My alma mater, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, with the Wasatch Mountains in the background. Enter to learn, go forth to serve.
Earlier this week, I agreed to chauffeur a friend visiting on nearby Sanibel Island to the newly created community of Ave Maria, an unusual town sprung up around a Catholic college transplanted from the north to the Florida wilderness near Naples by the founder of Domino's Pizza.
"Isn't this amazing?" she said. "An entire town centered on a religious college, with the church as its focus?"
It wasn't all that remarkable to me. I'd lived it.
I'd spent my college years at BYU.
Ave Maria might have a few hundred students gathered at the first newly created Catholic college in half a century, but when I attended college in the 1970's, Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, the largest private university owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, had over 25,000. Now, there are over 34,000, on a campus that is literally and figuratively the center of the community. I'd gone from a high school graduating class of twenty-nine to a college freshman class of several thousand.
It was an adjustment in more ways than numbers.
Suddenly I was subject to an Honor Code that has overnight been thrust into media spotlight by the plight of a young basketball player, Brandon Davies.
It isn't the first time BYU's Honor Code has received public scrutiny. In 2000, BYU coed Julie Stoffer was suspended from BYU for actions resulting from her appearance in the MTV reality show, "The Real World."
But most of the time, what happens in Provo stays in Provo, and the rest of the universe is blissfully unaware that the students and faculty there and at all BYU campuses worldwide, LDS or non-LDS, married or single, gay or straight, have agreed to abide by a set of university standards that include not drinking coffee, tea (when I was there it also included caffeinated soft drinks, like Pepsi, Coke and Dr. Pepper), alcohol, or 'abusing substances' including tobacco and illegal drugs. It was scandalous during my tenure to sneak NyQuil into our dorm rooms or have boys visit in the hallway. There were always partiers, those who lived a different life at home on weekends or found ways to get around the Honor Code, whether they should have or not. We affectionately referred to it as "The Zoo" and ourselves as "zoobies."
The speedbump for young Davies, apparently, was engaging in premarital sex (included in the general category of 'living a chaste life').
Certainly there is plenty of sex that occurs at BYU, but most of it is in the bedrooms of the married housing. Young LDS missionaries fresh from their missions at home or abroad are encouraged to marry quickly, and do, and many of the students on campus are married and starting families.
In the single coeducational population, the lines of chastity start to blur, as dating couples find their own ways to express affection, or not, and come up with Clintonian definitions of what constitutes sex.
To suggest that Brandon Davies is the first to encounter this would be wrong. He won't be the first, and certainly won't be the last.
He will, however, likely be the most expensive.
There'll always be a Provo, with the lights of the Provo LDS Temple illuminating the campus, the snow-frosted shadow of Timpanogos, the blazing Y on the hill, and the ghosts of Brigham Young, LaVell Edwards and Ernest Wilkinson roaming the corridors.
19-year-old basketball star Brandon Davies, left, who has been suspended from Brigham Young University for violations of its Honor Code. The 6'9" forward was expected to lead the team to upcoming NCAA glory.
On the Web:
BYU Cougars Profile - Brandon Davies
Brandon Davies Suspended from BYU Basketball Team for Honor Code Violation
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Comments
I went to Georgetown, a Catholic University with a strict "no-cohabitation" policy in my day. Co-habitation was defined as sleepovers involving toothbrushes and change of underwear. There were a lot of ungroomed students running around....
Nice to see you back, Kathy.
To each his own but their rules as they say.
rated with hugs
rated with love
R. TY for this background.
Actually attending BYU is a bargain compared to other schools. BYU tuition is subsidized by the tithing of members of the LDS church. Members get the biggest tuition breaks. So, yes, in a way a person still pays plenty to have to adhere to strict standards but it's also a bargain compared to similar universities.
I'm from the "Question authority" school of education.
As for enforcing the so called chastity rule, I wonder how many in the administration adhere to it.
Or is it "do as I say, etc"?
Oh, and Kathy, we had snow again. Do you want me to go shovel over there up the hill?lol
I completed my education at a Baptist University where dancing was prohibited. Yes, I actually graduated from "Footloose" University. I reside in one of many "dry" towns in my beloved Texas. Of course Baptists are like Mormons and everyone else. Some follow the rules better than others, and none of us are perfect.
Three universities, four States and twenty years later, I see BYU and Utah in a slightly different light. There are many commendable things for those willing to look.
Still, I hope that my daughter chooses to stay in Texas.
kurt
I can understand an honor code such as at the military colleges -- cheating and not turning in cheaters and all that, but the code your describe strikes me as utterly ludicrous. No tea, for godssake -- how about the wine-bibbing all over the Bible?
This idiotic code is just asking for trouble. It's a set-up for the kind of disaster that now befalls not only this young man, but his teammates as well. Yeah, I know, blame it all a nineteen year-old kid exposed to great temptation -- he knew the rules.
This is yet another sorry example of why it isn't just the FLDS that gives Mormonism a bad name.
♥R
I was shocked to learn some years ago, from a friend who lives in Las Vegas, that there's a large LDS community there. Quite the juxtaposition, you know? And, more recently, to learn that there's a fairly large LDS community at Harvard--and that many of the church's governing body are Harvard grad school degree holders.
as others have said...reading the print...(not even the fine print) matters. thanks R
It's odd for the fraud capitol of the world to be so high and mighty.
"Like I said in FB comments, I didn't see the Honor Code applied with the same enthusiasm to Jim McMahon."
My mom teaches at UVU--formerly UVSC--and from what I understand the administration has become far more conservative, along with the church leadership, over the past thirty years or so. It's worked out well for UVU. They've been able to hire a whole slew of highly qualified academics fired by BYU for teaching material that deviates even slightly from church sanctioned fluff. Then again, I'm sure it didn't hurt Jimmy Mac to be white. I wonder if BYU would've applied the same discipline to Jimmer Fredette.