If you came into my house and started rifling through the closets and drawers, you’d quickly discern our family’s academic allegiance– we’re Cougars through and through. I was an English major in the early and mid-nineties, when there wasn’t much job security for BYU English professors. But I’m not embarrassed to say that I had a great experience at BYU. I left feeling like I had received a great education in my major and in Mormon doctrines and culture.

A year after graduation, I started school again, at a much smaller university in the midwest. I’d been used to classes ranging anywhere from 30 to 900 students, so the seminar classes with four or five shocked me (“are they going to cancel this section?,” I wondered every time I started a new semester). For the first time I understood that while BYU had been a great place for me, it might not be the perfect fit for every student.

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It was lunchtime, and I was jonesing for a slice of pizza, a diet coke, and something good to read. I started digging through the magazine basket, and when I saw the Ensign, felt a familiar stab of guilt, ripped off the shrinkwrap, and carried it back to the kitchen. I’m embarrassed to admit this, but it was the first time I’d seriously delved into anything but the conference issue of the Ensign in a long while. Maybe I was just in a bad mood, but the articles felt stale– boring, preachy, or sensationally faith-promoting.

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This afternoon I came across two interesting tidbits about college options for LDS students. The first, from US News, listed BYU as the second most popular college in the nation, with popularity determined by the number of accepted students who actually enroll as freshmen (77% at BYU, trailing only Harvard, with 79%). The second was the website for Nauvoo University, a Mormon-friendly private educational institution that hopes to enroll its first class this fall, with eventual plans to become an accredited four-year university. More than a decade after a new board of directors reorganized Southern Virginia University as a school catering to LDS students (maybe some of those who decided the BYU environment wasn’t right for them), it appears to be thriving.

Do you see the independent Mormon publications as the SVUs and Nauvoo Universities of the publishing world? In what ways do you see similarities and where do they differ?