Description

On April 21,1966, a small group of BYU students covertly monitored pre-selected faculty regarding their responses to a politically-charged campus talk delivered by the school’s conservative president, Ernest L. Wilkinson. They then reported to the administration and Wilkinson the professors’ reactions. Wilkinson believed that members of his faculty–notably in the political science and economics departments–were advocating views contrary to his own political views, which he believed reflected the teachings of his church. Wilkinson hoped that by gathering eyewitness, first-person testimony of certain faculty members’ disloyalty, he would be best positioned to arrange for this dismissal. However, when word of the spy ring broke, Wilkinson scrambled to shield himself from the blowback, adopting a number of problematic responses. The resulting controversy, which Wilkinson termed “overblown,” remains an instructive chapter in BYU’s history.

Gary James Bergera was managing director of Signature Books from 1984 to 2000 and managing director of the Smith-Pettit Foundation from 2001 to 2022. He is author/co-author or editor/co-editor of forty-nine articles and twelve books, including the diaries of Leonard J. Arrington, published in three volumes as Confessions of a Mormon Historian. His one-volume annotated edition of the diaries of Ernest L. Wilkinson, Educating Zion: The Diaries of BYU President Ernest L. Wilkinson, was released in December 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.