Welcome to BYU. I\u2019m back for my sophomore year; and while that won\u2019t impress the seniors, it ought to be stunning to the freshmen, evidence one again of life after death. One of the great things about your year, this year, at BYU is that you\u2019re going to share it with my wife, Pat Holland. I\u2019d like her to step up here and say, \u201cHi,\u201d to you. We do this sort of business together throughout the year. The Proverbs say, \u201cWhoso findeth a wife findeth a good thing\u201d (18:22), and I found a really, really good thing. In fact, just this morning I heard her down fixing breakfast. Our youngest came in and said, \u201cMom, did you wake up grumpy this morning?\u201d<\/p>\n
And she said, \u201cNo, I\u2019m just letting him sleep in. It\u2019s school today.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sweetheart, would you give them a greeting?<\/p>\n
Jeff is kidding you. We really have a perfect marriage. My father told me we would have even when we were dating. Just a few nights before we were to be married, we had some kind of a little lovers\u2019 quarrel, and I was really upset with Jeff and said, \u201cPlease take me home.\u201d He brought me home and I ran into the house, slammed the door, ran into my father\u2019s bedroom, woke him up out of a dead sleep, and said, \u201cDaddy, you\u2019ve got to call this wedding off. This marriage just won\u2019t work.\u201d<\/p>\n
My father in all his wisdom sat up in bed and said, \u201cI will not call this marriage off. This marriage was made in heaven.\u201d When I stopped crying long enough to find out why, he said, \u201cBecause the rocks in Jeff\u2019s head will fill the holes in yours.\u201d<\/p>\n
This business with my father-in-law is real. I had a real challenge. It took me a while to win him over, but I knew I was home free in one of the most difficult moments of all. It was, in fact, at the very hour I had come in my best LDS fashion to ask for her hand. He just went to pieces. He ranted and raved and charged around and said she was too young and why did I think I\u2019d be able to marry her and on and on and on and finally said, \u201cDo you think I want her tied to an idiot for the rest of her life?\u201d<\/p>\n
I said, \u201cNo; that\u2019s the reason I\u2019ve come to ask for her hand.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a kind of friendly, family way, I am happy to have this opportunity to welcome you back to the university at the beginning of a new year. And I would like to extend a very special warm greeting to those of you who are new to the university. As my husband mentioned, we have been here just a year now, and we have learned so many things this past year\u2014both through our challenges and through our blessings that have come from being at this university. One of them is that Security will stop you on campus no matter whose wife you are, and the other is that the university does have a mission. We hope that everyone here at BYU can realize that.<\/p>\n
President Kimball said in my husband\u2019s inaugural:<\/p>\n
As the Church continues to progress, BYU will be thrust forward.<\/i><\/p>\n
He also said in a recent general conference that<\/p>\n
There is a tide to be taken now in the affairs of the Church in all the earth which will lift us up and carry us forward as never before.<\/i>\u00a0[\u201cLet Us Not Weary in Well Doing,\u201d Ensign<\/i>, May 1980, p. 80]<\/p>\n
You, my young friends, are part of that tide. We are all part of that tide. And BYU is one of the greatest instruments the Lord has to prepare you for that service. So let me strongly encourage you that while you\u2019re here you take advantage of every opportunity there is here at this university to grow.<\/p>\n
Some have worried whether the idealism that is here at BYU really prepares you to adjust to the harsh realities that you will be facing in the \u201creal\u201d world. But the vision that we have for you, the vision that my husband and I have for you, is that by the time you leave BYU you will have become so healthy and so strong and so well nourished, intellectually and especially spiritually, that the world will have to adjust and conform to you.<\/p>\n
My hope for you today is that you will work for, and especially pray for, and that you will reach to know and understand, your full potential. And I promise you that potential will come when you are then ready and willing to return that full capacity back to the purposes of our Father in Heaven. Of that I bear testimony and leave my love with you today, in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.<\/p>\n
Well, now you know why it\u2019s easy for me to do this job.<\/p>\n
There are many things I would like to say to you in a setting like this, and yet obviously by the very nature of our first devotional hour with you, we don\u2019t have that time. Perhaps later in the year, when things are a little less hectic, I can have an hour with you to talk about things of mutual importance. Let me at least say this morning that we love you, that we welcome you to BYU, and that you\u2019re needed here. May I suggest briefly some of the hopes we have for you.<\/p>\n
