Rel Ed Faculty Who Fail to Launch

There is a curious rash of legitimate PhD holding, BYU Rel Ed faculty whose professional and intellectual development essentially culminated in their dissertations. This represents wastage of time and resources, both on the side of top flight training left fallow and, more disturbingly, vast expenditures of university monies, benefits, research funds, etc., to leave the sunk costs to students to the side in this discussion.

Rel Ed faculty with BYU’s version of tenure make, on the very low end, $80,000 per year, and many are near, over, or well past the $100,000 mark, plus excellent benefits. In the academic world, that is very good pay. Of course the constant churn of popular books and materials augments these numbers still further. Rel Ed faculty are very well remunerated.

But what is the university getting for all that expenditure on purported experts in their fields? In the case of several, the university is paying for what amounts to outdated knowledge, expertise level that is no higher than a newly minted PhD, refusal to participate in the standards of professional organizations, and inevitable atrophying of language, critical, writing, and research skills that should increase over a career, not begin to gather rust upon the PhD hooding ceremony.

I’m sure that colleagues in other BYU colleges and departments must be annoyed if not furious with these free-loading Rel Ed professors. Do you think that business school professors are granted tenure or promoted to full professor based upon Ensign articles, a Sperry Symposium paper included in an annual collection, and maybe a handful of BYU Studies publications? I’m sure if we looked closely we could find two professors, one in a normal department, one in Rel Ed, that graduated with legit PhDs in more or less the same year and compare their professional development. That would be instructive.

Here are some puzzling cases of BYU Rel Ed faculty who are pulling down enviable salaries and who were trained at premier graduate programs but have done nothing or next to nothing in their professional fields since their dissertations 10, 15, 20 years ago.

OK, who makes the list? Daniel Belnap, Frank Judd, Eric Huntsman, Kent Jackson (now retired), and Gaye Strathearn are first round ballots from the ancient scripture side. Who else? List anyone that comes to mind in the comments, and if you are aware of publications by these scholars in their respective fields since they completed their PhDs then that is likewise helpful. It would make everyone’s lives easier if they all posted academic CVs to their faculty profiles, but here we are.

We’re studying the Book of Mormon again in seminary, and the current manual includes the following quotation from Joseph Fielding Smith (Lesson 5, “Overview of the Book of Mormon”):

There were bound to be some typographical errors in the first edition [of the Book of Mormon], and perhaps an omission of a word or two. Those who have published books under the most careful and favorable circumstances, have, to their dismay, found errors, typographical and mechanical, some of which occurred after the final examination of proof has been made.

… A careful check of the list of changes … shows there is not one change or addition that is not in full harmony with the original text. Changes have been made in punctuation and a few other minor matters that needed correction, but never has any alteration or addition changed a single original thought. As it appears to us, the changes … are such that make the text clearer and indicate that they were omitted. I am sure that the mistakes or omissions in the first edition were in large measure the fault of the compositor or the printer. Many of these mistakes which were in the first proofs were caught by the Prophet Joseph Smith himself, and he made the corrections (Joseph Fielding Smith, Answers to Gospel Questions, comp. Joseph Fielding Smith Jr. [1958], 2:199–200; italics in original).

The problem is that the second paragraph is almost entirely false. We can now compare the extant original manuscript and printer’s manuscript with the 1830 edition, and there are indeed several changes that make a difference in meaning, that modified more than “a single original thought.” Not all the changes made the text clearer. Joseph Smith did not catch many mistakes since he was living elsewhere and rarely interacted with the printer. And most importantly, mistakes and omissions are not to be blamed on the compositor or the printer.

Continue reading “A Plea to the Writers of Seminary Manuals”