On September 19, 2023, C. Shane Reese was inaugurated as the 14th president of Brigham Young University. During his inaugural response, he shared seven initiatives that will help BYU become the university that prophets have foretold — to become the world’s “greatest institution of learning” and “the fully anointed university of the Lord about which so much has been spoken in the past.” Or, in other words, “becoming BYU.”
In this Q&A series with President Reese, he shares more about those initiatives and how they apply to BYU employees.
This article focuses on the second of the initiatives, “focus on undergraduate teaching.”
BYU is an institute of higher education. Why would we need to have a major focus on undergraduate teaching?
Answer: When I speak of the second aspect of “Becoming BYU,” retaining a focus on undergraduate teaching, I say “retaining” in part because it is written into our mission statement. That's been our focus, our tradition and our history since the founding of the university.
We've heard prophetic emphasis after prophetic emphasis on the need for us to focus on our primary undergraduate teaching mission. So, it's something that has been emphasized by other presidents, but I'm doubling down on this emphasis. We've got to have a commitment to teaching, and that includes high-quality teaching in the classroom. But it also includes high-quality teaching and education of undergraduates outside the classroom.
It's not an abandonment of our research mission. It's just ensuring that our research mission does not drive the educational experience. Of universities our size, it is so common to promote research. A lot of that's driven by financial considerations. And with the way the incentives are set up, it is just so easy for us to migrate towards a research-first mentality. But the second we do that, we will remove one of the unique aspects of what makes BYU, BYU.
So often our students don't realize what a luxurious existence it is studying at BYU where undergraduate teaching is a primary focus. For our students who go on to graduate school, they're able to reflect and say, “Oh, faculty were available to me as a student. My courses were taught primarily by faculty members, not by graduate students so the faculty members could focus on research.”
How does undergraduate teaching from our full-time faculty help achieve our mission?
A: When we talk about mission-aligned hiring, we're talking about the hiring of all employees, but also specifically as it relates to faculty. We want faculty who are going to combine the spiritual with their discipline.
We had a forum speaker earlier this year, Ruth Okediji, who talked about the integrated life and how that integrated life shows up as a role model in front of a classroom. That must happen for our undergraduates.
If all our undergraduate courses are taught by graduate students and not by our faculty, we may not have that role model of someone who lives the integrated life. I'm not suggesting that our faculty are perfect or that they aren’t still learning about how to live the integrated life, but we hope that they've mastered it to some extent, so they can act as a role model for our students and talk to our students in and out of the classroom about what an integrated life looks like.
“If there is one thing that has been reinforced to me as the president in all of my interactions with the Board or the Executive Committee or other senior Church leadership, it has been this: that we cannot lose sight of our undergraduate teaching mission.”
Is there anything for staff and admin employees to be thinking about or incorporate into their everyday jobs to support undergraduate teaching?
A: Undergraduate teaching and the focus on undergraduates’ development happens in and out of the classroom.
As a student at BYU, one of the more influential people that I interacted with was a staff member. She had a big impact on my understanding of how the spiritual and the secular integrated into one. She was our department secretary, who was also an unofficial adviser to all the undergraduates. She was a role model of someone who lived an integrated life. She found ways to offer encouragement to me on my path to being a disciple-scholar.
Employees who are not faculty can have significant roles in the experience of our undergraduates. When we talk about retaining a focus on undergraduate teaching, obviously our first thoughts will go to the faculty because they're in teaching-proper settings, but our staff and administrative employees have important and lasting impactful experiences with our students as well, either in employment settings or in advisement settings.
This initiative was purposely included at the top of your list. What message does this send to our students and prospective students?
A: I hope the message that it sends to our students is that they are important. Each student is more than just their ID number to us at BYU. Their experience on this campus is of paramount importance as we evaluate all decisions.
There was a phrase that I hope is memorable from “Becoming BYU,” when I said, “It has to begin and end with a student in mind.”
That idea, by the way, is somewhat contrary to lots of institutions of higher education, who candidly begin and end with faculty in mind. It's usually the small liberal arts colleges that have a student focus. I'm suggesting that we can be a large institution that is distinctly student centric.
What advice do you have for faculty who are trying to balance their research and this need to focus on undergraduate teaching?
A: In a recent devotional President Oaks talked about the balance between love and law. Really the first commandment and the second commandment. And he said that he used to think about that as a balance. He also acknowledged that balance is exactly the wrong way to think about it. What we have to do is learn how to live both more fully.
That's not balancing because “balancing” presents a false dichotomy. I think that same thing applies here. I think what we must do is learn how to be exceptional teachers and how to excel in scholarship, not choose between them. Faculty members have 24 hours in a day like everybody else, so they might have to make some choices. This is where President Worthen talked about the messy middle. We might have to make some tough choices on quantity, but we would never sacrifice quality.
We expect faculty to be involved at home, fulfill their Church callings, etc., so there's a limit to what we can ask people in terms of time. But I love this thought of President Oaks’: how do you live both of these things more fully? How do we fulfill our mission as the only institution within all of CES that does have a substantive research expectation? We’ve got to be excellent. But we cannot do that at the cost of our undergraduate teaching experience. We've got to be first and foremost a primarily undergraduate teaching institution.
