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Show WINTER 2013 UHQ pp 4-90_UHQ Stories/pp.4-68 12/5/12 9:38 AM Page 68 L. TOM PERRy SPECIAL COLLECTIONS uTAH HISTORICAL QuARTERLy Responding to such rhetoric, some stu- Celebrating BYU’s win over the dents complained about Wilkinson’s University of Utah football team “unabashed partisanship.” “The political in 1965. speakers at university programs, with one exception, have been of one political party,” wrote one student in 1954. “I believe ... these programs have degenerated from an educational function into a political harangue.”15 In 1961, when Wilkinson announced that the year’s commencement speaker would be Barry Goldwater , conservative Republican Senator from Arizona—whom Wilkinson introduced as “essentially one of us”–one undergraduate composed a “special glossary of terms”: socialism—“any plan for social change or betterment not cleared with either Barry Goldwater or President Wilkinson”; conscience—“a special sense of right and wrong which is possessed only by ... a few Republicans of the extreme right, most of whom the students of Brigham Young University have been privileged to hear speak during the last year”; and freedom of assembly—“freedom to listen ... to a defense of President Wilkinson’s political philosophy.”16 Throughout the early 1960s, the number of politically partisan speeches sometimes accounted for almost 60 percent of total offerings. Some students “object[ed] to the use of our devotional as the vehicle of political 15 Roger A. Sorenson, Letter, Daily Universe, November 2, 1954. Maurice M. Tanner, Letter, Daily Universe, May 23, 1961.Wilkinson, Introduction, “Brigham Young University Commencement Address,” June 2, 1961, in BYU Speeches of the Year, 1960-61 (Provo: Brigham Young University, 1961). 16 68 |
