Then-BYU leader Wilkinson led thuggish school spy ring and lied about it

To see Cal Grondahl’s cartoon that goes with this post, click here. It’s the Ernest L. Wilkinson Student Center, or as BYU students for nearly three generations have called it, “The Wilkinson Center.” Wilkinson, now dead 30-plus years, was a Bircher-type conservative who ruled BYU in the 1960s. He was a man who could get LDS Prophet David O. McKay’s full attention with a phone or a visit. Despite the honor still bestowed the man, Wilkinson was responsible for the most thuggish official act contrary to democracy at the university. And, like a preacher caught in a choir singer’s bed, he tried to lie his way out of the amoral act.

Lest I mislead readers, Wilkinson was no adulterer or fornicator. What he did, as Gary James Bergera recounts in the Spring 2011 issue of the Utah Historical Quarterly, was oversee the development of a spy ring — staffed by ultra-conservative BYU students — to snitch on professors who failed to follow the dogmatic blend of religion and conservatism that Wilkinson advocated. And when he was caught overseeing the snitches, Wilkinson lied about his role. As is the case with these types of unsavory cover ups, parts of the truth dribbled out of the BYU president as his circle of denial diminished.

As Bergera writes, Wilkinson, after an unsuccessful run for U.S. Senate in 1964, returned as president of BYU “convinced that during his year-long absence from the Provo school, a group of ‘liberal’ teachers had decided … to bring it … toward Socialism rather than the traditional conservative view of the Church.” The BYU president argued to McKay that there were BYU professors teaching false doctrine.

It wasn’t difficult for Wilkinson to convince the feeble, 91-year-old McKay to approve a speech Wilkinson would give at the university. “The Changing Nature of American Government from a Constitutional Republic to a Welfare State” would be a firebrand, Bircheresque speech sure to annoy more liberal BYU professors. A theme of the speech, writes Bergera, was that students and faculty at BYU should adhere to a prophet’s political opinion as eagerly as they would his religious counsel.

Known to only a few was that Wilkinson intended to use his fiery speech to draw out professors he disapproved of via student spies who would take notes of any criticism they heard of the BYU president’s speech. Wilkinson recruited BYU’s comptroller, Joseph T. Bentley, to recruit conservative students “who had been complaining about liberal teachers.” Bentley recruited economics major Stephen Hays Russell. A top student as well as a John Birch Society member, Russell recruited several students to infiltrate the classes of professors Wilkinson wanted surveillance on.

The professors to be spied on included Louis C. Midgely, Richard Wirthlin (who would later gain fame as a pollster) and Ray C. Hillam, a political science professor. (According to Bergera, Wilkinson would later claim that the FBI use of surveillance justified similar use at BYU).

Eventually, Russell prepared a summary of his findings to Wilkinson. In his diary, Wilkinson wrote that the information showed “that they (the professors) think much more of their political convictions than they do of following their prophets — a situation which cannot be permitted on this campus.”

Russell’s report was handed over to BYU university counsel and vice president Clyde D. Sandgren. (It was at this point that Wilkinson told his first lie. He called the report voluntary, and omitted its origin.)

As such undercover, “Get Smartish” spying often is, the sinister incompetence of Wilkinson caused the crap to hit the fan. Professor Hillam, a lay LDS Church leader, soon discovered he had been spied on and was under investigation. He complained, as did his department chair. At this point, Wilkinson was faced with the headache of both justifying an internal investigation of a professor he disliked and trying to keep himself out of the initial conspiracy. That became more difficult as some of the students-turned spies became remorseful over their snooping and confessed to teachers and administrators. As Bergera writes, Wilkinson told Hillam that students were not organized to spy on the faculty (another whopper).

Things turned farcical at Hillam’s disciplinary hearing (one of his charges, by the way, was that he “reportedly endorsed the entrance of the People’s Republic of China into the United Nations.) At the hearing, where Russell denied “concerted surveillance activities,” another targeted professor, Midgely, called a member of the student spy ring to rebut Russell.

At this point, Russell, feeling the pressure from all sides, rushed to Wilkinson for help. As Bergera writes, “Wilkinson looked at Russell and. ‘with an instructive tone of voice,’ said, ‘You know of course this is the first I’ve heard of this group.”

It must have been a harsh, instructive moment for the flabbergasted Russell, who learned that even a man with a direct pipeline to the LDS prophet was capable of a bald-faced lie if it meant covering his butt.

Indeed, Wilkinson might have skated through the spy mess without embarrassment had he been able to make Russell, as was his intention, the scapegoat. However, BYU comptroller Bentley, who was one of the three who knew the truth, would not play along. He reminded Wilkinson “that Russell ‘had only done what (he) had been asked to do.”

Bentley’s refusal to engage in the smear of Russell and Hillam’s determination to get all the facts into the spy scandal at BYU eventually wore on Wilkinson and the BYU administration. The BYU president used his close relationships to the LDS hierarchy to try to protect himself (at one point Wilkinson badgered the aged McKay to sign a statement of support for his efforts “to see that Atheism, Communism, and Socialism are not to be advocated by BYU teachers.” But even that move was useless. By late winter of 1967, Wilkinson was forced to admit that there was an “organized surveillance of faculty by students.” After the drib, came the drab, and a month later Wilkinson was forced to admit “to having asked Bentley to recruit Russell and other students.” At around the same time, Bentley — living up to his promise to not weasel out of responsibility — released his statement that defended Russell and made it clear that Wilkinson had conceived of a spy ring.

The BYU president’s humiliation was great. The fiasco did not cost him his job, but it effectively cut his power of intimidation at the school. Hillam was vindicated and eventually made chairman of the Department of Political Science.

Most of the principals in the scandal, Hillam, Wilkinson, Sandgren, Bentley, are long dead. Ironically, the participan-turned-scapegoat, Russell, graduated with a degree in economics and pursued an academic career. Now nearing retirement himself, he is part of the faculty at the Goddard School of Business and Economics at Ogden’s Weber State University, writes Bergera.