The Light We Bear: Commencement Essays from Mount Liberty College

Graduates, you are the ones who have emerged. You have ascended the steep, stony path toward the sunlight of understanding. And now, you are called to return—to step back into a shadowed world and hold high the lamp of truth.

The Battle for Civic Education

This year, I sponsored a bill—SB334—that seeks to restore civic education to our universities. Not as a nostalgic gesture, but as a necessary course correction.

Why? Because I spent years in the classroom. I’ve seen what’s been lost: students equipped with slogans, not substance; credentials, but not conviction. They can quote grievance, but not Lincoln. They can deconstruct, but they cannot defend.

One recent critic asked me, “Why fix something when you can reinvent a whole other concept?”

Here’s why: Because what’s broken is not just policy—it’s purpose. And sometimes, reinvention is the most responsible form of repair.

SB334 doesn’t dictate doctrine. It doesn’t ban ideas. It revives balance, it renews foundations, and it reminds us all that our republic cannot endure if it forgets its roots.

And yet, for daring to suggest that students should engage with The Constitution, The Federalist Papers, and the great thinkers of our tradition—from Augustine to Du Bois—I was accused of censorship, of cowardice, of control.

Some said the words in my op-ed were too polished to be real—must have been written by AI. Others insisted I feared Karl Marx, though I’ve spent more time teaching his work than most who defend him. For the record: I’m not afraid of Marx. I just know better than to treat him as scripture.

The Meaning Behind the Words: A Cultural Diagnosis

When I wrote that Americans are sick of the “neo-Marxist, nihilistic narcissism of the hard left,” it wasn’t a rhetorical flourish. It was a cultural diagnosis—a warning drawn not from ideology, but from experience.

Neo-Marxism has infiltrated too many corners of the academy—not as one voice among many, but as a dominating lens through which all of history, literature, and society must be interpreted. It teaches that everything is about power—race, gender, class—forever locked in a binary of oppressor and oppressed.

Nihilism soon follows, replacing wonder with suspicion, and turning the quest for truth into a campaign of endless deconstruction. If nothing is true, then everything is permissible—and everything is politicized.

And narcissism completes the triangle, elevating personal identity above shared reality, feelings above facts, grievance above gratitude. It replaces moral formation with moral performance—and turns education into a pageant of self-righteousness.

This is not education. This is theater, not thought.

“The Communists openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.”

—Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

“The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness.”

—The German Ideology

This is the root system behind the weeds we now see growing.

The Virtue Tradition: Liberty Rooted in Reason

In contrast to the ideological chaos of grievance and guilt, the tradition you inherit today is grounded not in rebellion, but in reason—not in fragmentation, but in formation. It teaches self-rule, not mob rule. It teaches that happiness is found not in the hedonism of the moment, but in a life anchored to virtue, ordered liberty, and moral purpose.

“Pleasure,” said Epicurus, “is rather sober reasoning… banishing those beliefs that lead to the tumult of the soul.”

Justice Anthony Kennedy reminded us that to the Founders:

“Happiness meant that feeling of self-worth and dignity you acquire by contributing to your community and to its civic life.”

And then there is Alexis de Tocqueville, who saw far ahead—into our very moment:

“Tyranny in democratic republics does not proceed in the same way, however. It ignores the body and goes straight for the soul… You will remain among men, but you will forfeit your rights to humanity… Go in peace, I will not take your life, but the life I leave you with is worse than death.”

That, graduates, is the tyranny that awaits when liberty is divorced from moral clarity. When freedom is severed from formation. When truth is replaced by technocracy and virtue by virtual applause.

Before we go further, let me ask you directly: What will you carry forward from this place? Which truths will you champion when comfort tempts you toward silence? Because this is your moment—not to retreat, but to rise.

SB334, like your education here at Mount Liberty, is not about silencing opposition—it’s about ending the silence surrounding greatness. It’s about recovering the texts and traditions that shaped the world you now inherit—so that you can preserve them, question them, and if needed, improve them.

An Evening in Oxford: A Conversation with Buckley

Years ago, as a young academic, I found myself seated in an antebellum inn in Oxford, Mississippi. The fire cracked quietly in the hearth. Across from me sat William F. Buckley Jr.—founder of National Review, author of God and Man at Yale, and one of the great minds of our time.