To get into that, let me just imagine that some of you are wondering about how the Hollands feel after their first year. I can tell you in one word\u2014we feel terrific. We\u2019ve never had a more rewarding or exciting experience than the chance to be with you in this greatest of all universities. Our children have to walk a mile to see their next-door neighbors, but they believe the game room in the Wilkinson Center makes up for that. We\u2019re grateful for your kindness to them as they mow you down with their bicycles on their way to Wasatch Elementary.<\/p>\n
There have been some peculiar aspects to our experience, however, one of which saw its most dramatic realization about four weeks ago. You may not have thought about it, but it is an interesting challenge for the president of BYU, particularly when living on campus, to have some semblance of a private life in a very public word. We have had student visitors call and ask if our dog would bark into their family home evening microphone, if my wife would play the Cougar Fight Song on the piano to fulfill scavenger hunt obligations. We have been asked to hold in safekeeping pumpkin pie until an unsuspecting Mr. Wonderful was contacted, anonymously of course, and informed that his would-be eternal flame had left such a token with us for him and for him alone. We\u2019ve had couples want to get engaged in our living room; we\u2019ve had families want to have their pictures taken on our balcony; we have untold requests for moonlight dinners for two in our garden gazebo (we assume not to be catered by us). Now, because I hear all kinds of new wheels turning, I hasten to add that we have declined such requests, not because we wouldn\u2019t like to be part of every scavenger hunt on campus, but because we can\u2019t be. In spite of their father, I believe my wife hopes for some reasonable normality in our children so that only he, and not they, will be institutionalized upon release from the presidency of this university.<\/p>\n
Another aspect of that constant challenge has been to go off campus. Our family loves pizza. My wife ate so much pizza when she was expecting our second son that his first words upon entering the world were not \u201cmama\u201d or \u201cdada\u201d but rather \u201cpepperoni and mushroom, and keep the crust thick.\u201d But in my quest for anonymity, I have discovered that it is difficult to eat pizza through a ski mask, especially if you order Canadian bacon. We slip into a restaurant somewhere near campus, and there\u2019s a low buzz as if to say, \u201cSurely they don\u2019t eat food.\u201d When we order a local Big Mac or Whopper, the main topic of conversation for a week is, \u201cDid he hold the pickles?\u201d I occasionally stun them, eat the pickles, and hold the onions. Of course, if I really want to be stunning, I eat the onions and hold the rest of the burger. But it does make one a little self-conscious to have his cheeseburger analyzed and then watch a brief entry being made in a Book of Remembrance. Oh, the price one pays for public life!<\/p>\n
Now all of this, slightly exaggerated, is only to set the stage for this most dramatic moment about four weeks ago. The Hollands actually decided to go to a movie. We don\u2019t go to lot of movies. We venture out about once a year, and then we hit the Varsity Theater. That\u2019s more our speed, and the price is better. But our children prevailed upon us for a family home evening activity that would actually take us into the outside world for an honest-to-gosh movie. We weighed carefully the kind of movie we were going to, found one that seemed appropriate for the family, and went. It was one of those new combined theater arrangements where sixteen people and a keg of popcorn make a full house, so we knew it was going to be cozy, but we didn\u2019t realize how cozy.<\/p>\n
We came a little late; the movie was more popular than we had supposed, and the lines were long. By the time we bought tickets, there were, by actual usher\u2019s count, only seven seats left in the house. Now, there are five of us. That left two. We said we\u2019d take the five wherever they were and agreed as a family to regroup under the nearest streetlamp after the movie. As luck would have it, on one of the back rows of the theater where we entered were two seats together with a third nearby. We quickly inserted our children into those seats and thought at least they would enjoy the movie.<\/p>\n
Now, out of a total of seven, that should have left four, but somebody must have been hiding them as we began our long march down the aisle. It didn\u2019t appear to me that there was an extra arm in the room, speaking, of course, of movie seats and not human flesh. We were looking for arms without fingers on the end. Then the comments started\u2014first a kind of low hush, growing but increasingly audible to us and, I assume, to everyone else in the theater. I was a little embarrassed. \u201cOh, they\u2019re coming to a movie, an actual movie, and I\u2019m here in this very movie with them.\u201d Well, I didn\u2019t think our arrival deserved all of that; I mean I know we\u2019re famous, but I suppose President and Sister Oaks went to movies. We kept walking. \u201cOh, look, they bought popcorn. I want to talk to the girl who sold them that popcorn. I wonder if it\u2019s buttered or plain.\u201d<\/p>\n
