41 minute read
Public Philosophy and the Idea of the University The University of Utah’s Great Issues Forum, 1952–1974
Public Philosophy and the Idea of the University
The University of Utah’s Great Issues Forum, 1952–1974
BY JOHN NILSSON
From 1952 to 1974, the University of Utah’s Department of Philosophy collaborated with the Extension Division (now Continuing Education) to assemble the best minds of the local faculty in the Great Issues Forum. In a series of lectures organized around a common philosophical, ethical, or religious topic, each year’s invited participants addressed themes that would have resonated with academics and the general public. Topics for each year rotated and included such earth-shaking titles as “The Nature of Man,” “Man’s Survival,” and “The University in Crisis.” The Forum was initially designed to be engaging and accessible to the average interested layperson and to bridge the gap between the academy and the larger community. Consequently, the lectures were well attended and often broadcast to thousands of listeners and reported in city newspapers, given that they addressed, in the words of philosophy department chair Waldemer P. Read, “questions of general interest and of vital current concern to the public.” 1
The Great Issues Forum was the brainchild of Waldemer Read, the protégé of the previous philosophy department chair, Ephraim E. Ericksen, who had studied under John Dewey at the University of Chicago at the height of his power and influence in American philosophical, educational, and reform circles. While Dewey was a confirmed humanist, his pragmatic philosophy was amenable to religious inflections, and it was this compatibility that Ericksen found attractive. 2 This ideological constellation would constitute a compromise for Ericksen and Read between the idealism of traditional religion (treating the universe as the product of mind) and the realism of the natural and social sciences (treating the universe as existing independently of mind); according to Scott G. Kenney, “In pragmatism Ericksen found an intellectual basis for the communitarian emphasis of his people, a rationale for the heroic sacrifices of his parents, and a criterion by which authoritarian excesses might be critiqued.” 3 According to the American pragmatist philosopher Hilary Putnam (1926– 2016), pragmatism functions as “realism with a human face.” Distinguishing between a capital “R” Realism that presumes the possibility of a “God’s-Eye” view of reality and a more modest small “r” realism that recognizes the relativity of views contained within the universe, Putnam argued for a view of the cosmos that brackets the notion of absolute truth while commonsensically asserting the necessity of acting as if empirical science provides usable notions about how the world is constituted. 4
Such a view would have provided a comfortable ideological halfway house for Read, who, like Ericksen, began his career heavily involved with the LDS church’s religious educational system and transitioned to a traditional secular academic post at the university. Read’s doctoral dissertation on the philosophy of John Dewey contained the evangelistic zeal of traditional religion minus the supernatural elements: “Intelligence can become a significant factor in determining the course of events. It can determine the course of history in the very unique sense of determining it intelligently. . . . [T]he eventual issue of things will be better, not worse or indifferent, as the result of intelligent trying.” Read’s dissertation argues for the efficacy of “collective social intelligence,” formed by progressive public education and in creative dialogue with the community of scientists, both natural and social: “But whether the method of collective social intelligence ever does become a reality or not, those who concern themselves with bringing it about can have the satisfaction of knowing that they have tried to the best of their ability and with the best of instrumentalities to mitigate the evils and dangers that beset mankind.” 5
In Waldemer Read’s last contribution to the Great Issues Forum, he lectured on “The Nature of Philosophy”: “The study of philosophy is just like any other study except it is more thoughtful. . . . The human mind is as effective as it has proved to be because of the social nature of its operation. Human thought is a cooperative work. . . . I consider the thinking done by the professional so-called philosophers to be but continuous with human thought in general.” Read had an optimistic appraisal of this societal learning process. He believed that the history of human thought was best viewed not as a fruitless guessing game but rather as the gradual accumulation of data that made collective assertions about the nature of the universe more and more accurate as time goes on. 6
Deploying academic philosophy with an interested, engaged public in formal and informal dialogues resulted in an interchange of ideas that enlightened participants. In a sense, this understanding of the philosophical enterprise was the germ of the Great Issues Forum, but more importantly it was a microcosm of the idea of the university itself. The university as a cultural idea, and the University of Utah as an instance of that idea, was a vital part of this societal search for truth. Other notions of the university might see the institution as, on the one hand, merely transmitting already discovered truths to a new generation or, on the other, as blindly groping in the dark, as equally unable to arrive at truth as any past or current contender, but for Read and his colleagues, the university as a whole, and the University of Utah in particular, was indispensable in furthering human progress toward comprehending the nature of the universe.
Armed with this understanding of philosophy and the role of the university in discovering and disseminating truth, Read and other academically trained philosophers created a public forum where previously taboo issues could be discussed in an open exchange moderated by faculty in the department and not by the university president or the “downtown” nexus of commercial and ecclesiastical interests. The University of Utah’s Department of Philosophy assumed a leadership role within the university in organizing public discussion of weighty and controversial topics, but also took a similar role beyond the academy to speak on behalf of the university on these topics. The Great Issues Forum ended in the 1970s, when ideological and personnel changes in the department made it less tenable.
