technology — the very fabric of our community, modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The identities and sense of self has begun to erode. A younger generation is right defense against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments.” He emerging that feels untethered from communal infrastructure. theI SS U E S P E CWith IAL believed students needed to be taught the right order of the loves, to like unprecedented choices afforded through technology, there is now a criand dislike what they ought. sis of anxiety, loneliness and commitment. And it is faith communities Some of us find that vision of education to be compelling because in like Yeshiva University which, rather than retreated, have advanced the taking soulcraft seriously; it is making a correct assessment of the full value of faith. human person. That isn’t to argue that there isn’t value, even great valWe are deeply rooted and forward focused. We have a 3,000-yearue, in an education that isn’t aimed at soulcraft. I received an excellent old tradition, yet we remain forward focused — ever ready to confront education at the University of Washington and, during my college years, the challenges of the future. Some people misunderstand the juxtapoSPECIAL my faith was strengthened by ministries to college students. Still, an edsition of being deeply rooted and forward focused.

They assume that ucation that refines our sentiments, that teaches us to cherish the true the deep roots of Jewish tradition serve as a bulwark against instability, and the good, is a gift beyond measure. At their best, this is what Chrisensuring that the changes of the future don’t undermine our tradition. tian colleges and universities have to offer, and it’s a lot.

But that is not the true purpose of faith. Being deeply rooted is what propels us with confidence to infuse the future with meaning. A deeply P ET E R W E H N E R I S A S E N I O R F E L LOW AT T R I N I T Y FO RU M A N D A R E G U L A RS P E C I A L ISSUE rooted past is a responsibility to perpetuate and grow. The roots of the C O N T R I B U TO R TO T H E AT L A N T I C A N D T H E N E W YO R K T I M E S.

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No one whose family has been touched by higher education doubts its potential to transform lives. And yet, skepticism toward higher learning has become increasingly fashionable, reflecting understandable anxieties about this fraught moment in our history as well as cynicism about American society and institutions.

The numerous social, environmental and public health challenges facing our nation and world are an opportunity for colleges and universities to demonstrate their power to change lives and create hope. What can the leaders of colleges and universities do to restore confidence in institutions of higher learning and ensure that students can meet these challenges?

For starters, we need a diversity of colleges and universities proudly owning what makes them different. This demands that institutions forge an authentic identity reflecting the values and strengths of their community members, rather than simply aspiring, often in vain, to emulate other institutions. The uniqueness of each university community is its testimony to the world, containing the power to transform it.

In my early days as president of University of Maryland, Baltimore County, the leaders of our campus faced the challenge of a young university in the midst of an identity crisis: Would UMBC become a stronger liberal arts college, a research powerhouse or a “big public” known for respectability in sports? This was not just a question of strategic planning: It was a question of understanding our values.

We carried out robust, tough conversations with people from every corner of UMBC to answer that question. This process both identified our values and shaped them, engendering a shared commitment to high expectations, academic achievement, honesty and civility.

These values have created an environment where learners thrive.

Nearly 70 percent of UMBC students graduate within six years, and we lead the nation in Black graduates who go on to earn doctoral degrees in natural sciences and engineering and master’s/doctoral degrees. Most

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CAN RELIGIOUS SCHOOLS CREATE INCLUSIVE CAMPUSES?

BY LIZ DARGER

I was the only person in the room to step forward. I felt vulnerable.

But I wanted to be there to learn and to take part in the conversation.

The year was 2016, and I was participating in my first meeting with Common Ground — an NCAA initiative that brings together athletic administrators and LGBTQ advocates with the goal of creating inclusive environments for athletes of all sexual orientations, all gender identities and all religions. It’s a lofty and noble goal.

Being there as the lone representative of Brigham Young University — a school known for its religious-based honor code — I wasn’t sure how I might be received.

Early in the two-day conference in Indianapolis, a group facilitator had us all get into a big circle. She then asked people to take a step closer into the center of the circle if a certain statement she said applied.

The idea was for us to see who else was literally standing on common ground. After some time, the prompts grew more personal. Step forward if you consider yourself spiritual or Christian. Then the facilitator asked those who are “Mormon” to step forward.

I was the only one. I began to feel anxious, and my mind raced with questions. “What are these people thinking about me? How are they judging me and misjudging me?” I felt utterly alone.

Later, during our substantive conversations, someone mentioned Brigham Young University in a comment. And though I was in the back of the room, right then just about every eyeball turned to me, expecting a response.

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SHE USED HER POSITION OF PRIVILEGE IN THAT SITUATION TO SPEAK UP FOR ME. AND SHE TAUGHT ME RIGHT THERE AN IMPORTANT LESSON ABOUT WHAT IT MEANS TO BE AN ALLY.

I explained a bit about Brigham Young University, our honor code and our student athletes. During my comments, however, a different participant grew vocal and even angry. I tried my best to listen despite the interruption. I offered a silent prayer to know how to respond. I did my best to thank him for expressing his sentiments, even though I was a bit shaken by the exchange.

I was surprised by what happened next. A woman raised her hand. I recognized her as the director of inclusion for the NCAA, and who happens to be a member of the LGBTQ community. I had only met her through email.

She said, “I think there’s something important for the group to remember.

We didn’t invite BYU. They asked to be here.” She continued by saying, “I think that says something about BYU’s intentions that is worth keeping in mind during these conversations.”

I was blown away. She used her position of privilege, in that situation, to speak up for me in a way that I couldn’t for myself. And she taught me an important lesson about what it means to be an ally. As the facilitator moved on, a different woman, who others had referred to as the godmother of lesbian rights in athletics, turned around in her seat to face me, looked me in the eye, placed her hand on my knee and asked, “Liz, are you OK?” I suddenly went from feeling alone to having allies and to feeling respected and valued. In a remarkable turn of events, Common Ground went on to hold its 2018 meeting in Provo, Utah, on the campus of Brigham Young University. BYU President Kevin J Worthen addressed the gathering and spoke about BYU’s mission statement and our belief, as members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, that every person is a beloved son or daughter of heavenly parents. He encouraged the attendees to hold us to that high standardin how we treated them.

I learned that sometimes it takes standing alone to appreciate just how much common ground we share.

L I Z DA R G E R I S T H E S E N I O R AS S O C I AT E AT H L ET I C D I R E C TO R /S E N I O R WO M A N A D M I N I ST RAT O R AT B R I G H A M YO U N G U N I V E R S I T Y.

A LIFE WORTH LIVING WHY AMERICA’S LIBERAL ARTS TRADITION IS ESSENTIAL

BY PHILIP RYKEN

America’s liberal arts tradition traces back to the ruling class of ancient Greece — free citizens who had the time and leisure to pose and then seek to address basic questions about the good, the true and the beautiful. “Which whole way of life,” asked Socrates in Plato’s “Republic,” “would make living most worthwhile for each of us?”

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Christians were early adopters of this model of education. In great cities such as Antioch and Alexandria, they sought its advantages for their children, so that they in turn could provide holistic leadership for the church and society.

By the time that Alcuin of York was setting the curriculum for the courts of Charlemagne, liberal education had been codified into seven learned arts — the trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, astronomy, music and geometry). These varied ways of perceiving reality, understood in Christian perspective, gave students a more complete understanding of the world.

Eventually, liberal arts education flourished in the United States, especially at small Christian colleges across the country. Through what John Milton termed “a generous education,” men and women from all backgrounds explored the wonders of the natural world and the mysteries of human personhood without narrowly directing their studies toward a particular career. They were looking for a way of life, not merely a way to make a living.

Today more utilitarian forms of education are in the ascendancy, and the liberal arts are in eclipse. Of course, we need thriving vocational schools and research universities across the richly diverse landscape of American higher education. But we also need college graduates who have wrestled with ultimate questions in ways that prepare them to address society’s most intractable problems.

Ironically, perhaps, the liberal arts and sciences develop habits of mind and skills of analysis that also prove their worth in the marketplace: reading, writing, creating, collaborating, arguing and persuading. Graduates who have studied academic disciplines across a liberal arts curriculum are better able to see patterns, make connections and solve complex problems. These are some of the many instrumental benefits of a liberal arts education, especially for the long term.

But faculty and students at schools like Wheaton College also prize the liberal arts for their intrinsic value. We follow a rigorous and capacious general education curriculum primarily out of love for God and the world that he has made. Liberal studies become, for us, an act of worship.

Because we believe that all truth is God’s truth, we cultivate curiosity about creation, a love for great books, an appetite for truth and beauty, and a lifelong passion for the life of the mind. In the process, we hope to confirm that the Protestant reformer Pier Paolo Vergerio was right to describe the liberal arts as “these studies by which we attain and practice virtue and wisdom.”

We believe as well that this educational vision is not restrictive but liberating, as the liberal arts were always meant to be. Our religious convictions help give us a coherent view of the world and a compelling vision for our place in it. They also motivate us to serve the common good, so that everyone can live in a better, freer, more beautiful society.

P H I L I P RY K E N I S T H E P R E S I D E N T O F W H E AT O N C O L L E G E .

THE GAP BETWEEN SECULAR AND CHRISTIAN HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS HAS WIDENED, IN PART, BECAUSE CHRISTIANS VOLUNTARILY CEDED THE GROUND TO OTHERS.

A REASONABLE PROPOSITION HOW FAITH AND REASON COEXIST

BY PETER KILPATRICK

It is fashionable today to claim that religious belief and the freedom of inquiry are incompatible. Religion forces you to think within its own narrow constraints, and aren’t universities all about openness and free thought? And yet, I have found that religious universities are not less free to pursue their ends, indeed, they are more so.

At The Catholic University of America, where I am president, we take our religious identity seriously because it empowers our students to more fully flourish, and it makes us a better university. Like most universities, we equip students with the knowledge and skill to succeed in the discipline or profession of their choosing. But our mission is rooted in something much deeper. It arises from an understanding of the human person given to us through the rich tradition of the Catholic faith.

For us, education begins there: Understanding the person as made in the image and likeness of a divine creator, and endowed with capacities for love, wisdom and wonder. Our first task is to help students ask the question, “Who am I? What am I here for? What purpose should my life serve?” We direct them inward, to the deepest desires of their hearts. We teach them to look outward, too, to learn from those who have sought wisdom before them, from Aristotle to Dorothy Day. Our second task is to help students to recognize themselves as integrated, whole persons — intellectual and spiritual, physical and emotional — and to pursue their studies accordingly. It is common today to think we must isolate the spiritual to protect the integrity of the intellectual. But experience counsels the opposite: When we make space for both faith and reason, our inquiries become richer, deeper and more disciplined. We penetrate more closely to the core of what is truly real. At Catholic University, we invite students to wrestle not only with quantum physics but with its implications for belief in God; not only with the music of John Cage but with whether we find God’s beauty in it; not only with Marxist political theory but with its compatibility with Catholic anthropology. Faith invigorates the academic life.

The integration of faith and the intellectual life brings depth. A Catholic education aims for breadth as well. A common trend in higher education prioritizes specialization to the exclusion of integration.

We think this is a mistake. It teaches students to think narrowly rather than broadly. It harms their capacity to think critically. More than that, it instrumentalizes education, constricts its aims and fails to properly

contextualize learning for the good of society. Our religious identity helps us to avoid that mistake. It reminds us that the human person was made for complex, integrated and holistic thinking, for forging connections and for seeing the whole. It protects our most sacred duty as educators: to facilitate an encounter with the truth and to guide our students on the way toward wisdom.

P E T E R K I L PAT R I C K I S T H E P R E S I D E N T O F T H E C AT H O L I C U N I V E R S I T Y OF AMERICA.

FRIEND OR FOE? ACCREDITORS VALUE CLARITY OF PURPOSE

BY ROBIN BAKER

In Robert Putnam’s recent book “The Upswing,” he asserts that in contemporary America, “party polarization and tribalization has reached an intensity unseen since the Civil War with no end in sight.”

The clear polarization we are experiencing in the broader culture has begun to dramatically affect faith-based colleges and universities. I serve as a commissioner for the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, a U.S. regional accrediting body. Although there are almost as many private religious institutions as private nonsectarian institutions in the Northwest region, we have seen increasing numbers of formal complaints over the past several years challenging the legitimacy of religious institutions.

This past year, the Northwest Commission asked me and several others to provide a discussion at the annual meeting aimed at helping educators understand the history and educational approach of faith-based institutions in the Northwest. What we discovered generally was that, in a society that increasingly values individual expression and human freedom, there is little understanding of the role religious communities play in the broader culture. For many in my generation, we assumed that our fellow citizens, even if they did not accept our beliefs and practices, understood the societal value of churches and religious education. That is clearly no longer the case.

In order for faith-based university missions to flourish in the future (if that is even possible) it is essential that we focus on the vital role we play in an increasingly pluralistic culture. In her new book “God, Grades, and Graduation,” Ilana Horwitz poses the question: Why do some young people thrive in school while others flounder? Interestingly, Horwitz points to religion (belief and community) as one answer. Working-class SEPTEMBER 2022

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THE QUESTION OF WHETHER RELIGIOUS IDENTITY IS GOING TO BE A BRIDGE OF COOPERATION, A BARRIER OF DIVISION OR A BLUDGEON OF DOMINATION WILL PLAY A DETERMINING ROLE IN OUR COMMON LIFE TOGETHER.

DISCOVERING TRUTH CAN SCIENCE AND RELIGION COEXIST?

BY DERRICK ANDERSON

students who are active in a religious community are more likely to attend college. We also know that, on average, there are higher percentages of first-generation and Pell students at faith-based campuses than at secular colleges.

Further, our religious educational institutions produce students that have a positive impact on the broader community. Our students have a greater tendency to enter careers in human service fields, and they tend to return to serve their communities of origin.