By now I was thinking, \u201cShucks, we\u2019re just ordinary folks. Anybody could be president down there at BYU.\u201d But the chatter went on. The farther down the aisle we went, the more the heads turned. Indeed, I was amazed at how impressed the younger crowd seemed to be. Some of the group were probably BYU students, but the larger part seemed to be younger\u2014high school or junior high, sort of teenyboppers, if you will. I leaned over to Pat and said, \u201cYou\u2019re causing quite a stir, dear. They want to know if you have butter on your popcorn.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is ridiculous,\u201d she whispered back. \u201cI feel like Bonnie and Clyde after holding up a bank, and you\u2019re Clyde.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThanks,\u201d I said, \u201cbut I prefer Chuck.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cChuck what?\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust Chuck, you know, short for Charles\u2014Prince Charles, and you\u2019re Lady Diana. The carriage is just out by the fire hydrant, and we all turn into groundhogs at 10:00 p.m.\u201d (That\u2019s BYU curfew in advance of midnight. I just added that for you.)<\/p>\n
\u201cDon\u2019t make fun of the royal wedding,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not making fun,\u201d I replied. \u201cI\u2019m just asking you to keep your royal eye open for a vacant throne.\u201d<\/p>\n
By then it was obvious that not only were we not going to find two adjoining seats, but it looked doubtful whether we\u2019d find any seat at all, and we were near the front of the theater by now. \u201cOh, they\u2019re not going to sit together,\u201d someone moaned. Another girl, about thirteen, actually started to cry. It was obvious this whole thing was a very moving experience, but I didn\u2019t think it should be that moving. \u201cIt\u2019s okay,\u201d I kept saying in a sort of large-stage whisper. \u201cDon\u2019t worry about it; it\u2019s okay.\u201d But the moaning and the wailing and the tears increased.<\/p>\n
Just when it looked as if we were going to turn the whole theater into the downtown equivalent of the Relief Society nursery on homemaking day, we spied two vacant seats a couple of places apart. Some young woman, sensing our plight, moved over into one of them, leaving hers adjoining the other single, and we sank into them, safe, our noses eight inches from the screen. This was going to be a stereophonic experience with a vengeance. But interestingly enough, the moaning and the wailing and the whispering and the pointing went on. It continued to be directed generally toward us but with something of a glazed look now in the eyes of these young people. \u201cThis is ridiculous,\u201d I said to my wife. \u201cThey don\u2019t need to act like we\u2019re from another planet.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMaybe they wouldn\u2019t,\u201d my wife said, \u201cif you\u2019d left your cap and gown home.\u201d She was only kidding of course, but I gave her a little elbow in the ribs.<\/p>\n
Well, the teenyboppers were still bopping, and I thought we certainly had some responsibility. Something had to be done; it was my moral duty. So I stood in my front row aisle seat to acknowledge their feverish applause and turned head on, face to face, nose to nose, into Steve Craig and Marie Osmond, who had been walking down the aisle stride for stride behind us.<\/p>\n
Some of you who may be new to this campus won\u2019t know Steve Craig or Marie Osmond. Steve is from our very successful basketball team of last year. Steve has the kind of handsome looks that make Robert Redford consider plastic surgery. And Marie is a local working girl. (You certainly can\u2019t be expected to know everyone your first day on campus.) Well, so much for Prince Charles and Lady Di. Actually, we knew that Steve and Marie were behind us; we bribed them with the last two tickets. We thought it would look like we were on a double date. You can check with me afterward and I\u2019ll tell you whether they had butter on their popcorn.<\/p>\n
Well, to slightly more serious matters. I had hoped last year\u2014and said so\u2014after spending some considerable time in my first address to the students stressing why I thought clean, attractive dress and grooming were an important part of the mission of BYU, that I would never have to do it again, at least not at any length or at the repeated expense of other more important subjects. However, some redefinitions in our standards this year and the recent publicity about them suggest that I need to make it clear once again how we feel about this whole matter, and then I hope we won\u2019t need to belabor the matter again. It is important that no one misunderstand our intents nor underestimate our firm expectations. Let me give you just a little history. (And may I pause editorially to say don\u2019t be nervous about the hour; class won\u2019t start until I let you go.)<\/p>\n
Nearly two years ago, President Oaks and others at BYU began long, thoughtful conversations with the commissioner\u2019s office and the Board of Trustees about updating BYU\u2019s dress and grooming code. After several months of review and counsel, the Board of Trustees invited President Oaks to redefine and, in so doing, reemphasize two particularly important elements in our dress and grooming expectations. Shortly after that directive was given by the board, President Oaks was released, and I was appointed to succeed him. I then began to work with President Kerr and Deans Sorenson, Mouritsen, and Halvorsen and others in the Student Life area on this important matter. Last spring I then issued a memorandum to the university from which I now quote in part:<\/p>\n
