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Inauguration - President Eric B. Shumway

Aloha! President Hunter, Elder Maxwell, Elder Eyring, Sister Elaine Jack, President Lee, and all distinguished representatives of academia, of government, the Department of Education, Hawaii's business community, members of BYU-Hawaii's several advisory boards, our faculty, staff, students, loyal alumni and friends. You all do our campus great honor by your presence, for obviously much more is happening here than the installing of a new president.

We are celebrating today the very idea of Brigham Young University-Hawaii Campus, its value, its heritage, and, though small in size, its power for good in the world. We are very pleased that President Rex Lee is with us today--he has been a friend and inspirational role model to me for many years. I enjoy reminding him that whenever I meet distinguished people in the world, or when they come here, they seem delighted to learn that Brigham Young University has another campus in Provo, Utah.

As I look out over this vast congregation, the names and faces of significant others come to mind--many of whom have passed away, but who, with immense courage and infinite dedication to detail, built and blessed this institution under the direction of the Lord and his living prophet, David O. McKay: Vaun Clissold, Ralph Woolley, Wendell Mendenhall, Joseph Wilson, George Q. Cannon, Arthur Haycock, and an army of volunteer labor missionaries who, with stone and steel and sweat, built this campus out of a swamp that used to be a cane field.

Much of the list of men and women who volunteered their labor to construct these buildings and the Polynesian Cultural Center, reads like an honor roll from some heroic Polynesian genealogy--names such as Kekauoha, Kanahele, Keawe, Kekuaokalani, Feinga, Pulotu, Kauvaka, Afuvai, Magalei, Na'utu, TeNgaio, TeHira, Wihongi, and Uale, to name only a few. To all of them who have gone before, we extend our reverence and deepest gratitude.

Also in the audience are four of the seven former presidents of BYU-Hawaii/ Church College of Hawaii--men of stature and ability whose contributions significantly shaped this University and determined its growth and influence. I pay tribute to all the former presidents: to President Reuben Law, who in 1954 and 55, carried the initial burden of organizing the first administration, recruiting the first faculty, enrolling our first students, and holding our first classes in Army surplus buildings hauled in and set up on a temporary site in Laie. To Richard Wootten who guided Church College of Hawaii to its initial accreditation as a four-year college in the early 60s. To Owen Cook, a kind and godly man who memorized the names and faces of all the students. To Stephen Brower, who first articulated the four comprehensive goals which provide the primary focus of the University even today. To Dan Andersen, the consummate peacemaker, whose manner and trusting nature breathed new meaning into the concept of servant leadership. To Elliot Cameron, whose tough love and unrelenting desire for a "first class" institution lifted the sights of the entire University family. And to Alton Wade, who was the exemplar of integrity, courage, and cheerful acceptance of responsibility beyond the campus boundaries. His vision of the University's international significance to the Church gave us all new eyes to see our mission and our future more clearly.

In every case, these men were assisted by companions of equal stature, if not superior nobility. To you, Leda Law, Helen Wootten, Ellen Cook, Vivian Brower, Lina Anderson, Maxine Cameron, and Diana Wade, a million alohas and mahalos for the grace, spirituality, and elegance you brought to this campus.

This special group of seven "first ladies" of this campus is now joined by the eighth, Carolyn, my beloved wife of 31 years. As some of you know, after a 27-year leave from her own academic studies to concentrate on rearing our seven children, she returned to the classroom three years ago. Taking one course a semester she finally completed her bachelor's degree here in June of this year. Her unfailing love has been the wind beneath my wings, her counsel like the words of the Lord.

That love and that counsel are infinitely more and better than mere sentiment. Let me illustrate: A few weeks ago, she and I attended an elegantly prepared dinner in honor of F. William Gay, who was retiring from the Polynesian Cultural Center Board of Directors after 31 years of faithful service. Many distinguished persons were present, including President and Sister Hunter. Elder Dallin Oaks and his wife, June, presided at our table.