There is an irony that today’s academy espouses diversity of thought, but there are myriad examples where higher education discourages ideas that draw from a traditional religious perspective. One of my favorite editorialists, Tish Harrison Warren, recently wrote a piece in The New York Times lamenting the loss of physical bookstores and the diversity of thought they brought to citizens. “I believe in bookstores in part because I believe in pluralism. I believe that we need diverse ideas, competing worldviews and mutually exclusive truth claims discussed deeply and respectfully in our culture.”

We need to actively argue for a place at the table of ideas – our society flourishes when competing worldviews are “discussed deeply and respectfully.”

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BUILDING BRIDGES WHAT HIGHER EDUCATION OWES A RELIGIOUSLY DIVERSE DEMOCRACY

BY EBOO PATEL

The United States is the most religiously diverse nation in human history and the most religiously devout nation in the Western Hemisphere.

This growing religious diversity impacts virtually every facet of American life. Muslim congregational prayer is Friday afternoon, not Sunday morning; this shift in traffic patterns will impact zoning considerations in many towns and municipalities as Muslims establish mosques.

Many Jains, Buddhists and Hindus are vegetarian; this will change what is served in the cafeterias of schools and businesses. And the pandemic was a reminder that Americans may seek the guidance of a wide array of religious leaders alongside their doctors on matters like whether to take a new vaccine.

In a more general sense, the question of whether religious identity is going to be a bridge of cooperation, a barrier of division or a bludgeon 52

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of domination will play a determining role in our common life together.

Higher education owes America graduates who are competent professionals, effective leaders and ethical citizens with the knowledge base and skill set to shape faith into a bridge of cooperation, thereby strengthening our religiously diverse democracy.

The organization I lead, Interfaith America, in partnership with professors Matt Mayhew and Alyssa Bryant Rochenbach, recently completed the most comprehensive evaluation of how higher education is performing with respect to the challenge of religious diversity. The headline is that there are some hopeful signs, but there is a long way to go.

Here are some hopeful signs: • Ninety-six percent of college students said that they respect people from different religions.

• Ninety-three percent report having an interfaith friendship.

• Eighty-nine percent said that it is important for people of different faiths to work together on matters of common concern.

• Seventy percent said they were committed to bridging religious divides.

You might say that the overall culture of higher education fosters positive attitudes toward religious diversity and facilitates interfaith friendships — both highly important for life and leadership in a religiously diverse democracy.

But people need more than positive attitudes and friends from different faiths to be interfaith leaders. They need a concrete skill set and knowledge base. This includes having a radar screen for religious diversity, the ability to mobilize people from different faiths into the same space, the ability to identify common ground between diverse faiths.

Higher education, through formal courses and cocurricular activities, is the ideal place to learn this skill set. Unfortunately, colleges are failing at this important task.

Consider these findings: • Only 14 percent of college students participated in an interfaith dialogue.

• Only 11 percent participated in an interfaith action project.

• Only 9 percent participated in an interfaith training.

This means that colleges are not teaching students the skill of interfaith leadership.

Moreover, students respond that they are not learning the knowledge base either. While well over 50 percent of college students say they spend time learning about racial, political and sexual diversity, far fewer than 50 percent say they spend time learning about religious diversity.

Higher education is responsible for nurturing educated professionals who can build strong communities in a highly diverse democracy. It is time that higher education takes religious diversity as seriously as it takes other forms of identity, and educates its graduates with the skill set and knowledge base of interfaith leadership.

E B O O PAT E L I S FO U N D E R A N D P R E S I D E N T O F I N T E R FA I T H A M E R I C A .

In his July 1945 report to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Science, the Endless Frontier,” Vannevar Bush famously observed that “science, by itself, provides no panacea for individual, social, and economic ills.

It can be effective in the national welfare only as a member of a team, whether the conditions be peace or war.”

Bush was the primary architect of the U.S. national science system that still operates today, including the National Science Foundation.

This system is premised on the idea that science alone does not guarantee progress, but rather progress necessitates collaboration across diverse institutions with unique perspectives and values.

Although the U.S. now has a large network of universities and researchers playing different roles in generating knowledge and translating it into benefits for our social and economic well-being, religious institutions are notably underrepresented in academic research and within the broader practice of science.

Greater involvement of religious universities in science could help to address a key challenge in scientific research: ensure that diverse and socially focused perspectives are included, if not centered, in the process of discovery.

Although religious institutions have not been excluded from scientific research, few have made meaningful investments in research capacity.

Only four religiously affiliated universities are classified as “highly active” in scientific research. If we believe that diverse perspectives improve science, then becoming more active in research should be a key assignment for religious universities.

Religious universities have a great deal to offer the world, but respective to science, many are hiding their light. To maximize their contributions to society through science, they can engage science in unique ways that let their light shine.

A university’s religious mission and values can inform the way that it generates insights and translates them to practice. An institution’s religious identity can inform strategic emphasis on research in areas of special concern, such as humanitarian aid, poverty alleviation or family dynamics. Religious values can also support goals like creating pathways for underrepresented minorities or connecting science to charitable interests. In connecting research to their broader values and missions, we may look forward to religious universities cultivating humble dispositions toward scientific inquiry. Such humble inquiry would be a welcome complement to curiosity and competitiveness that drives most research today.

Many religious institutions expressly integrate their values into teaching, learning and service. For example, Georgetown University cites the Jesuit principle of “people for others” as an animating principle for service projects and community-based learning. Moreover, religious institutions frequently take stances on contemporary scientific issues. For example, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in recent weeks

has issued statements on topics including nuclear proliferation, ocean health, carbon emissions and human living conditions.

The long-standing notion that there is an inherent tension between science and religion need not deter religious universities from realizing their potential to carry out scientific inquiry and translate new knowledge into social benefit. Issues such as sustainability, infectious disease, poverty, renewable energy, malnutrition and artificial intelligence are all examples of issues where religious institutions and their unique perspectives can positively and uniquely influence the ability of science to advance progress.

University scientific research is particularly vital not only to our national economic competitiveness and security, but also to our democracy’s capacity to contend with so-called “wicked problems.” The strength of our distributed national innovation system is in how it facilitates collaboration guided by shared values.

In light of the major social, economic and environmental challenges facing humanity — and the unique role that ethical and normative considerations play in guiding science to address them — we can ill afford for religious universities to hide their light. By taking a greater role in advancing scientific research, religious universities can make unique contributions to a science that is not “by itself,” but rather is enriched by collaboration across a wider diversity of perspectives.

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THE PURPOSE DRIVEN UNIVERSITY HOW A UNIQUE MISSION HELPS EXPAND COLLEGE ACCESS

BY JOHN S.K. KAUWE III

As a doctoral student at Washington University in St. Louis, I learned firsthand how devastating Alzheimer’s disease is to patients and their families. I then devoted my scientific career to developing a cure. Over nearly two decades, my research direction and experimental approaches were shaped by many forces. Some were noble influences that kept me aligned with my goal of curing Alzheimer’s disease. Other influences, even those that were simple practical constraints, distracted me from my purpose.

As university president at BYU-Hawaii, I lead strategy and innovation that supports the development and success of our students. Strategy in higher education is motivated by a variety of forces, including finances, institutional prestige, research outcomes and many others. Managing and balancing these forces while maintaining a singular focus on the institutional mission is an ongoing challenge.

In my work I have learned that faith is an important, and often overlooked, motivator of strategy and innovation in higher education. At BYU-Hawaii our mission statement specifies that faith in Jesus Christ is a desired outcome for our students.

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In contrast to many of the nation’s earliest colleges and universities Focusing on this mission requires specific strategies and daily dethat abandoned their Christian identity in pursuit of greater research cisions, from an institutional commitment to providing financial aid activity and prestige, Baylor has continued to firmly ground our instito the careful planning of curriculum. BYU-Hawaii’s affiliation with tutional life in our Christian faith in the Baptist tradition.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has made it possible As a result, Baylor is able to guide students in the consideration to maintain a singular focus on our mission despite these challenges. of crucial issues from every possible perspective — ethical, religious, Work-study programs, conducted in collaboration with the Polynesian social and intellectual — and our faculty members can serve as open Cultural Center, have been developed and refined to provide financial and persuasive advocates for the beneficial role that faith plays in their support for students in need. These programs allow students to work 19 teaching and scholarly research. hours a week and receive complete support for tuition, fees, and room Baylor’s strategic plan, known as Illuminate, has one overarching and board. More than one-third of BYU-Hawaii students are thriving in goal: To bring light to the world as we accelerate our quest toward prethese innovative work-study programs, and we are working to expand eminence as a Christian research university, building on our historic this support to nearly two-thirds of our students. The English as an strengths and strategically investing in new areas of research and International Language program uses faculty instructors, recent E D service. We believe Baylor can demonstrate how both faith graduates and current students to provide teaching and menB IF F O T and reason reveal truth, how scholarly discovery inspired toring resources for nonnative speakers of English and facilby religious commitment brings knowledge and wisdom, itate success in their university courses. and how a Christian university — through its teaching, Affiliation with the Church of Jesus Christ has allowed research and service — might offer a distinctive voice and BYU-Hawaii to allocate resources to these and othpresence in the contemporary world. er key efforts, and remain mission-focused despite the P U E That today’s world is eager to seek out and support the unprecedented pressures that institutions of higher educaS CI AL IS tradition of Christian higher education found at Baylor has tion have faced in recent years. This relationship is carefully been borne out in recent years by evidence on several fronts: maintained as the university upholds standards of admissions, hiring, • In September 2021, Baylor announced an overall enrollment of teaching, and student and employee conduct that are aligned with the more than 20,000 students for the first time in university history, a redoctrines of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. flection of growing interest and applications from students around the Our mission is well beyond worldly standards of education. Our misS P E C I A L I SS U E country. sion is to be and to build people who follow the example of Jesus Christ • A host of distinguished scholars and teachers have joined our fac— people who are an example of unity, appreciation, esteem and love ulty in recent years, leaving significant positions at renowned secular for one another. This mission, we believe, not only gives us a distinct institutions to live out their faith at Baylor while making a difference identity, but gives us a unique advantage. in the world.

J O H N S. K . K AU W E I I I I S T H E P R E S I D E N T O F BY U - H AWA I I .

• In February 2022, we announced that gifts and pledges to our Give Light philanthropic campaign had surpassed the initial goal of $1.1 billion, establishing the campaign as the most successful fundraising effort ISSUE SPECIAL in Baylor’s history.

Our recent achievement of R1 status is a testament to the dedicated work of many people over decades of prayerful discernment and BRINGING LIGHT strategic planning. As I have often noted, Baylor’s faculty and staff TO THE WORLD S P E C IareAengaged L I S inSresearch U E at the highest levels not to achieve worldly PAIRING SCHOLARLY DISCOVERY recognition, but to make a difference in the world as the presence of WITH RELIGIOUS COMMITMENT Christ. And our students are leaving the Baylor campus equipped to address some of the most important issues and challenges facing the

BY LINDA A. LIVINGSTONE DIFFERENT DARE TO BE world while also shining a light for God’s kingdom.

We are thankful for the vision of those early Baptist pioneers who recognized the need for Christian higher education — in 1845 and today.

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Baylor University’s religious identity is based on the vision of our founders who, during the years of the Republic of Texas, resolved “to found a Baptist university in Texas upon a plan so broad that the requirements of existing conditions would be fully met and that would be susceptible of enlargement and development to meet the demand of all ages to come.”

Today, having enlarged and developed into an R1 research institution, Baylor remains a place where our pursuit of academic excellence is animated by Christian faith.

In doing so, Baylor and other outstanding faith-based institutions offer a counternarrative to the prevailing notion — based on the history of higher education in America — that religious faith in academic contexts is an obstacle to outstanding teaching and research.

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LY INITE F E D D — AN R E V E NG AT DONE.” R I O D F L I U N LEAR RY-LIKE B K YOU’RE D L U CTO SHO THIN “YOU NSIDE A FA ND THEN NOT I IFIC AGE A C A SPE

en Sasse, the junior United States senator from Nebraska, has written tens of thousands of words about education policy, but his philosophy can perhaps best be summed up in 10 words: “We need more folks to fall in love with learning.”

From his perch on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence — where he’s developed a focus on American competitiveness with China — the stakes couldn’t be higher.

“The world is changing, and we need to promote life-long learning and institutions that can provide it,” Sasse writes in a May essay for The Atlantic that reverberated throughout Washington. “American higher education is the envy of the world, and it’s also failing our students on a massive scale.”

Sasse has thought about this subject more than just about any other elected official in D.C. His book on the “vanishing American adult” just turned five years old, and even his critics concede he’d make a great history professor. That expertise — coupled with an affability that has won him friendships on both sides of the aisle — could make him the perfect person to break through the bureaucratic sludge and diagnose the structural problems facing higher education in our country. But at a time when partisans are looking for quick fixes in between cable news hits, can he recruit enough allies to join him on the tough and tedious road to reform?

SASS E N E VE R LO O KS comfortable in a suit — except for the cheap gold one he was awarded in May for appearing five times on “The Remnant,” a political podcast by and for conservative eggheads. He’s been known to wander the halls of Congress in a baggy T-shirt and gym shorts, and he looks much more athome hawking Runza sandwiches at the University of Nebraska’s Memorial Stadium in

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NE B RAS KA RE P U B L IC AN S E N. B E N SASS E WANTS AN “E COSYST E M OF INST IT U T IONS ” T H AT AR E B OT H T RADIT IONAL AND E X P E RIME NTAL IN T H E IR AP P ROAC H E S TO H IGH E R E DU C AT ION.

a bright-red Cornhuskers polo than he does wearing a necktie in a Senate Budget Committee hearing. Sasse’s boyish face, puckish grin and thick tousled hair make it hard to imagine anyone but Paul Rudd portraying him on the silver screen, and the actor’s Kansas City upbringing would ensure the midwestern twang is down pat.