We spoke at length about the decay of higher education. Buckley lamented that Yale had abandoned its soul. “They’ve kept the Latin,” he said with a wry smile, “but they’ve lost the light.” He was, of course, speaking of Yale’s motto: Lux et Veritas—Light and Truth.

I would add this: Yale’s seal doesn’t only include Latin. It also bears Hebrew script—Urim and Thummim—symbols drawn from biblical tradition, meaning “lights and perfections.” For Latter-day Saint students, those words carry sacred historical resonance. Some of you here will understand why. I won’t explain further—but the symbolism is profound.

When a university abandons Lux et Veritas, it doesn’t just lose tradition. It forfeits transcendence.

Buckley told me that universities were drifting not only from faith, but from intellectual seriousness, from moral purpose, from the courage to say some things are true and others are not. That night shaped me. It reminded me that ideas are not abstractions—they are anchors.

And now I say to you what Buckley said to me: We must bring back the light. We must not be ashamed to say that truth is not relative, that virtue is not obsolete, and that liberty requires more than license—it requires character.

A New Renaissance: Your Role in the Revival

Not long ago, I sat down with sculptor Sabin Howard—whose work on the National World War I Memorial has been called nothing short of a modern marvel. His bronzes don’t just commemorate; they communicate. They teach. They remind us that art, at its best, does not flatter our vanities but elevates our virtues.

Sabin and I spoke at length about something bigger than a statue—something deeper than nostalgia. We spoke about the need for a renaissance—not just of art, but of ideas. A revival of beauty, meaning, and moral imagination. A return to excellence.

He told me about his next great vision: The Grand Liberty Arch, a monumental sculpture installation coming to Salt Lake City—a tribute to freedom, courage, sacrifice, and the enduring American spirit. Not just metal and stone, but a declaration in form: Liberty still lives here.

Graduates, because of your education, you are uniquely equipped to be pioneers of this renaissance. You’ve studied the great texts. You’ve learned the architecture of liberty, the logic of justice, the anatomy of virtue. You are the heirs not only to a tradition—but to a task.

Let this be your charge: bring forth the new renaissance. In your writing, your service, your building, your teaching—make beauty again. Make meaning again. Make truth visible again. And where the world has grown cynical, build monuments—not just of stone, but of soul.

The Final Charge: Back to the Cave

Graduates, you are not stepping into ease. You are stepping into duty. You’ve left the cave. You’ve seen the light. And you’ve learned that it is beautiful—and it is blinding.

But now, like Plato’s liberated prisoner, you must go back. You must face a world that may scoff at truth, that may mock virtue, that may mistake liberty for selfishness.

Go anyway.

Because those still bound in the cave may one day look toward your voice, and by the grace of God and the strength of your example, they may turn—if only for a moment—toward the light.

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between political parties—but right through every human heart.”

—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Congratulations, Class of 2025.

Now go—and lead the light.

In High School, I was plagued by Pilot’s supposedly cynical question: “Oh say, what is truth?” As a child, the world was pretty simple. I didn’t have a smart phone, and my favorite pass-time was to make masterpieces from grass and twigs with my siblings. As I grew up, I was slowly exposed to contradictory ideas, and confusing people. With an extreme hatred for hypocrisy, and often for myself, I struggled to find a place somewhere between rigid religious world views and wacky postmodernism.

My education at Mount Liberty has gracefully guided me through the mighty and conflicting things I so desperately wanted to know. I now have the tools I need to face complexity with hope and humility. It’s truly impossible to tell you all in detail how this education gave me these tools, but I’ll attempt to give just a taste. The way each professor taught me, with their extreme care, interest, and desire for me to succeed — and my hilarious and insightful classmates — taught me almost as much as the books I read.

