Empty Chamber

As part of Orientation, Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm, President and Rosh Yeshiva of our esteemed university, delivered an impassioned lecture in which he used stories in the Talmud to derive the proper respect that one must demonstrate toward their fellow man. He stood at the podium and lectured in the Main Beit Medrash to an abject crowd of less than eighty students and faculty members. The large room remained abandoned throughout the speech as most students had evidently been occupied by more important tasks. Lamm's speech had been very well publicized in both the Orientation booklets and with signs posted throughout the university.

The fact that most students chose to not attend the lecture is at once a biting insult to Rabbi Lamm and confirmation of the apathy and indifference that tends to permeate the student body. Perhaps most disgraceful is the fact that over fifty students were visibly sitting in the room directly across from the Beit Medrash, none of them caring to attend the speech. So desperate was Dean Adler to recruit more students to the distinguished oration that he went to Morgenstern Hall lounge and begged the students watching television to grace the empty expanse in which Rabbi Lamm patiently awaited.

In the recent years, Rabbi Lamm's Orientation speech filled the Beit Medrash to capacity, yet this year the room somehow remained bereft of interested disciples. The students of Yeshiva should be completely ashamed of themselves as they have successfully demonstrated their gross disrespect for a brilliant man currently serving as both religious and secular leader of this university, as well as a lack of appreciation for the privileged education being offered. We sincerely hope that the less than mediocre turnout was merely some gross accident, and this event does not serve as a symbolic launch for a dispirited and inactive year on the part of the student body.