When the Board of Regents hired Arthur K. Smith in the early 1990s, much attention was given to the school's branching out in the academic world, diversifying and belying an unfortunate state image of homogeneity and intolerance.
The hiring came just a few years after the U. gained national acclaim for the world's first human implantation of an artificial heart and the pioneering research on cold fusion.
By hiring Smith, the U. sent a signal that the top academicians and researchers in the world, regardless of their backgrounds, were welcome here. That message was underscored several years later when Smith left the U. and was replaced by Bernie Machen, another non-Mormon.
But during the reigns of Smith and Machen, university officials were constantly barraged by legislators alleging anti-Mormon bias and discrimination against LDS students or applicants to the school's post-graduate programs.
There were even legislative audits and threats of budget cuts because of the assumption among some lawmakers that the U. was discriminating on religious grounds.
Richard Young, a descendant of LDS icon Brigham Young, is by all accounts an extremely capable, well-prepared academic and administrator who promises to continue a rich legacy of intellectual pursuit at the U. with no regard to religious, ethnic or any other limiting charac- terization.
He was hired over two other finalists, both non-Mormon, and soon after the U. announced the settlement of a four-year-old religious discrimination lawsuit that university officials and attorneys had vigorously contested.
U. officials stressed the settlement had nothing to do with the pending arrival of the new president. The school's administrators had vehemently disagreed with plaintiff Christina Axson-Flynn's claim that she was forced out of the school's acting program because she had refused to utter objectionable words in a script because to do so would have offended her sensibilities as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The abrupt about-face on the part of U. officials could have been dictated by events. The school had won a dismissal of the case at the district court level, but Axson-Flynn's attorney, Jim McConkie, appealed and won a decision that the allegations should be tried before a jury.
School administrators may have remembered a case several years ago when an employee of the university's Women's Resource Center filed a sexual harassment lawsuit. The U. offered a $75,000 settlement but it was rejected. After a two-week trial, the U. won, but ended up spending several hundred thousand dollars in court costs.
The Axson-Flynn settlement might also have been a result of sheer fatigue. McConkie had constantly stoked anti-Mormon paranoia by surveying U. students in an attempt to find a pattern of discrimination. He also sent a letter to 42 members of the Utah State Senate in 2001 suggesting they investigate and eradicate anti-Mormon bias at the U.
The U.'s first non-Mormon president already had felt the sting of testy Utah legislators holding the purse strings attached to the school's budget and their itching to impose their will on the academic activities at the school.
In 1995, Smith was summoned to a meeting in Orem with nine Utah County legislators who claimed U. instructors had professed anti-Mormon sentiments in the classroom and wanted to know why the university did not hire more LDS professors. Anticipating a confrontation, Smith had brought with him Michael Hinckley, president of the U.'s LDS Student Association and grandson of LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley.
During the 1996 legislative session, a few months after that meeting, then-State Sen. Charles Stewart, R-Provo, argued in a Republican caucus against increasing the U.'s budget because the school was teaching "counterculture values."
Machen felt the same kind of pressure from legislators. During his tenure, the Legislature conducted an audit of the U.'s Medical School to determine if the school discriminated against Mormon applicants. The audit came after one senator complained his grandson did not get accepted to the medical school and a representative whined about two students in her LDS ward who had been denied admission.
There seemed to be no sense of cognitive dissonance among legislators that the only applicants they worried might be suffering discrimination were white male Mormons.
prolly@sltrib.com
