CONTENTS

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PREFACE

Five years have elapsed since Brigham Young University fired professors Cecilia Konchar Farr and David Knowlton—the event that prompted us, individually at first, to begin plotting books about academic freedom at the Mormon school. We were both close to graduation and were editors of competing student publications—Kagel of the school's official Daily Universe, and Waterman of the independent Student Review, which is not allowed to be distributed on campus. Kagel first broke the story of the firings before other media caught wind of the event. Waterman covered the story in a Salt Lake City independent, the Private Eye Weekly, provided space for discussion in the Review, and, as a student of Farr and a friend of Knowlton, helped plan campus protests in response. We met that summer through a mutual friend, George Schoemaker, who was then teaching as an adjunct professor in BYU's English department. George, who had been central in forming an ad hoc faculty committee on academic freedom, knew that we were both contemplating larger treatments of the issues and suggested we pool our resources. That collaboration yielded this book and a lasting friendship.

Early on we realized that our rival editorial positions provided us each with advantages the other did not have: Kagel had a good working relationship with BYU public communications officials; Waterman enjoyed the confidence of faculty members who might have been a little leery of an editor from the official Universe. Our publications different print schedules—daily versus weekly or monthly—encouraged collaboration even during the early aftermath of the firings: Waterman would occasionally have information to offer Kagel for immediate release; Kagel sometimes had news he was not allowed to print, which he would sometimes share with Waterman.

The result of our efforts, The Lord's University: Freedom and Authority at BYU, takes its main title from a phrase Mormons commonly use to refer to Brigham Young University.1 Its embodiment of the tensions that surface on campus between "Lord" and "University" made it seem appropriate, though campus divisions are not quite so easily mapped. Students who use the term often do so to suggest that BYU policies are divinely inspired because the school's trustees are revered as prophets. Writing in 1995, for example, one student countered the suggestion from other students that school policies aren t divine: "I would definitely disagree that the administration of the University doesn't reflect the opinions of the Lord because it does."2 Proponents of academic freedom on campus—and perhaps even a large number of moderate faculty members and students—would probably disagree with such an assertion. To many of them, the phrase "the Lord s University" appropriately belongs within quotation marks.

The tension between those who see church and university officials as operating under the same divine influence, and those who view the university in more traditional terms as a place of both unique Mormon identity and unfettered intellectual inquiry, might also be summed up by our subtitle: "freedom and authority." We borrow this dynamic from another investigation of academic freedom at a religious university: Larry Witham's Curran vs. Catholic University: A Study of Authority and Freedom in Conflict. In 1994 we met Witham in Washington, D. C., where he discussed the Charles Curran case in which a moral theologian at Catholic University of America came into conflict with the Vatican over his writings on sexual ethics. Curran first lost his authority to proclaim doctrine, then, years later, his teaching privileges. He sued the university in the late 1980s for breach of contract and lost; and the university was censured by the American Association of University Professors in 1990. "A battle is underway for the ownership of the name Catholic," Witham wrote. Typically the church has tried to balance authority and freedom, he explained. "Authority is necessary because the church draws its existence from a presumably unchanging divine revelation that must be preserved and protected. Freedom is necessary for the human person to respond, unfettered, to the revelation of God."3

The dilemma resonated, we believed, with events at BYU, though with some differences. Most notably, the "Curran affair" lasted more than two decades, perhaps in part because an ocean separates Washington, D. C., and Rome. The distance between Provo (BYU's home) and Salt Lake City (Mormon church headquarters), on the other hand, is only forty miles. Also, conflict arose initially because Curran had been granted authority to proclaim church doctrine. BYU professors have no such injunction or responsibility. Finally, the language of "freedom and authority" plays out in more complex ways at BYU. Administrators and some faculty members regularly argue that the Mormon school's religious identity allows greater freedom because faculty are permitted to discuss religion in ways teachers in state schools are not. Further, and perhaps paradoxically, they argue that this greater freedom is predicated on submission to BYU's board of trustees. Not all faculty agree. For those who hold that free inquiry and Mormon identity do not have to conflict, academic freedom has been forced to yield to BYU's freedom to fire faculty who, administrators fear, threaten students religious faith. From this view, submission to authority limits the academic freedom not only of faculty, but also of students. While we do not seek to turn "freedom and authority" into a heavy-handed interpretive framework, we feel that the phrase captures the tension present in the stories we recount.

A few words about what this book is and is not. It is not, first of all, a comprehensive history of BYU. Nor is it even intended to be a comprehensive history of academic freedom controversies at the university. Rather, it is a chronicle of such events primarily from the last ten years—from 1988 to 1998. Earlier histories of BYU—the official centennial history and Gary James Bergera and Ronald Priddis's Brigham Young University: A House of Faith—remain indispensable to understanding BYU's history. We have chosen three issues in particular, however, to help provide a longer chronological context for recent controversies. Chapter 2 focuses on women and feminism from the school's founding in 1875 to 1990. The larger scope was warranted here, we believe, because previous histories have tended to neglect the topic. Chapters 3 and 4—on the student newspaper and the honor code—reflect two areas where "freedom and authority" most affect student life. These chapters also focus heavily on the role played by one university president in particular—Ernest L. Wilkinson—whose influence in these areas is still felt today.

Our conception of this book was that it would be primarily journalistic in tone, especially in its treatment of contemporary controversies. The contextual chapters measure up, we hope, to standards expected of professional historians. We have not attempted to assess claims made by individual faculty or administrators regarding the place of academic freedom at BYU, or to determine if administrators were justified in responding to certain cases as they did. Our objective was to tell the stories as the documentation suggests they happened; some degree of interpretation is inevitable, of course. But the book does not aim to engage in theoretical debates about the nature of religious higher education in Utah or elsewhere. Because so many of these cases played out in the media—with only limited communication between faculty and administrators—we tried to focus attention on the ways in which the stories unfolded to the public. In a few cases, we chose not to include information about potential controversies because they were not widely publicized; in doing so, we respected the wishes of some faculty who did not want to draw attention to themselves. Because of space constraints, we also omitted some issues that could fall under a broad discussion of "freedom and authority." Most notable might be the continual conflicts among BYU, the federal government, non-Mormon and non-BYU college students in Provo, and the American Civil Liberties Union over issues of BYU-approved student housing.4

The fact that we had been covering and collecting information about controversies at BYU for several years led to some unusual situations that warrant noting. Occasionally we found ourselves turning up as characters in the story we were telling. In spite of this, we tried to maintain balance and be fair to all sides. Certainly our narrative leans toward the experience of some faculty members, due to our level of personal access to them. It reflects as well the imprint of these events on our own experiences at BYU. Perhaps future historians will have access to accounts from administrators and board members—stories we were denied—that will further personalize their involvement in these events.