More than simply the university’s attempt at community outreach, as was common elsewhere in the country in the postwar period, the lecture series also represented the resolution of the secularizing movement that had begun in earnest in its academic freedom crisis of 1915. The academic crisis of 1915, in which University of Utah administrators dismissed four faculty members thought to be disloyal to the school, set the university on a trajectory of secularization whereby the university evolved in the public eye from an institution deferential to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the matters of faculty composition and subject matter to an institution that was perceived to be independent of sectarian influence. The Great Issues Forum, both in the topics covered and in the wide-ranging publicity given to its programming, illustrated the university’s complete academic freedom.
According to Ralph Chamberlin’s centennial history of the university, the 1915 controversy was sparked by Milton Sevy’s valedictorian graduation speech, in which he urged the university to throw off its ultraconservative shackles to become more broad-minded. Governor Spry’s presence at the commencement address and irritation with its inference that the state of Utah was backward-looking led the governor to ask President Kingsbury whether the student had acted alone or with faculty support. Kingsbury then determined several faculty had been aware of the content of Sevy’s speech and terminated their employment. The majority of the student body signed a letter of protest to the president and were joined by protests from civic associations not connected with the university. The resulting national attention, joined with the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) investigation, led the Board of Regents to take action to replace Kingsbury. 7
Allyson Mower and Paul Mogren assert in their centennial study of the University of Utah Academic Senate that the 1915 crisis was about freedom of speech rather than religion. 8 And, yet, these are not mutually exclusive. While disrespectful speech acts were the initial reasons given by the university administration for their abrupt dismissal of four faculty, the public perception of this was that it was at bottom motivated by religion, replacing critical faculty voices (non- and dissident Mormons) with compliant ones (orthodox Mormons). The recently formed AAUP sent a committee to investigate the allegations that the academic freedom of the dismissed faculty had been violated. The report they issued largely agreed with the aggrieved former faculty and condemned the actions of university president Joseph Kingsbury. The AAUP investigators felt compelled to devote a section of their report to the allegations of religious influence at the university and determined that while it was not possible to ascertain Kingsbury’s motivations, it was clear that the Mormon faculty he chose to replace the non-Mormon ones lacked the education and experience—and in the case of Osborne Widtsoe (brother of the soon-to-be university president John Widtsoe), who became head of the Department of English, “not such as is at present usually expected in those appointed to headships of important departments in either colleges or universities in good standing.” 9
University of Utah campus, 1914, a year prior to the academic crisis that resulted in the dismissal of four university professors. Utah State Historical Society, Shipler no. 15244.
The resolution of the crisis along the lines of the AAUP report’s recommendations for full academic freedom with appropriate institutional safeguards gave both town and gown what they wanted: the LDS church could win respectability by pointing to their hands-off approach to the university and critics of both the church and the business establishment could wrest control of the school from those same social groups. This new public modus vivendi gave rise to a quieter sub rosa struggle on the part of the LDS church and the non-Mormon business classes to place their own representatives in key positions at the university. 10
Under Widtsoe and his successor George Thomas, university administration would distance itself from direct church influence and advocate for religious neutrality on the campus. When asked, Widtsoe stated that LDS officials did not “tell him how to run the U, except to ask on occasion, that he employ a Mormon or two.” 11 For Thomas, who replaced Widtsoe in 1921, his two stated inaugural objectives as president were to improve the scholastic standards of the faculty and to raise the scholarship of the student body. 12 Thomas’s relatively long tenure embedded these higher academic standards, including religious and political neutrality, into the soil of the university. 13 For example, on the matter of political partisanship, Thomas believed the university should remain above the fray: “The institution is to serve all, irrespective of politics or creed, and it is difficult to engage in partisan politics alienating the good will of your opponents. Work on the stump naturally means partisan discussions, and to the ordinary individual, to say nothing of the active opponents of the participants, it is difficult to differentiate between the activities of the individual and the activities of the University.” 14
It is tempting to conclude that Thomas felt the same about other institutions competing for the loyalty of his faculty members. Ephraim Ericksen, who along with Milton Bennion comprised the fledgling philosophy department, was accosted on campus by President Thomas in the 1920s when Ericksen was both a philosophy professor and running the LDS church’s youth program, the Mutual Improvement Association (MIA). According to Ericksen’s wife’s account, Thomas said, “‘Well, good morning, Ericksen. How’s the MIA coming?’ My husband looked at him, startled, and said, ‘Well, fine. Yes, I . . .’ Thomas said, ‘You know, things would go quite far if you were spending as much time and energy and concern about the university as you do about the church.’” 15 During his administration, Thomas instructed department chairs to attempt to keep a rough balance on their faculty between Mormons and those who were not of that religious persuasion, although this conflicted somewhat with his other injunction to hire the best candidate for the position—and his own position to avoid any church affiliation. When LDS apostle John Widtsoe, who attended the same university ward congregation as Thomas, noted that Thomas’s church activity was restricted to dropping in on a Sunday school class once or twice a year and “slipping out” before the class ended, Thomas responded by saying he felt he could do a better job as president if he did not identify himself with any church. 16
Thomas was followed in office by two presidents who continued the university’s trend of emulating other American universities and maintaining academic freedom. Leroy E. Cowles, who presided over the university during World War II, and A. Ray Olpin, who was president from 1946 to 1964, were Latter-day Saints, yet acted in the same manner as presidents of other American colleges and universities.
