Ernest L. Wilkinson served as BYU’s president from 1951 to 1971. The influential leader developed a complicated bond with the student body, driving unprecedented growth while also stirring controversy. His autocratic personality, political views, and aggressive enforcement of orthodoxy were responsible for both success and scandal. For example, his cultivation of a “special arrangement” with David O. McKay created friction with Church leaders, a 1966 “Spy Ring” heightened tensions with faculty, and an enhanced Honor Code sparked a paternalistic shift in his relationship with students. In this interview, editor Gary J. Bergera shares insights from Wilkinson’s diaries, recently published by Signature Books.
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Table of Contents
- BYU President
- Personality and Administration Style
- Enforcing Orthodoxy
- Spy Ring Scandal
- Relationships with Church Leaders
- Legacy
- Further Reading
Becoming BYU President
When was Ernest L. Wilkinson president of Brigham Young University?
Ernest Leroy Wilkinson was named BYU president in 1951 and served until 1971, when he resigned.
Born in Ogden, Utah, he was 52 in 1951 and had spent the previous decades as an East Coast lawyer. Wilkinson had quietly campaigned to become president of the Latter-day Saint Church-owned school and earned First Presidency Counselor J. Reuben Clark’s support, among others.
His appointment heralded a period of considerable growth and change. Wilkinson could be feisty, single-minded, and wholly committed to the idea of BYU as a national, if not world, showplace of Latter-day Saint educational ideals.
What did BYU look like at that time in terms of enrollment, buildings, budget, and so forth?
Labeling Brigham Young University before Wilkinson as a kind of Church academy (high school) may be too harsh. It had some very good faculty who really wanted to support and expand Latter-day Saint higher education. But they lacked resources and leadership.
Statistical growth
Under Wilkinson:
- The student body grew more than fourfold to 25,000.
- The faculty tripled.
- Colleges and departments more than doubled.
- Library holdings increased nearly 500%.
- The number of buildings jumped twentyfold, with more than $143 million invested in the school’s physical campus.
- Annual Church subsidies rose fifteenfold to $22 million.
What were some of Wilkinson’s notable first acts as BYU President?
Three initiatives were central to President Wilkinson’s vision for the future of Brigham Young University:
- Attracting students
- Increasing expenditures
- Boosting funding
While student enrollments rose from 1,800 in 1945 to more than 4,000 four years later (thanks mostly to the GI bill), Wilkinson knew that growth could only be sustained with an aggressive recruitment program.
He also knew that while Church appropriations had jumped after the war due to much-needed capital improvements, they had fallen the year he took office by more than 27 percent to $1.5 million.
As enrollments increased, so did annual expenditures.
Thus, shortly after arriving on campus, he proposed to the school’s Board of Trustees (composed almost entirely of top-level Church officials) that selected faculty accompany church leaders to wards and branches throughout the U.S. to extol the benefits of BYU.
As a result, fall 1952 student enrollments rose more than 25 percent over the previous year’s.
As enrollments increased, so did annual expenditures—jumping more than $64 million from 1950 to 1970. Annual Church subsidies during the same 20-year period rose $20.3 million.
President Wilkinson’s Personality and Administration Style
What was his personality and governance style like?
Ernest L. Wilkinson combined a domineering personality, an unrelenting drive, and an autocratic leadership style.
According to BYU’s official history, which Wilkinson helped oversee, he could be “abrupt,” “inflexible,” “gruff,” and “inconsiderate.”
Church Apostle and later President Harold B. Lee publicly characterized Wilkinson as “tempestuous,” “strong-willed,” and “powerful in speech.”
What were some of Ernest Wilkinson’s nicknames?
For both his supporters and his critics, Wilkinson was:
- “Little General”
- “Little Caesar”
- “Little Napoleon”
- “Tasmanian Devil”
- “that evil genius”
Wilkinson found it difficult to take no for an answer. How did this personality trait yield results?
BYU’s growth was a direct result of Ernest Wilkinson’s tenacity. Of course, whether a less combative president could have accomplished more is unknowable.
He strongly believed in his vision and lived to work. He espoused what he termed a “pragmatic spirituality,” and routinely spent weekends—including Sundays—in his office, which custodial staff christened the “hornet’s nest.”
Wilkinson once explained to his secretary:
I am not unaware of the fact that at times I seem to be unreasonable and unyielding.…
If I sometimes offend people it is not because I want to, but because I am determined to get something done.
