Mormon Dynamo

The big 1918 influenza epidemic was at its height, and almost every man in the two companies of Students Army Training Corps recruits at Utah's Mormon Brigham Young University had the dreaded fever. Among them was Private Ernest Wilkinson--a short (5 ft. 5 in.), devout and dedicated boy who was then in his sophomore year at B.Y.U. As he prayed for recovery, young Wilkinson made a vow: If he lived, he would "do something great for the Lord's university."

Eventually, he more than fulfilled his vow. In 1950 he took over as president, promptly launched the most vigorous building campaign that shaky B.Y.U. had ever known. In 1954 top Mormon leaders gathered on campus in Provo to dedicate not one, but 22 modern buildings. Last week they were back again to dedicate twelve more. In only seven years, Ernest Wilkinson, 58, has turned B.Y.U. into one of the largest church-owned universities in the U.S., with a 1957 enrollment of more than 9,000.

No Reason to Go. Since the day in 1875 when Mormon Leader Brigham Young decided that his followers must have an academy to train Mormon teachers ("I want you to remember," he told its first permanent head "that you ought not to teach even the alphabet or the multiplication tables without the spirit of God. That is all. God bless you. Goodbye"), B.Y.U. has had a most uncertain career. Though it has turned out such men as Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson, Senator Arthur Watkins and U.S. Supreme Court Justice George Sutherland (one of Franklin Roosevelt's "nine old men"), it fell on such hard times during the Depression that some trustees wondered whether the church should not abandon it. By 1943 enrollment had dropped from 2,000 to 800; facultymen were so hard to find, says one alumnus, that "you could be attending class with a fellow one quarter and find that he was your teacher the next." Though the G.I. Bill started it on the road to recovery, it was not until Wilkinson came along that it really began to move. Before then, says another alumnus, "there was never any reason to go to B.Y.U.--unless you happened to live near it."

A prosperous Washington, D.C. lawyer, Wilkinson proposed a plan that was exactly the same as one he had advocated while editor of the student paper. "The way to build this university," said he in 1921, "is to use the machinery of the Mormon Church." As president, he persuaded Mormon leaders to shower the university with money. He also persuaded them to tell the church's stakes, wards and missions" to send him their brightest boys and girls. In some quarters, his brisk way of doing things earned him the title of "Little Napoleon." To others he was "the Little Dynamo." By 1953 he had so impressed his trustees that they put him in charge of the Mormon educational system, which includes one liberal-arts college in Idaho, one academy and one elementary school in Mexico, 116 full-time and 236 part-time seminaries.

Nothing Soft. Wilkinson brought in an Air Force R.O.T.C. unit, started a College of Physical and Engineering Sciences, a School of Nursing and a College of Family Living to teach coeds the virtues of Mormon home life. He upped faculty salaries 35%, brought in such scholars as Physicist Harvey Fletcher, 72, a top authority on stereophonic sound, and Chemist H. Tracy Hall, 37, who at General Electric helped to develop the first synthetic diamond.

But for all his big-time activity, Wilkinson never departed from the strict Mormon way. His students, 97% of whom are Mormons, must take two hours of theology a week, are forbidden to smoke or to drink alcohol, coffee, tea. or any of the colas. "We stage," says Wilkinson, "no fancy parties that cost great sums. We frown on aristocratic and expensive things." He also frowns on sloppy work, has so boosted B.Y.U.'s academic reputation that he may well be able to do even more for the "Lord's university" and double its size again by 1962. Says he: "We don't believe in soft education. There has been too much of soft education in the U.S. It's bad to permit students to get on a campus and develop habits of mental indolence."

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