Our individual and collective image has to do with the very mission of the university and the Church which sponsors it. By asking us to maintain a modest, neat, and clean appearance, our Board of Trustees are inviting us to aid them in making a deeper statement to the world about our beliefs, our convictions, our civility, and our discipline.<\/i><\/p>\n
In\u00a0<\/i>[that]\u00a0spirit, .\u00a0.\u00a0. may I say something of the two areas in our dress and grooming code which seem to cause the most difficulty\u2014hair length for men and wearing apparel for women.<\/i><\/p>\n
Regarding men\u2019s hair length, the Trustees have said, \u201cHair must be styled so as not to cover the ears and must be above the collar in the back.\u201d Neither the Trustees nor the administration intend this to mean that men\u2019s hair cannot\u00a0<\/i>touch\u00a0the ear. If clean, well-groomed hair brushes over the top of the ear, a student is not in violation of the spirit of this code. However, it is clearly stated that the ear is not to be<\/i>covered. If the brushed \u201ctouch\u201d at the top of the ear progresses to \u201ccovering\u201d a major portion of the ear, we ask that the hair be trimmed<\/i>. [Furthermore, if a young man has managed to limit the hair on his ear but the rest of his locks look as if they or he had been electrocuted, then we ask that the hair be trimmed, or at least better groomed.]<\/p>\n
As for women\u2019s wearing apparel, the Trustees and the administration have always stressed clean, modest attire. The intent of the code is to encourage attractive and appropriate women\u2019s wear which avoids a quasimale or unisex dress standard. This spirit should govern women\u2019s dress on the campus rather than endless debate as to whether a \u201cdesigner jean\u201d is also a slack or whether the fabric is cotton, polyester, or denim or whether it is colored red or white or blue.\u00a0<\/i>[Some modest, dressy jeans seem to be very appropriate. Grubby, faded, frayed, sloppy-looking jeans are not\u2014whatever the fabric and whatever the color. And that goes for men\u2019s wear as well.][Jeffrey R. Holland, \u201cDress and Grooming Standards at Brigham Young University.\u201d Unpublished memo, 10 April 1981]<\/p>\n
Now, in the spirit of love and friendship and as an adult to an adult, we ask your support. We have given our University Standards Office the responsibility and authority to interpret and apply our definitions. Most of you look terrific; most of you look perfect. I was delighted as I watched you coming on campus this morning. But a few of you will need to attend to this soon. Last Saturday night at the talent show, I saw several young men who needed to get their hair trimmed or ironed, I don\u2019t know which. I also saw several young women in jeans hardly fit for a car wash. We ask your help in conveying a positive and appropriate image to a world that watches us even more closely. These slightly more generous redefinitions have been made as a courtesy to you. We will always adjust anything that is adjustable if it can further the purposes of the university and make you that much happier here. But as we do so, the spirit of our standards must be firmly maintained. We have tried to be helpful to you; we ask for your support in this effort. Now, having said all of that, I really do hope that I never again have to use precious time with the greatest audience in the world on this subject. I hope we can accept, implement, and move beyond it to much more important tasks. It does seem important to have said this in a year of some adjustment and change.<\/p>\n
Now let me briefly note two such tasks that are indeed more important to me. I will mention them here; I can only mention them; then I will find other ways to visit with you about them in the months and years ahead. Our entire BYU family of faculty, staff, and administrators were together last week in preparation for your arrival and the beginning of another school year. I tried to give them something of an accounting, a stewardship report, if you will, of my first twelve months in office. I reviewed some changes, documented what I thought were at least some accomplishments over the past year, and then read them a draft of a mission statement for BYU over which I have labored for hours and days and weeks. I tried to read almost everything that had been said about BYU and then attempted to reduce that down to a single statement, a brief outline in about 500 words, as to why BYU exists and what it should try to do in the decade ahead. I will not take time to read that this morning, but after it has been finalized by our Board of Trustees, we will publish it and distribute it to you so that you know what our faculty, staff, and administrators are aiming for in providing you with and education. Suffice it to say here that it focuses strongly on academic excellence in the context of religious faith and the broad, balanced development of the total person.<\/p>\n