On another occasion, Wilkinson publicly explained, in words that just as easily described himself:
In making decisions, the administrator may often have to reject the advice of his closest advisors, and because of the close personal relationship, this is one of the most difficult tasks that I find for an administrator.
In one sense it requires more courage than a physical encounter. But somehow lieutenants must be taught to learn that the decision must be that of the leader …
[Then] the administrator must see that [his decision] is enforced and respected by all those who are governed by it.
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How did Ernest L. Wilkinson use intense meeting preparation to accomplish his agenda?
Wilkinson was famous among BYU’s trustees for over-preparing for board meetings. He understood clearly that one of his first priorities was “to convert” trustees to his vision of BYU—even to the exclusion of a good working relationship with his faculty.
He “spent lots of time preparing for … Trustees meetings.”
Wilkinson’s strategy was simple: present his proposals for change to the board, secure the board’s endorsement, and implement the board’s decision as official policy.
“New brooms sweep cleaner than old,” he told an early confidant, “and I know that while I’m new, I have a better chance with the board.”
Harold B. Lee anecdote
A member of BYU’s faculty once reported Elder Harold B. Lee telling him, only half-jokingly:
Ernest comes in here [to Board of Trustees meetings] with the most elaborate set of hogwash that I have ever seen to justify his need for money.
And he always gets it because there is no point at which you can attack it; there is no point where you can show that it is wrong; there is no point where you can show a fallacy in his argument.
Did Wilkinson lose any meaningful battles?
I can think of two examples in which Wilkinson was on the losing side of an important issue:
- The proposal to relocate Ricks College (now BYU Idaho) from Rexburg to Idaho Falls.
- Wilkinson’s junior college initiative.
Wilkinson’s plans for the future of Latter-day Saint higher education included moving Ricks to a city he believed offered greater growth potential than Rexburg and establishing a nationwide network of church-owned junior colleges in cities of strategic importance.
Freshmen and sophomores would first attend the junior colleges, then transfer to BYU (assuming they continued their education).
Wilkinson believed that catering to a student body of juniors and seniors would help maintain the community feel of the Church school, which he counted as one of BYU’s primary advantages. He feared high enrollments would erode the social benefits BYU offered students.
To say that Wilkinson was disappointed is an understatement.
President David O. McKay and Church trustees changed their minds four or so times about relocating Ricks and, in the face of unrelenting opposition from Rexburg business and Church leaders, eventually decided to keep Ricks in Rexburg.
The junior college plan proved too expensive for Church leaders to stomach, especially given the existence of Church Institutes already serving the needs of members attending state and non-Latter-day Saint universities.
To say that Wilkinson was disappointed by these rejections is an understatement.
How was Ernest L. Wilkinson viewed by his BYU faculty?
The director of BYU Public Relations remembered, “Lots of people go away shaking their heads at that man [Wilkinson]. It’s just that he makes them so angry, and it goes back to that lawyer’s training.”
The dean of the Fine Arts College noted: Wilkinson was “raised under the motto, ‘If you are right, plead for the law. If you are wrong, shout like hell and get your way anyhow.”
One of Wilkinson’s assistants recalled:
He was willing to make decisions, and I always was grateful to work with somebody who could and would make decisions, who had in mind where he was going and what he wanted to accomplish. I had dealt with other bosses who could never make up their minds, and found it frustrating, so I was grateful to be working with a man who didn’t have that problem.
How did Wilkinson react to the perceptions of BYU faculty?
“I can’t see why people get angry,” Wilkinson once commented.
“In law we fight with each other, but we go to lunch right after because that’s part of our game. I find now that oftentimes I talk to people and I find them getting angry because we differ.”
Why did Hugh Nibley want to leave BYU, and how did Wilkinson persuade him to stay?
Hugh Nibley felt he wasn’t sufficiently appreciated at BYU and thought he could gain more respect by moving to the University of Utah.
First, Wilkinson, then J. Reuben Clark, met with and eventually persuaded him to stay at Brigham Young University.
Wilkinson’s meeting with Hugh Nibley
On February 2, 1955, Wilkinson recorded:
I had a conference with Hugh Nibley, who had been sold on going to the University of Utah on the strange theory that he could do more for the Church there than he could at the Brigham Young University.
It was quite apparent that his main grievance, however, was that we had ‘not made enough of him’ at the B.Y.U. He had never been invited to give any university-wide lectures to the student body, whereas they always made a ‘fuss’ over him whenever he went to the University of Utah.
