Personal Encounters with Elder Packer (Part 2)

Last updated on: July 4, 2015 at 11:53 am by Dan Peterson

Personal Encounters with Elder Packer (Part 2) 2015-07-04T11:53:40-06:00 Dan Peterson

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I had my office at the time in what was then called the Jesse Knight Humanities Building, directly adjacent to the Abraham O. Smoot Administration Building in which then-provost Bruce Hafen’s office was located. In other words, the walk between the two buildings wasn’t very long.

Many years before, when I was still an undergraduate student at BYU, I had served on a committee with Bruce Hafen. At that time, I think he was some sort of assistant to the University’s president — not yet the president of Ricks College, the dean of the BYU law school, the prominent Mormon writer, the General Authority, or the president of the St. George Temple that he would eventually become.

But I didn’t think that he would remember me from that experience — I have no reason to believe that he does now; I scarcely distinguished myself — and, so, I was a bit surprised when, rather early in my teaching career at BYU, while he was serving as the University’s provost, he called to ask whether I could come over to his office at some point to meet with him.

(Parenthetical note: Brother Hafen once sponsored a kind of unofficial competition for the best effort to define the word provost. The winning entry was “superlative adjective: most like Provo.”)

Anyway, when I came over to his office, we spent a half hour more or less shooting the breeze. What were my interests? What was I working on? What was I doing in the Church? How did I like teaching at BYU? And so forth.

I became increasingly puzzled as things went on. Bruce Hafen was a very busy man, effectively the chief operating officer of BYU. There were lots of new faculty every year. Surely he couldn’t spend this much time with every recent hire. I hadn’t even quite finished my dissertation yet.

“You’re probably wondering what this is about,” he commented after roughly thirty minutes.

“Yes, I am,” I responded, honestly.

“Well,” he said, “Elder Boyd K. Packer wants somebody down at BYU that he can talk with about the Middle East. Somebody he can trust. And I think you’ve passed the test.”

I hadn’t realized that I was being tested, of course, but I was relieved that I’d made the grade.

Brother Hafen explained to me that Elder Packer would very likely call me at some point within the next several weeks. Probably after General Conference, which was approaching. He would be too busy before then with conference-related preparations.

I was somewhat astonished by the conversation, but walked back to my office afterwards. An old friend from graduate school, someone who has become a fairly well-known name in Mormon studies or Mormon history since then and who leans leftward (even more now than then) both politically and theologically, was visiting from out of state. When I arrived at my office, he was standing by the door.

We went in and sat down. I hadn’t yet had a chance to tell him what I’d just been doing — I don’t think I was planning to do so, in any case — when the phone rang.

I answered, and then muffling the receiver, indicated to my friend that this was an important call that I was going to need to take, and that it might require a few minutes.

“Who is it?” he asked, laughing. “Boyd K. Packer?”

“Yes,” I said. And he laughed again.

But, as a matter of fact, it was.

Elder Packer hadn’t exactly waited several weeks.

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