New Brigham Young University President Kevin J Worthen says a BYU education should elevate and etherealize. That was his message during Tuesday’s inauguration, at which Worthen was sworn in as the University’s 13th president.
Worthen offered the mountains surrounding the Brigham Young University campus as religious symbols of enlightenment. He asked that they be reminders of the learning environment he wishes to create at BYU-- one that not only inspires new learning experiences and spiritual insight, but that also allows students to become different, better people.
“The type of life-changing education that can take an inexperienced and insecure young man from the coalmines of Carbon County, whose soul and futile aspiration growing up was to be a pro basketball player, who never dreamed of being a university professor and prepare that kind of individual intellectually and spiritually to become by some unlikely miracle the president of one of the greatest universities in America," Worthen told the crowd tearfully.
Worthen succeeds Dr. Cecil Samuelson, who served as BYU president for the past 11 years. Worthen previously served as vice president of advancement at BYU and dean of the J. Reuben Clark Law School. He currently serves as an area seventy in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
