Assorted
Statement by the President of Yeshiva University (1995)
For the past year, I had hoped that the imbroglio caused by the tasteless personal remarks of a student speaker at the 1994 law school commencement exercises, concerning his homosexual relationship with some other person, would die down and so avoid a "desecration of the Name" by being aired publicly. After all, the number of students involved in homosexual groups in some of our graduate and professional schools is ludicrously minuscule —some 20-30 students out of a population of some 6,200—and it is the student government, not the university, that pays for and decides which groups may use which rooms for their meetings. These individuals gather for purposes of discussion. In this they are no different from other extracurricular student organizations in these schools devoted to singing or music or art or whatever, matters not necessarily related to their academic work. Moreover, there are no substantive halakhic issues per se involved here that should have impelled us to take action. But the issue has not disappeared, and, indeed, it has been exacerbated by misleading articles in the press; among them was one comparing Yeshiva to Notre Dame, which failed to emphasize that Indiana has no law constraining such groups, whereas Yeshiva is in New York and is bound by different laws. I have therefore reluctantly concluded that while silence was mandated heretofore, we must now, by the same token, declare ourselves forthrightly. Yeshiva University is, for an American Jewish institution, rather venerable: it is 109 years old. For the majority of its life, it has been an academy that combines Jewish studies and worldly disciplines— Torah Umadda or, as its name clearly suggests, both a yeshiva and a university. Because of this combination, it is a historic, even unique, entity. It is a complex thing, with interwoven and interacting parts, and balanced with extreme delicacy, and therefore cannot be understood without adequate reflection as to its essential nature and mission.…