First elected in 2014, Sasse brought with him to public office a number of seemingly conflicting experiences and perspectives that might make him the lawmaker best equipped to break through the stagnation that has plagued the United States’ sprawling constellation of colleges, universities and trade schools and resulted in fewer than half of Americans attaining a degree beyond their high school diploma.

He holds degrees from both Harvard and Yale — and studied abroad at Oxford, where,

in what he described as his “finest hour,” he was chosen to quarterback the American football team. And yet, Sasse thinks we devote entirely too much time and energy on a handful of elite schools that collectively service less than 1 percent of the 31 million people in the United States between the ages of 18 and 24.

He’s a historian by training who will answer a journalist’s question by referencing Mark Twain, Christina Hoff Sommers and Abraham Kuyper — “the, you know, Dutch prime minister at the turn of the 20th century” — but considers Khan Academy founder Salman Khan to be “the most significant algebra teacher in the history of humanity.”

He’s taught at a massive public university (the University of Texas) and was the president of a tiny Christian one (Midland). He homeschooled his three kids on and off with his wife Melissa — a former inner-city high

school teacher and administrator — in part because he believes the industrial model school is “terrible for human souls.” He’s a strong believer in the importance of the liberal arts, but some of his most memorable parenting advice centers on manual labor — his then-teenage daughter spent a month in 2016 working on a cattle ranch in exchange for room and board.

“We just believe in work,” he said at the time.

“We need to be thinking broadly about that 18- to 24-year-old cohort, and what it looks like to create a civilization of lifelong learners for the first time in human history,” he told us when we met with him this summer. “Nobody’s ever had to solve this particular riddle. The historian in me is always skeptical of ‘unprecedented’ kind of language, but this is unprecedented.”

Gone are the days when a young man or woman could select a vocation in their late

teens or early 20s, hone their craft over the next decade and ride that career into retirement 30 or 40 years later. “People who are 25 and just getting out of their undergraduate life, or doing a master’s program, or professional school, or whatever, they’re mostly going to be doing something different at 55 than they’ll be doing at 35,” Sasse says. “You should learn forever — and definitely not mostly inside a factory-like building at a specific age and then think you’re done.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly given his political bent, Sasse envisions minimal government involvement in shifting to a new paradigm.

“We need the state’s role to be chiefly around funding, but not around monopolistic administration and management of our institutions,” he argued, citing “Socrates 101” to explain why a child’s sense of curiosity should be sparked outside the classroom. “You can’t really give

somebody the answer if they’re not asking a question. And so great teaching — and great families and great neighborhoods — help people find those ‘aha!’ moments of pursuing a question. And once somebody’s got a question, once that motor’s running, once there’s wind in the sails, there’s not really a problem.

They’re going to figure out how to learn.”

But before students and schools can really grapple with this tectonic shift in approach, they face a much more immediate — and tangible — set of challenges: Costs are exploding, and there’s little reason to believe the tuition hikes will slow at any point in the near future. In fact, Washington’s current solution du jour — up to $10,000 in blanket student loan forgiveness per borrower — would exacerbate the problem.

“Washington is getting ready to subsidize failure,” Sasse writes in The Atlantic. “A mega-bailout in the form of student-debt forgiveness would prop up and excuse the broken parts of this system — missing the opportunity to go bigger and help college-age Americans from every class and community learn skills, enhance persistence, find work and embrace the dynamic opportunities of the coming quarter century.” higher education in this country did not show up overnight. But barring dramatic changes our sclerotic system seems incapable of implementing, it’s about to get a whole lot worse. The U.S. birthrate has been falling for decades, but the pace of the decline began accelerating in 2007. Now 15 years later, colleges and universities are bracing for applicant pools up to 20 percent smaller than previous generations. For many schools, it could be an extinction level event.

There are of course other concerns as well.

What schools have been teaching is becoming

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less and less attractive to today’s young people, and the reputation of higher education more broadly — its biases and apparent attitude toward much of society — is preemptively turning many would-be students off.

And then there’s the waning value of a college education.

“We have a system which is completely focused on selectivity as the coin of the realm when it should be focused on productivity and impact,” says Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University and author of “The Fifth Wave: The Evolution of American Higher Education.” “None of that is included in the way that we think about now.”

As happened with high schools, the percentage of Americans obtaining a bachelor’s degree is growing, but the marginal benefits of that degree are falling. A 2019 study from researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, for example, found that among white people born in the 1930s, those with college degrees owned 247 percent more wealth than those without them. That premium had shrunk to 42 percent for those born in the 1980s. The decline was even more stark for Black families, where the wealth effect was essentially nonexistent for those born between 1970 and 1989.

And yet the cost of a bachelor’s degree has skyrocketed. By one estimate, tuition growth has outpaced the overall rate of inflation by more than 170 percent in recent decades.

There’s plenty of blame to go around. Administrative bloat, ever-expanding federal regulations, exorbitant amenities and increased research spending have all resulted in higher costs. So has expanding access to populations that previously didn’t attend college: Schools compete more and more to cater to the tastes of the very wealthy and foreign students who can pay full freight, while spending more to support students less financially and academically prepared but most likely to take out substantial loans to attend.

But economists — and university presidents — will tell you there is something else at work: Baumol’s cost disease. Wage increases should be driven by productivity increases, but some sectors can’t be more productive. A string quartet in 2022 plays the same piece in the same length of time as it did in 1922, and yet it’ll cost you much more today to book one at your wedding. Why? Because other industries where productivity has improved are still competing for that labor. Universities may not have increased their productivity — it’s,

generally, still a professor standing in front of a lecture hall — but they still need to attract talent from the sectors that have.

“In those industries in which technology is not used as a way to put an accurate price on labor, prices will rise infinitely,” Crow says.

“That’s true in health care. That’s true in concert orchestras. And that’s true in many colleges and universities.”

Of course, there’s always Occam’s razor: Raising tuition is easy. “Schools have been choosing the path of least resistance because that’s a human tendency,” says Mitch Daniels, who recently announced plans to step down as president of Purdue University after a decadelong run. “And charging more was much easier than disappointing people or terminating programs.”

In Sasse’s eyes, the biggest problem facing most young Americans is far more formidable — and intractable — than student debt. “It’s that our society has lost sight of the shared goal of offering them a meaningful, opportunity-filled future with or without college,” he argued. “We’ve lost the confidence that a nation this big and broad can offer different kinds of institutional arrangements, suited to different needs.”

He has a point. Americans hold $1.5 trillion in student debt today, up from $250 billion in 2004. That’s arguably a sign of progress, meaning college access is expanding to low- and middle-income Americans as the federal government has made educational loans easier to get. A lot more people are going to graduate school, which increases their borrowing, yes, but also their earning potential.

And the debt itself isn’t as catastrophic as it first appears. Half of college graduates owe less than $20,000, and the six percent that owe more than $100,000 are almost all people who have taken out money for lucrative law and medicine degrees. The numbers look even better for those who attend public or nonprofit universities, and for those who actually graduate.

The numbers, however, are quite different for those who attended a for-profit institution or left without obtaining a degree. Half of those who attended a for-profit school have loans exceeding $40,000, and they have the highest rates of default — nearly four times that of those who enroll in a four-year program at a public school. Nearly 40 percent of all debt holders didn’t graduate within six years, and are trying to pay off their loans

without any of the wage benefits they were counting on when they took them out.

There’s also a problem with what people are choosing to study after they borrow the money.

Nearly half of the humanities majors who participated in a recent Federal Reserve study says they wished they had studied something else, as did a significant chunk of social science majors.

Put all of these pieces together, and it’s not surprising that about one in five Americans who went to college say it wasn’t worth it.

Sasse what the United States needs when it comes to higher education, you’ll likely hear a lot of the word “more.” More schools, more experimentation, more flexibility, more pricing models. “We just don’t have nearly a vibrant enough ecosystem of institutions,” he told us. “One of the fundamental problems with higher ed right now is that there are too few new entrants, and of those institutions that currently exist, there is a resistance internally and externally — because of the accreditors — to experimenting with different kinds of form.”

His home-state governor, Pete Ricketts, agrees. “The biggest thing that we need to focus on is how we can get more people the experience they need to take the jobs. And it doesn’t necessarily need to be the four-year degree,” he says. “Especially when you think about how many times people will be changing their careers.”

There were nearly 6,000 colleges and universities operating in the United States during the 2019-2020 school year — why isn’t that enough? Because too many of them operate in the same, outdated manner that graduates millions of students ill-equipped for a 21st-century career and boxes millions of others out from becoming students in the first place. “The vast majority of subject matter is not well served by three to four contact hours a week, 14 to 15 weeks a semester, eight semesters in sequence,” Sasse argues. “We’re headed to a world which is going to be better for humans. The pre-industrial era had more diversity around the way kids were taught.

The digital era is going to have more diversity around the way kids are taught.”

What does that look like in practice? It means rethinking the traditional 25-to-1 and 30-to-1 homogenized student to teacher ratio that dominates classrooms at all levels. “Some stuff should be infinity-to-one,” the senator continues, describing the online learning modules Khan Academy has

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perfected over the years. “And a lot of stuff should be one-to-one, or three-to-one, or five-to-one, or internship and experiential learning, or travel.”

The pandemic — and the era of virtual commuting which it ushered in — should have provided schools ample opportunity to experiment with different models, improving both the quality and accessibility of their offerings.

But most have failed to take advantage. “The median experience of an 18- to 24-year-old who’s in four-year higher education right now is a regional state university that’s more commuter than residential,” Sasse says. “There’s a place for that model, but it should not be the paradigmatic model, the lack of thick community, and yet place-based. If you’re not going to have thick community, you should be able to be a lot more geographically flexible. And if you’re going to be tied to one place, there ought to be a lot of thickness and character development happening.”

Sasse points to the Global Executive MBA program at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business — which combines 10 days of immersive group travel each term with six to eight weeks of remote learning — as an example. “When they’re together, they’re intensely together,” he says. “But if they’re not physically together, that doesn’t mean there’s nothing synchronous.

They just don’t try to get in a room for a 25- or 30-minute meeting, which doesn’t actually have thick community anyway. They just go ahead and make that part truly remote.”

But because he believes in a myriad of approaches to meet a myriad of student needs, Sasse was hesitant to highlight one college or university that should serve as a template for all the others. He did, however, point to Purdue — run by Daniels — and Arizona State — run by Crow — as examples of schools that are experimenting with new models in hybrid learning.

Crow is very upfront with the fact that they’re trying a new approach. “It doesn’t mean you can’t have schools built on the notion of a British model of exclusivity,” he says.

“But your big public universities should be something which is touching every family, touching every company, helping the hospitals to be successful, helping the social service organizations to be successful, helping the young entrepreneurs to be successful.” the systemic change that Sasse believes is necessary, the model of agility and adaptability embodied by Purdue and

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Arizona State will need to reach a lot more schools — including nonmarquee ones.

And although the landscape can seem hopeless, there are plenty of schools heeding that call. Just look at Midland University — a Lutheran liberal arts college located about 20 miles north of Omaha. The school’s total student population is just over 1,600, including 400 nontraditional students who have come back later in life for a degree or certificate program. Midland President Jody Horner described their motto as “relentlessly relevant.”

It also survives by having innovative and thoughtful leaders like Horner, and her predecessor, who stepped down at the end of 2014 to represent Nebraska in the U.S. Senate.

Describing his time at Midland, Sasse sounded more proud of what his administration accomplished outside the realm of academics than what they did in it, touting a 60 percent increase in the number of sports offered to students during his tenure, additional JV levels of competition and the introduction of a performing arts initiative for students interested in theater, choir and band. “A huge part of what an institution like (Midland) rightly recognizes is that a huge part of the character development and the learning that happens from 18 to 20 and 20 to 22 isn’t just in the classroom,” he says. “It’s in the dining hall, it’s in the residence hall, it’s on the field, track, mat, stage and those kinds of places where you learn plural vocations are critically important to the full development of a human.”

“We were institution building there because we were community building.”

If Sasse’s vision for American higher education is ever realized, recreating that sense of community on campuses and in classrooms around the country will have been key. Because, although his salary is now paid by taxpayers, his view on where change happens has remained constant.

“Our shared, common problem with coming of age (is) a public problem that individual families will rarely be able to address sufficiently on their own in isolation, and yet not the sort of problem that government power will be able to solve either,” his book concludes. “We need to be able to tell (our young people) that they are important, to be able to say to them: ‘You’re needed.’ That requires people who know them and have a feel for their history and their future.”

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s america has grown more diverse, more secular and more technologically advanced, religion has increasingly been relegated to the margins of society, and the university is no exception. Increasingly it is a place where people of faith are told that their views are outdated, misguided and outright bigoted. It is a place where secular and “neutral” viewpoints control the levers of power. It is a place where religious expression is wrongly criticized for impeding social, racial and economic justice.

Do not be mistaken: These dominant voices, both on college campuses and at every level of government, have their own moral framework they seek to impose. Whether on issues of sexuality and identity, the family or medicine, they strive not only to promote their own vision of morality, but also to scrub religion from the fabric of our culture. They are anything but neutral. Their ideology threatens the roots of what a university is meant to be and the university’s influence on what America is to become. Even the famed libertarian premise of “live and let live” is only a vision of the past no longer reflected in policies at the university or within the broader public.

