There is a statue of John Rockey Park in an alcove just to the left of the west (front) entrance to the University of Utah main administration building which bears his name.

The plaque lists biographical dates and statistics from Park's life and career, and then repeats the following quote from an 1885 speech he gave to future teachers: I would have you remember that the best intellectual ability ... will result in worse than failure, unless it has underlying it a stratum of moral culture.

Always remember in your teaching that the grand purpose of your labors is to make citizens—active, thinking, intelligent, industrious and moral men and women.

[7] In 1855, Park entered medical school at New York University where he was a student of the chemist, historian and philosopher, John William Draper.

At the time, Congress was consumed with an issue which would eventually only be resolved by the Civil War (1861–1865): whether slavery should be permitted to extend into the western territories.

Utah's Mormon settlers were very different from the "rugged individual" adventurers who would pour into the American West before and after the Civil War.

[11] Also, despite federal efforts to rigorously enforce separation of church and state, the Utah territorial government retained some elements of a theocracy (or, as Joseph Smith had phrased it, a "theodemocracy").

"[12][13] Like their lax attitude toward separation of church and state, the Mormons did not make great efforts to distinguish between truth received from spiritual revelation or from empirical confirmation.

Almost immediately after arriving in the Salt Lake Valley the Latter-day Saints began making plans to ensure that their children received the basics of a secular and religious elementary education.

"[16] During the 1850s, local LDS Church meeting houses typically served as schoolhouses for the community's children during the week, and the schools often used Mormon scriptures as supplemental texts.

However, as the settlers struggled with the realities of frontier life during the 1850s, there just weren't sufficient resources to ensure that schools throughout the Utah Territory taught to uniform standards.

[20] The legislators and regents who founded the university intended for it to be the governing institution supervising all the schools in the proposed State of Deseret; this was a system which the Mormons had attempted to implement while settling Nauvoo, Illinois.