Wilkinson arranges for J. Reuben Clark to meet with Nibley
The next day, after meeting with the executive committee of BYU’s Board of Trustees to review the Nibley situation, President Wilkinson:
arranged for President [ J. Reuben] Clark to see Hugh Nibley, which he did at his home on Saturday, February 5, at 11 a.m.
President Clark reported to me afterwards that as he left he thought he had changed his mind. President Clark pointed out to him that, if he went to the University of Utah, he could not under any circumstance openly proclaim the Gospel and publish treatises on the Gospel as a part of his professional duties, as he would be permitted at the B.Y.U.
President Clark’s recollection
J. Reuben Clark, in his diary, recorded the meeting with Hugh Nibley:
As he [Nibley] came in for the interview, I gathered the impression from his observations that he had quite made up his mind to go.
In accounting for his attitude he affirmed that our scholarship was way down at the Y, that they wanted him to build up the Humanities Department at the University [of Utah] and apparently were offering him advantages, as he thought, at the University which he did not have at the Y. He seemed to feel that he was not appreciated at the Y …
He said that he was never called on to make any speeches at the Y, though others were; that he was tied down very loosely at the Y, apparently by teaching, and had no opportunity to get away … He seemed not happy at the Y.
Clark replied that “there were three things that I had in mind that needed to be done for our Church that could be and should be done at the Y”:
- Undertaking “our own” translation of the Bible.
- Studying the early Christian heresies, some of which contained “statements of true principles which the Church had thrown away,” as well as the teachings of the early Church Fathers.
- “Cracking the Aztec codes.”
President Clark:
pointed out that if he went to the University he would be going to a State institution; that the State institution had no business to be interested in religion, that was not its function; that he would not be permitted, at the U, to write articles and work in the way of supporting Mormon doctrine, the people at least would not stand for that.
Nibley’s decision to stay at BYU
As Hugh Nibley left, he told President Clark:
“I think you have persuaded me to stay at the Y.”
Enforcing Orthodoxy at Brigham Young University
Why did Wilkinson broaden the student honor code to include various moral standards like the length of men’s hair and women’s skirts?
Ernest L. Wilkinson’s affection for students was genuine. “There is another side of this man that is not commonly know,” one of his “lieutenants” once noted.
He never wanted it known how many students [he] had helped financially. And to my knowledge, during the twelve years I worked with him closely, he literally helped hundreds of students … Most people, knowing Ernest’s responsibilities and his achievements, couldn’t ordinarily think of his having that tender side. But he has it.
From tenderness to paternalism
Eventually, however, Ernest L. Wilkinson found himself confronting a growing youth counterculture, student political and social activism, and the re-examination of traditional values—not to mention trustees who urged him to take a firmer stand.
His tenderness turned to paternalism and the regulation of behaviors previously untouched by Brigham Young University.
BYU student Honor Code examples
These responses to modernity included:
- Delineating the length of men’s hair and women’s skirts
- Broadening the student honor code to include infractions of the church’s moral standards
- Prohibiting certain kinds of music, dances, films, publications, and speakers
- Enlisting students to monitor suspected politically subversive faculty.
What were some of the specific enemies of orthodoxy in Wilkinson’s eyes?
Ernest L. Wilkinson was conservative—politically and religiously/theologically. And he occasionally faced off against more intellectually adventurous faculty, whose beliefs, he feared, could jeopardize relations with some members of a board of trustees already leery of unfettered thought.
“It may be that there are certain isolated statements made by different members of the General Authorities with which some … could not agree,” he believed, “but it is incumbent upon all … at the BYU to support these General Authorities in the performance of the functions of their various offices.”
Anyone guilty of destroying the faith of a student may not remain on this faculty.
President Wilkinson
Three years after assuming the BYU presidency, he warned teachers: “anyone guilty of destroying the faith of a student may not remain on this faculty.”
Organic evolution and paying less than a full tithe were early bugbears.
Later, in the 1960s, his faculty’s political views became his chief focus and irritant.
What methods did President Wilkinson use to verify that student and faculty conformity was adequately orthodox?
Enforcement of the student Honor Code
For students, whereas cheating had previously been the principal focus of BYU’s interest in student behavior, under Wilkinson, the focus expanded to include infractions of:
- The Word of Wisdom
- Student housing
- Dress and grooming
- Sexual behaviors
In 1959, Wilkinson told students:
In certain strata of our society there has grown up the false code that one ought not to ‘rat’ on friends … This is the code of the underworld. It is the code of those who engage in prostitution, other forms of moral debauchery and crime of all description.
