While BYU provides excellent, affordable academic and professional training, its deeper purpose is much more ambitious, said mechanical engineering professor Brent Webb in Tuesday’s forum. Webb explained how BYU’s combined focus on faith and study uniquely helps students develop their divine potential.
“I speak from the perspective of one who has experienced BYU as a student, a graduate student, a faculty member and an administrator for most of the first fifty years of the institution’s second century,” he said. “I have chosen to speak about the unique environment that has blessed and benefited my academic career.”
BYU’s blend of the spiritual with the academic goes back to the university’s founding in 1875, when Brigham Young asked Karl G. Maeser to start a special academy. “You ought not to teach even the alphabet or the multiplication tables without the Spirit of God,” Young famously told Maeser.
“More now than ever, the kingdom of God needs deep thinkers anchored in faith in all disciplines, capable of reconciling scholarly observations with authentic, defining belief in God.”
One hundred years later, Spencer W. Kimball reinforced the importance of spiritual learning at BYU in his Second Century Address, telling faculty and students that “as scholars you must speak with authority and excellence” but that “you must also be literate in the language of spiritual things.”
Referencing D&C 88, in which the Lord told disciples to “seek learning, even by study and also by faith,” Webb compared this dual method of learning to using both eyes to see.
“Have you ever tried to drive your car or touch a distant object with one eye closed? Looking through only one eye seriously limits our perception of depth, our perspective. BYU was founded on the prophetic precept that the same is true of education, that the eye of study and the eye of faith can be mutually enhancing,” Webb said. “Where else but at BYU are we institutionally free — and even encouraged — to view our disciplines through the complementary eyes of reason and faith?”
Webb shared examples from his own discipline of thermodynamics to show how a faith-based perspective enhances knowledge. Consider, he said, that the sun’s peak radiated energy lies in the small wavelength range to which human eyes are sensitive, or that water becomes less dense as it freezes, so that ice doesn’t accumulate at the ocean’s bottom and disrupt the Earth’s ecology.
“With vision afforded by both faith and reason, we see how this is providential — a sustaining place for Heavenly Father’s children to live,” he said, noting that only at a place like BYU could these connections be shared openly in an academic setting.
Rather than detracting from time spent on academic material, learning by faith appears to bolster students’ understanding of academic concepts. Webb referenced a 2006 BYU Faculty Center study of student course evaluations, which showed a strong correlation between courses that students found spiritually strengthening and those that they reported learning from the most.
“In learning at BYU, rigorous study is no substitute for faith, and faith is no substitute for rigorous study.”
Research and creative work are stated parts of BYU’s mission, Webb noted. Not only are great discoveries made through study guided by revelation, but students doing research at BYU learn “to think and reason and process” with the assistance of the Spirit.
Webb shared an example of when one of his students received revelation to help solve a thorny theoretical problem. “I saw clear inspiration come to my Ph.D. student, and it exploded in his work like a flash,” he said, recalling how the student’s headway resulted in groundbreaking work in thermodynamics that has been adopted by researchers and industry globally.
“More now than ever, the kingdom of God needs deep thinkers anchored in faith in all disciplines, capable of reconciling scholarly observations with authentic, defining belief in God.”
Finally, BYU’s emphasis on the spiritual encourages faculty to be “as concerned about who students are and what they are becoming” as about “what students know.”
“Understanding human potential in the fullest sense is unique at BYU and comes from our understanding of Heavenly Father’s plan,” Webb said. “Where else but at BYU do professors recognize that teaching a college student brings the heavy stewardship of teaching a child of God, and where else do students see their university studies as having eternal implications?”