A note on sources: Following publication of Bergera and Priddis's Brigham Young University: A House of Faith, pressure was brought to bear on BYU administrators and librarians to restrict access to the university's official archives. As a result, we have had to rely on public and private documents made available to faculty members, usually as a result of continuing status (tenure) review processes. While this material, largely unpublished and unreported, offers much information on the cases we consider, it tends to obscure the roles played by trustees and administrators. Since the documents Bergera and Priddis cite reveal internal disagreement and intervention on the part of previous boards of trustees, we assume that similar conversations have taken place in the last fifteen years. Again, perhaps future researchers will be able to access archival holdings we could not. Nevertheless, the amount of material we obtained deserves publication and supports, we believe, certain observations about BYU's current course.

We should also provide some explanation of terms for readers not familiar with BYU or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS; Mormon). Unlike many other church-affiliated institutions of higher education, BYU's board of trustees is composed of representatives of the church's highest governing bodies—the First Presidency and the Quorum of Twelve Apostles. The First Presidency consists of the church president (traditionally the senior apostle) and, typically, two counselors of his choice. These leaders and other "general authorities" are commonly referred to by the title "Elder." However, to distinguish between the Twelve and lower-ranking officials—who would presumably carry less influence with BYU administrators and are not represented on the board of trustees—we frequently use the term "Apostle" preceding the name of a member of the Twelve. While this is not current practice among church members, we feel it lends clarity to the narrative. Local church leaders, such as "bishops" and "stake presidents," are, unlike general authorities, unpaid officials in a lay male clergy. Thus a BYU professor from one department might serve as a local church leader to a member of another department. Mormon congregations are called "wards" which combine to form "stakes" (roughly the equivalent of a Catholic diocese). BYU students are, in 1998, organized into over two hundred wards and nineteen stakes.

We have also chosen to avoid assigning the term "intellectual" only to liberal Mormons who may be academically at odds with church leaders or traditionalist LDS positions. While Mormons generally tend to assign the term a degree of pejorative connotation, some conservative Mormon academics have complained that by equating "intellectual" with "dissident," the scholarly contributions of more traditional church members are neglected.5 Since part of the story we tell involves disputes between administrators and faculty members who share academic credentials and whose positions are academically informed and argued, we have attempted to avoid conflating the terms "liberal" and "intellectual," and have opted instead to note "conservative intellectuals" and "liberal intellectuals" where appropriate. Such terms are still not precise, but we have found them to be the best option available. Because conservative Mormon academics have withdrawn in the last several years from participation in such unofficial LDS discussions as those sponsored by the Sunstone Foundation, we have also avoided the commonly used phrase "Mormon intellectual community" and refer instead to the "independent Mormon sector." While the latter term runs the risk of ignoring the contributions of liberal Mormons in official church settings, we feel it best describes the forums for discussion themselves.

Over the last five years we have accumulated a wonderful list of friends, institutions, and publications who need to be thanked. Drafts of several chapters were first presented at Sunstone symposia in Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, Washington, D. C., and Boston between 1993 and 1998. A draft of chapter one was presented to Peter Berger's seminar on modernity at Boston University in 1995. Thanks to Maxine Hanks and Gary Bergera for formal responses on Sunstone presentations, and to audiences and seminar members in other settings for helpful comments and questions. Thanks to Omar Kader for introducing us to Larry Wither in Washington, D. C., in 1994. The following people deserve our thanks for reading and commenting on portions of the manuscript: Scott Abbott, Lavina Fielding Anderson, Amy Bentley, Peter Berger, Martha Sonntag Bradley, Mark Brewer, John Brooke, Stacy Burton, Bill Evenson, Melissa Madsen Fox, John Gholdston, Kent Harrison, Armand Mauss, Mary Stovall Richards, Paul Richards, Jana Riess, Taryn Wahlquist, and O. Kendall White. Their comments were always helpful but not always incorporated—and rarely in consensus. Thanks to D. Michael Quinn for his advice on indexing. Elbert Peck read the entire manuscript. His love and support as a boss, mentor, and friend helped us complete this project. Our years of working at Sunstone assisted us in keeping files and drafting news stories on several of the events discussed in this book. Thanks to our former co-workers on the Sunstone staff—Marti Esplin, Carol Quist, Greg Campbell, and Mark Malcolm in particular—for continually requesting updates. Various members of Mormon-related internet discussion groups receive our gratitude for carrying on energetic discussions about BYU issues. Among the many members of these groups, Stirling Adams, John Armstrong, Michael Austin, Nancy Bentley, Joanna Brooks, and Stacy Burton stand out as people whose ideas were continually provocative and astute, and who also provided moral support at crucial junctures. These people and others, including Nancy Kader, Merle Tanner-White, Mara Ashby, and Cami Hill, helped us secure source materials unavailable where we live. Cheryl Boots offered non-Mormon eyes, ears, and encouragement in Boston. Julie Vandervere and Saundra Morris provided lively kitchen-table conversation over a draft of the manuscript. Thanks for housing and child care during research trips to Utah go to Jennifer H. West, Elbert Peck, Tony West, Douglas and Jill Campbell, and Richard and Jan Kagel. Our parents—the Campbells and Kagels along with Neil and Rebecca Chandler, Lois and Dennis Waterman, and Marlene and Jack Smith—offered various combinations of emotional and financial support, anxiety about our eternal salvation, and unconditional love. The staff at the Harold B. Lee Library at BYU, particularly in special collections and university archives, was helpful, as were employees of the Utah State Historical Society and BYU's Women's Research Institute. Staff members at the Daily Universe and Student Review and members of BYU's student feminist group VOICE helped us over several years track down sources and citations. We owe special thanks to several key players in our story—Cecilia Konchar Farr, David Knowlton, Gail Turley Houston, Brian Evenson, and Scott Abbott, in particular—for letting us subject them to rounds of interviews and inquiries regarding their cases. While we benefitted tremendously from the assistance of everyone named above (and many more we have doubtless overlooked), we alone are responsible for the final product. Our deepest appreciation, finally, goes to our families—especially to Heather Campbell Kagel and to Stephanie Smith-Waterman, without whose support the book could not have been completed—and to our children, to whom the book is dedicated.

October 1998

If anything was clear to Gail Turley Houston in mid-1993, it was that her position at BYU was precarious. In the wake of Cecilia Konchar Farr's and David Knowlton's firings, she still had her job—but only provisionally, and with a clear warning that she would follow Farr out of the English department if she did not modify what the Faculty Council on Rank and Status branded her "feminist orientation and advocacy." As they had with Farr, council members charged Houston with allowing feminism to outweigh what they saw as more important concerns in her classes. "The matter of politicizing the classroom and proselytizing students to a partisan point of view is a serious matter," the council wrote, "especially if such efforts are unwelcomed by the students."1

Houston's colleagues and students had not thought she would reprimanded. With a book accepted at a university press, she surpassed the majority of her department academically. The publicity surrounding Farr and the view that Provost Bruce Hafen had intervened in Farr's review had led more people (including Houston) to anticipate action against Farr. When reporters began calling in early June, then, wondering if she was one of the group of professors to be on the firing line, she was surprised; she had not considered the possibility. For her first two years on campus, Houston had remained relatively quiet, pursuing academic career goals and not engaging in the public activism that had brought Farr notoriety. At the end second year, however, discussions in her course on Victorian literature made her aware that several students in the class had suffered abuse—as she herself had—at the hands of "good" Mormon fathers, brothers, friends. "It was the first time I ever cried in class," she later recalled, "and I knew I had to do something about it." For the next four years, Houston would be central to much feminist activity at BYU.