He argued that “those who do not engage in crime hardly require this protection and therefore need not subscribe to this nefarious code.”
Securing faculty compliance
Enforcement of the school’s Honor Code gradually shifted from students to the administration. Tools of compliance included warning, suspension, and expulsion.
Punishments for staff and faculty typically included restricted or reassigned work assignments, nonrenewal of teaching contracts, and termination.
How did Wilkinson know whether BYU faculty paid a full tithe?
In the 1950s and early 1960s, Wilkinson focused on faculty church attendance, especially the payment of full tithe. For a time, he accessed official Church tithing records to monitor and enforce faculty compliance.
By the end of the spring semester of 1960, more than 30 BYU employees had been released for non-payment of full tithing.
Eventually, however, the Church stopped providing Wilkinson with detailed tithing information, and later attempts to access tithing records to determine faculty promotion or student admission were unsuccessful.
How else did Wilkinson monitor student and faculty compliance?
In addition to his temporary review of faculty tithing records, Wilkinson assured conformity among students and faculty through measures such as annual ecclesiastical interviews and swifter punishments (which were implemented after he resigned).
Ernest L. Wilkinson and the 1966 BYU “Spy Ring”
What happened in 1966 that led Wilkinson to surveil BYU faculty?
Prior to 1965, Ernest L. Wilkinson usually relied on subordinates to handle complaints about faculty members he considered liberal-leaning. With time, however, he grew frustrated that such efforts seemed to produce only anonymous or hearsay testimony, and he concluded that he needed a more direct approach.
Sometime by early April 1966, Wilkinson decided to deliver a university-wide, politically charged talk deliberately crafted to provoke comment from the school’s more outspoken faculty. He then enlisted the aid of one or more students to report on said teachers’ responses.
Armed with eyewitness evidence of the professors’ “disloyalty,” Wilkinson believed he would be best equipped to secure their punishments.
How did Ernest L. Wilkinson gather information about BYU faculty?
Wilkinson secured the aid of one of his lieutenants, who contacted an undergraduate in economics who, the administrator believed, was “dependable, honest, and capable.”
His underling handed the student a list of 8 (eventually 12) faculty members to surveil. The student reached out to similarly minded undergraduates, some of whom attended classes taught by the targeted professors. These included classes they were not enrolled in.
Students asked the professors leading questions and reported back on the answers.
On the day Wilkinson delivered his address, the students asked the professors leading questions about the talk, and reported back on the teachers’ answers.
A 12-page summary of the students’ reports soon reached Wilkinson.
What happened when people found out?
Within about three months, rumors of an administration-sponsored student spy ring began to spread on campus.
Wilkinson tried to downplay and deflect the controversy, but following a series of investigations by high-level campus administrators, the charges of spying were sustained.
How did he feel about the public outcry?
Wilkinson believed the whole affair had been overblown, describing the incident to President McKay as a minor difficulty in impressing on faculty that they “not advocate socialism or the welfare state.”
Years later, one of the targeted faculty members observed, “In our culture, a higher level of perfection is expected of those who are powerful and preside over us … It is perhaps unfair to them as they are not without human weakness.”
When Wilkinson balked at telling the complete truth about the 1966 spy ring:
he was compelled by the pressures of his status, which we conferred upon him, to cover himself. And once he dissembled he became a prisoner entrapped by a web of deceit. He was compelled to protect his power and preserve his pride.
Does Ernest L. Wilkinson admit in his diaries to having BYU students spy on professors?
Wilkinson typically avoided any direct mention of the activity that may have implicated him in using students to monitor faculty.
The administrator he enlisted to deal directly with the leader of the student spies was more forthcoming in his diary.
He parsed his words.
Following Wilkinson’s departure from the presidency in 1971, he remained defiant regarding his involvement in the spy ring. A year before his death in April 1978, he parsed his words, insisting:
I never made one speech on campus about my political views, except to the extent that the Board of Trustees had previously declared. I didn’t want my administration here at BYU to be dove-tailed with politics.
I did not authorize students to use tape recordings of any kind. Students were never organized by the administration to spy.
Ernest L. Wilkinson on his role in the BYU spy ring (emphasis added).
