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:
“If we focus exclusively on teaching our children to read, write, spell, and count in their first years of life, we turn our homes into extensions of school and turn bringing up a child into an exercise in curriculum development. We should be parents first and teachers of academic skills second.”
—Neil Kurshan (20th century)
“If the Union is now dissolved it does not prove that the experiment of popular government is a failure.... But the experiment of uniting free states and slaveholding states in one nation is, perhaps, a failure.... There probably is an “irrepressible conflict” between freedom and slavery. It may as well be admitted, and our new relations may as be formed with that as an admitted fact.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the grave,
His soul is marching on.”
—Thomas Brigham Bishop (1835–1905)
“We see young men who owe us a new world, so readily and lavishly they promise, but they never acquit the debt; they die young and dodge the account: or if they live, they lose themselves in the crowd.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“If not us, who? If not now, when?”
—Slogan by Czech university students in Prague, November 1989. quoted in Observer (London, Nov. 26, 1989)