As a result of pursuing that university goal, I developed several personal goals of my own, two of which I combined into a little phrase\u00a0Virtus et Veritas<\/i>\u2014virtue and truth. As for truth, that goal ought to speak for itself. I hope we all understand that this is a university for which you have spent good money\u2014yours and other people\u2019s\u2014to attend. It is not a young adult conference nor a missionary reunion nor a dating bureau nor an intramural athletic depot, though it may incidentally bless us with elements of all those activities and many more. But it is first, and foremost, and forever a university which has taken the very pursuit of godly knowledge and divine intelligence as its motto. We can have the fun and the football and the firesides and the Frisbees if we don\u2019t forget that a century of human life and hundreds of millions of dollars have been devoted to us\u2014to you and to me\u2014so that we could learn everything we can learn in this ideal but fleeting moment, which moment, like a mission, will never ever quite be ours again. I ask you the way the mission presidents plead with their missionaries: Don\u2019t miss this opportunity. It won\u2019t come again. It is here, we reach for it, and all too soon it will be gone.<\/p>\n
I speak from experience, my young friends. It seems only about twenty minutes ago that I sat in those seats as a student and must have heard something very much like this same speech, and I, too, smiled and knew I had all the time in the world. Well, I don\u2019t have any time now, and twenty minutes or so from now, neither will you. Give it everything you have now, this semester, lest, like Oliver Cowdery, you realize too late that the opportunity of a lifetime has to be taken in the lifetime of the opportunity. We are moving out and we are moving up at BYU, and we ask you to do the same in your attempt to learn all that you can of what God knows and is anxious to make known to you. Learn how to learn; learn to love it. Learn to use it to bless lives in time and eternity. The truth will make you free. As a personal goal, I intend to join with you in that lifelong quest.<\/p>\n
My other linked Latin goal, along with truth, is not in this case\u00a0lux<\/i>, or light, as in the 93rd section of the Doctrine and Covenants, but\u00a0virtus<\/i>, or virtue. In our theology light is synonymous with and inseparable from the truth. Virtue, on the other hand, is all too often separated from both. Indeed, Lucifer was a son of the morning, a bearer of light (that\u2019s what his name means), but somehow he got light without getting virtue. I do not ever want us to be guilty of that here. To be ignorant is pitiable, and to be mistaken is unfortunate, but to know the truth and not conform our life to it is a crime which heaven and earth condemn. We are not interested at BYU in an alchemy which would adulterate the truth simply because that is easier than purifying the soul. The secularization of the western world has robbed education of what was once its chiefest and most important characteristic. \u201cEducation in virtue,\u201d said Plato in his\u00a0Laws<\/i>\u00a02,400 years ago, \u201cis the only education which deserves the name.\u201d Dallin H. Oaks fought to keep our institutional independence intact. If I am free to pick my battle, then I wish to fight to keep our institutional virtue intact. There are schools enough that have it. I want us value laden and moral. I want us a veritable rod of iron in what is too often a dark and misty ethical void. How dark and misty? Consider this fictional observation from one contemporary writer:<\/p>\n
This is the story of an imaginary teacher: One of his students, living off campus, vandalized her apartment to the tune of several thousand dollars and<\/i>\u00a0[then]\u00a0refused to reimburse the landlord. As the college did nothing to encourage her to pay for the damages, a professor took the matters into his own hands. He gave her an \u201cF\u201d in the course<\/i>\u00a0[she was taking from him]\u00a0and told her that he would not change it until she had paid the landlord. He justified this, he told the college, \u201con the solid Socratic ground that if a student did not know right from wrong, she should not pass a college course.\u201d<\/i>\u00a0[Alston Chase,Group Memory<\/i>\u00a0(Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), p. 180]<\/p>\n
Does that have meaning at BYU? Why is it necessary to lock a bicycle on this campus? Can anyone here help me with this personal dilemma? Why do my children or you have to lock bicycles on this campus? Convince me that it is really only because of a non-BYU group that might come on campus. Why do I see Smith\u2019s Food King Grocery carts upside down in a ditch six blocks from the store, often very near a student apartment? Is that a new program implemented by local store managers? Why do some merchants post signs for all the world to see reading \u201cNo checks cashed for BYU students\u201d? Why do some large telephone bills go unpaid or get left for the last roommate in the apartment to assume? Now, these are problems that I hope are the exceptions and not the rules. I believe the BYU family, speaking collectively and by comparison, are more honorable in such matters than any other in education, but in today\u2019s world that could be damning with faint praise. \u201cHe gave her an \u2018F\u2019 in the course…and justified it…on the solid Socratic ground that if a student did not know right from wrong, she [or he] should not pass a college course.\u201d<\/p>\n