While perhaps technically accurate in only the most narrow definition of “authorize,” “organized,” and “spy,” Wilkinson’s denial skirted larger questions.
Did he act alone?
Wilkinson believed he had President David O. McKay’s support.
Before delivering his April 1966 talk, he met with McKay to preview a draft of his remarks. He knew that McKay’s approval would help to ensure that any criticism of Wilkinson could be viewed as criticism of the prophet.
According to McKay’s diary, as kept by his secretary, Clare Middlemiss, the increasingly infirm president:
listened with interest to the talk President Wilkinson has prepared … against Communism or any issue [a]ffecting the freedom of the people of this country. I approved in general of the talk he will give.
After word of the spy ring began circulating publicly, Wilkinson met with McKay to remind him of his previous instructions that
teachers ought not to object to [Wilkinson] knowing what they teach, nor to students reporting on the same so long as the Administrator [Wilkinson] is careful in properly evaluating such reports … [and] that is my [Wilkinson’s] responsibility to see that Atheism, Communism, and Socialism are not to be advocated by BYU teachers.
Wilkinson made certain that McKay signed a statement attesting to this understanding, should he ever need to provide proof that he had merely been following McKay’s instructions.
Whether or not McKay, whose mental/physical health was in decline, fully understood the document he signed or the complete background of the controversy remains an open question.
Ernest Wilkinson’s Relationships with Church Leaders
How did he distinguish between a general authority’s spiritual and administrative roles?
Wilkinson understood that the Church’s leadership could be both inspired and human. Early on, he realized that working with a Board of Trustees—his 15 “bosses”—could be as frustrating as managing a diverse faculty.
While most board meetings were orderly, congenial, and harmonious, others were marked by special interests, divided loyalties, personality clashes, and outright feuds.
Even the brethren can be better inspired if they know what the facts are.
Ernest L. Wilkinson
“Try as best as the Brethren do to resolve their differences,” he once explained, “there still are individual differences in judgment and I suppose always will be.”
After his first 10 years as president, Wilkinson noted:
Even the brethren can be better inspired if they know what the facts are when they decide a question and I don’t believe that the good Lord intended that they would always be inspired when they made decisions without the facts when those facts are available.
How did these working relationships affect him?
Near the end of Wilkinson’s 20 years at BYU, the strain of the presidency was taking a toll.
“The Brethren really are not interested in what is going on at the Brigham Young University except for decisions which they have to make,” he recorded in his diary in early 1970, “so from now on they will get a famine of information; I will confine it just to the decisions which they make, some of which they will make without the basic information which they must have.”
The strain of the presidency was taking a toll.
The next year, as he spoke to the board of his departure, he was more mellow: “I told them this church belonged as much to me as it did to them, and that therefore I felt I had a right to express my opinion.”
Less than three years before his death, he had grown philosophical:
One of the peculiarities of Mormonism is that administrators can get together and gripe as to the decisions of the board but in the end they are deeply loyal to those decisions.
Describe the highs and lows of Wilkinson’s relationship with President David O. McKay.
There’s no question that David O. McKay became Wilkinson’s strongest advocate and champion at BYU. While he used his oratorical skills and legal training to their fullest, Wilkinson carefully and deliberately nurtured a “special arrangement” with McKay.
Wilkinson termed this “priming” and “lobbying.”
How did Wilkinson’s relationship with President McKay give him an advantage at work?
Wilkinson’s attentions to McKay gave him privileged access to the president.
As chair of BYU’s Board of Trustees, McKay, with his one vote, could—and sometimes did—overrule an otherwise unanimous board.
“He could get an audience with President McKay when he needed to,” wrote Wilkinson’s financial aide:
Sometimes [when] the Board wouldn’t give him something [that] he thought the school needed, he’d got to President McKay and get it on a short cut which wasn’t good procedure, I suppose, and it didn’t make the Board happy.
How did Wilkinson adapt to President McKay’s declining health?
When McKay’s health began to fail in the mid-1960s, Wilkinson’s support started to erode.
“It generally happens when the leadership is not able to crack the whip, his lieutenants start feuding, and this unfortunately is true at the present time,” he wrote in 1965.
Two years later, he added:
When there is no one person in active charge, there is a tendency for the brethren to go off in opposite directions …
This is most unfortunate and lends itself to great difficulty in administration at the BYU.
How did Wilkinson respond when others emulated his bureaucratic shortcuts?
