Dear graduates, I’m deeply grateful to address you on this great day of celebration. I’m particularly appreciative of the opportunity to hear from Commissioner Kim B. Clark and Elder Jeffrey R. Holland. If you and they will indulge me, I’d like to talk about the roles they played in bringing me to—and keeping me at—BYU-Idaho. The story may be helpful as you look to your future.
In the early Summer of 2005, I was finishing the second of three years as a mission president in Tokyo. Already, I was worried about finding a job. (Some of you may know how that feels.) I had embarked on the mission with no idea of how I’d make a living afterward.
Like many people, I was dumbfounded by the announcement that Harvard Business School Dean Kim Clark would become the president of BYU-Idaho, succeeding Elder David A. Bednar. But I immediately began to wonder whether I might go to work for President Clark when my mission ended. I called my brothers Matthew and John, who had been students at HBS under him. Both of them said essentially the same thing: “If Kim Clark would give you a job, you should take anything he offers.”
But my father, then the Church’s Commissioner of Education—and the immediate supervisor of the Church schools—was bluntly discouraging. He said, “President Clark has everyone he needs. President Bednar assembled a good team. They don’t need you.”
Now, I may have been unemployed, but I still had my pride. I thought to myself, “If they don’t need me, I don’t need them.”
However, the more I canvassed friends who might at least give me temporary employment, the more I encountered dead ends. There were only two exceptions. Independently, two longtime friends said, “I just saw Kim Clark. You should reach out to him.” I was impressed that neither friend had encountered President Clark in Boston, where he was still living. One of those encounters was in Utah. The other was a one-in-a-million chance meeting in rural England.
Yet, apparent miracles notwithstanding, I was still doubtful. I worried that President Clark would try to make BYU-Idaho more like Harvard. I decided to write a lengthy, unsolicited thought paper, warning him against all the mistakes he was likely to make if he copied traditional universities. In hindsight, it was the equivalent of writing a “Dear John” letter to a girl I’d never met.
But President Clark surprised me with his response. He said, “Henry, it’s as though you’ve been in my head all summer.” He didn’t agree with everything I’d written, yet we started a correspondence that ultimately led to an offer of a position at BYU-Idaho, one focused especially on online learning, a relatively new thing in those days. I was relieved and deeply grateful to know that I wouldn’t be an unemployed former mission president.
However, after six months on the job in Rexburg, things weren’t working out as I’d hoped. Having zero experience with online learning, I didn’t feel particularly valuable. Most of what I knew had come from my daughter Emily and my son Henry Christian, who were BYU-Idaho students taking some online courses. And it turned out that my father had been right: President Clark already had a great team long before I arrived. I felt relatively unhelpful, some days even useless.
It was under this cloud of doubt that I found a ray of sun in a commencement address, just like this one, given by Elder Holland in December of 2006, a year before the dedication of the Rexburg Temple. That talk, which I strongly recommend to you graduates, is titled, “Zion Revisited.” It is, from the beginning, a bold, custom-crafted prophetic vision and call to action for BYU-Idaho students. I especially remember and treasure these concluding lines:
You have begun a newer, bolder chapter in your history than ever before. What you are undertaking here, and what you graduates have been blessed to be a pioneering, ground-breaking part of, is virtually unprecedented in the world of higher education. You are making your own inspired, pioneering journey and you will have some Kirtland’s and Jackson County’s, and some Nauvoo’s along the way. Not every aspect of the future goal is clear; for that matter not every aspect of the present challenge about how to get there is clear. But everything about the BYU-Idaho experiment in education, just as with everything about that temple rising on the edge of campus is a declaration of faith, a declaration of sacrifice, a declaration of prophecy and purity and miracles. You have been at this long enough to know that what you are doing here regarding some aspects of both student and faculty life will require tremendous faith and divine direction if it is to succeed as you and your Board of Trustees want it to succeed.
But what is so new about that? The children of Israel have always undertaken quests, journeys if you will, that have required tremendous faith and divine direction. So as the modern bearers of that covenant heritage, I ask you to believe in the virtues and values of the BYU-Idaho experience. Indeed, to the extent that I have a charge to leave with you graduates tonight, I charge you to cherish what you have been part of here, to think about it over and over and over again, and to take it into the world wherever you go—whether that is to Ririe and Rigby or to Roanoke and Rio and Rome. I charge you to tell your story wherever you go. Spread it far and wide that you were part of something new and bold and creative educationally, but it was newness and boldness based on the tried and true doctrine of the gospel of Jesus Christ which is as old as mankind itself. Declare that what you did at BYU-Idaho mattered in the quest for a unique way to teach and learn and ultimately live, that wherever you are you are still trying to be “right before your Father in Heaven, doing the things God requires at your hands, standing precisely where he wants you to be,” at least in part because of what you saw and felt and experienced here. Think of Joseph, think of Brigham, and think of Brigham Young University-Idaho. In so doing please know that the future will roll into place for you and for this school just the way it has for the other aspects of the Kingdom of God during the hundred and seventy-six years of this Church’s existence.[1]
Elder Holland’s powerful graduation address kept me from dropping out of BYU-Idaho. I stayed to learn more about online learning and President Clark’s Harvard-inspired Learning Model as well as the remarkable structure and strategy of this university, created by a prophet. I also learned that we can’t put a stopwatch on the Lord’s timetable. For the past thirteen blessed years, I’ve seen thousands of BYU-Idaho graduates go out into the world, prepared to be natural leaders.
You will do so now. That is your BYU-Idaho birthright, as you honor it. I invoke this blessing upon you, in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.
[1] Jeffrey R. Holland, “Zion Revisited,” BYU-Idaho Commencement, Dec. 20, 2006; emphasis added.