The only major public incident challenging the stability of the academic freedom consensus occurred during Olpin’s tenure, on the occasion of the university’s centennial in 1950. A student-run literary magazine invited writers of national prominence to submit essays to their issue celebrating the anniversary, and several of the contributions featured critical commentary on the Mormon church. The church-owned Deseret News responded with equally critical verbiage directed at the university. The episode was resolved privately in an apology proffered by George Albert Smith, the LDS president, to Olpin. 17
The origins of the Great Issues Forum lie in this postwar period, when rapid growth in both student enrollment and faculty hiring coincided with the waning of the LDS church’s perceived ability to influence campus events. The philosophy department was uniquely positioned to fill the need for a flexing of the campus’s intellectual muscles. Waldemer Read, Obert Tanner, Sterling McMurrin, and Max Rogers were former LDS seminary and institute instructors who went on to graduate study in some of the nation’s finest institutions of higher education such as the University of Chicago, Stanford, and the University of Southern California. Mc- Murrin later referred to the department as “the intellectual hub of the campus” in the sense of attracting attention from university faculty (other professors enrolled in courses taught by McMurrin and his colleagues) and taking a leading role in public intellectual life. 18 Whereas in other American universities of this period philosophy was on the decline in terms of its place within the university relative to other disciplines, at the University of Utah it was at its zenith.
The department chair, Waldemer Read, initiated the Great Issues Forum, and its final year was dedicated to him in recognition of this. 19 Read, believing philosophy belonged not merely in the ivory tower but instead should be diffused throughout the community, wanted a wide practical benefit to result from the teaching of philosophy. 20 For example, Read and McMurrin sought to offer early, advanced-placement, introductory philosophy courses in local high schools but was turned down by the Salt Lake City School District. 21 This emphasis on practical benefit derived from pragmatism, a branch of philosophy Read picked up from John Dewey and which found other adherents in the department. Not only did the long-serving department chair, Waldemer Read, profess it, but he learned it from his mentor, E. E. Ericksen, former chair and Dewey protégé. Pragmatism suited the University of Utah’s situation well, as it was seen as a transitional philosophy between idealism and realism. Pragmatism legitimized scientific inquiry and yet also took seriously the desire for some type of residual metaphysical hope:
Among the first generation of university thinkers from 1865 to 1895, philosophical idealism was consensual. At the end of the nineteenth century, one form of idealism—pragmatism—won out not only because its proponents were competent and well placed but also because they showed the philosophy’s compatibility with the natural and social sciences and with human effort in the modern, secular world. . . . [P]ragmatism associated mind with action, and investigated the problems of knowledge through the practices of enquiry, tinting the physical world with intelligence and a modest teleology. 22
In addition, in the early 1950s many of the philosophy faculty, along with like-minded colleagues from other disciplines and universities like Brigham Young University and Weber College, participated in the Mormon Seminar, also jokingly referred to as the Swearing Elders. Organized at the University of Utah by Mc- Murrin and English faculty member William Mulder, the group often had heated discussions and featured presentations from specialists in a wide variety of academic disciplines who could in some meaningful way connect their work to the study of Mormonism. 23 The Swearing Elders was a template for the Great Issues Forum. Whereas the Swearing Elders sessions dealt with specifically Mormon topics, the Great Issues Forum took many of the parochial matters dealt with behind closed doors and lifted them to a level of abstraction applicable to religion in general. For example, the Swearing Elders would invite guest speakers to address their group on the mystical practices of upstate New York (Mormonism’s birthplace) while the Great Issues Forum would focus on the possibility and nature of religious knowledge for any religion.
Moreover, the Great Issues Forum provided a space for the members of the university’s philosophy department to continue playing the role most of them had played previously for the LDS church as employees of its seminaries and institutes of religion: that of a spiritual teacher or guide. In this they were following the template of their pragmatist mentors of a generation or two earlier. The educated classes in the time of William James expected philosophy to reassure them about the worth of human life and the value of tradition and to “join mild exhortation with a defense of fundamental verities. George Santayana put it well . . . when he said that the Cambridge philosophers had an acute sense of duty ‘because they were conscientiously teaching and guiding the community, as if they had been clergymen without a church.’” 24 A dialogue on ethics between University of Utah professors with questions from the audience performed the same function in Salt Lake City in the 1950s that the Harvard pragmatists had in the 1870s. Both may have included audience members struggling to understand, for instance, the implications of taking Darwin seriously and wondering whether and how they ought to modify their own ethical practices based on new scientific understandings of the place of humanity on earth and in the cosmos more generally.
