Describing the proposal as divinely inspired and blessed by church leaders, Brigham Young University administrators unveiled to faculty members last month a plan to radically reshape the undergraduate experience at the flagship school owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The changes, outlined by Academic Vice President Justin Collings in a recorded February video broadcast, would, he said, reduce the number of required general education classes to help students graduate in a “timely way.”

At the same time, they would streamline and homogenize the path to a diploma by no longer allowing undergraduates to select from hundreds of elective courses — from, say, sustainable infrastructure and Italian Renaissance to basic physics — to fulfill those pared-down requirements.

Instead, all students would need to complete the same eight courses crafted, Collings said, to emphasize the religious school’s “prophetic mission.”

Interviews with 12 faculty members from the hard sciences to the humanities, all of whom asked that their names be withheld for fear of retribution, uncovered widespread wariness over the proposal.

Recurring descriptors included “disaster,” “an existential threat to BYU” and “unfair to students.”

Collings appears to have received the message.

On Wednesday morning, the former BYU law professor and associate dean followed up his video broadcast with an update. After hearing from more than 200 faculty members in the College of Humanities alone, Collings said he was going back to the drawing board.

“In an effort to incorporate your feedback and to address your most consistent questions and concerns,” he wrote in an email to instructors, “we are in the process of making meaningful revisions to the proposal, even as we hope to honor the guiding principles that shaped it.”

BYU did not respond to multiple Salt Lake Tribune questions about the proposed courses, including planned class sizes and curriculum for each, as well as the nature of the faculty feedback.

Collings did provide a statement Thursday through a spokesperson, saying the school “is working to build a general education curriculum that is both academically rigorous and deeply connected to the university’s distinctive mission. BYU looks forward to continued collaboration with faculty throughout that process.”

The proposed courses

The eight suggested courses and brief summaries Collings provided in last month’s broadcast are:

• BYU Foundations for Student Success (already required). “This course introduces students to the community resources and habits that will enable them to pursue the full aims of BYU education.”

• Faith and Human Flourishing. “Drawing on the social sciences and the humane arts, the course examines how religious commitment furthers human flourishing, aligning with the university’s focus on the power of faith and families.”

• Languages, Tongues and People. “It cultivates informed awareness of the world’s cultures and nations, helping students to become charitable global citizens, prepared and equipped for lifelong service, including service outside the borders of the United States.”

• “Out of the Best Books”: Preludes to the Restoration. “It explores how women and men across time and space have wrestled with the great questions of the soul through art, music, literature and philosophy. It also provides how the longings of the millennia have found luminous answers to the restored gospel of Jesus Christ.”

• Foundations of Natural Sciences. “[It] introduces students to the physical and biological sciences with an emphasis on discipline, inquiry, root causes and responsible stewardship.”

• Foundations of Quantitative Reasoning. “[The course] helps students learn to think clearly with numbers, develop the capacity to reason statistically and morally and prepare for a world in which the capacity to consume and navigate numbers and data in the face of uncertainty will grow increasingly vital.”

• Foundations of Effective Communication. “[The course] helps students to write powerfully and speak persuasively, grounded in inquiry, rhetorical awareness and reflection.”

• American Heritage: Inspired Constitutional Principles (already required, currently under the title “American Heritage”). “[It] offers an intensive study of the U.S. Constitution, situated at the intersection of history, politics, law and humanities.”

Collings stressed in February’s broadcast that the courses would be much more interdisciplinary than current general education courses, many of which function as introductory classes for various majors, and would better reflect BYU’s religious identity.

Too many general education courses, he lamented, “overindex on disciplinary content and underindex on the virtues and dispositions of disciple-scholars, thus obscuring our uniqueness and making our general education difficult to distinguish from programs at other institutions.”

Finally, he cited difficulty navigating the current “circuitous” general education program as a motivation for the proposal.

BYU did not make Collings available for an interview. But in Wednesday’s email, the academic vice president told faculty he hopes to “circle back with a revised outline later this spring.”

Deflated diplomas

Among the most common concerns faculty members shared with The Tribune was the proposal’s potential to devalue diplomas and hurt would-be transfer students by saddling transcripts with idiosyncratic classes likely to raise the eyebrows of human resource and admissions officers.

Several interviewees expressed particular alarm over the framing of “Faith and Human Flourishing” and “‘Out of the Best Books’”: Preludes to the Restoration.” The titles and Collings’ descriptions, they said, seemed more fitting for Latter-day Saint high school seminary classes than university-level courses — and that those responsible for school rankings were likely to notice. (“Out of the best books,” for instance, is a reference from the church’s Doctrine and Covenants.)

“There is no way,” said one, “that this is about students.”

Another overarching concern was the lack of student and faculty input in crafting the courses, as well as few details about the content of the planned courses.

Despite this, some expressed a degree of cautious optimism, hopeful that the administration would allow instructors wide latitude to adapt whatever required courses it settles on according to faculty expertise and the needs and interests of students.

All agreed, prescribed classes in which instructors were expected to adhere closely to a syllabus handed them from higher-ups would result in a poorer classroom experience.

“Professors have poured their guts into creating transformational, testimony-strengthening classes shaped by their expertise,” a professor said. “Those would be gone.”

Hitting pause

Collings, who has occupied his current role for less than three years, emphasized in his original message that all was being done for the benefit of the university’s tens of thousands of undergraduates.

“[The] overarching consideration,” he said, “is simply that a revamped general education will bless the life of our students in deep and enduring ways.”

Indeed, faculty members interviewed for this story agreed with the need for changes to BYU’s general education program.

Still, some said they found it difficult to separate February’s proposal — likely to wipe out a slew of instructor-developed courses — from the view that the administration has grown increasingly hostile toward and suspicious of professors in recent years.

As in previous Tribune stories, many attributed the strained relationship to the tenure of Clark Gilbert, who served as the church’s commissioner of education from 2021 until his promotion to apostle last month. Gilbert, who holds a doctorate from Harvard Business School, has used language like “open foes” to describe BYU professors he believed were not loyal enough to church leaders and orthodox enough on Latter-day Saint doctrines.

His recently named successor, general authority Seventy James Rasband, who takes over next month, previously served as the dean of BYU’s law school and preceded Collings as academic vice president.

Collings, too, set off alarms early in his tenure by instructing BYU chairs and deans to revise their criteria for promotion to better reward faculty whose work supports church teachings.

Several interviewees said they were surprised by Collings’ willingness to adjust the general education proposal. Up until the moment they read Wednesday’s email, many doubted his request for feedback was sincere.

As one put it before receiving the communication: “Do they want feedback or a sustaining vote?”

The answer, at least for now, appears to be the former, although some remain skeptical that the new version will address the depth of instructors’ concerns.

Regardless, nearly all stressed that crucial voices remain missing from the conversation: students.

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Correction • Monday, March 23, 3 p.m.: This story has been updated to specify the college from which the 200-plus faculty responses originated.