The course was unbelievably difficult for 2 credit hours. He was one of those BYU Religion professors who felt as if your Religion course should be the most important and time consuming course of your schedule. Although obviously extremely intelligent, I found DK Ogden to be pompous and self-important, and thought he was literally God's gift to BYU (I know, this characterizes most BYU Religion professors, but he was clearly on the "A" list in the obvious pecking order of the Religion department.)
Yes, he is (was) like that. What I do find extremely fascinating, however, is that even though he knows 1,000 times more than the folks at FAIR and FARMS (before FARMS died), he never jumped on the apologetics band-wagon. I've often wondered why so many BYU religion professors, who know a shitton of stuffs about religion, don't publish apologetics research/articles.
He was "too obedient" beyond he point of "required obedience". For example, the monthly monetary allotment that each missionary would receive was cut down to what DK Ogden thought was "necessary"; he would then send the savings back to SLC. This caused quite a few missionaries to go hungry at times; however, and thankfully, the member's support was always beyond sufficient so that these missionaries didn't suffer quite as horribly as they would have otherwise. Also, DK Ogden's Zone Conferences were unbelievably strange. Rather than teaching about "missionary work" he would dive into detailed rants about how in "Hebrew" "XXX" means "XXX" and "XXX" equals "XXX" ... etc. So, for example, we never learned "how" to preach the gospel, we only learned the Hebrew equilvalent of word "gospel". Because of his ineptitude as a leader, baptism numbers were never great and missionaries lost their testimonies left and right. Nevertheless, I am thankful for what he passively taught us missionaries as a product of his inability to lead; i.e., he taught us that Mormonism/Mormons are bat shit crazy. He helped us missionaries to open up the can of worms that is Mormonism, and for this I am grateful.
...Rambling and pontificating on tangents that nobody in class understood to prove how brilliant he was. I vaguelyremember looking around his class with everyone having blank looks on their faces - nobody knowing what he was talking about.
Only problem is a mission is not academia. The only thing Church HQ wants to see is numbers, numbers and more numbers.