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Drawing on President Kimball's Second Century Address, President Oaks urges us to stand tall in the gospel and embrace our uniqueness at BYU.

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"My dear brothers and sisters, I am thrilled to be with you. As president of BYU for nine years, I heard many lectures and devotional addresses. The most memorable talks during that period were not those that only reaffirmed familiar subjects or introduced new facts but those that changed a way of thinking about a subject. I hope that something I say today will suggest or reinforce a helpful way of thinking about something important in your life.

I.
In one of the first devotional assemblies in the fall of 1975, President Spencer W. Kimball delivered his inspired address “The Second Century of Brigham Young University.”1 I was then president of Brigham Young University, so I listened to and subsequently pondered his talk as intently as any person living.

The subject was that Brigham Young University has “a double heritage,”2 being concerned with both “the secular and the spiritual.”3 Thus, President Kimball explained, BYU must not be shackled by “worldly ideologies and concepts.”4 “It must not [allow itself to] be made over in the image of the world.”5 As he neared his conclusion, he repeated that challenge:

As previous First Presidencies have said, and we say again to you, we expect (we do not simply hope) that Brigham Young University will . . . “Become a unique university in all of the world!”6

What must BYU do in its second century to secure and magnify that uniqueness? The first way BYU will be unique is that it won’t desert or dilute existing truth. President Kimball explained:

BYU . . . must continue to resist false fashions in education, staying with those basic principles that have proved right and have guided good men and women and good universities over the centuries.7

A second way BYU will be a unique university is its focus on undergraduate education:

While the discovery of new knowledge must increase, there must always be a heavy and primary emphasis on . . . the quality of teaching at BYU . . . [that] includes a quality relationship between faculty and students.8

A third and vital source of uniqueness is our personal and institutional relationship with God:

We expect the natural unfolding of knowledge to occur as a result of scholarship, but there will always be that added dimension that the Lord can provide when we are qualified to receive and He chooses to speak.9

President Kimball also spoke about our relationship with other universities:

We can sometimes make concord with others, including scholars who have parallel purposes. . . .

In other instances, we must be willing to break with the educational establishment (not foolishly or cavalierly, but thoughtfully and for good reason) in order to find gospel ways to help mankind. Gospel methodology, concepts, and insights can help us to do what the world cannot do in its own frame of reference.10

Please note that President Kimball and other First Presidencies are not asking BYU to be a unique university just by being different. Our uniqueness will always be rooted in our following the inspiration that we prayerfully seek in our personal work and that we receive from the university administration and our prophetic leaders. When leaders such as Elder Jeffrey R. Holland and Commissioner Clark G. Gilbert and President Kevin J Worthen repeat the same counsel and give the same challenges, hear it for what it is: inspired direction for what BYU and we must be and become."