George H. Brimhall

Early life Brimhall was born to George W. Brimhall and Rachel Ann Meyer in Salt Lake City. When Brimhall was about a year old his family moved to Ogden and then moved to Spanish Fork, which is where Brimhall attended Timpanogos University. Because of his family's financial situation, one semester they gave the school a side of beef to pay for his tuition. After working closely with instructor George Carson at a Spanish Fork common school, he moved back to Spanish Fork, became a teacher, and received a county teachers certificate. In 1874, Brimhall married Alsina Elizabeth Wilkins. They were the parents of 6 children. In 1908, students built a concrete retaining wall around the Y.

The Maeser building was completed in 1911, but leading up to its completion, Brimhall took it upon himself to invest more in the school just as many students and faculty members had done monetarily for the new university building. In order to achieve the goals that he had set for BYU, Brimhall recruited educators who had degrees from prestigious universities in the East. These educators helped facilitate the organization of the departments and curriculum of the collegiate program. This caused many in the press and members of other church institutions to question the church's authority to regulate professor's freedom of speech in the classroom.

A similar controversy at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City — what Brimhall himself at the time described as 'a tempest in a teapot' — erupted four years later in February 1915. There, the dismissals of two professors and two instructors by Joseph T. Kingsbury — and the subsequent resignations of 14 faculty members in protest (including Peterson, who earlier had resigned from BYU) — launched the American Association of University Professors' (AAUP) first institutional academic freedom inquest, spearheaded by AAUP founders Arthur O. Lovejoy and John Dewey. The 1911 BYU controversy, involving some of the same professors, led in part to the University of Utah debacle.

As a result of these intertwined academic storms, the AAUP published, in December 1915, its inaugural volume of the Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors, including the document now known as the 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure — the AAUP’s foundational statement on the rights and corresponding obligations of members of the academic profession.