Been Thinking...

Thinking pretty hard, to tell the truth. And trying to remain calm. I can get pretty worked up over this thing I've been pondering.

It started when my latest BYU Magazine came in the mail. Now, before you start to wondering just what about an issue of a college magazine could get me all worked up, please understand, I like BYU. I'm a proud BYU graduate. My dad is a BYU professor (English Dept). My mom has both her bachelors and masters from BYU. My parents (I hate to admit this) met at BYU. We escaped Utah briefly while Dad earned his PhD from Cornell. In the end, we ended up right back in Provo when dad went looking for a job. All in all, we like it here. Really. Even if we are not your typical Mormon family. Which, we definitely. are. not.

See, my parents are what have been referred to as "thinking" Mormons. We did not excel at Family Home Evening. Or Family Prayer. Or even Scripture Reading. No, we were a bit too disorganized for all that. (I'm not saying this is good, or even okay, I'm just telling you how it is.) There were, after all, 8 of us kids, and only 2 of them. But we were good at discussions. Lots of deep, thoughtful discussions, about just about everything. Including the gospel. We could start talking about something at the dinner table, and end up in the living room, long after the dishes should have been cleared away, and the littler kids in bed, still discussing whatever it was. We have a dictionary in every room, except maybe the bathrooms. That's the kind of family I grew up in. We talked about everything, explored every angle. We believe in being educated, for the sake of education, learning, enlightenment. We like to question things, think about stuff. Open our minds. Mom taught us that we could become anything, do anything we set our minds to. Knowledge is power. Words are fascinating. So bear all that in mind, as I begin to tell you what's been getting my dander up recently.

The latest issue of BYU Magazine sports a cover that looks like the front of a refrigerator. Magnets that spell out "I <3 mom", a few pictures, and word magnets, like the kind you get in magnetic poetry/prose sets, that spell out the feature article: "Homework: How moms employ their BYU education at home". Just reading the title makes my upper lip curl.( I wish I was kidding.) I tell myself, they didn't mean it that way. I'm sure that's not the angle they're pitching. I set it down in the living room, face down so I don't have to see that title on the cover. I don't want to hate the magazine, I want to be tolerant. I'm sure they meant well. All the same, I can't make myself read it. Not yet. I push the bad thoughts to the back of my mind until I can mentally prepare myself for what lies within.

Then, Tuesday night, at book club, one of the other gals (also a BYU grad)  brings up something sort of related. She says, (and, I have not researched the basis of this - I'm just relating what she told me) that after a decade of BYU trying to increase their academic standing in the world, recruiting top students, going for the really smart ones, and basically stressing the "university" aspect of what I always thought of as a very respectable institute of higher learning (the business school has always been heavily recruited by top accounting firms - or at least, that's what they told us); after a decade of this, they discover that these "smarter" students, these academic types, are not getting married. The marriage rate of our (not so) little LDS university has gone down. They are finally, at long last, shaking the image of being that school so many young ladies attend to get their MRS, never mind how irrelevant that was in the first place, because not all of them quit when they get married (I'm not sure I know of even one fellow student from my circle that didn't finish, even after having a baby), and when it works, when they finally have more students interested in getting their degrees than getting that little ring on their finger and starting a family, they panic. They change their tactics. They begin to recruit another type of student. Something more along the lines of "cheerleaders" (her word, not mine). Because the smart ones aren't getting married.

Did you get that? The smart ones are not getting married. Pandemonium ensues.

This is going to take a while, telling you how I feel about this. I'm going to have to come back to this later, when I've had a chance to calm down and think rationally. (and maybe to research her allegations: are the marriage stats published somewhere? or is this just the "buzz" around campus? also: does it matter? Or is it enough that someone thinks this way (I'm not saying my friend actually feels/believes this, either - she's just the one that shared it with me), and I just don't think it's right, even if it's not grounded in actual fact?)