Unlike Farr—a child convert to Mormonism who felt that her eastern, working-class roots set her apart from mainstream Mormon culture—Houston had grown up in Phoenix, Arizona, part of the "Mormon corridor" from Canada to Mexico. Houston's family had been Mormon on both sides for five generations. She attended BYU from 1969 to 1973, majoring in humanities, but it was not until she returned in 1979 as a widowed single parent, having completed an M. A. in humanities at Arizona State University, that she began to articulate her own feminist sensibility. Her experiences in a Ph.D. program at UCLA (where she eventually met and married Michael Amundsen, a free-lance film maker) further shaped her budding feminism. As a young parent, for a time unmarried, she relied on spiritual sources of strength and assurance. "It was a rigorous program [at UCLA]," she remembered" and difficult to do as a single mom, but I'll never regret it because I know, frankly, that my heavenly parents wanted me to do it."2

Houston's casual reference to the largely unspoken Mormon doctrine God as a heavenly married couple points to ways in which her feminism is rooted in spiritual experience. As discussed in chapter 7, beginning in the late 1970s, a growing number of Mormon feminists began to recover, explore, and share information and experiences about the Mormon concept of a heavenly mother. While Houston did not initially identify herself with figures like Sonia Johnson, she did recognize ways that Mormon conceptions of patriarchy had adversely affected her childhood—a realization that became more significant over the next decade as she completed her Ph.D. For Houston, the Mormon notion of God as heavenly parents provided an alternative to patriarchy; she began to feel this most intensely following her mother's death in 1992. In her mind the doctrine of heavenly parents was rational, commonplace, as orthodox as the familiar Mormon hymn that is its most popular expression: "In the heavens are parents single? No, the thought makes reason stare. Truth is reason, truth eternal, tells me I've a mother there."3

For Houston, as she arrived in Provo, there was no reason her feminism and her Mormonism should be in conflict. She considered herself devout, and her personal spiritual experiences made her a firm believer. Her decision to teach at BYU was accompanied by orthodox Mormon rituals: at her request, her husband bestowed a "priesthood blessing" on her through which both he and Gail felt divine confirmation of her decision to return to BYU to teach. A portion of her "patriarchal blessing"—an individual set of instructions typically given to Mormons as adolescents—indicated she would be educated at fine schools and be a gifted teacher. She and her family made the move from Los Angeles to Provo prepared to sink deep roots.

Houston's realization that several of her students had come, as she had, from abusive backgrounds helped convince her that shortcomings in her culture's ideas about gender roles were at least partly to blame. In January 1992 she joined with other campus feminists who, on the heels of VOICE's curfew proposal (see chap. 6), were mobilizing in support of a women's resource center on campus. That month VOICE sponsored a teach-in on violence against women; in pre-event press and during a panel on abuse, Houston announced her support for such a center. Recounting personal experiences with violence and abuse—including an attack she suffered by an intruder in her home in 1978, shortly after her first husband had died—Houston quickly became a central voice in the quest for a center. Her experiences with students led her to realize that many BYU women "have experienced violence against them in some way."4 As she told one reporter, "We carry the same problems [at BYU] the world has. What would be bad is if we didn't do something about it."5

When a Women's Coalition formed among various campus women's groups, Houston was named to head the drive for a resource center. VOICE's controversial status caused the group's co-advisors, Tomi-Ann Roberts and Cecilia Konchar Farr, to maintain some distance from the movement. But activism on behalf of the center was integral to much of VOICE's activities in 1992. At its first "Take Back the Night" march in April 1992, much of what was said by speakers and demonstrators regarded the center. A list of "Demands for a Better Society" distributed at the event included: "WE DEMAND that B.Y.U. stop pretending that women students here are not victimized by rape, incest or battery. WE DEMAND that they establish a Women's Resource Center to provide much needed advocacy, support and education for victims of sexual assault." Two hundred marchers chanted slogans like "Hey administration, open up you eyes! Rape and incest happen here. Stop telling lies!" and "15,000 women go to BYU. No resource center—what're ya gonna do?" For several months campus discussion centered around the pros and cons of a campus center, VOICE's outspoken advocacy, and the place of feminism at BYU. The Women's Coalition gained support for a Student Advisory Council-sponsored survey of campus women on issues related to the center, and in June the coalition completed an official resource center proposal.6

That fall, as the proposal was under review by Provost Bruce Hafen, opposition emerged in the form of a BYU undergraduate, Andrew Gustafson, who set up information booths on campus to counter those set up by the Women's Coalition. Gustafson claimed that establishing a center for women would be sexist, discriminating against men who may have been abused.7 Convinced that approval for a center was unlikely, VOICE members and others launched a letter-writing campaign to Hafen. Then in December, unexpectedly, the university announced its approval for a center, be administered under the existing Counseling and Development Center. When asked by reporters about the board of trustees' reaction to the proposal, President Rex Lee said he saw "unanimous recognition" among them that "there are problems peculiar to women and a desire to help."8 Gaining the center brought a sense of satisfaction to Houston and others who had worked for it throughout the year.

Less than a month before the center's approval was publicized, and just as her third-year review was getting underway, Houston raised some eyebrows on campus with an opinion piece in the off-campus publication Student Review, in which she questioned the intellectual foundations of, and motives for, the university's new Academic Freedom Statement. (See chap. 5 for the statement's development.) Her position, in part, came in response to the antagonism she had witnessed in the drive for a women's center, as well as to VOICE and feminism in general on campus. In addition, rumors had surfaced of administration "hit lists" composed of controversial faculty members. Some professors wondered if the academic freedom statement were being drafted to protect or to limit teachers' freedom of inquiry and expression. Houston's essay was the most public expression on the matter. I hope I am wrong," she wrote, "but since I have been at BYU it seems that those who do not agree with a majoritarian agenda are increasingly endangered." In particular, she took umbrage at the statement's suggestion—also expressed, she noted, in recent talks by Provost Hafen and Apostle Boyd K. Packer—that BYU professors are responsible for their students' faith. "Are testimonies so fragile as to disappear any time they are mingled with rigorous academic inquiry?" she asked. "And is it not potentially an abuse to allow the firing of a faculty member [as the statement seemed to do] because of claims that she or he caused a student to lose his or her testimony?" Rather, Houston saw personal faith as a journey; her own "deep and abiding faith," she said, was partly the result of "always having the option to fluctuate between other positions, such as doubt, disbelief, or even angry skepticism. ... [R]emoving the possibility of inhabiting a position of doubt, even antagonistic disbelief, endangers everyone in the community."9