As I’ve looked back on the past four years, there have been key themes that have stuck out to me. A Portrait of Abbess Hildegard von Bingen, a document I read in my first year, deeply struck me with its themes of sexuality and femininity, astounding writings for what people consider to be the “dark ages.” Jacques Barzun’s writings about Martin Luther’s antisemitism and his influence of the Peasant’s war, as well as Erasmus’ even-keeled and wise contributions to the Reformation, taught me so much about myself. Carl Jung’s quote I found to be true over and over again: “Every good quality has its bad side, and nothing that is good can come into the world without directly producing a corresponding evil.” Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible solidified Jung’s observation in my mind forever. My classmates are probably tired of me talking about Thomas Sowell’s book A Conflict of Visions, because of how deeply it impacted my view of the world and how passionate I am about trade-offs vs perfect solutions, and that everyone is inevitably a hypocrite. I read every word of Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist, and most of it out loud to one of my classmates, and Ridley’s pages and pages of research almost succeeded in making me a total optimist. There will always be people bemoaning about being “overworked, anxious, or isolated,” but Ridley refutes that economically, we truly live in the greatest time in the world. I reveled in the drama in Homer’s Odyssey, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, and Thomas Mann’s The Joker. At this point I should have the whole Constitution of the United States memorized (I don’t) but I learned invaluable things about the tyranny/anarchy cycle, Russell Kirk’s interpretation of a Revolution not made, but prevented, the lack of checks and balances on the judicial branch, and the ongoing debate today between the Federalists and the Anti-Feds. Ecclesiastes 1:9 “there is no new thing under sun” — The history of civilization taught me this from the women demanding The Oppian Law be repealed in 200 BC so they could wear jewelry in the streets all the way up to Mr. Jones stories at Columbia and students chanting “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ Has Got to Go.” The slippery nature of language and meaning has been bred into me from my study of latin, different translations of texts, philosophers like Derrida and Wittgenstein, and the Tower of Babel. I feel I finally have a grasp on the philosophy of science and mathematics from Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, to Euclid, Apollonius, Galileo, Newton, Francis Bacon, Popper, and Thomas Kuhn. Dr. Rogers taught me about historiography, and I learned so much about the nature of education from scholasticism in medieval times to the early years of Harvard to John Dewey to C.S. Lewis. I could go on for pages about all I’ve learned and the tools I now have.

But, what did I actually accomplish at Mount Liberty? Well, I didn’t fight in trenches, I didn’t get trained for a specific job, and I didn’t join a canoeing club…though maybe one day. But I felt that in some small way, I was able to revive the purpose of a true education. As it says on the walls of the Library of Congress: “The true University of these days is a collection of books.” What happened to “these days”? I’d like to go back to them, with less TikTok and more playing in the yard. At Mount Liberty, I got lost in some of the best and the worst books, and found myself reflected back in them. It was in the quiet corners of my study where I was able to unlock some of my greatest challenges and perplexities. So many of us are ever learning, yet never able to come to a knowledge of the truth. So many of us are starving for words of solace and understanding, but we get lost in the intricately placed weeds. As Oliver Wendell Holmes said “For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn’t give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have.”

Mount Liberty revived my childlike wonder for the world, instilled deeper foundations of faith in my heart, and made me grateful for every interaction I’ve had with someone who thinks differently than me.

The things I’ve learned at Mount Liberty have allowed me to put on the armor of God, and be a true warrior against the evil that exists, not on a bloody battlefield like Joan of Arc, but in the trenches of mighty and conflicting philosophies, “for we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

It is fairly easy in most classrooms, and sometimes even at Mount Liberty, to get away with listening to a lecture or discussion or doing a few reading assignments, without really allowing yourself to be changed by the content or discussion or feeling a need to be invested in it. I fully admit i have gone through classes while being like that. However, over time, after multiple experiences with a book, a classmate’s or professor’s comment, or ideas that really resonate, it is difficult to want to go back to being a passive learner.

I want to read this quote from Ezra Taft Benson that has greatly impacted my philosophy on life, and I have come to understand and value deeply through my experience at Mount Liberty College. “The Lord works from the inside out. The world works from the outside in. The world would take people out of the slums. Christ takes the slums out of people, and then they take themselves out of the slums. The world would mold men by changing their environment. Christ changes men, who then change their environment. The world would shape human behavior, but Christ can change human nature.”

I just love how clearly this college is a place of opportunity for these internal changes to happen. The change that comes from going to this college is not from forced behavior, and it’s certainly not because it has had glamorous classrooms, but instead Mount Liberty and the people within it provide a genuine choice to become something different as we seek individually for Truth. This school teaches us how to live better, how to think more clearly, live more intentionally, and become more Godly in the process.

MLC has given me direction and a framework from which a good life can continue to build on. MLC taught me how to be a lifelong learner, a better human, someone who strives to understand the world, other people, and myself—and most importantly, someone who understands the importance of becoming more Godly.

