Posted on 03/05/2008 3:58:42 PM PST by SJackson
'Yale experience' is depravity for some - Orthodox Jewish students file lawsuit
Insight on the News, Nov 10, 1997 by David Wagner
Five Orthodox Jewish undergraduates are seeking legal relief from Yale College's freshman ad sophomore housing rules. The dispute is the latest skirmish in the ongoing culture war.
On Oct. 15, following months of negotiations, five Orthodox Jewish students at Yale filed a lawsuit against the college. The students believe that Yale's gender-integrated campus dormitories are incompatible with the moral requirements of Orthodox Jewish life, and they are asking to be exempted from Yale's rule requiring freshmen and sophomores to live in dormitories. Yale has refused, claiming the on-campus requirement is essential to the Yale experience. The students rejected Yale's last offer -- dorm space that nominally would be "single-sex" but where mingling of the sexes still could occur. The legal papers were filed in New Haven by the students' attorney, Washington litigator Nathaniel Lewin.
While Yale cannot force anyone to live on campus, it can and does impose a $7,000 per year dorm fee. Students who do not pay by Oct. 1 are not registered for the semester. The protesting students have paid this fee rather than be thrown out of school, but in the meantime their case has drawn Lewin's pro-bono representation, the national media have descended on Yale and a dispute about conditions in Yale undergraduate housing has turned into a national episode in the culture wars.
Though the dispute came to a head with the start of the current academic year, it has been brewing for some time. Some older siblings of the protesting students simply paid the $7,000 and moved off campus. Others who were not prepared to do so have been in correspondence with Yale officials since last winter, trying to arrive at a mutually acceptable solution.
The protesting students are seeking to preserve their personal commitment to the Orthodox Jewish practice of "tzinis," or purity. As Lewin explained in a letter to Richard Broadhead, dean of Yale College: "Their religious convictions forbid them from residing in dormitories that are readily accessible to members of the opposite sex for extended periods of time, including overnight visits. The experience of Yale students is that this is true of all Yale dormitories, including those that are designated `single sex....' The obligation to exercise care and modesty in living accommodations so as not to permit even inadvertent encounters between men and women is a long-standing rule of Jewish religious observance."
For the protectors, the problem of no genuinely single-sex dorms at Yale (as at most other secular colleges today) is exacerbated by other aspects of campus life. Posters advertising safe-sex seminars accost students at every turn. Many bathrooms have condom dispensers. A guide to "Yalespeak" published by the Yale Daily News contains such items of argot as "couch duty," defined as "being forced to sleep on a common-room couch because your roommate and his/her significant other want some time alone together," and "sexile," defined as "banishment from your dorm room because your roommate is having more fun than you."
Yale is diverse, and many students shun the lifestyle implied by such arrangements and undergraduate witticisms. The protesting students, however, do not believe that such immersion is an acceptable way of living out the demands of their faith.
Yale so far has refused any form of accommodation, other than offering to assign the protectors to a so-called single-sex dorm, with no guarantee that "single-sex" would be anything more than a label. This is, at one and the same time, less than the protectors need and more than they are asking for. They don't need dorms with a single-sex label, they say, they need a place to live where the sexes really do not commingle. At the same time, they are not asking Yale to rearrange itself for their benefit or even to set aside space for them. All they want is to move off campus without a heavy financial penalty.
Yale has refused this request, basing its position on its policy of encouraging on-campus life as an integral part of the Yale experience. James R. van de Velde, dean of Saybrook College (one of the 12 "residential colleges" or dorms that make up Yale College), and dean of student housing, expressed it this way in a December 1996 letter to Orthodox Jewish student Lisa Friedman: "We believe in the totality of the experience: the dorm life, the dining-hall experience, on-campus activities, sports, recitals and much more. Although we at Yale protect and celebrate each student's individual beliefs, we must protect what we consider the centrality of the Yale educational experience -- the residential colleges and the many facets of education that expand outward from the college."
Rachel Wohlgelernter, a protesting students, doubts the nature of the Yale experience really is at stake here. "My father," she tells Insight, "was the founder of the kosher kitchen at Princeton. On that campus, the eating clubs are a big deal, and in his time people made the same argument against the kosher kitchen that we're hearing now about making exceptions to Yale's on-campus housing requirement -- that it would undermine the eating clubs and destroy the Princeton experience. It was nonsense, of course: The kosher kitchen was established, Jews who needed it were accommodated and the eating clubs continued just fine. It wouldn't be any different here."
