BYU’s ********** Problem

I chose to attend a university with a long, brazenly proud history of institutional censorship. 

Publications on BYU’s campus are not allowed to discuss school or church policy. The university has refused to house world-renowned Rodin sculptures in the Museum of Art or allow feminist Laurel Thatcher Ulrich to address attendees in conferences on campus. The university-affiliated gay-straight alliance isn’t allowed to meet on campus. The figure models in the art department are not allowed to pose nude. I had to cut a piece of a science report I made at my BYU Radio job that mentioned passionate kissing (which, fun fact, spreads less germs than a handshake). I could go on. 

But it is the less-institutional mutation of censorship, the emboldening of students to censor one another, which worries me the most. Students, despite surface-level administrative changes in the last few years, still feel it their place to police their peers’ “morality.” At the risk of seeming dramatic, I find it dystopian. 

I encountered this sort of censorship during my two-and-a-half year stint with BYU’s political op-ed publication, the Political Review. 

Honestly, the Political Review is not usually a hot-commodity magazine. We did what we could to be balanced, relevant, and fair, but what we got for that was a monthly readership in the few-hundreds, the occasional spicy email, and some post-it notes on our distribution racks lambasting us for being too liberal. 

But in February of 2019, all of our issues were dumped in trashes around campus, along with the distribution rack placards. The highlighted article of the issue focused on sex education in Utah.

Then again in November of 2019, anonymous students took it upon themselves to censor the Political Review, this time by putting inserts into every issue of the magazine with a Family Proclamation stapled to a flyer that said “BYU Political Review regularly publishes messages contrary to church doctrine” and the scripture 2 Nephi 15:20. I won’t reprint it, but it’s about good and evil. The issue covered LGBTQ+ rights.

In both instances, we received no emails or survey responses objecting to the posters or covers. We were silenced without expression or engagement—very much a definition of censorship. 

Ultimately, what media you do and do not interact with is your choice. But I urge you not to quash discourse because it makes you uncomfortable. That kind of thinking harms you and the campus environment as a whole. Please, let’s talk about sex education. And sex! Gun laws. Abortion rights. Medical marijuana. The border. Sticking your head in the sand or trying to force others to do the same will not make any of those issues go away. 

I’ll end with a paragraph I wrote after the February 2019 issue of the Political Review was thrown in the trash--a letter that was censored and never published: 

I am genuinely baffled why someone would feel the need to censor a campus-endorsed publication and deny their fellow students the opportunity to partake in valuable discourse about any topic, let alone the vital health information provided by sex education. Denying hundreds of smart, legal adults the chance to engage with or learn about well-researched, commonly-held, logical perspectives is authoritarian and arrogant. It is not up to you what other people think or read; to think otherwise flies in the face of what I am confident you believe America and the Church stand for.