College Progresses, Syms Regresses

With its successful passage of a resolution creating a test bank for Yeshiva College courses, the YC Senate has courageously begun an effort to challenge a time-honored practice of academic delinquency rooted in the very culture of this institution. Mesorah has been the scourge on scholastic integrity at the College for long enough. With the present resolution, equity will prevail where social adeptness once dwelled, hard work will be rewarded in the place of frantic midnight photocopying binges. The Senate is to be commended in the strongest terms for advancing this laudable, if belated, initiative. The College's faculty and administration also deserve credit for putting aside their characteristic partisanship in an effort to pursue what is clearly in the better interests of the academic community over which they preside.

We find distressing, however, the failure of the Syms School to follow the lead of its elder brother. We cannot decide whether to chortle or cringe when SSSB Assistant Dean Ira Jaskoll intones "I am not aware of a mesorah problem." Propagating this sort of falsehood in the face of what is an unquestionable truth of the YU academic landscape requires, to borrow Shalom Carmy's formulation, some sort of "gift at self-deception." Jaskoll's denial betrays either almost unbounded naivete or, more likely, reprehensible dissembling.

Not satisfied to distort the known facts, Jaskoll proceeds, in a trademark YU administrative maneuver, to perversely shift the blame for the "mesorah problem" to students. "Those students who claim mesorah is a problem are not working with us." Of course they aren't. Students cannot be expected to compromise their relationships with professors in a pious bid to save the administration the effort of properly discharging its duties. We will, however, lend the Syms School a helping hand by observing that one section of Professor Greenberg's Business Law course received a precise, question-to-question repeat of the previous year's final examination during the fall semester.

We have embarked on an institutional journey to academic redemption. Let the entire academic family join us.

Related Links:

• YC Student Senate Passes Resolution to Create Test Banks
• Discuss the mesorah issue on our Message Board