BYU remains stable during 1960s

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    The Daily Universe celebrates 50 years

    By Jacob Terry

    The 1960s were tumultuous years for the United States. The Civil Rights Act ended segregation; the Vietnam War took thousands of lives and prompted thousands of protests; and LSD and other drugs garnered national attention.

    And what of BYU?

    The Associated Press in 1969 wrote: ?But while winds of dissent swirl through the West, the BYU campus itself is an eye of quiet. No protests ? just thousands of young Mormons pursuing learning in a homey central Utah town.?

    The reporter was referring to protests over racial policies of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the organization that owns BYU. Perhaps the one issue of the 1960s to truly impact campus ? discrimination at Brigham Young University ? was discussed weekly in the newspaper.

    ?I never saw anybody in the slightest degree get treated differently because of their race,? said Doug Wixom, a Daily Universe reporter from 1964?67. ?But it got really sticky nationally, in terms of black people being upset at BYU and not wanting to play against them.?

    Although the university had a policy forbidding discrimination on the basis of race, its sponsoring church did not allow blacks to hold the priesthood. Also, the small number of blacks on campus led many to assert that the university, despite its policy, discriminated against African-Americans.

    Some athletes in the Western Athletic Conference where BYU played at the time boycotted competitions. Others wore black armbands to signify their disapproval of BYU. When members of the San Jose (Calif.) State football team, black armbands in place, met the BYU welcoming committee at the airport in November 1969, the situation was dealt with in a decidedly BYU way.

    ?A tense air filled the room around the San Jose State representatives,? Daily Universe reporters wrote in relating the incident, ?but before long, the sweet smell of cookies and the infectious smiles of BYU coeds turned the tide of ill will.?

    There was similarly little ill will concerning the Vietnam War at BYU. While students at other universities protested the war regularly, there was no mention of any protests in the Daily Universe.

    ?I have a friend that was in a protest at BYU, but I didn?t find out about it until 10 or 12 years ago,? said Lavina Anderson, feature editors at the Daily Universe from 1964 to 1967. ?There must have been one, and I just missed it.?

    Any sort of counter-culture movement at BYU would have had to be quiet because of the tight control President Ernest Wilkinson kept over the campus, said Anderson.

    ?President Wilkinson was a very powerful influence,? she said. ?Experiments in dress and demonstrations against the war, all of those were actively repressed in their smallest forms, and repressed officially. Instead of expression of the ?60s, there was repression.?

    That?s not to say that there weren?t some counter-culture elements lurking.

    ?You could find anything if you looked for it,? Wixom said. ?At that time, everyone sent their kids to BYU to get them straightened out. It was not really a goody-goody campus, even in the ?60s, but it was subtle.?

    In a photo from the HBLL special collections, the caption reads ?BYU students maintained their composure and conformed to the stands set by the Church and the University rather than those of the militants of the day.?

    The 1969 candid photograph that appeared in the U.S. News and World Report showed well-dressed students walking past the library. ?There are no ?hippies? here. Everybody dresses up to go to class. Beards are a rarity and you don?t see mini skirts.?

    The article went on to say that while campuses across the nation witnessed prejudices against the ROTC program with building burnings and flag protests, a BYU official is quoted as saying, ?Here, we are expanding our ROTC, and everybody stands and faces the flag when the national anthem is being played morning and evenings.?

    One subtle influence was growing drug use. Timothy Leary and others? advocacy of LSD use brought national attention to the issue, prompting the Daily Universe to run a four-part article on the history and effects of the drug.

    The university revised the honor code in 1967 to require abstinence from the use of drugs, although there was no evidence of a problem, said Wixom.

    ?You wouldn?t know there was any marijuana,? he said.

    There was some use, however. Police arrested six BYU students in January 1968 for marijuana possession in a raid on a Provo house. According to a front-page article, president Ernest Wilkinson wrote in response to the incident. It was the first time a student was involved in drug possession.

    The influence of communism was perhaps a more immediate threat than drug use for the students. Anderson said she remembers a time when it was announced at one of the weekly forums that a communist would be the next week?s speaker.

    ?It was a real sensation when it happened,? she said. ?This was sort of like having Satan appear on campus.?

    The announcement was a fake, though. It was going to be an anti-communist speaker and the student who announced it wanted to generate buzz.

    And that event seems to be an excellent representation of BYU in the 60s. Even while students around the country were demonstrating and rioting, it took a fake announcement to get a response at BYU.

    ?The whole social protest movement passed right over the heads of BYU students that lived in Happy Valley,? Wixom said. ?We were all so much in harmony with the basic values of the church that there was nothing to protest.?

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