100 years of BYU: Institution evolution

PROVO — One hundred years after President Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark to explore the American West, President Teddy Roosevelt prepared to sign a treaty to give American ships access to a canal through Panama.

It was fall 1903, and with far less notice than Roosevelt was getting in the White House, the Wright Brothers headed to Kitty Hawk, N.C., to continue experiments in human flight — considered by some the "standard of impossibility" — for a fourth year. This time, on Dec. 17, their invention would fly 852 feet.

It was the year Henry Ford founded the Ford Motor Company, and the year of the first Tour de France. It was also the year a small parochial academy in Utah made an audacious proposal that its name be changed from Brigham Young Academy to Brigham Young University.

The school in Provo had done nothing to warrant the change. It had but 64 college students mixed in among classes for kindergarten, elementary and high school students. In fact, school officials had staved off elimination of the college courses just two years earlier, arguing they were good competition for the University of Utah. LDS Church leaders relented, concerned that they would lose control of matters at the state university that might be maintained at a church university.

So in September 1903, Academy President Benjamin Cluff proposed separating out the school's college students to establish a "Joseph Smith College." The Board of Trustees rejected the idea, but agreed to change the school's name from academy to university.

It was hardly ready for so lofty a title. The campus was located in what is now central Provo, with only some athletic fields on Temple Hill, from where BYU would spread east and north over the next century. At least one person, Anthon H. Lund, a member of the LDS Church's First Presidency, was uneasy about the name change. On Sept. 30, he wrote in his journal, "I hope their head will grow big enough for the hat."

Of course, a century of discovery and invention later, BYU's hat is too small for its head. It has evolved from a podunk school for Mormon kids snuggled in quaint, isolated Utah Valley to become the second-largest private university in the United States, with more than 30,000 students. The landlocked campus is expanding its reach through technology, with more than 100,000 people around the world taking online courses each year.

It also is considered one of the nation's best colleges, according to numerous independent rankings. Admissions standards have risen dramatically. In the 1950s, a student needed a 2.0 grade-point average to qualify for admission. Today, the incoming freshman class averages a 3.75 GPA.