The whole occasion was aglow with friendship and appreciation. It was an emotional time for me, too, since I would also be leaving the PCC Board of Directors. To intensify my emotions, immediately after the tribute dinner, Carolyn would be boarding a plane for San Diego for a week, and I would be flying back to Hawaii alone.

Now, I'm a moony fellow and hate any kind of separation from my life's companion. Over the years, however, Carolyn has always provided those extra strokes of reassurance and love at such times of parting. She's an inveterate hider of love notes in my luggage when I travel. So I was not surprised during this elegant dinner to see her writing me a note on a 3x5 card. My heart warmed at her sense of timing. What a tribute to her love for me that, even in the wonderful distraction of this event, she would not forget my need. She handed me the note under the table. I knew it would begin with something like, "Dearest Adorable." Here was the message: Dearest Adorable, Please try to avoid shaking the table when you move in your chair. Every-one's goblet has jiggled 4 different times from your jolts. Adoringly, (Smiling face drawn.)

It was perfect instruction. It was love manifest in the dimension of real concern, not just in sentimental signals, as valuable and as important as those signals are. I, like many of us, especially students, wanted strokes of pity; what I needed was a shot of reality. I wanted expressions of love. They were given in the best sense of that word. I thought I needed a pat on the head, as it were; what I really needed was better table manners. Besides saying something about Carolyn, this little homely anecdote obviously provides, by extension, some wonderful perspectives for the new president that accompany the magnificent instruction of this day.

No expression of mine can convey the joy we all feel at this moment, especially for your magnificent words of love and admonition, President Hunter. I accept them with all my heart to be my walk and talk throughout my tenure as president of BYU-Hawaii. And for your clarion message, Elder Maxwell, and for other messages spoken, prayed, or sung today: In the language of the psalmist, they are for me as the words of the Lord, "pure words: as silver purified seven times" (Psalms 12:6). I will "lay [them] in my heart" (Deut 11:18) and they shall be "a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path" (Psalms 19:105).

We have mentioned that today is a celebration of BYU-Hawaii, originally founded as Church College of Hawaii forty years ago. It is significant that "Hawaii" is in both titles. For us, Hawaii suggests more than just a place for a serious educational institution. Our Hawaiian kupuna tell us that Ha means "the breath of life," and Wai'i "ever living water." The Aloha Spirit of the Aloha State permeates this campus, and two of Hawaii's mightiest ideals are at the very heart of education here, "Harmony amidst Diversity," and Ua mau ke ea o ka `aina i ka pono, "The life of the land is preserved in righteousness." We hold it an inviolate truth that that life and that harmony can be preserved only in the righteousness, the intellectual and moral strength, of the rising generation--our children.

The Spirit of Aloha, so frequently expressed in hospitality, charming smiles, and wonderful music, also has much to do with peace and unity, (ho'o lokahi); spiritual well-being, (pono `uhane); faith, (mana'o'i'o); forgiveness, (huikala); and fidelity (ho'o kupa'a). The Spirit of Aloha on this campus is synonymous with the Spirit of Christ.

Six weeks ago, in anticipation of this moment, we mailed out thousands of letters to BYUH Alumni asking for a candid appraisal of their experiences as students here, including how they would advise the new president as he assumes his responsibilities. As the letters have come back, I am fascinated by the thematic consistency with which many of our former students describe the blessings of BYU-Hawaii. Their responses, including their constructive criticism, are a clear validation of the mission and the goals of the University. Permit me to share a few of these comments.

An alumna from Indonesia expresses gratitude for her entire attitude shift in BYU-Hawaii's multicultural setting. She praised what she calls the "equally treated" environment of BYU-Hawaii. She says that here she lost both fear and prejudice, and learned to never undervalue anyone. Now, in return, "everyone is my friend as I travel the world as an apparel merchandiser for my company."

An alumna from Tahiti says she is still dressed in what she calls her "BYU-Hawaii armor," which she defines as professional skill--an increase in secular knowledge accompanied by patience, endurance, compassion, and hope.

Another recent graduate from India, not a member of the Church, now an investment banker in New York City, comments on his work there in what he describes as a setting of "delicate egos and big tempers."