In its first decade, the themes addressed by the Forum were religious, ethical, and epistemological. For instance, the 1954–1955 Great Issues Forum featured University of Utah philosophy professor James L. Jarrett’s “Does Philosophy Destroy Faith?” Jarrett carefully considered the three terms of the question as a proper philosopher would and concluded that the risks of attending something like the Forum are rather worth taking. He phrased the weakest version of the question as “Do some philosophers and teachers of philosophy sometimes say something which might slightly modify some aspect of somebody’s belief about some aspect of the universe?” and the strongest version of the question as “Do all philosophers invariably totally shatter the confidence and wholly overthrow the beliefs of everyone they meet?” 25 Rejecting both extremes, Jarrett helpfully formulates a more moderate position: “For those who prize above everything complete orthodoxy as defined by one or another of the dogmatic churches, is there danger in studying philosophy in a secular institution of higher learning?” Acknowledging a risk for the believer when the question is phrased in this more realistic way, Jarrett contrasts two scenarios:
Obert C. Tanner, professor of philosophy at the University of Utah and frequent participant in the Great Issues Forum. Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake Tribune Negative Collection, MSS C 400, no. 8175-8,9.
Sterling McMurrin, E. E. Ericksen Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and History at the University of Utah and contributor to the Great Issues Forum. Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake Tribune Negative Collection, MSS C 400, no. 18045-4,5.
Jarrett’s argument likely was framed in such a way as to allay suspicions in more traditionally minded University of Utah students that the purpose of the Great Issues Forum was to directly challenge religion in general and Christianity and Mormonism in particular. However, Jarrett’s language was also jaunty enough to welcome participation from the conservative members of the campus community who would likely have some of their ideas refined rather than replaced.
The topic addressed on March 23, 1955, “Do History and Religion Conflict?” featured a debate-style presentation between McMurrin and Hugh Nibley, a professor of religion and history at BYU. Nibley was well-known as a philologist who attempted to vindicate Mormon truth claims by identifying parallel customs in ancient civilizations and those described in Mormon scriptures. Taking the negative side, Nibley claimed that the premise of the evening was faulty: “The obvious intent of the question is to test religion’s claims in the light of historical discovery, or as the newspaper phrased the question, ‘Can religion face its own history without flinching?’ There is no hint that history might flinch in the face of religion . . . the question proposes a beauty contest in which one of the contestants has already been awarded the prize.” 27
Nibley concluded by taking issue with the historical discipline itself:
In essence, Nibley urged the primacy of faith over secular scholarship, noting the weightiness or gravitas of the concerns of religion over against the mundane trivialities with which history concerns itself. In this way, Nibley somewhat echoed the midcentury trend of neo-orthodox Christian theology exemplified in the work of such thinkers as Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, and Reinhold Niebuhr, who acknowledged the importance of the scientific method but stressed the incomparably greater demand placed on the believer by the word of God.
McMurrin adopted the positive side of the proposition and argued that religious faith is undercut by the study of religious history: “It is the study of religion itself that occasions the most difficult and discomposing questions. It is when religion is studied and discussed seriously by rational, informed persons with open minds and honest hearts that it encounters its most severe testing.” This is because “one who is truly conversant with the history of religion has had more than a glimpse of the development of something that a large segment of the faithful suppose to be basically free from historical change.” 29 Among the difficulties posed by the study of religion to belief include human failings of religious leaders, the primitive origins of all religions, the complexities and contingencies of religious origins, and the fact of development and change writ large. McMurrin charged “apologetic scholars” (presumably including Nibley) with hiding and distorting this history from the faithful, because admitting honest history “would produce a different kind of religion, a kind which they do not like, that often makes people less amenable to authoritarianism and churchly control.” 30
One undergraduate philosophy major at the University of Utah who attended the event recalled how exciting the McMurrin-Nibley exchange was. He remembered the auditorium full not only with students but faculty and the general public. The impact of the Great Issues Forum on undergraduates often was salutary. Not only was the experience a co-curricular feast for philosophy majors, but students in other departments attended as part of the university’s well-rounded liberal education program. For many students, the Forum assisted in the developmental process of sorting out the varied claims of reason and faith. 31