Our firm, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, has seen the far-reaching effects of this trend on college campuses and throughout our nation. Lawsuits on both private and public campuses are bringing to light the persistent threats facing religious liberty in America. Time and time again, college

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administrators are waging war on their own students, restricting their ability to exercise their faith and depriving their campuses of the benefits of a vibrant and religiously diverse community. Something similar is happening at private religious schools, with a growing number of outside organizations challenging religious schools’ right to maintain their religious principles. We must confront these forces at every turn.

TO GROWING NUMBERS OF COLLEGE ADMINISTRATORS, PROFESSORS AND STUDENTS, THE IDEA OF GOD ON CAMPUS IS ANATHEMA.

They often rely on a Supreme Court ruling issued over a decade ago in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, which proved dismal for religious liberty in the years that followed.

The case involved a Christian student group at the University of California’s Hastings College of Law that required its leaders to accept and adhere to a statement of faith. The students argued that to form a Christian association, their leaders had to be Christian. How

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could their group maintain its religious identity if not shepherded by leaders who embraced its faith? UC Hastings countered that the group’s leadership standards violated its nondiscrimination policy. In April 2010, in a hotly contested 5-4 opinion, the Supreme Court ruled in UC Hastings’ favor, threatening the associational rights of student-led faith groups across the country.

Soon after, similar cases began popping up on public campuses around the country. The Becket Fund just recently argued two such cases against the University of Iowa, representing student groups kicked off campus for requiring their leaders to affirm their Christian convictions. Although the university allowed fraternities to restrict their leadership to men, and feminist groups to require their leaders to share certain views on contraception and abortion, our clients were told they had to meet off campus if they wanted leaders who shared their beliefs. When a federal judge initially warned against this unlawful religious discrimination, the university responded by kicking most other religious groups with leadership standards off campus too¸ as if to say that mistreating religion was OK as long as all religions were mistreated equally. Nearly 40 Islamic, Sikh, Christian, Jewish and other religious groups were sent the message that upholding their religious beliefs made them unwelcomed on campus. Notably, one group with a less traditional, university favored statement of Christianity was permitted to remain.

Fortunately, we successfully defended our clients in the federal court of appeals, so they could eventually return to campus on equal terms with all other student groups. But four years of being treated like second-class citizens by administrators and facing the vitriol of antagonistic students took a serious toll. One of the groups we defended barely survived the lawsuit and — not long after — was forced to close its doors. In litigation, the process is often the punishment, and university officials know they can lose the lawsuit but still claim the prize: shutting down groups whose beliefs they disapprove of.

Today’s attacks on religious liberty at universities do not end with student groups at public institutions, although we see a lot of those cases. They also include challenges to private religious schools’ ability to operate within their distinct faith traditions.

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One such case involved a leading Protestant seminary. In applying, all students are required to sign an agreement affirming the seminary’s community standards, which include traditional expectations regarding marriage and sexuality. Two students later admitted they had violated these standards by entering same-sex marriages and, as a result, were dismissed from the seminary. The students sued, asking the courts to penalize the seminary for its decision about who was eligible to minister within its own faith tradition. They argued that, because the seminary accepted students’ federal grants and loans as tuition, any religious standards had to give way to federal nondiscrimination laws.

While a court of appeals ultimately ruled in the seminary’s favor, the time spent defending against these unlawful attacks on its internal religious standards diverted focus and resources from its religious mission.

Unfortunately, courts don’t always get these cases right. Last year, Yeshiva University — the nation’s preeminent university for modern Orthodox Jews — was sued by a handful of students for allegedly violating New York City’s nondiscrimination law by declining to recognize a Pride Alliance club. Although most students at Yeshiva University study Torah up to five hours a day before commencing their secular studies, and are expected to observe the laws of Shabbat and kashruth on campus, the court held that Yeshiva was not sufficiently religious to deserve First Amendment protection. The ruling turned, in part, on Yeshiva’s decision decades ago to accept students’ state and federal funding for tuition.

We are still appealing that decision to defend Yeshiva’s Jewish identity and the right to control its internal religious affairs.

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dangerous as it is unjust. Religious formation, especially in education, is crucial to the well-being of our country. College graduates go on to lead not just churches, but also corporations and communities, nonprofits and nations. No one disputes that a stellar secular education is essential to good governance in all these arenas. But so is good moral character, which is essential to appreciate the fragility of freedom, the complexity of scientific achievement, the virtue of commerce and the nuance of human needs. A society that pushes religion to the side rejects not just demanding theological principles but the world’s most profound and enduring influence for developing individual integrity, humility, compassion and vision — traits we desperately need in leaders in all aspects of life. The university arguably has the greatest access to America’s future leaders. Preserving space for religious formation in higher education is thus paramount. The environment on college campuses is reflective of what is happening in the public square, and the corrective is the same: respecting religious conviction, protecting freedom to disagree and recognizing the social good that religion brings to the public square.

Despite challenges, we are optimistic about the future. Recently, the United States Supreme Court has taken pivotal steps to protect religious freedom in both public and private schools.

In 2020, in Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru, the court ruled 7-2 in favor of our Catholic school clients’ First Amendment right to employ teachers who would exemplify the beliefs of the Catholic church “in word and deed.” The court recognized that religious education is “vital to many faiths practiced in the United States.”

In terms of time spent, teachers often have far more influence on students than religious leaders. The court concluded that “judicial intervention into disputes between the school and the teacher” thus would unconstitutionally violate schools’ religious freedom to form students in the faith.

Just this year, in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, the court upheld the right of a high school coach to pray in between his official duties at a football game. Contrary to some alarmist responses, the court did not address teachers “leading prayers” with students or before a “captive audience” — practices the court has previously struck down. But considering the many ways public school teachers 64

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convey their own diverse beliefs and values to students, it would be discrimination targeted at religion to prohibit personal religious expressions or observance by teachers just because they are at school. Instead, the court wisely concluded that tolerance and respect for others’ personal religious exercise is “indispensable to life in a free and diverse republic.”

In Carson v. Makin, also decided this year, the court rejected the argument that government can favor secular private schools over religious private schools in granting funding.

It is long settled, under the Establishment Clause, that the government cannot directly fund favored religions alone. But Carson made clear that once the government makes

RELIGION HAS INCREASINGLY BEEN RELEGATED TO THE MARGINS OF SOCIETY, AND THE UNIVERSITY IS NO EXCEPTION.

funding broadly available to private entities — as it frequently does in education, historic preservation, medical care and countless other areas — it cannot exclude religious individuals or institutions, even if that funding incidentally supports some religious purpose. Again, it would be blatant religious discrimination if, for example, once the government guaranteed Pell Grants to students in need, it forbade religious students from using them at religious schools. Carson held this would violate the First Amendment’s free exercise clause by allowing the government to use its funding powers to disfavor religion.

One additional case warrants mention, although it arose outside the context of education. In June 2021, the court in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia affirmed the right of religious institutions to serve their communities while still staying true to their religious convictions.

In that case, heroic foster moms in the City of Brotherly Love partnered with Catholic Social Services to open their hearts and homes to needy foster children. Catholic Social

Services, in turn, partnered with Philadelphia to recruit and support loving foster families.

But when Philadelphia found out that Catholic Social Services adhered to the traditional Catholic view of marriage, it attempted to shut down the ministry and remove children from its partnering foster moms, even though the city was short thousands of beds for kids in need. In a remarkably unanimous opinion, the court chastised the city’s religious discrimination. It recognized that in a pluralistic society, individuals and institutions of good will must be free to participate in the public square regardless of disagreements on difficult and sensitive issues.

American judicial rulings are famously case specific. For years to come lawyers will continue to argue how they apply in similar but nuanced factual circumstances, including cases about how nondiscrimination policies apply to religious students on public campuses like the University of Iowa and to private religious schools like Yeshiva University. But these recent Supreme Court cases are encouraging.

Almost 30 years ago, now-President Dallin H. Oaks, first counselor in the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, testified before Congress defending First Amendment protections for religious freedom. Reflecting the feelings of many religious communities that, at one time or another, have been viewed as outsiders, he remarked that religious persecution was “not academic history” to him or his community, and that “political power or impact must not be the measure of which religious practices can be forbidden by law.” “There is nothing,” he concluded, “more sacred to a religious person than the service or worship of God.” The spirit of tolerance and respect reflected in this statement and in the Supreme Court’s most recent rulings is at the heart of the American experience and the university tradition in particular. University is where young adults can learn to engage complex and difficult issues in a spirit of humility, good will and openness to learn. Religion has millennia of thought and experience to contribute to this process. Protecting space for religious students and universities to bring this to bear promises great dividends and is well worth the fight.

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SHIRLEY HOOGSTRA, DAVID BROOKS AND ANNE SNYDER SPECIAL

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eaders at religious universities and colleges recognize the value mission-driven higher education has — not just for students and faculty — but for society as a whole. But for those outside the world of religious college and university campuses, the question persists: Why does mission-driven higher education matter.

Few can answer this question with more authority than Shirley V. Hoogstra, the president of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, a higher education association of more than 185 Christian institutions around the world.

In the conversation below, Hoogstra explores the value of Christian higher education with David Brooks and his wife, Anne Snyder.

Brooks is an op-ed columnist with The New York Times and appears regularly on “PBS NewsHour” and “Meet the Press.” He is the bestselling author of several books, including “The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life” and “The Road to Character.”

Snyder is the editor-in-chief of Comment Magazine, the author of “The Fabric of Character: A Wise Giver’s Guide to Renewing Our Social and Moral Renewal” and the host of “The Whole Person Revolution” podcast. She is a graduate of Wheaton, a private Evangelical Christian liberal arts college in Wheaton, Illinois.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Anne, as a Wheaton grad, you’re familiar with how Christian education S HI R LE Y HO O GSTR A :

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I became a Christian in high school after spending my childhood overseas and navigating my teenage years in an aggressively secular setting. I found Wheaton to be both culture shock and a time when I had never been so excited by learning in my life.

First, the disciplines were integrated. Somehow math could relate to history, could relate

ANNE S NY DE R:

“THERE’S SOME FREEDOM IN THE QUESTIONS THAT ARE BEING ASKED ON CHRISTIAN COLLEGE CAMPUSES THAT ARE NOT IMMEDIATELY SHROUDED IN IDEOLOGICAL SUSPICION OR DEFINITION.”

to theology and so on. I wound up as a philosophy major, which I’m sure hammered the integrative feature home even further. That horizontal way of thinking has shaped my brain in ways that probably made it difficult to

get a job right out of college, but have proven to DARE be really handy in my role as an editor.

DIFFERENT TO BE Wheaton gave me lifelong curiosity around connections, around questions of why.

Then, there was the fact that Wheaton didn’t operate purely in the intellectual domain but rather offered a whole sense of head, heart and helping hands, and a building of community. You were meant to deepen your intellectual life in relationship with each other and with the faculty.

That whole-person integration has just transformed the way I write, the way I have followed my footsteps and convictions, the way I have had to sometimes make hard, less popular choices. I had a bit of a lightbulb moment, just in the last few months, of realizing that it’s actually hard for me to think in an individualistic or siloed way. That has its strengths and weaknesses, but I think Wheaton’s formation meant that I am always thinking in terms of webs and connections.

H OOGST RA: Yes, there’s an emphasis now on a singular or vocational training, but you can see how the type of educational experience you had lasts a lifetime. David, you went to the University of Chicago, but you have spent a lot of time on CCCU campuses, engaging students and faculty. From your perspective, what comes to mind when you think about Christian higher education?

I call the University of Chicago “the Wheaton of the South Side” because it’s kind of like a Christian college — we had

DAV ID B ROOKS :

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TH AT SE NSE OF BE I NG U N DE R ASSAU LT PRODUCE S A S PI R ITUA L SU PE R IOR ITY COM PLE X COM BI N E D W ITH A N I NTE LLECTUA L I N FE R IOR ITY COM PLE X .

sacred texts. We would dive into a long tradition of scholarship and a traditional moral philosophy. Our professors taught us that if we read these books carefully, we would know the secret of life.

And there’s a problem with the modern university, which has become a research university that emphasizes specialized knowledge. The problem with that, as a colleague of mine once wrote, is that it makes asking the big questions, like the purpose of life, seem not only inappropriate but unprofessional. You can go to a research university and never ask the big questions.

Years ago, Anne and I did a bunch of seminars for research on what became “The Road to Character.” And all the academic places we went — including Yale, where I was teaching — had good discussions, but Wheaton’s was the best, because the professors not only read the books we were discussing, but they were used to applying them in their lives.

They were used to saying, “No, here’s how you should think about that relationship.” Or, “Here’s how you think about that vocation.” It was not simply a set of academic exercises.

HOOGST RA: Using a text to build a certain kind of life — that goes to the idea of eulogy values and résumé values that you have written about. If you’re using the text to build a certain kind of life, you’re going to get a eulogy-values life.

Yes. If you read Homer, you have a certain conception of the good life built around courage and service to the city. If you read Exodus, you have a version of the good life that’s dedicated both to obedience to law and commitment to the community. If you read Matthew, you have a version of the good life devoted to grace and self-sacrificing love. These are different moral ecologies. At Chicago, we couldn’t say one was better than the other; they said, “Pick one.” At a CCCU school, that’s not the approach. The approach is that one is better than the other — one is the true way.

And that doesn’t solve all your problems, but you have a sense of what is your ultimate devotion. The absence of an ultimate devotion for a lot of people these days is a very disorienting thing, which I think leads to a lot of fanaticism. You don’t know what ultimate truth you’re surrendering to or have an ultimate vision of the good. What are you shooting for? What are your goals? If you don’t have a sense of goals, then your life just becomes one

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of wandering and anxiety, because you don’t know who you are or where you are going.