Ernest Wilkinson hated faculty making their own direct appeals to sympathetic general authorities. He believed that such actions were breaches of administrative protocol and evidence of disloyalty, if not sabotage.
I think the very few faculty who engaged in this did so only because they felt that they could not get a fair hearing with Wilkinson, who, they worried, would misrepresent their beliefs and actions.
This was especially true during the 1966 spy ring, when some of the faculty targeted by Wilkinson were convinced that Wilkinson could not be trusted.
What did other general authorities think of Wilkinson’s “special arrangement” with President McKay?
BYU Trustees were well aware of Wilkinson’s penchant for sometimes dealing directly with President McKay—and more than a few of them didn’t like it.
I think it’s telling that when Wilkinson returned from his 1964 run for the U.S. Senate, trustees made certain not to reappoint him as Church Commissioner of Education, a position he’d held since the 1950s.
Similarly, when a new Commissioner (Neal A. Maxwell) was appointed, Wilkinson was instructed that henceforth he would report only to the new Commissioner.
What caused Wilkinson to clash with President Henry D. Moyle and Elder Harold B. Lee?
It’s tempting—but not entirely incorrect—to suggest that in many cases (maybe the majority), Wilkinson’s clashes stemmed from differences in personality.
Both President Henry D. Moyle and Elder Harold B. Lee did not hesitate to speak their minds—especially when their views differed from Wilkinson’s. They could be short-tempered, blunt, and did not tolerate pushback easily.
Wilkinson’s hard-court press to relocate Ricks College and to champion his junior colleges, his occasional end runs to President McKay, his calls for increased church spending at BYU, and his partisan politics gradually contributed to Elder Lee’s quiet moves to have Wilkinson replaced as president.
Wilkinson sensed this, especially after President McKay’s death, and more or less voluntarily resigned.
How did politics influence those relationships?
Wilkinson’s clashes with President Hugh B. Brown, in addition to their different personalities, stemmed from their opposing political orientations.
Wilkinson was a Barry Goldwater/George Wallace conservative; Brown was more of a Kennedy/Johnson liberal. This oversimplifies both men’s politics, but I think it paints a picture.
Ernest L. Wilkinson’s Legacy
Why was the BYU student union building named after Ernest L. Wilkinson?
In 1965, after Wilkinson returned to BYU following his unsuccessful U.S. Senate run, the Board of Trustees informed him that they had decided to name the new $6 million student union center after him in recognition and appreciation of his contributions to the school.
(They’d also released him as Commissioner of Education, and the naming of the new building may have been intended to help soften the blow.)
How much money did Wilkinson raise for the Church at BYU?
By the time of Wilkinson’s resignation, school officials counted on income from all sources totaling over $67 million.
In addition to increases in student tuition and church subsidies, Ernest L. Wilkinson hoped to improve the school’s finances through several fundraising drives. He believed “a person’s loyalty ought to be judged by response to appeals from the University.”
Initially, BYU trustees worried that such programs would compete with tithing donations. But when the Ford Foundation gave $1.2 million to BYU in 1956 as part of a nationwide campaign to improve faculty salaries, Church leaders embraced the possibility of outside revenue and Wilkinson arranged for the appointment of a full-time fundraiser.
Wilkinson also tried to require BYU students to take out life insurance policies naming BYU as the beneficiary.
Wilkinson’s fundraiser found it easiest to solicit funds by canvassing Latter-day Saint wards and stakes, and when trustees learned of negative reactions from some local Church leaders, the fundraiser was called on a mission.
Wilkinson also tried to require BYU students to take out life insurance policies naming BYU as the beneficiary. The program failed to gain traction and was abandoned.
What is Wilkinson’s legacy at Brigham Young University?
Ernest L. Wilkinson insisted that BYU’s growth—student body, faculty, physical campus, budgets, church appropriations—was actually one of his “lesser accomplishments.”
His greatest achievement, he believed, was the establishment of BYU campus stakes to service the spiritual and social needs of the school’s students.
Nonetheless, Wilkinson took pride in the growth he initiated, oversaw, and fought for.
On his last day at BYU, President Wilkinson recorded:
I have mixed feelings as I leave the Institution, but I do wish that I had been able to do more of the things which in my judgment would have been good for the school. I may, of course, have been wrong.
(I suspect he had in mind his Ricks College and junior college initiatives.)
Of course, Wilkinson did not act alone at BYU. He gathered around him a corps of carefully chosen administrators who shared his impossible vision, even if they sometimes disagreed with his methods.