My beloved young friends, we have a chance at BYU. We have a chance to make a difference, to stand for something. A recent writer in the\u00a0New York Times<\/i>\u00a0said:<\/p>\n
The gut issue in the United States today is the lack of quality from top to bottom in American life.<\/i><\/p>\n
Well, we have an answer to that frustration. If we miss this chance, some future historian will ask why we became part of the world\u2019s ethical drift rather than seeking to shape it by our own strengths and scholarship and moral convictions. Such a historian will conclude that ours will not have been a failure of opportunity but of seeing opportunity, not a failure of wisdom but of the will to use the wisdom God has given our dispensation for a century and a half, a failure not of training but of purpose and integrity.<\/p>\n
The moral qualities of higher education in this country are now a little like Louis XIII in the last year of his life. His doctors didn\u2019t know exactly what to do with him either, so they bled him 47 times, purged him 215 times, gave him rebeneese from a pharmacopia, which included the left foot of a tortoise, the urine of a lizard, some elephant dung, a mole\u2019s liver, blood drawn from the right wing of a white pigeon, an elixir of quicksilver, and an elixer of arsenic. They didn\u2019t lengthen his life; they just made it seem longer. He died at 41 years of age.<\/p>\n
Now, we have some answers at BYU, answers to questions now being asked. We have a contribution to make. We can offer truth and virtue to a world which desperately needs them both. But we have got to demonstrate both here, in our personal lives at BYU. I ask you to join in this call this morning to high adventure.<\/p>\n
Now, I tried to begin the hour in a light way, commenting on what it is like to be the president of BYU. When asked how I like it, I said \u201cTerrific; I love it,\u201d and I meant it. But I need to say to you that I love it with one exception.<\/p>\n
The part I don\u2019t love about this job is that it appears I will be the first president in the 106-year history of this institution to tell an increasingly larger number of prospective students that they cannot come to BYU. I had been in office only a matter of hours late last summer when I began to understand what real personal pain it would mean to families, friends, alumni, and high school graduates throughout this Church to be told that there was no available space remaining at Brigham Young University. The frustration and disappointment and anger many feel over this has been the most difficult part of my year; and without going into that detail, I do need to say to you that it is in every way a privilege and not a right to be at BYU. I say that of myself, I say it of Sister Holland, I say it of colleagues in the administration, faculty, and staff. But certainly it must also be said of you. What I am sure you don\u2019t need to be told in light of the pain of so many parents and prospective students is that I\u2019m going to be pretty unsympathetic with a student who comes to BYU in this decade to play, to goof off, to loaf in and out of class, to defy our standards and our expectations and our values, whether those be moral values, whether those be moral or academic or otherwise. By the same token, we never wish to be cold or unkind. We certainly will not be unfair. Where honest help is needed, honest help will be given. But a carelessness\u2014and I use that word specifically and literally\u2014on your part about what BYU intends to stand for will not be impressive to me at a time when 4,500 students every year are being turned away. We are going to be as fair and as equitable in our retention policy. But it will be with the assumption that students who come to BYU and who stay at BYU will be those who love learning, who love Christian living, and who want to make a constructive contribution to their world.<\/p>\n
Please know that you are loved; please know that you are needed. It is for you that this university has been established. There is an investment on the part of tithepayers the length and breadth and history of the Church devoted to what you will become. I join hands with you to stand by that trust and give honor to the meaning of it.<\/p>\n
Now, last night I was restless. And late\u2014because I wanted to and we needed to\u2014Pat and I left the house and the children in bed and walked. We walked across the campus\u2014around it, through it\u2014and looked at it and thought of you. We saw some of you scurrying here and there, anxious to get home, ready to start a new year. And I did indeed think in the beauty of the night and the grandeur that is this campus\u2014I did indeed think about what the Prophet Joseph Smith said about Nauvoo. Of it he said and of you I say that it was the best place on earth, and you are indeed the best people in it. May this be your highest, healthiest, happiest year, the best of your life, in the search for self-discovery and in the discipline of matters of both truth and virtue that will be important for your contribution now and forever. I pray that for you and for us all in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.<\/p>\n
\u00a9 Brigham Young University. All rights reserved.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"template":"","tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n