H O O G ST R A: One of the things I hope for this discussion is not only to identify what is going well in Christian higher education, but also to identify those areas where we can activate in new ways because of our unique educational approach and our values.

So, speaking of value, what are one or two things that you would suggest to Christian university leaders about better articulating the value of the enterprise?

H OOGST RA: Do you think that Christians are actually offering this approach to the world enough? It would seem to be an antidote to the polarization that we’re having in our culture. So why aren’t Christians being a more pervasive influence to transform things for the better?

When I talk to CCCU schools, many times my message is the same: First, be not afraid.

Second, you have what the rest of the world wants. The whole country is filled with spiritual hunger, with no vocabulary to articulate it, and Christian colleges have the vocabulary.

But often Christian colleges have a feeling of siege mentality and of being under assault, whether for following traditional sexual ethics or other issues. That sense of being under assault produces what I’ve described many times as a combination of a spiritual superiority complex combined with an intellectual inferiority complex. It creates a sense of, “We can’t really go out into the world and say what we’ve got because they’ll hate us.”

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When you say “siege mentality,” of course, I see that occurring. But I think that for us as leaders in Christian higher education, there has to be a conviction that we will not take on that mindset of siege. We will be responsive or even proactive, but we will not be under siege.

H OOGST RA:

You can speak to this more than me, but ever since I’ve been going to CCCU campuses, the students have always shocked me by how self-confident they were and how uninterested they were in some of the culture war issues. I remember my first visit to a Christian college, Seattle Pacific, and I was interviewed by a student journalist who had metal piercings going up and down her face. And I was like, “Oh, this is not what I expected.” Visiting Wheaton for the first time, I expected to find a bunch of megachurch kids. But they were very dissatisfied with that model. And I find, especially in the last four years, there’s just a gigantic generation gap between the young and the old. Anne, I think it’s more interesting to you to figure out how to be a Christian than it is to determine how Christians should operate in American politics.

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In my own Christian education

I don’t know if they can necessarily say this about themselves, but I say it about them as a graduate and as someone who feels like a real beneficiary of Christian higher education. In an age where everything is so ideological, there’s something about an educational institution that is founded on an utterly different category of value. That is, this embodied knowledge that is oriented in the person of Christ. It’s not ideological in the same way. I realize this gets tricky as we talk about Christians and public life these days, but these kinds of faith-based institutions are vital for our democracy. When I speak to public intellectuals that feel suffocated by what you can and can’t say on elite college campuses, if they have gone to speak to a Christian college they talk about this surprising grace and intellectual oxygen in the room. There’s some freedom in the questions that are being asked on Christian college campuses that are not immediately shrouded in ideological suspicion or definition. I think that’s an important strength to learn how to defend and hold.

When I graduated college, I felt like I was part of a generation — and I think this is still fairly true — where the commencement speech was, “Change the world!” I think in the realm of justice, that’s great and important, but understanding “change it” versus “serve it,” I think, is what a place like Wheaton certainly did for me.

In my own Christian college experience, we learn that we are ambassadors, yes, but we are here to be of service; there is pain out there, and we bear the wounds of a God who bleeds for this same brokenness. So find the wounds and staunch them. It sounds subtle, but I think it profoundly affects the posture with which we pursue the public square, our local place and our vocations.

S NYDER :

— and I think this is true for many students and alumni I meet from Christian colleges — Christianity is very much the light and the lens by which you view the world and how you see and treat others.

I’m really drawn to local faith actors who may be running a rehab center, or people who are doing interesting racial reconciliation work in Detroit or working with the disabled.

I’m interested in the local manifestations of Christians being Christians, where their faith informs their entire strategy of how they serve those who exist on the margins. That seems to be where the kingdom is unfurling these days, and dwelling there keeps my hope alive.

I think at the broader national level, we get sucked into a very politicized scene, where the levers of change seem confined to hashtag messaging. It’s a lot of words, it’s a lot of coalition building. And somehow I find that those levers fit very uncomfortably with Jesus’ model of influence and social change.

There’s something to be said for those 12 disciples and that small replication model that I watch flowering in a million places, often quite small and local. But this broader national Christian thing has become a matter of using political weaponry, political words, political strategy. I don’t know exactly how to get out of that, but it’s almost like two different Christianitys.

In my view, Christianity is not against objective knowledge, but it offers a different kind of knowledge. In the Bible, the word “to know” is not solely a rational thing; it’s also very emotional. When Augustine thought of knowledge, he didn’t think of it

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as studying. He thought that it illuminates us into being a certain person. And even as neighbors, we illuminate each other into being certain sorts of people by the presence we bring into the room, or the quality of the attention. So it’s a relational form of epistemology that gets lost in modern science and, frankly, in modern liberalism.

I remember friends and I from my college days discovering the truth of this for ourselves: “To love is to know, to know is to love.” There is something about becoming knowledgeable because you love something.

David and I often discuss the interpretation of the two Adams in the book of Genesis — Adam I and Adam II. Each one of us has these two Adams within us. Adam I is the one that masters, that desires to win, is very ambitious, wants control over your domain and seeks excellence. Adam II is the one that is softer, has a desire to seek virtue, to humble oneself before God and to humble oneself before others. And when we were getting to know each other, David would joke that my Wheaton education had really made me great on Adam II, but we had some work to do on Adam I. He wasn’t wrong, and I’ve since had some more rigorous moments on my own career path where Adam I has had to be sharpened. But I’ve often found that there’s still a dominant impulse moving out of love of God and love of other. A love that motivates excellence in, for example, hosting a gathering, in clarifying a thought in writing, in performing a piece of music. It’s a different way of framing David’s notion of embodied knowledge, but this love factor feels vital to the distinctiveness of Christian education.

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T H I S I N T E RV I E W I S A D A P T E D F R O M A C O N V E R S AT I O N T H AT F I R ST A P P E A R E D I N A DVA N C E , C C C U ’S M AG A Z I N E , I N T H E FA L L 2 0 2 1 I S S U E .

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here is nothing new about critiquing American higher education. After all, it was 1908 when Abraham Flexner first published his matter-of-fact titled book “The American College: A Criticism.” Ever since, there’s been a long line of would-be reformers, skeptics and staunch defenders of the academy. But in recent years the conversation has become more urgent. Rising tuition, student loans and questions about college’s effectiveness have drawn public scrutiny.

In this context, Sen. Ben Sasse, of Nebraska (profiled in greater depth on page 56), who is also a former university president, recently underscored the paradox that “American higher education is the envy of the world, and it’s also failing our students on a massive scale.” He asks, “How can both be true simultaneously?”

Even while major American research institutions serve a laudable function in society, students are not completing college at acceptable rates, particularly lower-income students. For example, in its 2022 study, the Pell Institute showed that the six-year bachelor’s attainment rate for students in the top income quartile was just under 60 percent.

Alarmingly, for students in the bottom income quartile that percentage drops to just 15 percent. Despite these low completion rates, both tuition and funding costs continue to climb. In the decade preceding the Covid-19 pandemic, college costs outpaced inflation by 19 percent at private nonprofit institutions and 28 percent at public ones, according to 70

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the National Center for Education Statistics. The College Board estimates that the average cost of attendance (tuition, housing, books and fees) was over $27,000 for in-state public universities and nearly $55,000 for private universities.

Mind you, those figures are not the total cost of earning a degree, but the estimated cost of attending one year of college.

This cost and completion crisis is not only impacting students. Despite the continued AMERICANS NEED TO GET CREATIVE IN SOLVING THESE PROBLEMS, AND THAT MEANS LOOKING FOR MODELS — HOWEVER EXPERIMENTAL — THAT DELIVER EDUCATIONAL RESULTS WHILE REDUCING COSTS.

increase in tuition, more and more universities are struggling financially. Even with admirable attempts by many employees, donors and legislators, institutional closures have climbed. Since 2016, 75 American colleges and universities have closed. Beyond closures, the extended financial pressures threaten to substantially, and in some cases irreversibly, alter their founding missions or their essential identities.

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a unique set of advantages in addressing the cost-and-completion crisis facing American education. First, having a religious mission offers a different primary identity for faculty and administrators that gives institutions the autonomy to think differently from traditional academic models and more deliberately focus on the needs of their student communities. For example, there is tremendous scholarly and peer pressure on faculty to follow common university models that elevate faculty research over student teaching. Religious purpose offers a chance to build a different faculty identity focused on elevating student needs, including more focused mentoring and teaching incentives.

Second, spiritual identity opens up a second resource religious schools can draw on in helping students succeed. Most religious schools have a built-in pastoral mission. This deeper purpose opens opportunities to align faculty priorities around mentoring and ministering to student needs. In fact, when done well, this can become part of the formal faculty contract at religious institutions. Moreover, the development of the “whole person” is directly tied to the mission of many religious schools. Many students who pause their university experience do so for nonacademic reasons — financial struggles, social insecurity, personal anxiety or lack of confidence. By focusing on the whole person, faculty and academic mentors have unique opportunities to draw on spiritual identity and heaven’s direction in helping students work through these challenges.

A third resource religious schools can draw on is a sense of sacrifice and community that strengthens the institution beyond the summation of a broad group of individual contracts. In an academic world where many faculty move from institution to institution based on the best financial offer or most attractive terms of individual employment, religious universities have the opportunity to create consistent community through shared identity, values, common language and shared purpose.

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Americans need to get creative in solving these problems, and that means looking for models — however experimental — that deliver educational results while reducing costs.

In this regard, some religious-based institutions are forging a surprising path.

CONT E MP ORARY AM E R I C A , there is no shortage of outstanding academic talent.

Professors are strenuously vetted and selected at the time of initial employment; a single opening in the faculty can draw dozens of applicants. Newly hired assistant professors are likely to teach mainly lower-division courses with high enrollments. A process of weeding begins immediately. Over the years, those faculty members deemed highly competent can move up a ladder that, ideally, ends with full professorship and a tenure agreement that is all but ironclad.

However, the many purposes and preferences of the university community can produce mixed motives and inefficiencies.

Factors limiting completion may include inadequate registration counseling and already full classes, making it hard for students to get into the courses needed to advance according to their graduation plans. That pressure can spill over onto beleaguered professors carrying high course loads and class enrollments.

Ironically, even as course loads increase, incentives often focus away from students and are redirected at faculty research. These forces are moving in different directions,

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putting further pressures on students, especially students who struggle.

Also, the typical institutions’ salaries vary vastly, based on academic discipline. A full professor of English or history, for example, might make a fraction of the compensation given to a professor of mechanical engineering, computer science, accounting or business management. The academic job market is demand driven. Salary equity can be a serious sore point for many.

Collectively, higher education also has another two-pronged problem of its own making. One of those is a dearth of pressure to economize. Tuition, for example, rarely decreases. Only in unusually turbulent economic times is a tuition freeze considered, and not for long.

Then, following such an unusual down financial year, there is strong, broad-based I LLUSTR ATI ON BY ANDR É DA LOBA

sentiment to make up the lost revenues. The higher education community tends to move in concert, not only returning to inflationary tuition increases, but also adding offsets to at least partially compensate for the lean years.

In addition, economizing among universities and colleges, in terms of tuition rates, is rare. Also, there are few institutional rewards for lowering operating costs via economizing or innovating. To the contrary, constructing new buildings and increasing tuition rates can be interpreted as a signal of increased prestige and value.

But, as Sasse has warned, business as usual in higher education is leaving too many students behind. Those students include both high school graduates who don’t enroll in higher education as well as college students who drop out before earning a credential, having educational debts to pay.

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ECONOMIZING AMONG UNIVERSITIES AND COLLEGES, IN TERMS OF TUITION RATES, IS RARE. ALSO, THERE ARE FEW INSTITUTIONAL REWARDS FOR LOWERING OPERATING COSTS VIA ECONOMIZING OR INNOVATING.

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THE POT E NT IAL TO draw on religious identity in such a systemic way may sound overly hopeful or even naïve. But religious universities are, in fact, using their religious identity not only to strengthen spiritual mission but to help drive innovation, including efforts to increase completion and lower costs. My evidence is very close to home, in rural Idaho at the institution I now lead, Brigham Young University-Idaho.

In the spring of 2000, faced with growing numbers of students hoping for a faith-based education in the Latter-day Saint community, Gordon B. Hinckley, president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, called my father, Henry B. “Hal” Eyring, then the church’s commissioner of education, into his office. The 90-year-old church leader wasted no time.

“Hal,” he said, “Couldn’t we serve more students at lower cost by making Ricks College a university? What problems do you see?”

Ricks was a two-year college in a small Mormon pioneer-founded town known for hard, windy winters and down-to-earth folks.

Eyring, who holds a doctoral degree from Harvard and received tenure at Stanford, hesitated to reply. His mind raced from one deal-breaking objection to another.

Four-year status would mean a near-doubling of student enrollment, requiring concomitant increases in faculty and physical facilities. Also, current professors lacking advanced degrees would need to seek further higher education, and with those credentials would come higher salaries. It also seemed the campus would require a near-doubling of the physical facilities.

Eyring knew President Hinckley well enough to pull no punches. Having long experience with universities, he felt obligated to warn against the all-but-inevitable tendency of a new university to become an institution more expensive, per capita, than anything ever imagined as a community college.

With all the understatement Eyring could muster, he said, “It will cost you more.”

But President Hinckley was ahead of his junior colleague. “It will cost less.” He went on to outline what’s proven to be a bold innovation here in Rexburg, Idaho.

Though the new four-year college would bear the name Brigham Young University — with a hyphen followed by “Idaho” — President Hinckley was confident that the administration and faculty colleagues could create a school embodying the most essential aspects of higher education while simultaneously retaining the Ricks College tradition of

student-focused teaching in a gospel context.