Obert Tanner, in a Great Issues in Philosophy lecture on March 28, 1956, addressed the question, “Are Moral Values Absolute?” Tanner’s philosophical pragmatism was illustrated in his response that standard positions on the grounding of moral values are incorrect. He claimed it equally untenable to hold that moral values are “determined by an objective standard” as it is to claim that they are “determined by private opinion or by the customs of a particular group.” Tanner asserted that there is an “intermediate position between absolutism and relativity, there is a standard for our values that is relatively absolute.” 32 Tanner pointed to a dichotomy in Western civilization between reason and religion, as represented by the Greek and Christian traditions respectively—the former identified with relativism, the latter with absolutism. Tanner thought it possible to work out “a compromise between science and religion as they affect our moral values.” Since, in his view, moral values as established through empirical observation “have always been the supreme moral values taught by religion,” he held up his morality as being “in complete harmony with the teaching of religion.” 33 Tanner criticized John Dewey’s overly broad definition of morality of carrying out every activity the best way it can be carried out and sided instead with the more or less utilitarian definition of Princeton philosopher W. T. Stace, whose narrower view of morality “includes only those universally applicable rules of conduct which seek to control the relations of men with one another.” 34 Based on this definition and the concomitant utilitarian emphasis on happiness as the outcome of morality, Tanner posited altruism as the relatively objective standard of moral actions. Unselfish actions based on justice are praised in all cultures and vary essentially only in the size of the social group in which these actions are to be applied. 35
Obert Tanner continued in a similar vein in the following year’s “Issues for Laymen in Contemporary Philosophy”: “To separate myth from truth is an enormous undertaking. It becomes a large part of the work done by a university. This effort to distinguish truth from myth is the primary element of progress in all the history of mankind.” 36 Referring to the “endless warfare” of truth with myth, Tanner said there is “some compensation. If truth were to prevail over myth, the humanities and social science departments would just about go out of business. Myth keeps many of us going, pays our salaries, and generally makes life quite exciting. Myth is at once our friend and foe. Without it we would have to teach science or go into business—a horrible dilemma.” 37 Tanner queried the predominance of myth on the campus: “Why is the population of this student body possessed of minds crammed full of explanatory and truth-claiming myths that will not hold up against scholarly investigation?” He suggested four reasons for myth’s success: “life’s harsh realities,” usefulness of myth to leaders in “keeping power and authority over those who believe,” myth’s “easy alternative to faith,” and the ability of myths to “masquerade as ideals.” 38
For Tanner, theologically liberal author of the LDS Sunday School text Christ’s Ideals for Living, this last charge was likely the most serious. At some length he launched into a point-bypoint exposé of myths that he claimed supplanted “noble” ideals (for Tanner, nobility meant a devotion to one or more of the triad of classic Greek virtues of goodness, truth, or beauty). These were myths that those from Christian backgrounds in general, and Mormon backgrounds in particular, would recognize as central to their faith:
Tanner ended his address by considering, and then rejecting, a last ditch defense of myths as helpful to society: “There is no place for truth-claiming myths in a society sufficiently advanced to conceive and support free universities. . . . Truth-claiming myths spring from primitive explanations. It is better to face life as it is, thereby seeking for ways to improve it, than to use the escape of believing what is an untrue, unreal, or fictional interpretation of life.” After what must have been received as a scathing critique of the local power structures, Tanner suggested a positive method for separating truth from myth: “As truth claims go by in review, I would ask: Are you verifiable? And if not, are you probable? And if not, are you reasonable? Imagine all the casualties among truth claims, all those that are unverifiable, improbable, and unreasonable.” 40
Tanner’s address illustrated several characteristic features of the University of Utah’s midcentury approach to philosophy. First, it claimed a universal relevance and an applicability to the concerns of everyday life. Second, it elevated reason and evidence above intuition in the search for truth. Third, it did so publicly in dialogue with other participants, faculty, students, and community members in the audience. When asked late in his life about the philosophers and philosophical schools he was most drawn to, Tanner replied that he sympathetically entered into the minds of whichever authors he was reading, although when pressed, he identified primarily as a pragmatist, with elements of realism and skepticism making their appearance. 41
An address by Waldemer Read in the 1961–62 “Great Issues Concerning Freedom” series was emblematic of the Great Issues Forum’s approach to public philosophy and represented the peak of the series’ engagement with topics that could be seen as more or less directly speaking to Mormonism. A philosopher and cultural Mormon, Read noted in “What Freedom Exists in the Local Culture?” that every member of the philosophy department agreed that the topic of freedom necessitated a treatment of the status of freedom in Utah. He noted that civil and political liberties common in the United States were also found in Utah, and that Utah was utterly similar to other states in its lack of responsiveness to the dangers of Nazism and McCarthyism. 42
Read then identified freedom of thought as the most important of all freedoms—the one most likely to produce material improvement to humanity. “Thought control” expressed through psychological conditioning is what prevents many in the local culture from realizing that the only sure-proof methods of testing a proposition’s truth value are “considerations of empirical fact, and of logical relation.” 43 Those who are hesitant to accept the claims of faith are stigmatized as having a bad character. 44
The greatest tragedy of this state of affairs for Read is that the monotony of Mormon culture incapacitated its people to think new thoughts and contribute toward a larger national conversation on United States policy more generally. This conversation for Read has a domestic component, which is both racial and economic, and an international component, which is mainly to do with issues of peaceful coexistence and the United Nations as an instrument of that peace. 45
Program of the 1957–58 Great Issues Forum “concerning the nature of man.” Department of Philosophy records, University Archives, University of Utah.
