During the 1960s, Wilkinson told BYU students in his annual address that participation in a serious disturbance would lead to dismissal. The tough approach wasn't one-sided: Students regularly gave his pronouncements a standing ovation.

But not all students toed the line. Late in 1968, 60 students war black armbands to a lecture by third-party vice-presidential candidate Curtis LeMay and disrupted his speech with spurts of applause.

The next spring, administrators told students to remove peace signs from dorm windows.

Then in May 1970, Wilkinson denied permission to students who wanted to circulate a petition calling for the gradual withdrawal of funding for the Vietnam War. A letter to the editor in the Daily Universe called the decision a double standard because a petition supporting the war had been allowed years earlier.

Wilkinson relented five days later.

Some of the unrest might have been generated by the toll on the BYU family. In Vietnam, 38 BYU alumni were killed, listed as missing in action or held as prisoners of war.

Conversely, there has been little publicity about at least two BYU alumni who have died in the Iraq war. Navy Lt. Nathan White died in a friendly fire incident on April 2, 2003, when a Patriot missile struck the F/A-18C Hornet he was piloting. Army Capt. Bill Jacobsen died in a mess hall bombing in Mosul on Dec. 21, 2004.

Wilkinson's successor, Dallin H. Oaks, now a member of the Quorum of the Twelve of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, called for less partisanship during his inauguration in 1971.

"I would like to suggest that Brigham Young University has no political objectives, only intellectual and spiritual ones," Oaks said. He added his belief that all people should have strong feelings about political issues but called for kinder, gentler discourse.

"I hope we can achieve a moratorium on the use of the words 'liberal' and 'conservative' on this campus. I am persuaded by observation and experience that the damage caused by the use of these words far exceeds the value of the communication they foster."

Those labels are alive and well in the current campus debate about Cheney, who might wish to be treated like another Republican vice president, Spiro Agnew.

There were rumors of a student demonstration to denounce Agnew before he spoke at BYU in 1969, but that protest never took place.

Gordon B. Hinckley, then an apostle and now president of the LDS Church, visited campus in 1969 and, like he said during a speech at BYU last fall, provided what Bergera and Priddis called "an unexpected voice in support of student pacificism."