The campus would operate on a year-round basis, for starters, taking advantage of calendaring that would allow the university to reach many more students while using the same physical footprint. Today students are accepted into one of three tracks — fall/winter, winter/spring or spring/summer — essentially adding an additional 50 percent capacity while leveraging the existing classroom facilities.

The year-round calendar could only happen because President Hinckley also announced the faculty would be teaching-oriented: “Effective teaching and advising would continue to be the primary responsibilities of its faculty, who are committed to academic excellence.”

Not only did this mean that research would be de-emphasized in faculty hiring and promotion, but that the university would focus on bachelor’s degrees and not expand into graduate programs. Additionally, intercollegiate athletic programs would be phased out, in favor of substantial growth in intramural sports.

President Hinckley leaned into the school’s religious governance, but he also leaned into the school’s religious identity to build a student-centered culture that simultaneously lowered costs and increased student outcomes. Despite near open enrollment, BYU-Idaho’s graduation rate in 2021 was over 67 percent, well above the national average of 57 percent. Moreover, the year-round calendar and teaching-focused faculty contract have allowed the school to keep student tuition low and student engagement high. The average class size at BYU-Idaho is barely over 30 students, nearly half the size of most public universities, despite annual campus enrollment that is approaching 40,000 students per year. From 2000 to 2022, BYU-Idaho has more than tripled its enrollment while total costs have grown at or below inflation. This phenomenon has happened because the university has remained disciplined to the innovations.

BYU-Idaho is drawing on its unique religious identity to help overcome the cost and completion challenges so prevalent in today’s higher education environment, but it’s not alone.

As American higher education searches for ways to solve the pain points that have led to the crises of lower graduation rates and rising debt, maybe rural Idaho and other innovators in religious higher education are a good place to start looking.

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he last book that Brigitte Madrian read was a book she could have written. Its title: “How to Change.”

That’s a subject in which Madrian, the first female dean of the Brigham Young University Marriott School of Business, is fluent.

After all, she was behind the widely praised recrafting of the business school’s longtime mission statement, which one CEO says is the best articulation of a school’s vision and values that he’s seen recently.

Prior to that, Madrian made a major personal change, leaving the Harvard Kennedy School of Government in Boston, which she says promised her the “sun, moon and stars” to stay, for familiar ground in Provo, Utah.

Madrian, a behavioral economist who holds a doctorate from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, doesn’t take change lightly. She tends to choose a path and stick with it; she decided in eighth grade, for example, that her future would include a doctorate and she had been at Harvard’s public policy school for nearly 13 years when BYU Marriott came calling. She has said she could easily have finished her career in Boston, but ultimately came to believe that God wanted her to return to the campus where she spent so much time in her childhood. (Her father, Spencer J. Condie, was a BYU sociology professor.)

Madrian, who is 56 and married with two daughters, took over at BYU Marriott in January 2019. Despite her familiarity with the university and its mission — she graduated with an economics degree in 1989 and spoke at commencement — she found herself hesitating when asked how the business school’s mission was different from the university overall.

BYU Marriott had a mission statement, but it was more than a decade old.

Proposing the development of a new one

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was risky; the school’s values and Christian mission hadn’t changed, all. But it turned S P E Cafter IAL ISS UE out to be a unifying exercise for leadership, faculty and staff during the pandemic. Moreover, doing the challenging and time-consuming work of crafting BYU Marriott’s “vision, mission and values” — which the school had printed on 5,000 cards to hand out — provides a shortcut for decision-making, especially when considering a change.

Says Madrian: “Our mission statement is now the scaffolding of everything we do.”

As a faith-based school, it’s fitting for BYU to focus on “things of eternal consequence.” But there’s a secular way to express this: making de-

PART OF THE PROCESS OF CHANGE IS BRINGING THE PEOPLE ALONG WHO DON’T NECESSARILY WELCOME CHANGE OR SEE ITS VALUE.

cisions and changes with “the end in mind.”

As an example, a decade ago, Madrian, whose research has focused on household finance and savings, was leading a new initiative at the National Bureau of Economic Research on Household Finance that involved planning one or two economic conferences every year.

The economics profession, she says, had a reputation for conferences that were divisive

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and contentious; that’s something that Madrian and her co-leaders wanted to change. To do so, they set out to plan conferences with “the end in mind,” and then made choices that would enable the goal.

DIFFEREN DARE BE several individual Instead of justTO aggregating papers to build a program, they thought about what kind of discussion they wanted to have, who would best facilitate that discussion and created a program around those constraints.

The format for a program that would facilitate the type of respectful discussion they wanted meant shorter presentations that would lead to fewer interruptions, a discussant who would model what they wanted and reserving several minutes for general discussion.

“It was definitely more work to plan a conference this way, because the easy choices that would take less time weren’t always consistent with the outcomes we wanted. But the effort we put in worked. We quickly established a conference culture that was very different from many of the other conferences,” Madrian says. “And as people experienced this culture and decided that they liked it, the conferences quickly grew both in terms of the number of people who submitted their work to be on the program, and in terms of the number of people who attended the conference.”

Effective change, Madrian says, requires three things of us: envisioning a different, better future, and the path to get from here to there; having the confidence to travel the path; and having the courage to act in the face of challenges, “that is, not to get derailed or give up when it gets hard,” she says.

“Many people are afraid of change because change invariably pushes people outside of their comfort zone. So part of the process of change is bringing the people along who don’t necessarily welcome change or see its value.”

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EDUCATION’S END EXPLORING THE MEANING OF LIFE HAS LOST ITS HONORED STATUS AS A SUBJECT OF ORGANIZED ACADEMIC INSTRUCTION

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n the fall of 1965, I was a sophomore at Williams College — for the second time.

The year before, I had left Williams to work as an organizer for Students for a Democratic Society. It was an exciting time to be in college. Black students in the South were at the forefront of the civil rights movement. Their courage had set an example for the world to admire. In the North, the (mostly white) student leaders of the SDS had begun a movement of their own for social and economic change.

The Port Huron Statement of 1962 was their manifesto.

It described with passionate clarity the gap between America’s ideals and the realities of racism and poverty, and summoned my generation of students — ‘‘bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit’’ — to close it. The war in Vietnam was on the horizon. The campuses of America’s colleges and universities were beginning to stir with an energy they had not seen since the 1930s. By the time the decade was over, these stirrings would grow into the most powerful student movement the country has ever known.

It was in this mood that I enrolled that fall in a seminar taught by Nathaniel Lawrence, who was then the chairman of the philosophy department at Williams. I had some dim sense that I might find in philosophy, and in professor 76

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Lawrence’s seminar, answers to the questions that plagued me. The seminar was titled ‘‘Existentialism.’’ Most of the other students were juniors and seniors, and I felt a bit over my head. The readings were difficult. We read Kierkegaard’s “Either/Or,” Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness” and “The Mystery of Being” by the great Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel.

AN INSTITUTION OF HIGHER EDUCATION IS ONE OF THE PLACES WHERE THE QUESTION OF WHAT LIVING IS FOR CAN BE PURSUED IN AN ORGANIZED WAY.

We met once a week in professor Lawrence’s home at the end of Main Street, a few blocks from campus. Each session lasted three hours.

We broke in the middle for tea, and there were always fresh cookies (courtesy of Mrs. Lawrence). The fall came on, the days shortened, the air grew chilly. The Berkshires were covered in scarlet and gold. When we arrived at professor Lawrence’s home, late in the afternoon, we found a fire going, and his two golden retrievers asleep like bookends beside the hearth.

The discussions were animated, often passionate. It seemed to all of us that much was at stake — just what one would expect in a seminar on existentialism. At the heart of the seminar was the question of how best to live, of what to care about and why, the question of the meaning of life. It was the question that Kierkegaard, Sartre and Marcel all addressed in different ways and that we discussed — awkwardly, confusedly, eagerly — around the fire in professor Lawrence’s living room. By the third or fourth week of the term, I had begun to look forward to our meetings with growing excitement. The seminar became the center of everything I did that fall, in class and out.

Partly it was because the readings were deep and enlightening, partly because I discovered I could keep up with my more advanced classmates and even make a contribution or two, partly because professor Lawrence’s wisdom and kindness enveloped us all. But mostly it was because I made a discovery in that class that has been a central conviction of mine ever since. I discovered that the meaning of life is a subject that can be studied in school.

What I discovered in professor Lawrence’s seminar so many years ago was that an institution of higher education is one of the places where the question of what living is for can be pursued in an organized way. I had left Williams looking for a place where the question I LLUSTR ATI ON BY R OBERT NEUBECKER

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has more reality than I thought it ever could in school. What I found when I returned was the place for which I had been searching. It has been my professional home ever since.

For more than 50 years, I have been by turns a student, a teacher and a dean. I am now, after 10 years as a dean, a teacher once again.

For decades, I was a member of the faculty of the Yale Law School. More recently, I taught a freshman program in Yale College devoted to the study of the great works of philosophy, history, literature and politics that form the foundation of the Western tradition.

For all this time, and in the different roles that I have occupied in my career, my deepest belief has remained unchanged: that a college or university is not just a place for the transmission of knowledge but a forum for the exploration of life’s mystery and meaning through the careful but critical reading of the great works of literary and philosophical imagination that we have inherited from the past. Over the years, many of my beliefs have changed but not this one. My confidence that the meaning of life is a teachable topic has never faltered since professor Lawrence first helped me to have it, and my whole professional life has been devoted to vindicating this confidence and to transmitting it to my students.

But over time, I have watched the question of life’s meaning lose its status as a subject of organized academic instruction. I’ve seen it pushed to the margins of professional respectability in the humanities, where it once occupied a central and honored place, and I have felt what I can only describe as a sense of personal loss on account of my own very substantial investment in the belief that the question is one that can and must be taught in our schools. The question has been exiled from the humanities, first as a result of the growing authority of the modern research ideal and then on account of the culture of political correctness that has undermined the legitimacy of the question itself and the authority of humanities teachers to ask it. I have felt puzzlement and anger at the easy sweeping aside of values that seem, to me, so obvious and important.

Why did the question of what living is for disappear from the roster of questions our colleges and universities address in a deliberate and disciplined way? What is the source of the appeal of the research ideal, and why is it so hostile to this question? Why are the ideas of diversity and multiculturalism and the belief that values are merely expressions of power so corrosive to the exploration of 78

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the question of life’s purpose and meaning?

What have the consequences of the disappearance of this question from our colleges and universities been for the culture at large, where our churches now monopolize the authority to address it? And what are the prospects for its restoration to a position of respect in the academy?

OUR LIV E S ARE the most precious resource we possess, and the question of how to spend them is the most important question we face.

The lives we actually lead are the more-or-less well-thought-out answers we give to this question. Our answers depend, of course, on what we value and where we find fulfillment. How should I spend my life? That question immediately invites another. What do I most care

THE QUESTION OF WHAT LIVING IS FOR IS NOT THREATENED

BY DOUBTS BUT BY PIOUS CONVICTION TO POLITICAL CORRECTNESS AND THE BLIND ACCEPTANCE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY THAT DISGUISE AND DENY OUR HUMAN CONDITION.

about and why? For the sake of what — or who — am I living? What is my life for?

Perhaps the most obvious thing to be said about the question is that it has an unavoidably personal quality. How I answer it depends upon my interests, tastes and talents, as well as my upbringing and social and economic circumstances — in short, upon a thousand factors that distinguish me from you and everyone else. These differences all have a bearing on what I care about, and hence on how I choose to spend my life.

But there is a second, deeper sense in which the question of what my life is for is personal to me. For it is a question that only I can answer. No one else in the world is competent to answer it for me, even if they know as much about my makeup as I do. I may of course learn from others and take instruction from their example. But what matters most to me — what is of overriding importance — is not

that the question of what living is for has a right answer, which someone else perhaps has already found, but that my answer be the right one, even if others discovered it long ago.

Deference and delegation, which are appropriate where an impersonal concern for the truth has priority, are out of place here. The question of how to spend my life, of what my life is for, is a question posed only to me, and I can no more delegate the responsibility for answering it than I can delegate the task of dying.

The question of what living is for arises only from the standpoint of the idea of life as a whole. This idea is at once inclusive and bounded. It gathers every aspect of one’s life and underscores its mortal limits. Only this combination of inclusiveness and mortality provides the perspective from which the question of the meaning of life comes into view.

The modern research ideal attacks both elements of this idea at once.

Through its demand for specialization, it discourages inclusiveness. It requires the scholar to concentrate her attention on something much smaller than life as a whole and disdains more inclusive pursuits as a dilettantism with little or no academic value. And through its insistence on the supreme importance of the discipline, of the multigenerational program of discovery and invention in which the individual researcher is engaged and in the context of whose larger life her own mortal career has no meaning, the research ideal minimizes the importance of mortality and promotes an ethic of supersession that condemns the scholar who takes her death too seriously as immature and unprofessional.

The modern research ideal thus compels those who embrace it to concentrate their attention on matters that are, at once, both smaller and larger than their lives as a whole.

It discourages, at once, the inclusiveness and the attention to mortality from whose combination the idea of life as a whole derives. It devalues both and deprives the idea of its ethical and spiritual worth. It makes the idea of life as a whole seem childish, ridiculous, unprofessional, self-indulgent. And by doing that, it undermines the credibility and authority of the one point of view from which the question of what living is for arises.

The effect of this, of course, is not to make the question itself disappear but only to deprive it of legitimacy within the arena of academic work — to push it out of school.

