On Wednesday night, Dec. 31, 2025, Brigham Young University lit up the giant white “Y” on the dark adjacent mountainside to honor President Jeffrey R. Holland.
Just hours prior, Latter-day Saints and friends throughout the world watched the broadcast of the funeral for President Holland, president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He died Saturday, Dec. 27, 2025, from complications related to kidney disease.
The lighting of the “Y” was a tribute to President Holland, who served as president of BYU from 1980 to 1989 and was a staunch friend and supporter of the university.
Recently, in an interview alongside President Dallin H. Oaks for BYU’s 150th anniversary, President Holland recollected the BYU dance celebrating his 1980 inauguration. He looked out through the Wilkinson Center windows eastward to Y Mountain, with the block “Y” awash in lights celebrating the event. His wife, the late Sister Patricia Holland, came up and said, “They’re lighting that for you.”
“I just wept, like I am now,” he said. “I just wept that a place I loved that much, and a place to which I owed that much, and the friends that I had made there that I loved so much — I just wept over that lit, outlined ‘Y’ on the hill, and it still means that much to me.”
In coming to BYU as a student, “my life was changed like a tsunami,” President Holland said. “It was a major, major reset in my life — but with eternal consequence."
Besides his marriage, “the two decisions that I made that changed my life forever were to serve a mission and enroll at Brigham Young University. And those two set my course forever,” President Holland said.
In 2021, then-Elder Holland spoke of his first experience seeing the huge block “Y” on the mountain as a child, which he described as “big and bold and beautiful.”
At just 7 years old, “I somehow knew that bold letter meant something special — something special to me — and that it would one day play a significant role in my life,” he recalled.
Besides serving as president of the university, President Holland also completed his undergraduate and master’s degrees there and served as dean of religious education. As the Church commissioner of education and then as an Apostle, President Holland also had a supervisory role over the university and served as a member of the BYU board of trustees as well as chairman of the board’s executive committee.
Through the years he spoke many times at BYU — the BYU speeches archives includes the texts of 28 of his addresses. In his last address there, President Holland referred to the school as “the university that I love with all my heart.”
Current BYU President C. Shane Reese noted recently in a Church News podcast that the impact of President Holland — along with his predecessor at BYU, President Oaks — on the university is felt “every single day.” The two men “had such a dramatic and profound impact on this institution that we will be forever grateful on this campus for their leadership,” President Reese said.
Also in tribute to President Holland, the university compiled photos and quotes from his many devotional addresses, inviting viewers to “remember his warm, witty and wise counsel.”