He says: "I miss the homey atmosphere of BYU-Hawaii, especially the warmth and genuine love of the people that make up Laie's beautiful community. My experiences there have definitely prepared me for my work here; in many ways they have given me an edge over some of my peers who cannot seem to see the larger picture of life, and seem obsessed with a never-ending desire to want more and more, to get ahead in a race that never ends [My company] prides itself in hiring the best graduates from America's premier institutions. Watching these top recruits at work, and working with them on several projects, I have found little difference in the level of the ability between these students and the ones I studied and worked with at BYU-Hawaii."

Another former student, now practicing medicine on the Big Island, writes: "BYU-Hawaii campus stands on hallowed ground, set apart by prophets of the Lord for the training of young minds to be leaders. My greatest blessing was that I found the Gospel of Jesus Christ there."

In all the letters to date, there are at least five thematic constants: 1) Gratitude for the strong religious and moral values manifest not only in the honor code which all students subscribe to, but in the curriculum as well. 2) The opportunity for a competitive academic training that prepares them for their life's work. 3) The rich interaction of people of many cultures. 4) The integration of training, theoretical study, and practical work experiences, particularly at the Polynesian Cultural Center, which is an extension of inestimable worth to our campus--educationally, culturally, and financially, and 5) a deep appreciation for a caring faculty who, as mentors, even ministers, gave them personal time and attention both inside and outside the classroom.

Two years ago when we were trying to recruit a new psychology professor from a mainland university, he made an observation about our campus that we too often take for granted. He attended a class where the students had brought refreshments to celebrate the last day of class. They called on their regular teacher to bless the food. The teacher prayed for more than a blessing on the food. He called upon the powers of heaven to bless the students as well, in their lives and in their exams. In the prospective professor's words, "How wonderful to be at a university where the teachers can literally bless their students." This professor is now with us.

The five constants repeated throughout these alumni responses regarding their Alma Mater are anchored in certain perspectives which we believe are universally true and eternal, and which give meaning and substance to BYU-Hawaii's educational mission, namely, that God is real. He is personal. We are all His children. He knows each and all of us intimately and loves us infinitely. He sent Jesus Christ into this world, our exemplar and savior. His desire is that we learn to love as He loves, to cherish one another on this planet as brothers and sisters which we are--literally.

Although customs, language, religion, and geography may accentuate our diversity, we are after all, profoundly and fundamentally connected, one race, the human race, and the family of God. He created this world for His children to possess and take care of. Our existence on this planet is not a mystery. It is not by chance. It has a profound and eternally significant purpose. And that purpose is fundamentally educational: to learn to walk by faith and from our own experience, not only to distinguish between good and evil but to choose the good and overcome the evil, for we are free agents to choose. Education helps us to make wise choices, and as more than one person has discovered, education is coming back home and knowing the place.

God our Father is the author, custodian, and advocate of all truth--truth that is apprehended through intellectual inquiry; truth that is understood feelingly through religious experience, and truth that is distilled upon the soul as wisdom from all of life's encounters. Each of these encounters has an educational function in the preparation of each soul to understand God's truth. With God our Heavenly Father, all truth, wherever found or however apprehended, is circumscribed into one great whole. Ultimately, there are no contradictions, no quarrels, no inscrutable paradoxes, no mysteries.

In the meantime, we are commanded in the scriptures, (note, commanded) to learn even by study and by faith, one not being more important than the other in this context. Robert Browning would say that life's victory is measured not so much in high accomplishment as in the quality of our aspirations and the perseverance of our struggle to know and understand. Jesus Christ has declared that the highest pursuit of knowledge is anchored in the primary aspiration to know God and his Son, Jesus Christ. "For this is life eternal that they might know thee, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent" (John 17:3).

I have learned for myself that the best education is and must be value-driven and character-developing. This kind of education unifies and blends intellect, aesthetics, character and behavior, defying the false separation of the life of the mind from the ethics of action. There should be no such thing as an "inquiring mind" apart from a "moral being." The thoughtful person, the good person, and the action person, should be, after all, the same person. By the same token, striving for good character should never be an excuse for sloppy thinking, incompetence, or what I call "premeditated ignorance;" that is, the deliberate refusal to face the intellectual and moral problems of this complex world because they are either unpleasant or may challenge our comfortable, untried assumptions.

