I have underestimated the amount of dissent at BYU during the 1960s and early 1970s. Gary Bergera and Ron Priddis’s Brigham Young University: House of Faith documents a number of interesting incidents, mostly relating to the war.

Students expressed minority viewpoints on the Vietnam War through letters to the editor of the Daily Universe, columns of the BYU Young Democrats’ newsletter, and pieces in the underground newspaper, Zion’s Opinion, which ran from October 1968 to May 1969. One student, for instance, asked in a letter published in the Daily Universe: “Why should the [Vietnamese government] waste [its] own people when [it] can sucker American boys to blindly fight and die instead?” (p. 182). In a tribute to Hugh Nibley published in the May 2005 Sunstone, Omar Kader, a student at BYU during the time, wrote:

My fondest memory of Hugh is of working with him to publish a series of articles on Brigham Young’s views about war and preserving the environment in the BYU Young Democrat, a newsletter for our campus organization. The articles were printed in 1970, during the height of the furor over the Vietnam War, and much to the chagrin of the BYU administrators, whose job it was to keep even the scent of war protests out of campus life. I was president of the Young Democrats, and, because Hugh was one of us, it didn’t even occur to me that anything we did or thought was politically radical. All publications had to be submitted for approval by school officials, and many in the administration tried to block ours. However, they could not easily censor the commentary of the renowned Hugh Nibley. When Hugh contributed his articles, I always enjoyed watching the faces of certain administrators turn red when they realized how anti-war Hugh’s articles were. (p. 15)

Student organizations provided another forum for expressing political views. The Young Democrats was one of the small number of student political clubs recognized on campus. (Requests to organize chapters of the W.E.B. DuBois Club, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), and the Peace and Freedom Club were denied.) School officials apparently threatened to close down the Young Democrats on several occasions, including in 1969 when students placed a peace symbol in the Wilkinson Center, passed out anti-draft literature, and exhibited literature by Che Guevara and Malcolm X (p. 189-90).

In late 1968, the first major demonstration took place at BYU, when approximately 60 students wore black armbands at a speech by Curtis LeMay, the running mate of U.S. presidential candidate George Wallace. The students turned their backs on LeMay and applauded at inappropriate times to disrupt his address. In response school officials formulated a list of suggestions for addressing student disturbances and put together a student committee on student and civil unrest. Two years later school administrators adopted a civil disturbance plan (p. 184).

In March 1969 members of a “Free Student Coalition” delivered a list of sixteen demands to BYU officials, including demands for recognition of a student club called Mobilization for Peace, abolishment of ROTC class credit, and establishment of a civil rights week. Schools officials were not receptive.

In May 1969 President Wilkinson participated in an “interrogation” forum with nearly 300 students. He noted in his journal that he enjoyed the “give-and-take of [the] free discussion,” but felt that “from this confrontation, there is more unrest on the campus than there has been in any previous year” (p. 185). Also in May 1969 undergraduate students were asked to remove peace symbols from their dorm windows (p. 186). In the fall of 1969, Wilkinson had the school’s Code of Student Conduct changed to allow discipline in the event of “obstruction or disruption of teaching, researching, administration, disciplinary procedures, or other university activities.” Some students planned to participate in a nationwide boycott of classes in October 1969, but ASBYU officials voted to promote the idea that students should write their congressional representatives to express their opinions on the war. Some campus workshops and lectures on the war and pacificism were held during the boycott period (p. 185).

During the next several years President Wilkinson instructed BYU security officials to engage in surveillance of certain “radical” students. Some students who questioned BYU policies, including some who wrote letters to the editor of the Daily Universe, were watched by the Office of Student Life to learn if there were grounds for discipline (p. 186).

In May 1970 some students asked for authorization to collect signatures for a petition calling for gradual withdrawal of government funding for the war. School administrators responded by banning all petitions from campus. Several students challenged the move in the pages of the Daily Universe, one suggesting the existence of a double standard since an earlier petition had circulated at BYU supporting the war. Five days later school officials reversed course somewhat, allowing petitions “which do not violate the fundamental objectives of BYU” and had been given approval by school officials. A few days later school officials opted to deny services to students wearing armbands. One college dean asked faculty members to ask students not to wear armbands or to ask them to leave the classroom (p. 186-87).

In the fall of 1970 President Wilkinson distributed a flyer encouraging students to enroll in ROTC. A dozen students responded with a pamphlet that outlined legal alternatives to military service. One school official gave permission for the pamphlets to be circulated during a devotional, but Wilkinson condemned the pamphlet during the devotional. The same school official who had earlier approved circulation of the pamphlet wrote to a student leader rescinding his permission to distribute it (p. 187).

Also in the fall of 1970 a student club called Spectrum staged several anti-war skits entitled “Guerilla Theater” in the Varsity Theater. After complaints were filed, school officials closed down the production. Spectrum sponsored a discussion in early 1971 on the U.S. involvement in Vietnam which included Andrew Kimball, a grandson of President Kimball and a conscientious objector and returned missionary (p. 187-88).

One of the largest student protests at BYU, though, had nothing to do with Vietnam. In the early 1960s, more than 2000 students gathered at the football stadium, where they burned the dean of students in effigy and later egged the school cafeteria. The school was divided on the issue of whether the Christmas recess period should be extended (p. 183-84).