Human beings, scholars included, are irresistibly drawn to the question of life’s

meaning, and there is no reason to expect this will change. But to the extent the modern research ideal systematically devalues the perspective from which this question must be asked, it compels those who would ask it to look outside the academy for answers.

It says, to teachers and students alike, ‘‘Do not look for answers to the question of life’s meaning here. Do not even expect the question to be raised here, for to do so would violate the most basic premises on which modern scholarship is based.”

By accepting the imperatives of the research ideal and arranging their work to meet its demands, humanities teachers have therefore traded a valuable and distinctive authority for one based upon values they can never hope to realize to anything like the degree their colleagues in the natural and social sciences can.

For the humanities, this has been a very bad bargain indeed.

It has left teachers in these disciplines with a sense of inferiority and no way back to their lost authority. It has left them in an anxious void, without a secure sense of their own special role in higher education. It was into this void that the political ideas of the 1960s and 1970s entered — the ideas of diversity and multiculturalism, and the theory that values are merely disguised acts of power. These took root in the humanities in part because they met with no resistance — because teachers in these fields had lost the self-confidence that would have given them the strength to resist.

But more fundamentally, they took root because they seemed to offer an antidote to the emptiness produced by the humanities’ own endorsement of the research ideal.

But the cure has proved an illusion. The culture of political correctness that has grown from these ideas has not restored the self-confidence of the humanities but further weakened it instead. It has diminished their authority, not repaired it. It has placed the humanities at an even greater distance from the question of life’s meaning — the real source of their most lasting authority — and made it even more imperative that teachers of the humanities recover the wisdom and nerve to ask it.

The ideas of diversity and multiculturalism start from attractive moral and political premises. Each promotes a worthy cause — racial justice in the one case, and responsible global citizenship in the other. By transforming these ideas into principles of pedagogy, teachers of

the humanities have been able to reassert their claim to a special and valued role in higher education. They have been able to see themselves as making a distinctive contribution to the moral and political work of their colleges and universities. And by grounding the ideas of diversity and multiculturalism in a constructivist theory of knowledge that emphasizes the depth of human freedom and choice, they have been able to conceive their new role as one that extends a key premise of secular humanism to its fulfilling conclusion.

But all this is a mistake. The real effect of the humanities’ endorsement of these ideas has been quite the opposite. It has not restored their authority but further compromised it instead. It has undermined the notion of an old and ongoing conversation

AMERICA’S COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES ARE TODAY THE LEADING CENTERS OF RESEARCH IN THE WORLD. BUT WE HAVE THE RIGHT TO EXPECT SOMETHING MORE. WE HAVE THE RIGHT TO EXPECT THAT THEY OFFER THEIR STUDENTS AN EDUCATION IN THE MEANING OF LIFE.

that gives each entrant a weighted and responsible sense of connection to the past, and substituted the egotistic presumption that we can start a new and freer conversation on our own, engaging all the works of all the world’s great civilizations in a colloquy we invent for ourselves. It has encouraged the fantasy that in our world today, the ideas and institutions of the West have no more significance or value than those of any other civilization. It has wrecked the humanities’ claim to be able to provide organized guidance in the exploration of the question of the meaning of life. And it has simultaneously limited the idea of human freedom by tying our powers of judgment too closely to facts about ourselves we cannot change, and expanded the notion of freedom to the point where our choices are emptied of their meaning.

In all these ways, the wide acceptance within the humanities of the ideas of diversity,

multiculturalism and constructivism has made it harder for teachers in these fields to acknowledge the legitimacy of the question of what living is for and to approach it in a serious, responsible and organized fashion.

TO DAY, T H E L EG IT IMACY of the question of what living is for is not threatened by doubts.

It is threatened by pious conviction. Its real enemy is the new faith which prescribes the orthodoxy to which so many students subscribe — the culture of political correctness that strangles serious debate, the careerism that distracts from life as a whole, the blind acceptance of science and technology that disguise and deny our human condition.

It is these that now put the idea of an art of living at risk and undermine the authority of humanities teachers to teach it. But these same pieties make it essential that this authority be reclaimed. In the secular academy, the humanism that once saved us from our doubts must now save us from our convictions. It must rescue the question of life’s meaning from the forces that belittle and obscure it and restore the openness and wonder that will always accompany any authentic effort to ask it.

America’s colleges and universities are today the leading centers of research in the world. But we have the right to expect something more. We have the right to expect that they offer their students an education in the meaning of life. Once they did, and will again, when the tradition which has been misplaced, but can never be lost, is recovered and put to work as a lever to dislodge the orthodoxies that now blind us.

That this will happen, I am hopeful. The conditions are encouraging, and the need is great. For the desire to understand is eternal, and in an age of forgetfulness, when our humanity is concealed by the powers we possess and the question of life’s meaning is monopolized by the churches, to whom our colleges and universities have relinquished all authority to ask it. With wonder and sobriety and the courage to face our mortal selves: Let our colleges and universities be the spiritual leaders they once were and that all of us — teachers, students, parents, citizens of the republic — need for them to be again.

A N T H O N Y T. K R O N M A N I S ST E R L I N G P R O F E S S O R O F L AW A N D A FO R M E R D E A N O F YA L E L AW S C H O O L .

T H I S E S S AY WAS E XC E R P T E D F R O M H I S B O O K “ E D U C AT I O N ’S E N D : W H Y O U R C O L L E G E S A N D U N I V E RS I T I E S H AV E G I V E N U P O N T H E M E A N I N G O F L I F E .”

C O PY R I G H T © 2 0 0 7 BY A N T H O N Y K R O N M A N. R E P R O D U C E D BY P E R M I S S I O N O F YA L E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S. A L L R I G H TS R E S E RV E D.

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INSIDE THE COLLEGE SPORTS GOLD RUSH SOME FEAR THE NIL REVOLUTION. OTHERS SEE GOOD OLD-FASHIONED OPPORTUNITY

BY E R I C A D E L S O N

T

here’s a distinctive smell to college football. While we speak of sights and sounds — tailgate barbecues, marching bands playing fight songs, the clash of shoulder pads, the roar of a student section pounding the bleachers under the lights — the smells are even more visceral. It starts with fresh-cut grass on crisp autumn air, clean like an unblemished record or a new semester. But later, if you’re close enough to the sidelines, you can feel it turning acrid and metallic, laced with blood and sweat as the players grind toward victory or defeat.

That’s not how it smells today, as hundreds of administrators, sports agents and student-athletes descend on the College Football Hall of Fame in Atlanta. In cavernous halls and virtual displays, the sprawling complex showcases the game’s greatest competitors and the moments that defined them and celebrates the broader tapestry of this most American tradition. But this gathering is not about the pageantry of the old ways.

Rather, they’ve come to chase a piece of the future, a suddenly wide-open field of opportunities to profit from the renown of these young stars. Here, it smells like any conference center in corporate America.

In a large atrium, powerful sports agents take turns offering advice that just two years ago might have launched a scandal. “How many of you have reached out to a brand on direct message and set up a relationship?” one 80

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asks. “Do that. Everyone should be doing that.”

Act quickly, another one argues. “College is short, not a lot of years. Think of it as a platform to expand your opportunity.” A crowd of student-athletes, seated at round tables, nod.

Some take notes, with no fear that the meeting could tarnish their amateur status.

The first-ever NIL Summit — a forum for college athletes to learn how to leverage their personal brands into corporate partnerships IT’S EASY TO FREAK OUT ABOUT THE END OF COLLEGE SPORTS AS WE KNOW IT, BUT IT’S MUCH HARDER TO FIGURE OUT WHICH FORCES ARE CAUSING WHICH CHANGES.

and cash — feels like the center of a new gold rush. Short for “name, image and likeness,” NIL refers to an athlete’s right to profit from their representation on a billboard or a T-shirt, in a TV commercial or a video game.

A wave of falling legal dominoes climaxed in June of 2021, when the Supreme Court ended the NCAA’s antitrust exemption and a bevy of new state laws opened the gates. Making money while playing a college sport has gone from taboo to totally cool — basically overnight. As

corporate and licensing attorney Matt Reece says, “it’s a brand-new market.”

Some fear the NIL market will hurt amateur sports. Several name-brand football coaches have expressed concern that blue-chip recruits will simply go to the highest bidder, or the one backed by the most generous car dealership, or that their competitors may take undue liberties in the process. Commissioners from the Pac-12 and SEC have met with members of Congress, and the University of Arizona athletic director has said that NIL could “erode our overall Olympic programs or we’d have to be completely restructured.”

Old-school fans fret that this new cash flow — part of a series of major structural changes, like conference consolidation and the transfer window — could upend the traditional kinship they’ve felt with players and make it even more difficult for smaller programs to compete nationally.

But NIL is, essentially, a business proposition. Many players have already struck lucrative deals with brands — some in the six and seven figures. After the session, Jason Ranne hustles out to the street to catch an Uber to the airport. He’s a high-ranking executive at Wasserman — a leading talent agency. Wasserman’s logo is on the summit brochure. I ask him how much hesitation the student-athletes are showing in this new world. “Zero,” he says.

“The stigma from making money is not there with these athletes.”

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tried to pull off this event before. In 2019, the CEO of INFLCR — a company dedicated to athlete brand-building — reached out to schools nationwide, inviting them to gather in Studio J of the TNT studios here in Atlanta. “Only administrators showed up,” Cavale says, “because all the schools said bringing athletes would be an improper gift.”

This time, he’s pulled in 300 student-athletes.

And some have eye-popping stories. Leah Clapper, a gymnast at the University of Florida, says she’s “lost count” of how many NIL deals she’s done. She even invented a gymnastics board game and sold hundreds of copies.

“Seeing what has happened in just under 12 months is absolutely incredible,” she says.

This year’s summit has wooed some big corporate names: Meta, Invesco and even the WWE. Meta hands out a flyer titled “Athlete Well-Being Tools on Instagram.” Legendary pro wrestler Triple H (with his 7.6 million Twitter followers) gives a speech and introduces a “Next In Line” class that includes a volleyball player from the University of Miami, a football player from Michigan State, a cheerleader from Ole Miss and a couple of wrestlers. “All of those companies had a common problem,” Cavale says. “None of them could get a direct line to the athletes. And NIL has broken that. The middleman has been cut out.”

The “middlemen” at the universities are still there, but they’ve done a remarkable aboutface. Rather than watchdogs, a lot of officials in athletic departments are now facilitators.

At the summit, Jeff Rudy, the associate athletic director for football at the University of Utah, is positively buoyant. “We want to learn how to better support the student-athletes in their opportunities for NIL in the future,” he says.

“NIL gets a bad name sometimes, but we see it with our roles as helping the student-athletes and educating them.”

Continuing, he explains that the two forbidden categories are “inducements” — come to this school and we will pay you — and “pay to play” — throw three touchdowns and you get a bag of money. Rules vary from state to state, but the bottom line is this: Students must do something outside of sports and school to earn the compensation. “We’re trying to educate our donor base,” Rudy explains. “Don’t give the kids money; give the kids an experience.”

Standing with Rudy is Gavin Van Wagoner, Utah’s director of major gifts. Van Wagoner scrolls through the INFLCR app as a demonstration of how this world works now.

J I M CAVA L E HAS

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Student-athletes can browse a menu of possible deals, respond to those that interest them, and then send a deal to the school’s compliance department for approval. That way, the athletic department and the athlete both know it’s OK to proceed. There’s even a way to request a tax form. “We try to innovate as a department,” Van Wagoner says, “teaming up with the business school and the app to give them a one-stop shop where they can go in, access content to brand-build, disclose their deals with compliance and access opportunities with one click of the button.”

So allowable “compensation” for athletes

“ALL OF THOSE COMPANIES HAD A COMMON PROBLEM. NONE OF THEM COULD GET A DIRECT LINE TO THE ATHLETES. AND NIL HAS BROKEN THAT. THE MIDDLEMAN HAS BEEN CUT OUT.”

before I had any representation, it was a crazy amount of people — not only brands reaching out to me but representation companies reaching out to me,” Levis says. “I was just overstrung talking to too many people.” He felt “burdened” by not saying “no” enough, and eventually he turned down “four times as many deals as I accepted.”

Now consider the student-athletes who don’t have any idea what they’re doing, and don’t have the right voices in their ear. It’s not like they aren’t oversubscribed to begin with, considering all the hours doing homework and practicing and traveling and playing. Some helpful advice can come from schools, but when a panel of athletes at the summit is asked to name the biggest thing their schools have done to help them through this time, a deafening silence fills the room.

“Right now, the thing that worries me is the information-gathering and making sure we’re able to disseminate that information,” Rudy says. “We’re trying to remove roadblocks for our student-athletes. For those who want to be in this space, we want them to know we have the resources.” so much on a reliable routine, but right now, NIL is a huddle without a playbook, at a chaotic point of the game. More players are transferring, more schools are switching conferences and the pandemic threw athletic department budgets and eligibility rules into flux. It’s easy to freak out about the end of college sports as we know it, but it’s much harder to figure out which forces are causing which changes. Is a player transferring to a different school because of an NIL deal? Or because he doesn’t like the new offensive coordinator? Or is it simply because he’s got an elderly relative who he wants to see more often? The kneejerk reaction is often to assume the worst. If a player leaves a program, the spin will almost surely be that “he’s greedy for money” rather than “I botched his development.”

“I think it’s going to wreck the (coaches’) world because they won’t have all the control,” says Amanda Paule-Koba, professor of sport management at Bowling Green State University. “Coaches are very used to operating a system where they are in control of everything.

I don’t hear them saying their own $9 million contract is ruining the sport.”