The Catholic sociologist Thomas O’Dea responded to Read’s paper by humorously noting his religious outsider status and by noting that the local culture at least has produced a man like Waldemer Read. O’Dea offered a few points supportive of Read’s main point, including the need for Mormonism to reconcile itself externally with the Copernican revolution and other intellectual adjustments to the scientific worldview, and internally to reconcile competing theological strands of thought. 46 Two philosophers with Mormon backgrounds, David Bennett and Lewis (Max) Rogers, also offered comments on Read’s speech. Bennett thought that it would be more effective to win Mormon believers’ confidence by citing sources from their own tradition that would support the arguments he was making.
He believed Read’s criticisms would be fairer if they had been based not on the average but on the “highest fruits of Mormonism,” among whom Bennett classed Read and other “avowed heretics.” 47 Rogers commented directly on the meaning of the phrase “local culture”: “There can be scarcely any question in the minds of those present as to whom or as to what these terms refer. However, it should be observed that there are important elements in this culture other than the LDS Church . . . who . . . have insisted upon and successfully maintained their rights to be free.” Quoting pragmatist philosopher William James, Rogers places his hope for positive change in the local culture in differences between individuals—the persuadable and the unpersuadable: “There is very little difference between one man and another, but what little there is, is very important.” 48
The 1964–65 series was the final Forum explicitly dedicated to a religious topic. In seven sessions spread between October 1964 and March 1965, the philosophy department held a public conversation treating the issues involved in theism: evidence for God’s existence, the meaningfulness of theism, the reliability of biblical sources of information, the meaning of personality when applied to God, God in popular culture, and the concepts of necessity and contingency when applied to God. The latter was a paper presented by Charles Hartshorne, a leading philosopher from the University of Texas who followed in the footsteps of his mentor Alfred North Whitehead in holding to a non-absolutistic God in a version of process theology. Hartshorne’s paper was consonant with views that Sterling McMurrin had advocated when treating the distinctive nature of Mormon theology, although Hartshorne also advanced a form of the ontological argument for the existence of God, something McMurrin omitted from his more descriptive accounts. 49
The most emblematic of the seven addresses was Waldemer Read’s “What Difference Does It Make?” Read’s pragmatist’s concern for the practical significance of religious belief took the form of what he termed twin “abuses”: the use of theism to win advantage over others in the field of politics, and the use of pressing practical problems to urge the propagation of theism. Read employed Martin Buber’s notion of the “I-Thou” relation with god to provide a counterexample to the conceptual limitations faced by most theists and atheists. Buber believed that god ought to be experienced directly like “the great religious mystics.” Read averred that for those who do, their lives are changed tremendously, but that even for the majority who are not mystics, but merely believers in God, the difference that belief makes in their lives is still great. 50
Read concluded that religion makes a great difference in the life of the individual believer. That said, in his assertion that there is no universal mind, but only a multiplicity of individual minds, there are likewise billions of conceptions of God. He concluded that if God exists, then the difference God makes must be reflected in the way things are—and that therefore, given the reality of social problems like war, it must be up to humans to make peace. 51
American philosophy began to change after World War II, and although the change was slower to arrive at the University of Utah than at the premier departments of Harvard, Columbia, and Chicago, it came nevertheless. A brand of philosophy that had shared antecedents with pragmatism but was more informed by the precise formulations of a Bertrand Russell or a Ludwig Wittgenstein began to capture the imaginations of younger philosophers newly graduated from PhD programs around the country. Termed analysis, or analytic philosophy, this type of philosophy eschewed the traditional concerns of both American pragmatism and its European ancestors, and focused instead on logic, mathematics, and linguistics. It saw philosophy’s role not as asking and answering the big questions that gave life meaning, but as clarifying the terms under which scientific investigation could be best carried out. As the historian Bruce Kuklick wrote,
In 1963, perhaps partly as a result of newer faculty hired in the department and their interests, the Forum began a noticeable transition to more political topics of national interest. Tanner’s February 20, 1963, address “Economic Competition and World Peace” defended the proposition that “sound international economic competition has an enormous potential for world peace.” 53 Tanner, the successful local jewelry entrepreneur, favored competition over cooperation in the economic realm, since in his view “competition is the basic law of life.” 54 “Cooperation,” besides being nicely alliterative, is a nicer sounding term for economic planning and state control of the economy. In a style reminiscent of his schematization of the war between truth and myth, Tanner argued that through religious united orders, communism, socialism, consumer unions, collectives, mergers, monopolies, and cooperatives” humans have sought solace “from the unhappy and sometimes unsuccessful life of economic competition.” 55 Tanner stressed that although unfair economic competition may have prevailed under the old conditions of colonialism, globally earlier forms of colonialism were on the decline. The United Nations was the honest broker in the new world order to ensure that “tyranny and exploitation are highlighted . . . for all the world to see. World opinion is the new world force. The UN marshals this power of world opinion, which makes older forms of economic exploitation difficult.” 56 Whereas Tanner had identified scientific consensus as the corrective to myth, here he placed the UN as the corrective to economic exploitation.
