Academic freedom at Brigham Young University has been the subject of several controversies regarding the school, mostly focusing on its religious nature. In 1992, BYU issued a statement limiting academic freedom in certain areas, including language that attacked The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and language that violates the university's honor code. Since this statement was released, the university has received continued accreditation from the Northwest Association of Schools and of Colleges and Universities, which specifically approved of the new statement, as it was typical of many religious institutions. In 1997, the American Association of University Professors (with a membership of about 47,000) criticized BYU based on the wording of the new statement, as well as recent controversies involving several professors allegedly denied their academic rights. Cecilia Konchar Farr, David Knowlton, Gail T. Houston, are among the more notable controversies, although BYU has stated that these professors' discharge was based on issues other than academic speech.
Famous quotes containing the words academic, freedom, brigham, young and/or university:
“An academic dialect is perfected when its terms are hard to understand and refer only to one another.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“The way leads to freedom, to freedom it goes. The old world must crumble. Awake, wind of dawn!”
—Alfred Döblin (1878–1957)
“John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the grave,
His soul is marching on.”
—Thomas Brigham Bishop (1835–1905)
“Hit’s growin, stark and heich,
derk and straucht and sinister,
kirkyairdie-like and dreich.
But whaur’s the Minister?”
—Douglas Young (1913–1973)
“Like dreaming, reading performs the prodigious task of carrying us off to other worlds. But reading is not dreaming because books, unlike dreams, are subject to our will: they envelop us in alternative realities only because we give them explicit permission to do so. Books are the dreams we would most like to have, and, like dreams, they have the power to change consciousness, turning sadness to laughter and anxious introspection to the relaxed contemplation of some other time and place.”
—Victor Null, South African educator, psychologist. Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure, introduction, Yale University Press (1988)