The passion to know is inborn in all of us. It can be stifled or corrupted, or it can be guided and encouraged. Again, we are commanded to learn even by study and by faith. The act of learning truth is a vital, sacred act, even an act of worship, as President J. Reuben Clark once taught. By sacred commandment, we are charged to stretch our minds. And all of our experiences within the compass of this world, no matter how pleasant or horrific, will, as the Lord promises, "give [us] experience and be for [our ultimate] good" (D&C 122:7).

Although small and in some sense remote, BYU-Hawaii does help to illuminate a better path for education through the darkness of our times when strife and confusion grip so many of our nation's schools, and when public confidence in higher education is in steep decline. The lament over education's decline has been intoned in major national studies for over two decades from presidential commission reports and national educational surveys to public opinion polls and testimonials from educational professionals.

The warnings and prophesies of many educationists from the 60s and 70s have come to pass and are coming to pass in the 80s and 90s. Our fear of what might happen has happened. The sexual revolution and the so-called "new morality," accompanied by the worship of explicit violence and promiscuous sex as entertainment; the frenzied pursuit of personal and special interest rights, frequently at the expense of what is right--all have left many in our nation morally destitute, particularly those of the rising generation.

Religion has been banned in many ways from public service. Religious values, if not seen as the enemy of personal freedom, are too often the objects of scorn and ridicule, and are tossed into the bin of fanatical conservatism. A "new religion" of ethical relativism has now emerged and a "new gospel" of "indulge every impulse" is beginning to inundate the land, riding waves of radical philosophies of individual freedom and self-actualization.

Clearly, the problems of our schools and the society at large overlap and feed each other: the disintegration of more and more families has reached epidemic proportions; economic distress is very real; violence has divided many schools into war zones; alcohol and other drug abuse is devastating whole populations of young people; chronic student passivity toward learning is increasing; and virulent forms of identity politics rear their heads constantly.

Most tragic of all is the moral anarchy sabotaging our youth, an anarchy in which, as poet William Butler Yeats would say, "everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity" ("Second Coming"). As Jeremiah described it anciently, they obey not the moral law, "nor incline their ear, but everyone walks in the imagination of their [own] heart" (Jer 12:11).

In a recent essay by Richard Hersh, President of Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York, the author makes these all too familiar observations about young people who now attend college. The students, he says, are "fragile, not secure about who they are, fearful of [their] lack of identity, and without confidence in [their] future." They are a generation which has "experienced few authentic connections with adults in [their] lifetime." They have grown up within a "culture of neglect," a culture all too often manifested first in the home and from there pervading every other social institution, including the school.

Says Hersh: "We have failed to teach [them] an ethic of concern and to model a culture of responsibility. We have created a culture characterized by dysfunctional families [indifference, violence, and divorce,] mass schooling that demands only minimal effort, and media idols subliminally teaching disrespect for authority and wisdom. It is as if there were a conspiracy of parents and educators [and legislators] to deliberately ruin our children" (Newsweek, Sept. 26, 1994, 12-13).

Hersh speaks out of the crucible of experience as a college president. Another perceptive social commentator argues that "To reintroduce into our culture the ideas of right and wrong is the first commitment of meaningful cultural renewal. This is not a matter of self-righteous moralizing. It is a matter of compassion, for it is the vulnerable who suffer most when standards are weakened--children making choices about work, sex, and violence, when the stakes can be despair, prison, or even death. A society that is indifferent to its moral and spiritual life is indifferent to its future" (Jack Kemp, "A Cultural Renaissance." Imprimis, August 1994, 3).

Thanks to the generous investment of monetary and spiritual resources by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the guidance of its Board of Trustees, Brigham Young University stands as a mighty repository of study and learning, passionately committed to the spiritual, moral, and intellectual life of our students, our state, our nation, and our world.