While no negative response was immediately forthcoming, the article would turn up in her third-year review and figure prominently in her eventual firing in 1996. At the time, however, she received only two memos of thanks from faculty—one of whom, Professor of Russian Thomas Rogers, would sit on the college committee that would help place her on probation in 1993. Houston did encounter university president Rex Lee, with whom shared family ties,10 during a meeting he held with English department feminists in early 1993, primarily to hear their concerns about negative attitudes on campus toward feminists. Lee asked Houston to stay a few minutes after and mentioned the essay, but seemed satisfied, she recalled, by her explanation of it. The next spring a political science professor, David Bohn, took issue with Houston's piece in his own lengthy Student Review essay.11 Houston had envisioned this kind of academic exchange; less collegial, however, were reports in the English department that one of her more conservative colleagues, Don Norton, had sent a copy of her article to the board of trustees. After Norton confirmed the rumors, Houston fired a memo to department chair Neal Lambert asking him to look into the matter. She was puzzled, she wrote, "why no one (including Don) ever came to express their disagreement with the positions I took in that article. I don t want to be obnoxious," she continued, "but I m concerned that there are rumors going on about my work that I don t hear about until after complaints have made to higher sources. By then what power do I have?"12

For the next three months, Houston heard nothing from the additional levels of review—college or administrative. Not knowing that her commitment to the church was being questioned by the college committee and dean, based in part on her Student Review essay, Houston wrote a lengthy letter on April 22 to LDS Church Commissioner of Education Henry B. Eyring, President Lee, and Provost Hafen regarding rumors that Hafen had interfered in Cecilia Konchar Farr's review process. Her letter addressed as well, she wrote, "the general atmosphere of the university as it affects women," an atmosphere "intertwined" with Farr's review. "I seek to work in an atmosphere in which the board and the administration trust the faculty they have hired," she wrote, arguing that, once a faculty member had made it through the rigorous hiring process, she "should be given the benefit of the doubt when questions arise regarding [her] performance."

Asserting that it would be "morally wrong to consider firing Professor Farr," and noting that in recent years "the environment at BYU and in Utah County has been full of innuendo, miscommunication, erroneous reports, and even death threats" over feminism, Houston defended the place of outspoken feminists at the Mormon school: "[A]s women faculty members," she explained, "we have a variety of experiences that can help women students to resolve the extremely difficult issues they face. ... [E]ncouraging [women students] to come, with the implicit or explicit message that they are only here to find a marriage partner, is a waste of the university's dollars and the women students' potential." Firing someone like Farr, she said, would alienate many women faculty and produce "tremendous institutional pressure for us to remain silent." Finally, she "exhort[ed]" administrators to recognize the commitment she, Farr, and others had made to the community. "Thus," she concluded, "because I am expected to be loyal to BYU, as a faculty member in good standing, I also expect the administration to hear my voice. ... [and] to take seriously the charge that in many ways the atmosphere at BYU is a hostile one to feminists, that dialogue must take place, that drastic decisions must be avoided."13

Part of Houston's complaint came in response to news a few months earlier that the administration had refused to approve award-winning historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, an active Mormon, as keynote speaker at the annual women's conference.14 The day after this refusal was publicized, a group of students attending a Gloria Steinem speech in Salt Lake City launched plans to host an independent LDS women's conference. The conference—called "Counterpoint"—gained additional sponsorship from a Salt Lake City-based feminist group, the Mormon Women's Forum. Just before the conference was to take place, however, the seventeen BYU faculty and students who had helped plan the event and who were on the program—including Houston and Farr—withdrew, having been warned that their participation could bring repercussions from the university.15

The theme of the Counterpoint conference—the "silencing" (as in Ulrich's case) of Mormon women's voices—made the withdrawal all the more potent. That spring at the Mormon Women's Pilgrimage—an annual, invitation-only, independent retreat—Houston helped direct a discussion on "How to Implement Change in the Church." Houston later reported that while workshop participants had trouble agreeing on the extent of the church's problems or the degree to which action was called for, they did settle on a mild form of protest that would turn up locally over the next year or so: a campaign to wear white ribbons, similar in design to the nationally popular red AIDS ribbons, but turned upside-down to resemble a "V" for the "voice" some Mormon women felt they were being denied.16 Later that year, after a group of liberal Mormon intellectuals and feminists (along with one ultra-conservative theologian) was disciplined in what was widely known as "the September Six" incident, Houston participated in a similar campaign—this time to deliver white roses to the church's offices in Salt Lake City as a plea for reconciliation (see chap. 7).

In early June, Houston, along with Farr and Knowlton, received the results of her review: she had been granted only a provisional candidacy by the Faculty Council on Rank and Status. A majority of the media attention that followed centered on the firings of Farr and Knowlton. The council's letter, though, propelled Houston into less-noticed private and public activity. Behind the scenes she immediately began what would turn into a year-long inquiry regarding her status. The most troubling portions of the council's letter, in her mind, were allegations concerning her teaching and commitment to the church. "The problem of concern," the council wrote, "is her use of the classroom as a political forum to advocate her personal views. Regardless of the title and announced content of her courses, each one seems to be dominated by a feminist orientation and advocacy that a significant number of students find disturbing and partisan." However, the council noted that guidelines on curriculum matters were vague, and encouraged a clearer articulation of departmental expectations.17

In the press attention the tenure decisions attracted, Houston followed up on her April letter to Eyring, Lee, and Hafen, and was one of the first to call attention to an increasing pattern of anti-feminist activity in Mormonism generally and at BYU in particular. In the June 10 Daily Universe article that broke the story of the controversial reviews, Houston pointed to a "clear bias against feminism": "To give me a provisional [candidacy] because I am honest about my ideology makes me very upset. I do not feel that they appreciate me."18 In her view the university "gave me a provisional [candidacy] because I'm a feminist and they would have given me a full vote of confidence [otherwise]." The question of politicizing the classroom had also factored in Farr's firing, something Houston found particularly troubling: "It's a total misunderstanding of what feminism says," she argued, "which is that everybody has politics and the most ethical thing to do when you walk into a classroom is to say ?I'm a feminist and these are my politics. This is what I do." In the future, she said, she expected BYU feminists to continue "to have a hard time when they come up for their third[-]year review I guess the message is be quiet or stop being a feminist. It's very sad because I don't think a lot has been done [to defend feminism] on the part of the administration." Also, if her classes had been so troubling, she wanted to know, why had no one "ever come to complain to me about any of this stuff [before] suddenly it appears in my third[-]year review[?]"19 In response to the charges of politicizing the classroom, she argued that Knowlton's and Farr's firings also demonstrated a political bias. "The review process is fair most of the time—unless you re an activist. There's clearly a double standard."20