Obert Tanner’s November 6, 1968, “Moral Aspects of the Invasion of Privacy” further illustrates this shift in emphasis. Tanner underlined the serious nature of his talk by saying “the foremost question of public morality facing our country today lies within the area of privacy” and that the quandary with privacy, unlike presumably more straightforward issues like crime, poverty, and international relations, stemmed not from a lack of will but a lack of knowledge. 57 Taking it as a matter of course that the protection and extension of privacy was a positive value, Tanner modestly restricted his remarks to the meaning of privacy and its future protections. Accepting the definition of Daniel Dykstra, a former dean of the University of Utah Law School, that privacy is the individual’s control over when and how to communicate personal information, Tanner suggested that the U.S. Constitution contains an implicit right to privacy. 58 In conclusion, Tanner equated privacy with freedom: “Many violations of privacy, such as churches asking personal questions about one’s beliefs, overzealous government investigators, businesses prying into personality problems—if these and a thousand more invasions of privacy were discussed, privacy would come more and more to be equated with freedom, which is surely the greatest value of our civilization.” 59
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, most of the original group of philosophy faculty who had conceived and organized the Great Issues Forum had moved on. Waldemer Read retired in 1966, though he continued participating in the Great Issues Forum occasionally until the end of the series. Sterling McMurrin resigned his position in philosophy in 1970 to move to the history department, Charles Monson died unexpectedly in 1974, and Obert Tanner reduced his involvement in the department in preparation for his full retirement in 1975. Their departure from the philosophy department ranks decreased much of the impetus for offering these lectures and discussions. McMurrin’s resignation letter sheds light on the generational change that occurred in the department:
The newer philosophy faculty members were more interested in devoting their energies to rigorous, technical conversations with their colleagues at other institutions in American Philosophical Association meetings than on accessible local campus discussions about big questions. In addition, whereas the older faculty was largely a product of Utah and interested in issues pertaining to ethics and religion understood primarily through pragmatism, the newer faculty was from outside the state and embraced a different set of philosophical concerns, including analytic philosophy and even more radical political stances than those they were gradually replacing, including opposing the Vietnam War and aggressively confronting university administrators. 61 A 1972 external review of the department concluded that the faculty were “all actively engaged in philosophical research and very much in the mainstream of American professional philosophy.” 62 This marked a profound contrast with the outgoing faculty, whose involvement in research and publishing in philosophy was minimal and usually confined to local outlets but for whom leadership of the university and engagement with the public was paramount. This was common to other universities as well; the divide between the academy and the wider public was less than it is now. This, combined with declining attendance among students, spelled the end of the Great Issues Forum after more than two decades. 63
Equally important, however, was the change in topics offered by the Forum itself, which indicated a turning away from questions focusing on what Read euphemistically termed the “local culture” to the types of topics common on any university campus in the United States. This shift in direction and loss of interest could also indicate that the freedom Read so earnestly pleaded for was at last a reality and hence taken for granted in the local culture, at least at the University of Utah. This shift reflected the Forum’s role in the secularization of the University of Utah. By the time the Forum began in the early fifties, the university was ready to use the freedoms it had formally achieved in an earlier era. By the end of the Forum in the mid-seventies, the university had achieved a seasoned maturity in matters relating to the local culture, well-illustrated by an anecdote. One senior university administrator in the period after the Great Issues Forum can recall only one incident where the relationship of the university and the LDS church was put to the test. After a winter storm, several fraternity members constructed a snowman elaborately designed to resemble a particular Mormon apostle. A general authority of the church contacted the university president and asked him to do something about it. The president declined. 64
Notes
1. Waldemer Read, ed., Great Issues Concerning Freedom (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1962), preface.
2. John Dewey, Terry Lectures: A Common Faith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). Dewey’s conception of religion makes room for worship yet eschews the supernatural.
3. Scott Kenney, ed., Memories and Reflections: The Autobiography of E. E. Ericksen (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1987), 194.
4. Hilary Putnam, “Realism with a Human Face,” in The Pragmatism Reader: From Peirce to the Present, ed. Robert B. Talisse and Scott F. Aikin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 327–29. Although Putnam formulated this in the 1980s, it is clearly based on statements of the early pragmatists like Charles Sanders Peirce and William James and would have been a familiar understanding of pragmatism’s place on the continuum between realism and idealism during the time of the Great Issues Forum.
5. Waldemer Read, “John Dewey’s Conception of Intelligent Social Action” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1947), box 2, fd. 14, Waldemer Read Papers, MS 572, Special Collections and Archives, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah.
6. Waldemer Read, “The Nature of Philosophy,” October 1972, box 1, fd. 28, Read Papers.
7. Ralph V. Chamberlin, The University of Utah: A History of its First Hundred Years—1850 to 1950 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1960), 323–41. Chamberlin’s is the only comprehensive history of the university to my knowledge, and he treats the 1915 crisis as a matter of “faculty relations”.
