Publications Deserve Space on YU's Site

To The Editor:

After being witness to the recent game of ping-pong between PR, MIS and Enayim L'Torah, I'd like to throw out one simple query: Why is Yeshiva’s on-line exposure still dominated by the Public Relations department? Besides not knowing what is good for them, the PR department fails to realize that the current YU on-line existence is an embarrassment and we would be better off if the current YU website did not exist at all.

Earlier this year, you printed an article in which Director of Public Relations, Mr. David Rosen was quoted saying, "If you go to the YU web site, you'd think that the University has no students." What I cannot understand is why this "policy" is being implemented on purpose! The trivial act of erasing the header of Enayim L’Torah online was not only inane in reason but also BAD PR for Yeshiva. What is so terrible with letting the world know that it is indeed published by "The STUDENT Organization of Yeshiva?"

The very fact that the Enayim's on-line presence on yu.edu was threatened, is an obvious declaration of the lack of priorities of the PR dept. The outside world looks to YU for Torah, yet the highest priority on the YU webpages is the Galileo Project. A Divrei Torah publication, written, published and updated weekly by students, is something of which YU has only to be proud. Too bad for us, that someone in a corner office went surfing one day and discovered something he had never seen or "approved ," for unexplainable ever-morphing reasons. The end result of course, is once again, students contemplating distancing themselves from their own school. The Computer Science Society had its server shut down, so they built an independent Linux web and development server, that "have nothing to do with YU, officially." The Commentator online has its webpages and its own domain name on a server in Pennsylvania. There is even a website with Rav Golwicht’s Shiurim in audio, set up by a former student.

;The time has come for the PR department to realize that by shunning students from Yeshiva’s web server, causing them to openly declare their online existence as "having nothing to do with YU," is a PR disaster. What does it look like to the rest of the world when all the YU student clubs, society’s and publications' web sites include a disclaimer of proud embarrassment that they have nothing to do with YU?

Ephraim Shapiro,

Secretary, Student Organization of Yeshiva (SOY) ‘97-’98