Wohlgelernter also observed that even if Yale dropped its on-campus residence requirement altogether -- which is more than the protectors are asking for -- some 80 percent of freshmen and sophomores still would choose to live on campus. Roughly that percentage of juniors and seniors, who are not under the on-campus residence requirement, make this choice. Thus, says Lewin, the claim that granting a religious exemption would unravel Yale's community life strikes the protectors as contrived.
To some students, including many who do not share the protestors' moral values, Yale is hopelessly impaled on a contradiction. After decades of throwing away paternalism with both hands and making the individual freedom of students paramount, say some students, Yale is now -- in the face of opposition from a culturally conservative source -- returning to a paternalistic notion of its duty to craft and foster (some would say impose) a "Yale experience."
Sophomore Eric Ries, writing in the Yale Free Press, the leading conservative paper at Yale, notes that the all-male, all-WASP Yale of daily chapel and coat and tie is long past, replaced by accommodation and genuine pluralism. Reciting a long list of Yale's official accommodations of different values and lifestyles, Ries -- a Jew, but not Orthodox -- notes: "When Yale was a conservative place and liberals sought to change it for the better, Yale was willing to accommodate them. But now that Yale is an overwhelmingly liberal campus, we find traditional groups that ask much less costly accommodations are denied."
Ries resolves the contradiction by theorizing that Yale in fact has a new orthodoxy -- one that originates in Socrates' proposal in The Republic to weaken family ties by having young men and young women exercise naked together. According to Ries, Yale's claim that it enforces no orthodoxy has at least one exception: It is willing to enforce "the belief that men and women should live together in the same dorms." In fact, concludes Ries, "it sounds like Yale has a new orthodoxy, only not a religious one, but a pagan one."
Yale administrators have adopted tactics that have the effect of playing some groups of Yale Jews against others. The protesting students tell Insight that Betty Trachtenberg,, dean of student affairs, has in the course of negotiations repeatedly played the "other Orthodox" card, pointing out (accurately) that other Orthodox Jewish students have lived on campus without difficulty. Yale Hillel, the official Jewish campus ministry, has voted to remain neutral in the dispute, not wishing to oppose the protestors but also wishing to acknowledge that Yale generally has been accommodating to Orthodox Jews.
Senior Christopher Thacker, a Catholic who is a friend of some of the protectors, tells Insight that when Lewin gave a speech to the Yale Political Union about the controversy, there was tension in the air between him and the Hillel rabbi.
Wohlgelernter agrees. "Mr. Lewin tried to make it clear that we are not impugning anyone's orthodoxy or Jewishness. He himself is Orthodox, but he does not wear a yarmulke to work -- though he went to the Supreme Court to win the right of a Jewish US. Army officer to wear one. There are degrees of observance within orthodoxy. We're not challenging the other orthodox students. But we know what our values are, what our upbringing has been and what we have to do."
Freshman Batsheva Greer, another protector, declines to be drawn into commenting on anyone else's Judaism. Nor does she dispute Yale's right to defend its own traditions. "Yale has a tradition that's almost 300 years old," she tells Insight, "but we have one that's 3,000 years old."
The controversy has tested the supposedly familiar boundaries of the terms "liberal" and "conservative" on the Yale campus. There are at least some for whom liberalism implies a willingness to be confronted with unfamiliar viewpoints -- even conservative religious ones. Junior Peter Stein wrote to the Yale Daily News "to defend my beloved word `liberal.'" He said, "In my view, the liberal argument would be one in favor of accommodation. To suggest that [the protectors] should not have applied to Yale knowing its policy is to categorically rule out an entire group of people who could contribute a great deal to the Yale community."
Among campus conservatives, there is near-universal support for granting the protectors a waiver of the on-campus requirement -- but strong reservations about whether a lawsuit is a good idea. There is a sense that, though Yale is behaving badly in this matter, the authority of government should not be used to force Yale, a private institution, to behave better.
Contrary to what some of their Christian well-wishers might hope or expect, the protectors do not see their stance as a prophetic witness to society at large or even to the rest of Yale. "It doesn't bother us that other people do things that are inconsistent with our moral code," says Wohlgelernter. "But we are concerned about the impact of a permissive atmosphere. Not that we would start having promiscuous sex as soon as we move into a Yale dorm -- but people are affected, if only marginally, by their environment. There is such a thing as moral `secondhand smoke.'"