8. Allyson Mower and Paul Mogren, When Rights Clash: Origins of the University of Utah Academic Senate (Salt Lake City: J. Willard Marriott Library, 2014), 36.
9. American Association of University Professors, Report of the Committee of Inquiry on Conditions at the University of Utah (July 1915), 75–80, qtn. on 80, available at https:// www.aaup.org/sites/default/files/files/University %20of%20Utah%20-%20December%201915.pdf.
10. Joseph H. Jeppson, “The Secularization of the University of Utah to 1920” (PhD diss., University of Utah, 1973), 187.
11. Jeppson, 218, 223.
12. Joseph Glen Erickson, “The Life and Educational Contributions of Dr. George Thomas” (master’s thesis, University of Utah, 1954), 23–24. In line with the first objective, Thomas established a committee to enforce the university’s first minimum grade expectations, leading to the identification and dismissal of seventyfive students from the institution the first quarter the new policy was implemented.
13. Erickson, 25. As a member of the State Board of Education in the 1930s, Thomas supported universityapproved released time for religious education on the condition that all religious denominations be allowed to take advantage of the policy.
14. Quoted in Ericksen, 38.
15. E. E. Ericksen, Memories and Reflections: The Autobiography of E. E. Ericksen (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1987), 94n9.
16. Ericksen, 71, 76.
17. Sterling M. McMurrin, “The Cultural Values of Utah and the Future of the University,” October 1978, box 165, fd. 1, Sterling M. McMurrin Papers, MS 32, Special Collections and Archives, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah.
18. Sterling M. McMurrin and L. Jackson Newell, Matters of Conscience: Conversations with Sterling M. McMurrin on Philosophy, Education, and Religion (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1996), 321.
19. The Salt Lake Tribune, March 18, 1975.
20. McMurrin and Newell, Matters of Conscience, 150.
21. McMurrin and Newell, 217–18.
22. Bruce Kuklick, A History of Philosophy in America, 1720–2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 95.
23. Thomas A. Blakely, “The Swearing Elders: The First Generation of Mormon Intellectuals,” Sunstone 10, no. 9 (1985); Gary James Bergera, ed., Confessions of a Mormon Historian: The Diaries of Leonard J. Arrington, 1971–1997, vol. 2, Centrifugal Forces, 1975–80 (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2018), 2:602–4.
24. Kuklick, Philosophy in America, 167.
25. James L. Jarrett, “Does Philosophy Destroy Faith”, in And more about God, ed. Lewis M. Rogers and Charles H. Monson (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1969), 15–17.
26. Jarrett, 17–18.
27. Hugh Nibley, Temple and Cosmos: Beyond This Ignorant Present, ed. Don E. Norton, vol. 12, The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1992), 436.
28. Nibley, 438, 449.
29. Sterling M. McMurrin, “Do Religion and History Conflict?” in Religion, Reason, and Truth: Historical Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1982), 134–35.
30. McMurrin, 140.
31. John Bennion (former philosophy undergraduate), in conversation with the author, December 2017.
32. Obert C. Tanner, “Are Moral Values Absolute?” in One Man’s Search: Addresses (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1989), 291.
33. Tanner, 292–93.
34. Tanner, 295–96.
35. Tanner, 298.
36. Tanner, “Issues for Laymen in Contemporary Philosophy,” in One Man’s Search, 101.
37. Tanner, 102.
38. Tanner, 103.
39. Tanner, 107–8.
40. Tanner, 109.
41. Obert C. Tanner, Oral Interview with Sterling McMurrin, 1991, 4, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, accessed April 23, 2019, https://collections.lib.utah .edu/ark:/87278/s68p69pv.
42. Read, Great Issues Concerning Freedom, 113–15.
43. Read, 121.
44. Read, 126.
45. Read, 129.
46. Read, 132–34.
47. Read, 130–31.
48. Read, 135, 138.
49. Box 2, University of Utah Department of Philosophy Records, Acc 504, University Archives and Records Management, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah.
50. Waldemer Read, “What Difference Does It Make?” in Rogers and Monson, And more about God, 340–47.
51. Read, 356–57.
52. Kuklick, Philosophy in America, 267.
53. Tanner, “Economic Competition and World Peace,” in One Man’s Search, 23.
54. Tanner, 27.
55. Tanner, 28.
56. Tanner, 34–35.
57. Tanner, “Moral Aspects of the Invasion of Privacy,” in One Man’s Search, 275.
58. Tanner, 283–85.
59. Tanner, 290.
60. Sterling McMurrin, “Letter of Resignation,” December 1970, box 2, fd. 20, Read Papers.
61. Bruce Landesman, “History of the University of Utah Philosophy Department,” May 12, 2012, https://www .youtube.com/watch?v=r2Jwc-Q6oZ4.
62. Vere Chappell, “External Review of Department of Philosophy,” June 1972, box 2, fd. 1, Read Papers.
63. Bruce Landesman, in conversation with the author, December 2017.
64. James Clayton, in conversation with the author, January 2018.
