President and Sister Eyring, it is my great honor to represent the faculty in officially welcoming you to this remarkable institution. Any such welcome is, of course, a bit unnecessary, since you've enjoyed a long relationship with this campus and its faculty. Over those years, you have no doubt sensed, as I have, that this faculty is deeply committed to perpetuating two of our university's foundational principles--two seemingly paradoxical virtues that have been articulated and nurtured from Jacob Spori, to your own father, to you.
On the one hand, this institution is imbued with a spirit of humble frugality, a virtue instilled through its hardscrabble origins. On the other hand, that humble frugality has always been combined with a rather audacious reach--an astonishing effort to embrace all the pure knowledge that mortal minds can comprehend, a breathtaking ambition to overrun the earth with truth and light, grace and goodness.
As a faculty, we know you feel the awesome responsibility of extending that audacious reach. We also hope you sense that we are your genuine friends and eager colleagues in that effort--ready to roll up our sleeves and work alongside you, in all humility and frugality, to stretch the boundaries of possibility. Most, if not all, of us were drawn to this place for precisely this reason. We were drawn here because this is a community--in all the best senses of that word--where genuine learning is the focus rather than worldly ambition; a community where scholarly inquiry can be pursued, by both students and professors, simply for the love of truth rather than for professional advancement; a community similar to one described in the Book of Mormon, where "the teacher [is not] any better than the learner"[1] and where the hearts of instructors and students can be fully "knit together in unity and in love."[2]
To the task of building this uncommon community, full of divine possibility and influence, we, the faculty of BYU-Idaho, pledge our full support and extend to you our most heartfelt welcome. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.
Notes
[1] Alma 1:26
[2] Mosiah 18:21