BYU—Idaho: The campus on the hill

REXBURG, Idaho — The evolution from a college to a university is generally a slow process that occurs over many years. But in less than three full years, Brigham Young University-Idaho has left behind a hundred years of Ricks College status and become a full-fledged four-year university.

What did it take? Nothing to it, really. Just be certain the effort includes:

• A mini building boom to provide new classroom and activity facilities, several hundred units of new housing for additional students, plus new residences for many of the 67 new faculty — with more coming.

• Timely applications to accrediting agencies for upgraded status that will verify the quality of the 50-plus new baccalaureate degrees being offered.

• The revamp of dozens of two-year programs to provide a smooth expansion into four-year programs.

• Name changes from Ricks to BYU-Idaho on hundreds of items — buildings, signs, stationery, T-shirts, official campus publications, diplomas and pencils.

• Creation of an attendance scheme that divides students somewhat equally among summer, fall and winter terms to maintain a constant 11,600 on campus.

Put all these and hundreds of other details together in a small agricultural town in which half the 18,000 residents on any given day are affiliated with the university and — voila! A university.

"It was a wise decision," said BYU-Idaho President David A. Bednar, looking back over the transition. "We're doing it line upon line, precept upon precept." It is a scripture borrowed, appropriately, from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the university's owner.

That church affiliation attracts the majority of BYU-Idaho's students. The student body is more than 99 percent LDS — about a third of them returned missionaries — who want to get their higher education in an atmosphere that fosters the church's standards and principles. "And I have a much better chance of finding a wife here than I would back home in Michigan," one young man forthrightly confessed. Non-LDS applicants to the Rexburg school must abide by its strict honor code, which includes high moral standards and refraining from tobacco, alcohol and drugs.