MLC created space where we could talk about difficult, controversial topics, with open minds and intellectual honesty. It’s taught me how to discern which principles I believe are worth living by, and how to hold those beliefs while exploring the many ideas that are out there.

To my professors—I want thank you for pushing me, for believing in me, and for being examples of what it means to live a life of both intellect and integrity. They are good people as well as being good mentors.

I am also so grateful to my family for the support they have shown and through them even having the opportunity to choose to go to Mount Liberty College.

In life, we aren’t just given information. We’re being constantly invited into transformation, and as students or family members, community members, patriots, or wherever and whatever we may be doing in life, we each get to choose whether we accept that invitation to transformation.

This resulted in a work that was personal, Tolstoy wrote it for himself, and while he paraphrased and added his own thoughts, the work is largely the words or ideas of other men. It took Tolstoy 15 years to compile the work. It was first published in 1904, and then revised and republished by Tolstoy in 1905 and 1910. This work was not flashy or glamorous. In many ways, it is quite plain and simple. And it was, and I can say with almost complete certainty, never will be Tolstoy’s most famous work.

As my education here at Mount Liberty College has drawn to a close, I have been looking back and have found many parallels between my education and this work by Tolstoy. While it would be exciting to be able to compare my education with one of Tolstoy’s captivating and awe-inspiring works like War and Peace or Anna Karenina, it would feel untrue.

As you can see, in spite of my desires, we do not gather today on a beautifully manicured campus. There are no vaulted ceilings, no ivy creeping up walls of stone and framing stained glass windows, no grand lecture halls, and most regrettably, there is no library wing, with endless shelves of books to get lost in.

My education at Mount Liberty paints quite a different picture. It involved countless hours in two small and very hot classrooms, countless secondhand battered books with the covers falling off, and other people’s scribbles in the margins; that is, if you were sent the correct book in the first place (I will forever mourn my second edition of Scientific Knowledge, which unfortunately never reached me).

It involved many hours driving during rush hour, many hours on Zoom with technical difficulties, school break-ins, stollen cameras, seeing classmates leave and never return, frantically trying to find the spot in a book we were currently discussing because you were the only one with a different translation or edition and so page numbers are no help, waiting to be able to use the only microwave we were allowed to use, or anxiously using the microwave that was “off limits” and hoping that the overly defensive woman down the hall who claimed said microwave wouldn’t catch you.

It consisted of single stalled bathrooms with random sticks of butter, graphic historical stories tolled in a way only Dr. Smurthwaite could tell, countless tangents, inside jokes, quotes on the quote board, and pages and pages of notes. Just to give you a small glimpse of my time at Mount Liberty.

As with Tolstoy’s book, my time at Mount Liberty was also prolonged and required several revisions. While at Mount Liberty, I tried it all, classes in person, classes online, and a mix of both. Full-time classes, part-time classes. Working full-time, working part-time, not working. While being single, while dating, and being married. You name it, if it was an option, chances are that I tried it. And I am still reviewing, revising, and at times reaffirming the lessons and truths I learned at Mount Liberty.

My education at Mount Liberty will most likely not be seen as my greatest success, just as Tolstoy’s Calendar or “circle” of reading was not considered his. But, as Tolstoy’s work did for him, it has undoubtedly changed me. Tolstoy wrote the following about his work,

“I felt that I have been elevated to great spiritual and moral heights by communication with the best and wisest people whose books I read and whose thoughts I selected for my Circle of Reading. … What can be more precious than to communicate every day with the wisest men of the world?”

My education at Mount Liberty has given this to me. It has given me knowledge of, and experiences with, the greatest minds the world has ever known. This has deeply changed me. While others may not consider Mount Liberty to be my greatest accomplishment, Mount Liberty has given me the ability to climb to any height, accomplish any task, and associate with anyone I desire. Mount Liberty has enabled me to accomplish greater things. For this, I would like to thank Mount Liberty. Thank you to each and every one of my professors, for the wisdom you have given me. To my fellow students for the great thoughts shared and good times spent. And thank you most especially to my family and husband who have supported me through it all.

In closing, I would like to echo Tolstoy when he said,

“I cannot understand how some people can live without communicating with the wisest people who ever lived on Earth?”

Mount Liberty has given me an opportunity to do just that, and because of this, I will forever be grateful.

Thank you.