Whatever place BYU has come to occupy… it owes in large measure to the efforts of Ernest L. Wilkinson.
He also enjoyed the nearly unqualified support of President McKay.
But it was his single-minded drive to mold Brigham Young University into the kind of educational institution that would command the respect of American academe that set forever after the direction and guided the course of Latter-day Saint higher education.
Whatever place BYU has come to occupy in the Latter-day Saint community and beyond, it owes in large measure to the efforts of Ernest L. Wilkinson.
Did you ever meet Wilkinson?
I met Ernest L. Wilkinson once, in February 1977, a little more than a year before he passed away. I was an undergraduate at BYU, enrolled in a journalism class.
I had decided to write an article documenting BYU’s history with academic freedom and made an appointment to interview Wilkinson about his involvement a decade earlier in using students to monitor certain faculty.
I left my encounter with Wilkinson equal parts impressed and intimidated.
At the time, his office filled a small BYU-owned house across the street to the east of the Latter-day Saint Missionary Training Center, north of Brigham Young University’s main campus.
When I arrived at the house, what struck me most was Wilkinson’s physical bearing. He was short, thin, a little stooped, but he grabbed my hand to shake with such force that I would have guessed he was in his 50s, not 70s. Despite a heart attack a month earlier, he was lucid, vigorous, and direct.
I left my encounter with Wilkinson equal parts impressed and intimidated. I suspect that may have been his intention.
Editorial Note: The majority, if not all, of the source references for the quotations above may be found in the editor’s introduction to Educating Zion: The Diaries of BYU President Ernest L. Wilkinson, 1951-1971.
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About the Scholar
Gary James Bergera was the managing director of Signature Books from 1984 to 2000 and the managing director of the Smith-Pettit Foundation from 2001 to 2022. He is author/co-author or editor/co-editor of twelve books. He edited the diaries of Church Historian Leonard J. Arrington, published in three volumes as Confessions of a Mormon Historian. His one-volume annotated abridgement of Wilkinson’s diaries, Educating Zion: The Diaries of BYU President Ernest L. Wilkinson, 1952-1971, was published by Signature Books in November 2025. His publications have received awards from the Mormon History Association, the Utah Historical Society, and the Dialogue Foundation. He served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Mormon History and the John Whitmer Historical Association Journal. He is the 2018 recipient of the Leonard J. Arrington lifetime achievement award from the Mormon History Association.
Further Reading
Read more From the Desk articles about the topics, themes, and people from Ernest L. Wilkinson’s diaries:
- Why Did President Wilkinson Offer Lowell Bennion a BYU Faculty Position?
- Was Truman Madsen a Candidate to Replace Wilkinson?
- What Were Baseball Baptisms?
- Is D. Michael Quinn a Reliable Scholar?
- How Did President Kimball Receive the 1978 Priesthood Revelation?
Ernest L. Wilkinson Resources
Read what other top scholars and publishers say about Ernest Leroy Wilkinson:
- Educating Zion: The Diaries of BYU President Ernest L. Wilkinson, 1952–1971 (Signature Books)
- Ernest L. Wilkinson and the 1966 BYU Spy Ring [PDF] (Dialogue)
- Loyal Opposition: Ernest L. Wilkinson’s Role in Founding the BYU Law School (BYU Studies)
- Ernest L. Wilkinson’s 1964 Bid for the U.S. Senate (Utah Historical Quarterly)
- A Strange Phenomena: Ernest L. Wilkinson, the LDS Church, and Utah Politics (Dialogue)
- Dr. Wilkinson’s 1992 Obituary (Deseret News)
One reply on “Who Was Ernest L. Wilkinson?”
My wife and I were members of the BYU 1st (Married Students) Ward in the fall of 1962, and on one particular Sunday, Pres. Wilkinson was the speaker in our sacrament meeting. It was a very warm day, and the old campus building in which we met (now long since demolished) had no air conditioning. All the little babies (including our three month old son) were fussing due to the uncomfortable heat, and when our bishop (Rulon G. Craven, later a General Authority Seventy and secretary to the Quorum of the Twelve) introduced Pres. Wilkinson as the concluding speaker, he apologized for the commotion. Pres. Wilkinson responded, “Bishop Craven, I’ve never read in the scriptures that the cries of little children are displeasing to the Lord!” My wife leaned over to me and whispered, “I could kiss him!”