During the twenty years he served as president of LDS Church-owned Brigham Young University (1951–71), Ernest L. Wilkinson transformed the school into a showplace of the church’s educational values. "More than any other single cause," his successor, Dallin H. Oaks, observed, “[Wilkinson's] remarkable and relentless leadership . . . is the key to the present stature of Brigham Young University.” Under Wilkinson, the student body grew more than four-fold to 25,000, the faculty tripled, colleges and departments more than doubled, library holdings increased nearly 500 percent, the number of buildings jumped twenty-fold, and as perhaps the most telling manifestation of Wilkinson's influence, annual LDS Church subsidies rose fifteen-fold to $22 million. His single-minded drive to mold BYU into the kind of institution he hoped would command the admiration of American academia permanently set the direction for Latter-day Saint higher education. As he presided over this academic landscape, Wilkinson produced about 5,000 pages of typed, single-spaced diaries–—a literary creation that ranks among the most important diaries in the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Wilkinson also had access to the highest echelon of the church, writing of numerous meetings of the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Educating Zion assembles in one volume an annotated abridgement of those diary entries having the greatest interest to modern readers. The diaries are both a remarkable achievement and a phenomenal historical record whose importance cannot be overstated.

Gary James Bergera was managing director of Signature Books from 1984 to 2000 and managing director of the Smith–Pettit Foundation from 2001 to 2022. He is the author or editor of eleven books. Most recently he edited the diaries of Leonard J. Arrington, published in three volumes as Confessions of a Mormon Historian. His publications have received awards from the Charles Redd Center at BYU, the Utah Historical Society, the Mormon History Association (MHA), the John Whitmer Historical Association, and the Dialogue Foundation. He served on the board of directors of MHA and on the editorial boards of the Journal of Mormon History and the John Whitmer Historical Association Journal. In 2018 he received MHA’s Leonard J. Arrington lifetime achievement award.