A few weeks ago, while enduring an interminable wait in the reception area of a Yeshiva administrative office, I found myself leafing through a YU brochure for lack of better reading material. While idly scanning its description of our institution's undergraduate programs, I discovered a surprising fact sandwiched between other glossy promotional bullets. Apparently, or so the brochure seemed to suggest, Yeshiva offers a joint undergraduate/law degree with its Cardozo School of Law.
Having never heard of such an option before, I was intrigued. Yeshiva seemed to be offering its students the opportunity to take advantage of the University's relationship with one of its marquee graduate schools. After researching the matter, however, I found that this option did not really exist. "It was only useful to students who didn't attend a yeshiva in Israel," revealed Rabbi Michael Hecht, Yeshiva's pre-law advisor. "Most of our students wouldn't have saved any years under this program." Hecht added that few universities feature such BA/JD models, and that Yeshiva's program was rarely used.
Ok, fair enough. Nevertheless, I found myself incessantly thinking about the joint degree paradigm. What about a joint BA/MD with Einstein, our vaunted top-tier medical school? I knew that other mainstream schools such as Yale and SUNY-Downstate boasted such courses of study. Arguably, by admitting a select cadre of its undergraduate pre-med students to such a program, Yeshiva could spare these students the stressful and tedious MCAT and application process, allowing them instead to focus on securing a better undergraduate education. This would be a win-win scenario: Yeshiva would produce stellar undergraduates, who then would continue as outstanding medical students.
Despite my grand vision, responses to my inquiries indicated that this joint program was not under consideration at Yeshiva. The more I looked into the matter, however, the more I found that Einstein was keeping Yeshiva College and Stern College for Women at arm's length. Instead of opening Einstein's state-of-the-art facilities to regular undergraduate biology research, Yeshiva was relegating its students to working in third-rate undergraduate labs. Instead of facilitating undergraduates to experience advanced biology classes in Einstein's biomedical division, Yeshiva instead chose to hinder such enrichment with a mass of red tape. Einstein's sole acknowledgment of its undergraduate sister schools is the summer Roth Scholars program.
I soon realized that these academic barriers were endemic to our entire institution. Apart from RIETS and Revel's joint BA/MA program, I found no interaction between Yeshiva's separate schools. Rather, each school isolates itself like a petty fiefdom, only occasionally throwing bones of tribute to Yeshiva University, its aloof academic suzerain, in return for regular access to the eminently fungible funds in the Yeshiva kingdom's treasure chest.
Clearly, Yeshiva is satisfied with keeping its relationship with its professional graduate schools strictly fiduciary.
While this disjointed state of affairs calls the entire conception of Yeshiva as a coherent university into question, it wreaks its most deleterious effects on the undergraduate programs. Starved of real attention, Yeshiva College and Stern College for Women remain the low men on Yeshiva's institutional totem pole. They derive minimal benefit from Yeshiva, because they confer neither the prestige nor the capital influx that Yeshiva's graduate schools do.
Ultimately, though, this policy hurts Yeshiva more than it realizes. Contrary to what administrators and board members may think, Yeshiva's undergraduate schools might just be the most important entities in the university.
A quick calculation can reveal that less than 5% of Yeshiva undergrads eventually attend Yeshiva graduate schools, including RIETS. This figure suggests that YC, Stern and Sy Syms may be Yeshiva's only opportunity to influence the vast majority of Modern Orthodoxy. Yet, instead of using this opportunity to mold a cohort of educated alumni, Yeshiva remains content to wallow in academic mediocrity, ultimately producing underqualified graduates.
From this perspective, the undergraduate programs seem much more vital to Yeshiva's purported mission of furthering Modern Orthodoxy than even RIETS. America's academic landscape boasts numerous top-tier graduate schools and the Jewish world offers many rabbinic seminaries. In contrast, I can think of only one undergraduate school whose stated purpose is to train its students in Torah U'Madda.
Yeshiva, however, deprives this school of adequate funding for its teachers. Yeshiva refuses to invest in new scientific facilities for this school, even as it restricts the school's students from taking advantage of superior University graduate resources. Yeshiva obstinately refuses to expand this school's critical departments, forcing the undergraduate deans instead to resort to financial legerdemain for creating new tenure lines and classes. Yeshiva neglects this school's spiritual core, scrimping on the purchase of seforim and constraining the size of its Main Bais Medrash. Yeshiva holds out on this school's student activities, often leaving its student leaders wondering why they even bother trying to make a difference. Yeshiva ignores this school's library, closing it to dedicated students on Saturday nights, and forcing it to maintain pitiful periodical holdings and outdated liberal arts collections. Most disturbingly, Yeshiva feels content to hide this school's academic shame behind the fig leaf of a university wide top-tier ranking.
Obviously, the solution to this problem does not merely lie in the creation of a joint BA/MD program, or in the upgrade of YC and Stern's science facilities. While acquiring relevant periodicals for the library, tripling the size of the miniscule undergraduate History, Speech and Music departments, and expanding the Main Bais Medrash would represent steps in the right direction, they would also remain isolated steps, devoid of a supportive academic framework. Instead, Yeshiva must effect a sea change in its attitude towards its undergraduate schools. It needs to view supporting and developing its undergraduate schools as the university's primary goal.
While panaceas for problems of this magnitude generally do not readily offer themselves, fortuitously, History has actually granted Yeshiva a unique opportunity to actualize a radical change in its institutional outlook. When selecting a new President of Yeshiva University at the end of this school year, the gentlemen on the Board of Directors must realize that their choice need not be the best individual for Einstein or Cardozo. While this figure obviously needs to consider the good of the University as a whole, he also needs to regard Yeshiva's undergraduate schools as the primary platform for Yeshiva's ethos.
Of course, Board members like Michael Jesselson and Robert Beren can select a candidate who will maintain the status quo. Such a choice will be historically irrelevant: presumably, Yeshiva will remain a top tier University, while Yeshiva College and Stern continue to languish in academic Siberia. If however, they acknowledge that their choice can radically remap Yeshiva's priorities, they can seize the rare opportunity to influence Modern Orthodoxy that History has afforded them.