Houston's attempt to appeal her provisional candidacy lasted almost a year and resulted in a stalemate when the administration announced in October 1994 that "provisional candidacy" was no longer a category in BYU's advancement process and hence all candidates so designated would resume full candidacy.21 But a year's worth of wrangling did provide her with a better understanding of the process that had led the council to assign her probation. Her major points of contention, which she addressed to administrators before the month of June 1993 was out, dealt with the apparent lack of substantiation for the claims made in the Faculty Council's letter—particularly regarding her teaching. Who were the students who had lodged complaints against her? Why hadn't they made their complaints where she would have seen them, in the university's evaluation process? Who was claiming that her classes were politicized and antagonistic toward the church, and on what grounds was this charge made? No one had ever raised these issues with her before, and when she confronted her department chair about student complaints, he told her that only one student had lodged a complaint with the department. "How can I respond to charges made against me," she asked one administrator, "that have never been raised with me by my two chairs and that have never appeared as a serious problem in my student evaluations?"22

In August, after repeatedly asking to examine the files used by the college and university committees—including, for the first time in a recent BYU academic freedom case, invoking guidelines set by the American Association of University Professors—Houston obtained access to portions of the review file assembled by the department college and dean.23 Noting the "courageous, if sometimes controversial" nature of her feminism, the department committee was overwhelmingly positive and recommended continuing status.24 At issue in the college committee's letter (the committee at that level had recommended provisional candidacy, with one member voting for termination) were two charges that would resurface in her sixth-year review—that her teaching had unsettled enough students to warrant notice, and that she lacked loyalty to the church and university. Regarding her teaching, the college review letter had apparently been the source of the charges repeated by the university council. At the college level, however, the charges had been even more severe: "We read with concern," the committee had written, "the statements of a number of [Houston's] students ... that they feel distressed— betrayed, or ?deeply pained, or ?troubled —by at least some of Dr. Houston's statements in her classes." While the committee said it did "not wish to make a case against Dr. Houston at this time, or ever, for that matter," it did claim that she "overwhelm[s]" her courses with "her feminist views." Further, some students apparently saw "her present teaching stance (in the classroom or in the media) ... as negative and thus at odds with the LDS community she had contractually agreed to serve and whose values she is expected to espouse, represent and foster." In a strongly worded paragraph, after claiming that her teaching style was "confrontational and often undercutting and diminishing ... the received positions of the institution," the committee presented her with an ultimatum: Houston "must now come to grips" with the committee's concerns. "If she wishes to continue as a faculty member at Brigham Young University, she will find ways over the next three years to accommodate herself and her viewpoints to the standards of this institution." Otherwise, the committee wrote, "we assume she will be too ill-at-ease to desire to continue at BYU."25

	Gail Turley Houston (center), an English professor at BYU from 1990 to 1996, was placed on probation in 1993 and fired in 1996, primarily for her public positions on Mormon feminism. A driving force behind the creation of BYU's Women's Resource Center in 1992-93, Houston had, like Farr, been controversial for feminist activism on campus. (Courtesy Michael Amundsen.)

Houston noted crucial portions in other review materials as well. In his March 31, 1993, letter to the Faculty Council on Rank and Status, humanities dean Randall L. Jones had repeated the college committee's claim regarding student complaints, including the charge that Houston "uses the classroom as a platform for her strong feminist beliefs," and added the first explicit mention of her Student Review article about the academic freedom statement, to which the college committee only alluded. Rather than take issue with Houston's critique of the academic freedom statement, though, Jones focused most intensely on a passing reference she had made to seeking guidance from her "heavenly parents" in prayer. Jones wrote: "I strongly defend the right of feminist criticism to be taught at BYU, but I am concerned when it violates the principles of the gospel and church. I find it a problem," he continued, "when someone openly advocates praying to a Mother in Heaven, especially when specific instructions have been given to us from the First Presidency not to. Her article in the Student Review is sufficiently troubling as to suggest that she needs to re-evaluate her position as a member of the BYU English Department." Jones agreed, though, with the college committee that Houston should receive provisional candidacy rather than termination.26

Clearly these two items—the letters from the college committee and the dean—had provided the Faculty Council on Rank and Status with the charges regarding her teaching and loyalty, a discovery that infuriated Houston. Jones's letter to the Faculty Council quickly circulated among feminist faculty members. Along with material that was surfacing as Cecilia Konchar Farr was preparing to appeal her firing, Jones's assumption that a "feminist agenda" was more "political" than other critical or cultural standpoints led some faculty to contemplate the possibility of a class action discrimination suit. While such a suit never materialized (Houston says in retrospect that fear won out for many and that, for others, statutes of limitations had run out), Houston's review material did concur with the claims of those working on Farr's appeal that the all-male college committee had demonstrated a clear bias against feminism and failed to recognize the political content of other, supposedly "neutral" viewpoints. "What the College Committee completely ignores," William A. ("Bert") Wilson would argue that month in Farr's defense, "is that for decades the [English] department has had only one mode of discourse, formalist criticism; only one body of literature of major import, the traditional canon; and a near total focus on only one ideological concern, the study of primarily white male authors. No one charges those still clinging to these monistic points of view with being politically motivated." Further, Wilson argued elsewhere in Farr's appeal, the chair of the college committee, Richard Cracroft, was one of the English department's strongest opponents of allowing previously marginalized groups of writers, including women, into the classroom. The college committee's claims that Houston and Farr substituted feminist material for departmentally mandated guidelines (which, the faculty council admitted in Houston's letter, were few and unclear) could be seen as a criticism of canon expansion.27

On August 17 Houston met with Dean Jones to discuss his letter from her review file. Jones was angry that the letter had been copied and circulated, but Houston argued it was important to let other feminists know how feminism had been regarded in the review process. As for the complaints about her teaching and the Student Review essay, Jones agreed with Houston that these concerns should have been raised with her earlier. But he maintained that the college and university committees had been concerned about reports that she had made anti-church statements in class, and told her that his own impression of her Review essay was that she did not care about her students. Houston wanted to know who had been to her classroom to hear the statements; Jones could not answer. All complaints, he said, would be housed with Neal Lambert in the English department. When Houston told him that Lambert had only received one complaint, Jones seemed surprised. (Earlier that day Lambert had told Houston that the one complaint he did receive had been transmitted to him orally via John Tanner, another English department faculty member and an administrator.)28

