Sex and the University

I'm rolling my eyes over the suspension of Brigham Young University student Brandon Davies from the school's basketball team for violating the Brigham Young University "code of honor" by having premarital sex with his girlfriend. The school has been praised for being true to its commitment to students leading clean, honorable lives by holding a star athlete who broke the rules accountable for his actions, even if it led to BYU's Cougars basketball team, ranked third in the National Collegiate Athletics Association, losing a home game without Davies to an unranked team and denying BYU the top seed.

This is, by a wide margin, the silliest story of the year so far. Here's something to consider as you ponder this story: BYU treats its students like children. The Mormon Church-affiliated university is so concerned with cultivating pure, wholesome individuals that it intervenes in every aspect of a student's development except the intellectual aspect. Many colleges and universities treat students like the adults they are and expect them to live with and understand the responsibilities of an adult . . . and the issue of students engaged in premarital consensual sex is not academically relevant enough to bother with. Such colleges and universities try to develop fine minds - the primary objective for any college or university - and give students a thought process with which to ponder morals and ethics rather than spell out commandments for them. That's certainly the case at Drew, where I went, and that school was founded by Methodists.

Brigham Young University, as a school associated with a church not known for encouraging free thinking, should at least encourage some kind of mature thought process in the context of the Mormon faith, if such an academic mission is even possible. But BYU is too busy banning caffeinated beverages on its campus. And besides, the fact that BYU even values its basketball team so much that it's a great sacrifice for the team to lose a game due to an adherence to principle only shows how ridiculous the importance of intercollegiate athletics has become. Maybe commentators should pay less attention to the athletic standing of the Mormon Church's equivalent to Notre Dame and focus on the more pertinent issue of its academic standing.

Davies, a Mormon himself, is also black, and the church has a history of racism. Brigham Young himself said that blacks were cursed with dark skin for challenging God's authority in pre-existence. Mormons have been pretty good at assimilating blacks - albeit with a little difficulty here and there - since the church dropped its racist beliefs in 1978, so I don't know how much of an issue race is in this situation. I'm sure a white student athlete would have been suspended from a team sport for the same infraction, and the possibility of Davies's race having something to do his suspension seems to be a rather unlikely scenario. But when you get right down to it, there is still the issue of whether or not Davies and other BYU students are getting a rigorous higher education they can apply the school's equally rigorous moral code to.

Judge for yourself: The school is named after a man who was a talented administrator but had only two days of formal education.