Despite a culture so bent on planning — football teams usually arrive at the stadium with their first 15 offensive plays already

COL L E GE S P ORTS H INGE

— once restricted to a scholarship, tuition and meals — has expanded significantly. In 2017, a BYU graduate named Brian Fagan started Oncoor Sports Marketing to help former college athletes. In the first month after NIL went online, Oncoor did a reported $300,000 worth of deals for its clients — with backers ranging from a credit union to a taco joint.

Like any literal gold rush, this one has yielded some shiny nuggets, but few have truly gotten rich — and the digging can be arduous.

“The most surprising thing about NIL for me,” says Kentucky quarterback Will Levis, “is the amount of work you have to put into it to get out what you’re looking for. When it first came out, everyone thought it would be an easy couple bucks here and there, but it is a job, and you have to block out the hours of the week you put into it or else you’re not going to get the reward you are looking for.”

Keep in mind: Levis is one of the NIL winners so far. He struck a deal with Claiborne Farm in Kentucky to back thoroughbred racehorse War of Will. It was a smart move, timely and locally focused. It also came after a flood of requests. “In the beginning,

chosen — the NCAA didn’t plan for this. Many of the athletes, however, dreamed of this long ago. Britain Covey, for example, a Utah wide receiver who is now in the NFL, employed NIL to start a foundation dedicated to honoring his late cousin by teaching “hope, confidence and resilience in young women through equestrian training.”

Yes, some student-athletes simply see dollar signs. But quite a few want more meaning from NIL than stereotypes suggest. Many want to lift their new communities and give back in a way they could not do before NIL. And that may bring them closer to fans, rather than driving them away. It’s the same with commercial appearances: A poster signing at a local book shop, for example, can help to humanize the athlete behind the face mask. A 10-year-old kid isn’t likely to care if the athlete drove a free car to a charity event.

“I don’t think the sky is falling,” Paule-Koba says. “It’s a shift for power dynamics, and athletes realizing their worth. And that is scary for coaches and athletic directors and people who are used to being in charge.”

But won’t this just bring a huge concentration of power? Just this summer we’ve seen Pac-12 giants UCLA and USC announce moves to the Big Ten, and that was after Big 12 giants Texas and Oklahoma announced moves to the SEC. Won’t NIL just shovel more money and power to the fewer and fewer?

Maybe not. Athletes who rush to the most dominant schools may be chasing a scarcer number of deals in one place. It may be advantageous for some players to look at communities that have more creative solutions to offer than the usual name-brand programs. And the lure of the pros may be offset (at least to some extent) by on-campus income. Some students have already said they are staying in school because it’s financially easier to wait now. “Since NIL happened, I’m not really in a rush to go pro,” says Michigan track athlete Aasia Laurencin. “I’m staying. I’m going to be here until my eligibility runs out.”

Still not quite convinced? Let’s go to the movies. This whole scenario reminds me of a time when famous movie actors signed longterm deals with studios, appearing in several films during a contract. Then the sands shifted — led in part by legal action — and the talent could sign for one movie at a time. Eventually, stars became much bigger, leveraging their fame into huge paydays from the goliath studios. “It used to be the movies weren’t so much about the actors and actresses; it was the

fascination with moving pictures,” says Glenn MacDonald, professor of economics at Washington University in St. Louis. “Over time, they became about the artists. That commanded a much higher rate of pay.”

All these decades later, the movie industry has not died. It survived television and the internet and streaming. College football will likely survive NIL for the same reason: People will still want to watch their favorites. “People think there’s not enough money or it’s going to ruin things,” says Michigan basketball player Hunter Dickinson. “There’s always been enough money. College coaches can get paid $10 million a year, so they’re able to find some money. If they’re able to build a $190-million practice facility for football, they’re able to find some money.”

David Berri, professor of economics at Southern Utah University, compares the NIL market to professional free agency — but not in a pejorative way. “We already saw this play out in Major League Baseball,” he says. “Back in the 1970s, they said if you allow free agency, you’re going to kill the popularity of the sport.

It didn’t make a difference.”

While many are afraid that traditions will vanish, new ways of thinking will emerge, along with new leaders and even new careers.

Every deal and every decision is a precedent for generations to come. “Unlike more mature markets where you know what fair market value is — where everybody has some education, some assistance, some help, some agents, even a pro players’ association, the league, the teams,” Reece says, “here it’s a little more fluid.”

For enterprising student-athletes, the NIL market isn’t scary at all. It’s exciting, representing more than a short-term financial boon. Rather, it’s an intersection of sports and entrepreneurship, a new field where they can make their mark and perhaps change their lives without depending on the NFL’s eventual perception of their talents. “You look at the great startups — the Snapchats, the Facebooks, the Googles of the world — they were created by thought leaders on campuses as students,” says UCLA quarterback Chase Griffin. “Now student-athletes are able to be part of these and get equity as a part of growing generational wealth.”

If that’s how it plays out, it will happen through a dynamic free market driven by innovation and initiative. And what could be more American than that?

Maybe not so scandalous after all.

“COACHES ARE VERY USED TO OPERATING A SYSTEM WHERE THEY ARE IN CONTROL OF EVERYTHING. I DON’T HEAR THEM SAYING THEIR OWN $9 MILLION CONTRACT IS RUINING THE SPORT.”

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THE LAST WORD

Deseret asked Abrams about politics, legacy and what he hopes to teach young people about their role in America’s future.

YOU’VE HAD A LONG AND STORIED CAREER IN PUBLIC SERVICE. DO YOU EVER THINK ABOUT HOW YOU’D LIKE TO BE REMEMBERED?

ROB E RT AB RAMS

BETTER TOGETHER LESSONS IN POLITICS AND EMPATHY FROM ONE OF NEW YORK’S ELDER STATESMEN

BY LO I S M . CO L L I N S

R

obert Abrams is all about building bridges. Now 84, the former New York attorney general devoted his career to public service and practicing the law, but he made it a lifelong habit to reach across aisles and mend fences. That’s what brought the influential Jewish leader to Salt Lake City this summer, when The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints presented him with the Thomas L. Kane Award, honoring his work connecting the Jewish community and members of the church. Abrams, who goes

by Bob, is not a large man, but he captivates a crowd with his jovial laugh and outsized energy, his arms windmilling as he tells a story, hands in near-constant motion.

As a young man, Abrams didn’t set out to become a politician, but his plans changed thanks to a government course at Columbia College in 1958. Assigned to interview his congressman, he made numerous efforts to reach out, but never got a response. You might say he never got over it, because years later, while he was in law school at NYU, he helped a reform campaign to unseat an incumbent

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who’d represented his district for three decades — who happened to be the man who couldn’t be bothered to return a call from a frustrated student. That experience sparked an interest in politics. In 1965, Abrams won a seat in the “IF YOU COULD EXPLAIN TO YOUR CONSTITUENTS WHAT MOTIVATED YOU TO VOTE THAT WAY, WHAT WAS ON YOUR MIND, WHAT WAS IN YOUR HEART AND CONSCIENCE, EVEN IF THEY DIDN’T AGREE WITH YOU, THEY WOULD UNDERSTAND.”

New York State Assembly. He was 27 years old.

That became the first step in a lifelong journey. Abrams later won the office of Bronx Borough president and eventually, in

1978, was elected as attorney general for the state of New York. The first Democrat to win that position in nearly four decades, he tackled consumer and civil rights, as well as environmental causes, holding onto the role until 1993. He won his party’s nomination for the U.S. Senate in 1992 but lost a close race to incumbent Al D’Amato. Even after going into private practice, he continued public service, sitting on boards, commissions and committees.

A die-hard liberal, Abrams still counts conservatives among his closest friends.

Over his decades in office, he collaborated with A.G.s from other states — big and small, red and blue — in a quest to right corporate wrongs. In the foreword to his 2021 memoir, “The Luckiest Guy in the World,” New York Attorney General Letitia James writes: “Robert Abrams was larger than life. His legacy was manifest not only in New York but across the nation.” The Justice Building in Albany was renamed the Robert Abrams Building for Law and Justice in 2009.

At the end of your days, as you’re lying there, ready to meet your maker, you want to know that you made a difference, that your life was worthwhile. That you did everything you could. Not everybody can do titanic important things, but we can all do a little to help improve somebody’s life, or our community, or even the world. You want to look back and say: “I’m proud. I made the most of my life. I made the most of my days. I worked hard. I tried to be honest, to have a good reputation.

I tried to raise my family with the proper values.” That’s what I hope might be my legacy.

Hopefully, people will say, “He tried hard and he had a good name.” That I was a person of independence and integrity. I’m proud of my life and career as a lawyer, and it was a privilege to serve the public. To help people across the board has been a great honor.

THAT’S QUITE THE IDEAL. WHY DOES IT SEEM SO HARD FOR POLITICIANS TO LIVE UP TO THEIR PRINCIPLES?

All too often what you see in the newspapers are the outliers, the people who abuse the public trust, who therefore get the headline. Not the bulk of the people who serve in government and in politics who are decent, who are honorable, who are there for the right reasons. But this is a tough business.

I’m a baseball fan. The Baseball Hall of Fame is in my state, in Cooperstown, New York. You can get inducted there if you get a batting average of around .300. That means you make an error — you get out — two out of three times. And you’re still one of the all-time greats. In politics, if somebody disagrees with one thing that you have to say, that may do you in. Especially with the internet and social media.

That said, I found that if you can explain to your constituents what motivated you to vote that way, what was on your mind, what

was in your heart and conscience, that even if they don’t agree with you, they'll understand.

ALL THAT SEEMS MORE DIFFICULT IN 2022. IF YOU WERE STARTING NOW, WOULD YOU STILL GO INTO POLITICS?

I don’t want to discourage anyone, but a campaign is a much more difficult crucible to enter today. The amount of money you have to raise to run for public office, the kinds of campaigns that are waged, the things that are said in the course of those campaigns, the stretching of the truth if not outright lies that are hurled against you — no one likes that. It’s hard to have your children, spouse and family hear all kinds of vile things about you. So you really have to be committed and want to do good and want to serve.

But nothing is easy in the world. We all know that. The bottom line of my message to young people is, don’t drop out. Roll up your sleeves and get into the fray because the world needs young people. It needs their energy, idealism and their commitment to appropriate values. We need people to help clean up the mess, to solve some of our problems. And creative, dynamic leaders are important to the health of our country and our world order.

WHILE WE’RE TALKING ABOUT BIG IDEAS, IF THERE WAS ONE SINGLE ISSUE YOU COULD SOLVE, WHAT WOULD IT BE?

If there was one thing that I could wish for this world, it would be peace. There’s still too much war, too much conflict. There’s too much bloodshed, loss of life, loss of human values and caring for others. My wife and I were once fortunate enough to travel through Ukraine. We visited Crimea, Odessa, Nikolaev. We saw the beauty and the majesty of that country and we met the people.

We connected with the Jewish community.

What’s happening there now — the death and destruction I see on television — gets to my heart every day. As humans, we seem to be incapable of learning from all the wars that we’ve gone through, all the horror. We just don’t understand that, as George Santayana said, if you can’t learn the lessons of history you will repeat them.

YOU’RE A LIBERAL PERSON WHO RECENTLY ACCEPTED AN AWARD FROM A CONSERVATIVE CHURCH. TELL US ABOUT THAT UNUSUAL FRIENDSHIP.

A friend who is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints invited me to come here and bring some Jewish leaders from New York City to learn more about their faith and what the organization does.

From that trip blossomed years of significant relationships and activities together. Much has been accomplished, much has been done to build those ties, but I think our efforts should even be further intensified.

We need bridge builders, and the leaders of this church feel very deeply about that. I quote them, men like President Russell M. Nelson and President Dallin H. Oaks, about the need for people who are different to respond to each other — indeed, to love one another. Those are admonitions and commitments to be found throughout the scriptures.

You should respect me for who I am, I should respect you for who you are. No two people are exactly alike. Spouses learn that they are not exactly alike. No two nations are alike, and no two faiths are totally alike, but there are broad similarities, and we can develop respect and love for one another.

That’s what I think the world should be all about. Certainly, that’s been part of my relationship with the church, which is something that makes me feel lucky. Hopefully we’re only in the midst of that process, and we can extend these friendships between our two communities.

DO YOU HAVE A LAST WORD?

The cup is always half-full. You’ve got to be optimistic. There’s enough going on in the world today that can turn you off — it can make you feel very depressed — but you’ve got to look at the other side of it. We can do better, we can enjoy more by way of achievement and benefit for humankind, as brothers and sisters living and learning together, sharing the bounty of the land, sharing the fruits of our ideas and the ideals. I hope others feel the same way.

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PARTING SHOT

“We have an end in sight, and it’s not like this is forever.”

STEPHAN’S QUINTET A GROUPING OF FIVE GALAXIES

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An enormous mosaic of Stephan’s Quintet is the largest image to date from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, covering about one-fifth of the moon’s diameter. It contains over 150 million pixels and is constructed from almost 1,000 separate image files. The visual grouping of five galaxies was captured by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera, built by a team at the University of Arizona and Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Center, and Mid-Infrared Instrument.

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HOPE

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Every project we undertake is critical for you and our commitment is to treat you that way.

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SEPTEMBER 2022

SPECIAL ISSUE

THE FATE OF THE

R E L IG IO U S

UNIVERSITY

DARE TO BE DIFFERENT

WHY RELIGIOUS SCHOOLS MATTER

BY CLARK G. GILBERT

THE REFORMER BEN SASSE’S PLAN TO FIX HIGHER ED

BY SARAH ISGUR AND DECLAN GARVEY

IS IT TOO LATE TO SAVE THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT? A CONVERSATION WITH

SEPTEMBER 2022 VOL 02 | NO 17

JONATHAN HAIDT INSIDE THE

COLLEGE SPORTS GOLD RUSH