Diversity, Religion and the Office of the Dean

Dean Michael Hecht, Assistant Dean of Yeshiva College for the last fourteen years, is leaving his post to take over the helm of MTA. Rabbi Hecht, for those of you who somehow don't know, is a well-respected educator and an exemplar of Torah U'Madda. He has served as both a High School Rebbe and advisor to the Pre-Law students at YC, as well as teaching a number of law courses in the College. He has long argued that Yeshiva students have a unique advantage in the field of law precisely because of their exposure to and involvement with the study of Talmud. His presence in the YC Dean's office will surely be missed as he takes his leave for MTA next fall.

As would be expected, many College students have expressed concern as to who will fill his role next year as Assistant Dean of YC. However, I have been troubled by the reason and rationale behind many people's extraordinary concern. Many people in this school were extremely unhappy when Dr. Joyce Jesionowsky was brought in to fill the position vacated by Avery Horowitz. After all, they say, "she's a non-Jewish woman, a shiksa; the precise antithesis of the student body of this school. She came here with no understanding of the 'frum world,' or the "way things work here in yeshiva.'" Some people even went so far as to claim that her appointment was an attempt by the nefarious administration of YU to de-Judaize our Yeshiva and destroy any Torah content in the school.

But this wasn't a total disaster, people explain to me. You see, whenever you needed to be signed into a course, or get a requirement waived, or you need help squeezing your college career into four semesters, you still had someone to go to. Rabbi Hecht understands the ways of the Beis Medrash and "knows the system." Now, don't get me wrong; I have no desire to disparage Dean Hecht. He certainly has been around YU a long time, and in all my dealings with him, I have found him to have the highest of academic standards and equally high expectations for students in this school. In fact, in my first day on this campus, it was Dean Hecht who got up in front of a room full of new students and encouraged us to stay four years on campus, saying that a high quality college education can't be crammed into three years.

But the perception on campus is that a frum Jew in that office will identify with your desire to skimp on your liberal arts education in order to get back to the Beis Medrash, help you keep your GPA high without doing too much work, or just figure out how you can spend as little time in college as you can. The problem here is two-fold. First, why is the assumption made that just because the dean has a big black kippa, that he lacks academic standards? Anyone who has worked or studied with Dean Hecht knows that this is not true. Second, why is the assumption made that just because the dean insists on everyone graduating from this school gets a first-rate education, she much not understand the way things work? Anyone who has discussed their courses with Dean Jesionowsky - not just shoved a paper in her face for a signature - knows that she takes great interest in the students of this school.

I fully understand the importance of having the goals of our school guided by religious principles. But once those religious principles dictate that we get a high-caliber secular education, we should look for the best deans to deliver this education. These may not all be religious, just like all professors in the school are not religious, nor should they be. In fact, in striving for the best education and the best educators, it is often a good idea to look outside the "system" for people who aren't used to "the way things work." Let them come in and question why, just because we are religious, we want to get away with a lower level of education or a less time in college. Let them ask why a CLEP test is a good substitute for learning your own nation's history, or why any challenging course should be replaced with a course at Ramapo College. Then, let us realize that the reason we can't come up with a good answer to these questions has nothing to do with the Dean's religious convictions, but rather our complacency with mediocrity. And let us take a step out of our cloistered lives and our well-developed stereotypes and start to consider what will most befit our educations, with boundless and immeasurable benefit, rather than our traditional old-boys' club, with little or no worth in the world of intellectual achievement and success.