Recently, a Mormon man who attended Brigham Young University had his diploma revoked, after being excommunicated from the church. The grounds for his excommunication were supposedly his failure to tithe and “lapse[s] in other religious obligations,” but there is reasonable suspicion that the revocation was a response to a calendar of shirtless Mormon missionaries he published.

Regardless of whether it was for not tithing, or publishing a tasteless calendar depicting sacred Mormon flesh, it is apparent that earning a degree at BYU is not strictly dependent on academic performance, as it is in other Universities. On the contrary, the decision to deny him the diploma hinged crucially on his excommunication from the church.

I think this evidence requires us to abandon the pretense that BYU is an academic institution at all, and that their diplomas are proof of scholastic aptitude, as long as a prerequisite for earning one is religious devotion and conformity.