The same day she spoke with Lambert and Jones, Houston filed a formal appeal with the administration, despite academic vice president Todd Britsch's insistence that one could not appeal provisional status. Drawing on the meetings with Lambert and Jones, Houston demanded to know where the student complaints had come from and, if they could not be substantiated, why they were allowed into her file. She challenged the motivation behind the college committee's letter. "Am I right," she asked, "in interpreting the ... letter as having a hostile tone?" She also questioned the college and dean for having passed judgment on her loyalty to the church: "How can the college committee and dean state that they are concerned about my 'loyalty to the teachings, doctrines and leadership of the Church' and that I 'violate the principles of the gospel and church' when none of these men ever talked to me to express their concerns in the manner we have been enjoined to use both professionally and spiritually, that if you have anything against your brother or sister you go and talk to them."29 Although Vice President Alan Wilkins acknowledged that she had raised "important questions about the accuracy of evidence and reported concerns used to make comments about [her] performance in the classroom," administrators asked her to accept private apologies rather than a forum for appeal.30

In an additional plea to Britsch, Houston made more specific complaints about procedural violations: "[T]he university committee evaluation of my performance," she claimed, "was based on uninvestigated charges made by the college committee," as well as on misinformation about the English department's "core" curriculum. "[T]he many tiered system set up for the third[-]year review did not," she believed, "work properly in my case." If she were to follow Britsch's advice and simply "accept private admissions that mistakes have been made in my case," she wanted to know, what would prevent "other committees in the future from imposing their own agendas and philosophies upon feminist candidates?"31

On October 6 Houston received from Jones a reassessment of her third-year review, which he hoped would clarify the questions she had raised about the process. Jones had consulted with English department chair Neal Lambert and English professor Richard Cracroft, who had chaired the college committee. After reaffirming the positive comments made during the process about her scholarship and teaching, and following an attempt to reassure her that "we respect you, we admire you, and we need you," Jones addressed the issues of negative student comments and Houston's Student Review essay. "The criticisms and comments that you have asked about," he wrote, "all arose from the materials in the promotion file—nothing else." Houston noted, however, that while Jones was able to procure comments from student evaluations that questioned her use of feminism in the classroom ("if a stranger came into our class they may think this [world literature course] was a Women's Lib class"; "Her rebellion against patriarchy was infectious among the female students and some of the males"), none of the quotations he provided matched those in the college committee's review letter (which had spoken of students being "betrayed" and "deeply pained"). Still, based on comments he was able to cull from the student evaluations in her file, Jones felt that "when more than one or two students express concern over the ideology of a course, that is a concern for us, too. These expressions," he explained, "coupled with the Student Review article and disquieting low marks on 'Gospel Insights' and 'Spiritually Inspiring' [on student evaluations] are the element which, taken together, lead to our concern."32

Jones's memo was not the vindication Houston had hoped for. Indeed, she felt, it raised more questions: the comments about categories like "Gospel Insights" on student evaluations had not been made previously. Still, it was a more positive expression of her strengths than had been previously made, and it downplayed the issue of loyalty to the church (with the exception of a vague allusion to the Student Review article). Houston drafted a response which, she hoped, would accompany Jones's memo as the only materials to be reintroduced into her sixth-year review. In it she itemized her student evaluations for 1990-93. Of seventy-two comments in her file, sixty-six (or 91.6 percent) were positive, and six, which all dealt with feminism, were negative. (Two of these, Houston argued, were positive about the class overall but still expressed a negative response to feminism.) Regarding claims about the categories "Gospel Insights" and "Spiritually Inspiring," she showed that of the twenty-six times these categories had appeared in her student evaluations, she was higher than the university average eleven times, equal to the university average four times, and lower than the department average eleven times. According to the scores on the evaluations, she wrote, her lowest averages (4.5 - 5.4 on a scale of 7) all fell within a ranking of "very good," and "All other scores I received for spiritually inspiring and gospel insights = Excellent." The Student Review article, she continued,

has been greatly misunderstood. ... This essay was not written by someone who does not care about her students—rather, it was written by a teacher who desires that her students be responsible for actively directing the course of their spiritual life—a teacher who believes that students must actively work at keeping that testimony alive and not passively rely on the testimony of others, for from her own experience this teacher knows that in the trials of life one can only make it through if she has her own personal witness.33

While officials mulled over Houston's argument that she deserved an appeal process, negative decisions were announced that fall in the appeals of Cecilia Konchar Farr and David Knowlton (see chap. 6). After almost three dozen faculty signed an editorial arguing that BYU's academic freedom policies were fair and responsible, and that Farr's and Knowlton's firings (for, they implied, "politiciz[ing] an agenda contrary to Church beliefs") had been upheld by "some of the most respected and competent men and women faculty on campus," Houston responded in a lengthy editorial. Contrary to the belief of these faculty that their own assertions were politically neutral, she argued, their move to defend the status quo was highly political. Even if the faculty editorial were correct in asserting that a majority of BYU professors supported the university's recent actions, Houston argued that "minority voices are invaluable to the health of the community" and deserve to be listened to rather than vilified. "Mormons have a wide range of divergent views about many secular and spiritual issues," Houston argued, "and it is time to cherish the free agency with which God has endowed us. Just because we disagree about our political positions—and we all have them—does not mean we cannot be a community of scholars."34

At the end of March 1994, Houston met separately with Lambert and Jones, still hoping to resolve the matter—in particular, wanting to limit the amount of material that would be allowed to enter her sixth-year review in 1995-96. Over the next month they worked out an agreement acceptable to all three: of her third-year review material, only the October 6 reassessment of the review by Jones and Houston's response to it would factor in her sixth-year review. This agreement was solidified in a meeting among Houston, her attorney, and David Thomas, assistant general counsel for BYU. The administration still refused to allow Houston to appeal her provisional candidacy; after Alan Wilkins announced that the category was no longer part of the university's review system, provisional faculty, including Houston, would only be required to submit a letter summarizing previous concerns as they went into their sixth-year reviews.35

As Houston was working behind the scenes to overturn her provisional candidacy, a number of events in which she was involved attracted media attention. Just over a month after Houston received her notice of provisional status, and in the wake of the Ulrich speaker refusal, the women's conference's longtime organizer, Carol Lee Hawkins, was unexpectedly removed from her position. BYU maintained that Hawkins was "rotated" to another position, not fired. But several faculty women who had worked on the conference believed that the dismissal, which came after five years of service from Hawkins, was due to negative publicity over Ulrich and the continuing conflict between traditional and career women on the program. (For the development of this tension, see chap. 2.) Houston and a colleague, English professor Susan Howe, were especially vocal. Hawkins's firing, said Howe, was just one example of how the women's conference had in recent years "gone from being autonomous and carried out by women to being directed by a body of men." Houston saw "the action against Hawkins" as shocking. "Her firing sends a strong message to all the women in our community," she told the Salt Lake Tribune.36 Coming on the heels of Farr's firing, Houston told the Daily Universe, Hawkins's removal was especially troubling.37 Undoubtedly Houston's own censure for feminism was also on her mind.