Harvard tries women-only gym hours
An Exercise In Discrimination At Harvard (a.k.a. "Sharia U.")
Harvard Sets Women-Only Hours for Gym, Complying With Muslim Students' Request
To accommodate Muslim students, Harvard tries women-only gym hours
As it was with Harvard, Yale is another private school and it has the right to conduct business as it so desires.
Gender segregated facilities used to be the norm, and were seen as basic to equal use of amenities by citizens.
I am familiar with academic life but am not American, and so I am shocked to hear of co-ed dorms. Everywhere else has single sex colleges.
Maybe it would be more useful for all groups with an interest in this to unite rather than taking the chance to criticise each other. In Sydney, Australia, there is an old sea bath (a walled off pool) at Coogee beach which has always been “women only.” Some man challenged that with a law suit, and both Muslim and Jewish women petitioned that he would be taking away their only place to swim. Catholic nuns and disabled women made the same point. But then his suit was blown out of the water when an Australian Aboriginal woman said it was a site consecrated for women’s use. And after that no one argued.
At the time I thought the zeitgeist was the actualization of themes described by such as Robert Rimer and his book The Harrad Experiment.
It was, in my view, a wholesale form of child abuse.
Both Harvard and Yale were seminary schools with high values.
A society can take a seriously bad wrong turn. These open dorms are one example thereof. Once a general debasement occurs it is easy for those caught in it to view it as perfectly good morally and normal. Such was the case when the the American Colonies debased temporary indenture into life-time slavery.
Co-ed dorms are a disgrace.
Were I a young man, I would never marry a woman who even attended—let alone lived—at such a college.
Unlike Harvard, which is making special accomodations with women-only hours at the gym, Yale is not being asked to make special accomodations but rather to exempt students from a residence requirement without doing anything else for them.
When I went to school, the one women’s dorm held the Orthodox Jewish women, the Muslims, some of the well-to-do who could afford the higher fees for a classier looking residence, and a fair number of lesbians. And boyfriends still stayed overnight and you could run into them in the showers.
The one men’s dorm was so filled with Orthodox Jews and nerds that female visits were not much of a problem ;-)
What you call "sensibilities" in this case, others more wisely call moral rules conducive to a strong, healthy society and country.
And therefore rules that undermine a strong, healthy society and country, that society and country has every natural right to oppose.
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Uh, these guys didn’t realize the requirements of Yale before they requested admission?
Either they were stupid, or were looking to change the status quo. To me this is as bad as muslims and gays wanting to be separate, but equal.
A conservative Christian school advertises itself as such. Yale, having once been a a seminary does not advertise itself as an illiberal pagan institution devoted to changing America.
Nothing wrong with that at all... but as another poster mentioned, why did these students not verify that the type of housing that they required was available before they applied? Yale doesn't exactly hand out admissions to people, so they could have easily found a different school that was more suited to their needs.
If Yale is private, then I don’t care what religious laws they might be violating. I don’t want annoying exemptions for muslims so I can’t accept them for fellow Jews.
I don’t think it’s very fair to charge somebody $7000 for housing if they can’t live in Yale housing due to their religious beliefs. I’d rather give up Yale than give up purity before G-d. But Yale could simply waive the $7000 and let the students get their own local housing instead.
And that's the sad situation at hand. Religious affiliations, or that a school is private or public shouldn't matter... in a healthy world no student should forcibly be immersed (as a condition of enrollment) into a culture of depravity and then be put on the defensive about *his* lifestyle "demands" (esp. if those demands are simply a request to be separated from the depravity). Or, that he should essentially be fined $7000 for opting out of the "experience".
If the school is so insistent about this type of dorm experience, I shutter to think was it considers to be acceptable educational material.
What it comes down to is this: those whose moral sensibilities are still intact are a vexation to the participants in and peddlers of perversity.
But even if these individuals didn't cite their beliefs as a reason for not wanting to live on campus, they would still be charged $7000. I still say the best course of action for these students is to simply take their education dollars to a school that is more accommodating.
I firmly believe that private institutions have the right to set their own policies regardless of what others think or want. As customers, we can simply take our business elsewhere if we do not agree. This situation is no different than the men-only rules at certain golf clubs that frequently get protested by feminist groups.
But Yale does give plenty of residency exemptions to undergrads for other reasons. Students who are parents, disabled, extreme allergies, caregiver for disabled relatives, local county and state government workers taking qualifications courses, etc. I don’t think any of them are charged the room and board fees, or the fees are offset with 100% grants.
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