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 fourth of the initiatives, “dare to be different.”
Can you explain how this initiative differs from promoting our double heritage?
Answer: You can cultivate a double heritage and be bilingual but also shy away from it. It's one thing to live your double heritage in private at BYU. But it’s another thing to live that heritage at a conference at another university or with a professional organization. Our charge is to stand for the religious mission of BYU no matter the setting.
To me, developing the courage to be different is primarily directed at external audiences. Now, not everything we do is going to demand the courage to be different. But there are those defining moments where we must have the courage to stand for the restored Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Can you think of examples of how this initiative is personified among our employees?
For faculty, it may be asking a different question in a research setting. It might be, for people who are our communications or our branding professionals, being willing to embrace the uniqueness of BYU in a public forum. It might mean for others that when they’re at a trade meeting, they don't shy away from what makes BYU unique. That's where we exhibit the courage to be different.
In having the courage to be different, I think of a couple specific examples. One is the current work we have done and will continue to do in our brand messaging. I love the billboards that are showing up at the Salt Lake City Airport that clearly and distinctly describe BYU as a place where we’re serious about our crafts and disciplines because we’re followers of Jesus Christ.
Second, we've seen this happen recently in athletics where the Cougs Care tailgate service projects exemplified the courage to be different. BYU alumni and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints served people and organizations at other schools. And BYUtv ran spots on the good things happening in our opponent's alumni’s lives — that's quite a price proposition, to go spend our resources to feature the good happening at other institutions. But it shows the courage to be different walking into the Big 12. Combined with our service tailgates, it’s a remarkable thing.
I've seen coaches talking in press conferences or at media days showing the courage to be different, saying, “We're a distinctly religious university, who wants to be as competitive as any other program that's within the Big 12. But we're going to do it in a different way.”
I see it happening in important ways with many of our employees from across the campus. I see it happening in classroom settings with our faculty. Since my inauguration I’ve heard so many positive stories from our academic support units and with employers interacting with our students. I’m immensely grateful for all such efforts.
In what ways are we different from our peers? What are those things that we can stand on?
I think if we don't lean into our spiritual mission, if we don't lean into the things that make us unique, then we won't have the courage to be different. That's one way we are distinct.
So many institutions of higher education started with a connection to a church sponsorship. The book “The Dying of the Light” talks about what has happened to those schools as they gradually moved away from their spiritual moorings. Many are still great academic institutions, but over time they may have lost a bit of that moral or spiritual light. This history really centered on the faculty culture and the rank and status (or what others call “promotion and tenure”) incentives that drive faculty and others. Slowly schools detached from their church sponsorship.
To avoid that here, we've got to make sure the incentives at BYU aren't set up to help us look more like every other university. We've got to be sure that our incentives ensure that we will maintain our distinctive nature, and to me, we will have to be deliberate. The absolute pull, whether it's in the academic endeavor or whether it's in the academic support endeavor or whether it's in our messaging, is for us to not look different. The incentives are set up to get us to look like everyone else. So that's part of why this courage to be different is so vital.
"When we talk about these other aspects of becoming BYU, they may all depend critically on our ability to develop the courage to be different."
In your inaugural response, you said, “We exert our strength only to the extent that we embrace and enhance our religious identity.” Can you expound on that phrase?
Another way of saying that phrase is we won’t be successful despite of our spiritual mission but rather precisely because of it. I have seen many instances when someone had a gospel lens through which they saw their discipline, and it made their work better. Bringing a gospel lens often fills a needed gap in the intellectual landscape.
Let me give you an example of something that happened recently. We had a BYU Capstone/Global Engineering Outreach group who developed a solution for creating prosthetics that could be replicated at a low cost. That group of students could have taken a plane full of prosthetics down to Ecuador, and they would have solved a few problems. In other words, they could have given a fish and fed someone for a day. But instead, they developed a sustainable solution through which people in Ecuador can develop this for themselves.
This need in Ecuador, by the way, was discovered by a student during missionary service. He had this transformative experience, much like the one I had when I served my mission. He brought back some of what he learned and said, “Let's go do something in a place where I recognize there’s a need.” That took courage, to come back to a university and be different and talk through how being different matters.
Standing alone sometimes can be scary or intimidating or lonely. Do you have any advice for students and employees who might be struggling to practice having the courage to be different?
It takes practice and effort. At one point in preparing my inaugural address, when I was considering how to describe this idea of developing the courage to be different, I originally had written down, “Have the courage to be different.” And I thought, “That's a poor description because that sounds like you either have it or you don't.” What happens if I'm a person who really hasn't stood alone and had to be different? That is a scary place, it absolutely is, and it can be alarming for anyone who hasn't been there.
I recognize that the courage to be different is going to be something we cultivate and develop in our students and employees. There’s a difference between the idea of “having” the courage to be different versus “developing” courage. I felt it was important to emphasize the latter. At times you are going to stand alone, or at least stand in a pretty small crowd away from a much larger crowd. Sometimes courage is developed by taking baby steps. It is not an easy thing to be different, to stand alone. But Christ calls His followers to be a city on a hill that cannot be hid.
I will also add that this can happen in normal and natural ways. It need not be forced. It should be and feel authentic. This is a critical part of developing the courage to be different.
Can you think of some examples or some ways that you can imagine students doing this during their time here?
I have this vision that the students on this campus could transform the way people use social media. Can you imagine the courage to be different in building people up instead of tearing them down? And when you enter a conversation where you can sense that the trajectory of a thread is to tear someone or some idea down, to instead find the positive things and to be builders? I mean, that's a place where we on this campus could show the courage to be different. This idea is distinctly connected to President Russell M. Nelson's encouragement for us to be peacemakers. What more contentious place is asking for peacemakers than the mess of social media?
I've seen compelling examples of students having the courage to be different already, even in the last year of being president. I often hear about the great, great accomplishments of our students. I just received a report on annual activities from our BYUSA presidencies. I was so impressed with the slate of activities that showed an incredible amount of courage to be different, compared to what a student government association would look like at most universities.