Only a few days later, on July 23, the Salt Lake Tribune published an opinion piece titled "Is BYU Anti-Feminist? Profs Say Yes" in response to Rex Lee's assertion that the actions against Farr, Houston, and others were not anti-feminist. The statement was the first publication of a litany of wrongs that would be repeated over the next few years: BYU had only a weakly implemented affirmative action policy for women; only three female administrators, none a vice president; and only two women among the school's fifty department chairs. Despite the church's emphasis on "family values," BYU offered no maternity leave. Then came the list of women who, in addition to Farr and Houston, had been "silenced" in some way by the school: Laurel Ulrich and Claudia Bushman, another highly regarded Mormon woman scholar, deemed inappropriate for BYU audiences; and Carol Lee Hawkins, recently dismissed as head of the women's conference. Actions taken against feminists had created, the professors asserted, a climate of fear on campus. Many faculty invited to sign the statement refused because they were "afraid to jeopardize their jobs." (The essay's principal author, in fact, decided not to sign, and Houston had taken up the task of circulating it for faculty signatures.) The difficulty obtaining names served as "additional evidence that many professors perceive the administration as one that does not appreciate or understand the importance of feminism to the whole academic community and to the culture at large."38

The next day, July 24, the Tribune reported that in May influential and conservative Mormon apostle Boyd K. Packer had identified feminists, "so-called scholars and intellectuals," and gay rights activists as three principal "dangers" facing the contemporary LDS church.39 Packer's talk, in the eyes of many observers, added to the cacophony of voices attacking feminists in Mormon culture. Copies of Packer's talk circulated on campus and at the Salt Lake Sunstone Symposium the following month, where one faculty member was overheard to claim that he belonged, happily, to all three of Packer's dangerous groups. (Though heterosexual, he explained, he supported gay rights.) In an opposite response, several students on campus marveled at the mixed messages coming from university and church leaders, between Rex Lee's affirmation that feminists are welcome on campus to Packer's assertion that they threaten Mormon security.40

The attention to feminism increased yet again before the end of July, leaving campus feminists feeling they were under siege. On July 27 a local daily tabloid, the Utah County Journal, whose conservative editors had a history of antagonism toward VOICE and other BYU feminists, published an article alleging that feminists in the English department were biased against male students with traditional Mormon values. The front-page feature, its headline announcing that an "Ideological Battle Rages at BYU," quoted students who said they had been "on trial because [they] actually happen to believe that there's a living prophet, and that the brethren are inspired and that there is real scripture." A parent, Cherilyn Gulbrandsen, whose son had been involved in public campaigns against VOICE and English department faculty, claimed that her son's freshman English class had been a course in "politically correct feminist indoctrination." Another student, unnamed, agreed that feminist professors were antagonistic to students who did not agree with them: "Basically, for a male in my [English] class, it was like being a black in the '50s in the South."41

While the article, written by longtime VOICE opponent Michael Morris, attempted to paint campus feminists as anti-Mormon, it also included quotes that revealed the "ideological battle" was rooted in larger conflicts in the American academy: "What's happening in the humanities and English departments around the country," reported BYU political science professor Louis Midgely, "is that they have been radicalized by certain sets of ideologues and turned into political battlegrounds. Some of that has leaked over into BYU. ... What we have here is a war going on over something that isn't appropriate in the church to be warring over." (For more on the American culture wars, see chap. 10.) The Journal seemed to side with Midgely's contention that feminists "ought to have the sense to go somewhere else where they're free to peddle their ideology." For example, Morris wrote, "BYU's mission statement calling for an environment 'enlightened by living prophets' and its new academic-freedom guidelines restraining teaching and behavior that 'seriously and adversely affect BYU's mission or the Church' are sometimes challenged by faculty with a contrary agenda." Cheryl Brown, an associate dean in the college of humanities, explained further: "If you buy totally into feminism and then you view everything, including the church, through feminism, you re going to have trouble, because it leads to some conclusions that are very anti-patriarchy and ... anti-church, anti-church government, anti-priesthood, etc."42

While Morris's chief target at BYU had long been Cecilia Konchar Farr (the article claimed that her firing could be interpreted as "the genesis of the school's rebirth"), she declined to speak with him, and so the article's only defense of feminism came from Houston. "[T]hings are more complicated than that," she said in response to Morris's theories of feminist conspiracy and anti-male bias.43 Others responded later: English professor Kristine Hansen, who directed the department's composition program (the subject of some of the article's harshest allegations), answered in a lengthy guest editorial. "Morris never bothered to check with me to find out anything about the curriculum of the six writing courses offered in our program," she wrote. "He did not interview any of our 119 teachers [or] any of the almost 27,000 students who have been enrolled in the writing courses during the [last] three years." (The complaints about upper-level courses, she added, came from interviews with only five of the school's 1,500 English majors or 10,000 students who take general education literature courses.) In three years as director of composition, Hansen argued, she had only received one complaint about a BYU writing class: from Jimmy Gulbrandsen, whose mother had been quoted in Morris's article. With that in mind, Hansen wanted to know the source of Mrs. Gulbrandsen's expertise about the department: "How would Mrs. Gulbrandsen know what is happening in the more than 160 sections of freshman composition taught each year? Or in the nearly 200 sections of advanced composition that are offered each year?" The complaints, she concluded, reflected Morris's own agenda, and the article reflected his poor skills as a journalist: "If a reporter decides to investigate a rumor that the writing program at BYU is carrying out an agenda antithetical to the aims of its sponsoring church, wouldn't it make sense for him to interview the people who plan the writing curricula, order the texts, hire and train the teachers, visit the classes to observe the teachers, and read the teaching evaluations at the end of each semester?"44

While campus feminists and many others dismissed the Journal article out of hand, the story was picked up by the Associated Press in an abridged form, lending the charges an air of legitimacy.45 That publicity, available to LDS church leaders who already seemed negatively predisposed to campus feminists and the English department in general, was more disturbing. So was the fact that no department or college administrator stepped forward to counter the charges; indeed, Associate Dean Cheryl Brown had seemed to endorse Morris's assumptions. The Journal's editorial cartoonist added insult to injury a few days later with a drawing of four women, some portrayed as stereotypical old maids (presumably bitter because they are unmarried) and one with a hairy chest and armpits, wearing an executioner's mask and a tank top that says "Academic Freedom." The women, seated at a bar labeled "Y Church of Feminism, formerly the English Dept.," shouts charges at a scrawny, henpecked male student who clutches a copy of a church magazine while the women prepare to burn him at the stake. Beneath is a stack of reading material: "Hillary," "Femi-nazism," "The Farr Side," "Anita Hill," and a Margaret Atwood novel, The Handmaid's Tale, which had figured in Farr's troubles. The BYU experience as perceived by feminists themselves, however, was directly the opposite: rather than feeling in control of a small wing of the university, feminists at BYU in the summer of 1993 considered themselves an endangered species.

	VOICE: BYU's Committee to Promote the Status of Women was founded in 1988 and became a campus club in 1990. The group attracted local attention for its activism in protest of violence against women and national attention in 1991 for a satirical curfew proposal. The group has survived several rounds of probation and confrontations with administrators and campus conservatives. (Courtesy VOICE.)