At the beginning of my talk today I acknowledged several people significant to the creation and growth of this University. I would now like to conclude by mentioning others vitally significant to my own creation and growth--my parents, including my father and mother in law, Doug and Dorothy Merrill, and our seven children, Merrilli, Angela, Jeffrey, Aaron, Heather, Emily and Douglas. And other "borrowed" children who have lived with us over the years.

My father died eight years ago. Mom is too ill to be here in person but I feel the power of their love and their generous longing that I amount to something. Dad was a tough, "one-fist-of-iron-the-other-of steel" sort of person who adored his children and worshiped his wife. Mom was a very public person who taught music in the elementary schools, and whose children's choirs and operettas were the pride of the whole region for three decades.

There is one memory from my childhood which memorializes their life together and serves as a powerful admonition to me as I assume the burden of leadership of this campus. Dad owned a small service station business in tiny St. Johns, Arizona. We boys helped him in the afternoon and on weekends but his work was a straight-through, eleven hour day, six days a week. One night, when I was about thirteen years old, I came home late to find Dad at the kitchen sink doing the dishes--Mom's dishes, I thought. Dad was still in his blue Richfield uniform covered with the grease and grime from work. Mom was away conducting a rehearsal of an upcoming children's concert. Seeing Dad at the sink filled me with pity for him and indignation toward Mom.

"Why don't you make Mom do the dishes before you get home at night?" I asked, "That's her job!" My words were spoken with less bitterness than I felt at the moment. I had learned early in life never to complain about Mom in Dad's presence. Dad's answer has become a monument to his memory. "Well, sonny," he said, "I can do dishes but I can't teach kids to sing. You let your mother bless those kids with music and come here and help me finish these dishes."

As president I will do everything that I can to lead the University to new areas of excellence. Much of what I do, like Dad's doing the dishes, will be to facilitate others--our immensely gifted faculty and support staff--to bless our students more effectively.

I feel the prayers and support from our University family. My twenty-eight years on this campus as a faculty member, administrator, and citizen of the North Shore community, allow me to draw from the enormous strengths of my predecessors. They also give me the perspective of history and the absolute assurance that, as President David O. McKay declared in the beginning, "God has His hand over [this campus in this] choice land." As I have said, the harmony and peace of this campus is the result of the Aloha Spirit manifested in Christ's restored Gospel plan, uniting peoples, not dividing them. BYU-Hawaii is, in this sense, the antithesis of the "culture of neglect" that Richard Hersh describes.

Universities have not typically been places of peace. One academic described a good university as being in a state of "permanent insurrection." I'm thinking of the story of one faculty member who once described his training in another university: "I was taught how to argue instead of how to think. I was indoctrinated with the idea that challenging and contending for their own sake was a higher form of cerebral activity. Verbal power (and voice volume) were passed off as intelligence. Attacks on accepted standards were viewed as courageous, thoughtful restraint was considered cowardice, or worse, capitulation. Patience was a drag, meekness an irritant, goodness a bore. Scintillation and intensity were everything. Instead of the pursuit of truth and virtue, I was to make my case, defend my position (however outrageous), simply because I was free to do so."

We are committed at BYU-Hawaii with equal passion to train minds of budding scientists, teachers, business and other professionals, and to fill our communities with people who think with care and who care enough to think seriously and feelingly about moral improvement. My years in a university setting have taught me the value of meritorious debate and freedom of expression. But I have also learned that truth and common sense are usually the first casualties of intellectual pride and power politics--we must never allow the argumentative edge to sever the heartstrings of our own humanity.

Again, President Hunter, we rejoice in the perspective and vision you have given us today. We are like the ancient Polynesian living on a tiny and remote island, who was asked by a visiting American, "Don't you ever feel confined, restricted or claustrophobic, living on this little rock?" To which the old man replied gently, "How could I ever feel confined or restricted, surrounded as I am with this vast expanse of ocean?"

We recognize the vast ocean of possibilities and opportunities all around us--to teach, lift, and inspire our students and through them affect the world for good--which is our prayer in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.