NOTE: This chapter continues on for another 51 pages.
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1. Clayne L. Pope to Gail T. Houston, June 8, 1993. Copies of this and all unpublished material cited in this chapter, unless otherwise noted, are in our possession.
2. Houston to Bryan Waterman, electronic correspondence, Jan. 21, 1998.
3. On the Mormon doctrine of Heavenly Mother generally, see Linda P. Wi!cox, "The Mormon Concept of a Mother in Heaven," in Maureen Ursenbach Beecher and Lavina Fielding Anderson, eds., Sisters in Spirit: Mormon Women in Historical and Cultural Perspective (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 64-77. The hymn, "O My Father," was written by nineteenth-century Mormon women's leader Eliza R. Snow, and is included in official church hymnals today.
4. Sarah Jane Cannon, "Voice to host teach-in," Daily Universe, Jan. 23, 1992.
5. Katherine Kapos, "Women Need Place to Turn on BYU Campus," Salt Lake Tribune, Mar. 29, 1992.
6. See "Application for Human Subject Review Committee Approval: Use of Human Subject Protocol," signed by Student Advisory Council advisor David Lucero, ca. Mar. 1992.
7. On Gustafson see, for example, Amy Covington, "Proposed BYU Women's Center Ignites Debate," Daily Utah Chronicle [University of Utah], Nov. 6, 1992.
8. Brian Kagel and David Farnworth, "Women's Services and Resources Approved by Board, Will Open in '93," Daily Universe, Dec. 3, 1992.
9. Houston, "Opinion," Student Review, Nov. 4, 1992.
10. Lee and Houston's mother were first cousins.
11. Bohn, "Thinking Again About Intellectual Freedom," Student Review, Mar. 24, 1993. Bohn's article was also presented on March 17 as a lecture to the campus club VISION, a short-lived conservative response to VOICE that focused on preserving the authority of church leaders.
12. Houston to Lambert, Feb. 12, 1993 (misdated 1992).
13. Houston to Eyring, Lee, and Hafen, Apr. 22, 1993.
14. Peggy Fletcher Stack, "LDS Pulitzer Prize Winner Puzzled by Rejection as Speaker at BYU," Salt Lake Tribune, Feb. 6, 1993.
15. Peter Scarlet, "Does LDS Church Stifle Women? Conference will Explore Issue," Salt Lake Tribune, Apr. 24, 1993. The article includes English department chair Neal Lambert's denial that he warned the BYU participants to withdraw. Privately, however, several of the seventeen women said otherwise. One student told an L. A. Times reporter that she had been given reason to believe her student standing would be jeopardized if she participated. See Lyiin Smith, "Protesting Patriarchy," L. A. Times, May 16, 1993. Houston also publicly contradicted Lambert's assertion when, a year later, she pulled out of Counterpoint again. See Peggy Fletcher Stack, "Y. Teachers Pull Out of Feminist Conference," Salt Lake Tribune, Oct. 29, 1994.
16. See Gail Turley Houston, "Creating Out of Chaos," Exponent II 18 (1993): 3. Houston made a habit, for a time, of wearing the ribbon along with a Solidarity pin a fellow BYU professor had brought her from Poland.
17. Pope to Houston, June 9, 1993.
18. Brian Kagel, Ernest Geigenmiller, and Tracy Hellman, "Farr, 4 other faculty may lose jobs," Daily Universe, June 10, 1993.
19. Sheila Sanchez, "BYU tenure controversy draws mixed reactions," Daily Herald, June 11, 1993.
20. Michael Phillips, "Students Protest Firing of 5 BYU Professors," Salt Lake Tribune, June 11, 1993.
21. See Alan Wilkins to Gail Turley Houston, Oct. 20, 1994.
22. Houston to Todd A. Britsch, June 30, 1993.
23. For these attempts, see, for example, Houston to Britsch, June 30, 1993; Houston to Britsch, July 12, 1993, which outlines AAUP guidelines on review processes; Houston had met with Britsch on July 8. She received the material, apparently, on August 17. See Houston to Todd Britsch, Alan Wilkins, Steve Walker, Randall Jones, Richard Cracroft, and Neal Lambert, Aug. 17, 1993.
24. English Department Faculty Review Committee (Greg Clark, Catharine Corman Parry, Gloria Cronin, and Steve Walker) to Neal Lambert, Feb. 20, 1993.
25. College Committee on Rank Advancement and Continuing Status (Richard Cracroft, Alan Melby, Steven Sondrup, Jerry Larson, and Thomas Rogers) to Dean Randall L. Jones, Mar. 18, 1993.
26. Jones to Faculty Council on Rank and Status, Mar. 31, 1993.
27. For these arguments on Farr's behalf, see William A. Wilson to Academic Vice President's Council, Aug. 26, 1993. See also chap. 6.
28. Houston, notes to conversation with Randy Jones, Aug. 17, 1993. English professor Kristine Hansen was also present for this conversation.
29. Houston to Britsch, Wilkins, Walker, Jones, Cracroft, and Lambert.
30. Wilkins to Houston, Aug. 20, 1993.
31. Houston to Britsch, nd., ca. late Aug. 1993.
32. Jones to Houston, Oct. 6, 1993.
33. Houston, "Gail Houston's Response to Concerns in Dean Jones's Letter," nd.
34. Houston, "Both conservative, liberal are political," Daily Universe, Dec. 9, 1993.
35. The dates of these meetings and memos are chronicled in a letter from Houston's attorney, Elizabeth T. Dunning, to Claudia Harris, Houston's faculty advocate during the appeal of her 1996 firing. See Dunning to Harris, Aug. 28, 1996.
36. Peggy Fletcher Stack, "BYU's Dismissal of 'Moderate' Troubles Women," Salt Lake Tribune, July 17, 1993.
37. Ernest Geigenmiller, "Conference director reassigned, some see Pres. Lee's action as negative toward women," Daily Universe, July 20, 1993.
38. "Is BYU Anti-Feminist? Profs Say Yes," Salt Lake Tribune, July 23, 1993. Eleven of the eighteen professors who signed were men.
39. Vern Anderson (A.P.), "Apostle Packer Says 'So-Called' Scholars, Gays, Feminists Are Leading LDS Astray," Salt Lake Tribune, July 24, 1993.
40. The observations reflect our experiences on campus at the time; Bryan Waterman was present during the conversation cited.
41. Michael Morris, "Ideological Battle Rages at BYU," Utah County Journal, July 27, 1993.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid.
44. Kristine Hansen, "No battle rages at BYU," Utah County Journal, undated news clipping in our possession, ca. Aug. or Sept. 1993
45. See  "BYU Teachers with Feminist Leanings Politicizing Courses, Some Students Say," Salt Lake Tribune, July 28, 1993.
[Note: There are 121 more footnotes in this chapter.]