A recent Observer headline declared the lack of feminism at Stern "surprising." This is hardly the case. When no policies or courses seriously address the topic, it's foolish to assume that the student body would somehow divine a feminist ideology.

The approach of Stern's leading administrators is laughable. Quoting Dean Karen Bacon: "We don't want to do something that only interests a few people." Quoting Rabbi Ephraim Kanarfogel, who heads the Stern Jewish Studies Department: "I don't know yet if we have the demand for courses like that." These are pretty interesting statements; if Stern students haven't expressly stated their desire to learn about a certain topic, they don't have to. Are Science requirements soon to join already-swirling feminism in Stern's academic toilet? Obviously not, Bacon argues, because, while science is something worth studying, Women's Studies courses, "don't lend themselves to a coherent major." It's nice to know that Yeshiva's standards are so high that its colleges can simply abandon universally-recognized fields of study, recognizing, as the Ivies apparently don't, that such disciplines aren't "coherent."

How bad is the situation for feminism at Stern?

I've got numerous personal anecdotes, but here's one that really takes the cake. For nearly two months, the first major work of modern feminism, Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, sat on a shelf in Stern's library, on sale for fifty cents. Doubtless, many young women - perhaps hundreds, perhaps thousands - passed by this book. Who now owns the cheaply-priced tome? Yours, truly.

Think of any Rav book; let's use Nefesh Harav. Even with the language barrier, how many copies could sell at Yeshiva for fifty cents? Probably hundreds, likely thousands. Because we have an intellectual predecessor, we bother to learn about what he has to say. At Stern, apparently, Betty Friedan means absolutely nothing; not only would no student spare two quarters for it, no one has even checked it out of the Stern library since December 3rd, 1998.

And it doesn't stop there. Feminist Ethics, one of the few feminist-ethics volumes in Yeshiva's collections, hasn't been checked out since YULIS went electronic. Feminist Ethics and Social Policy hasn't been passed through library doors in more than two years. Then there's the first-ever feminist tome, the grand-mommy of women's rights, Mary Wollestonecraft's The Rights of Woman, which hasn't been checked out for as long as I've been at Yeshiva.

How does this ignorance play out in practical terms? Well, one of the leading feminists at Stern - according to the Observer - had a conversation with me not too long ago in which she defended students' rights to free expression on the basis of Title IX. For those of us that don't already know, Title IX is the primary legislative accomplishment of feminist efforts, mandating equal sports programs for men and women at universities. So, while women at other universities across the country endlessly praise Title IX for allowing them to have their own competitive curling programs, leading Stern feminists can't differentiate it from the Bill of Rights.

Of course, feminism has a rather practical application in Judaism, too, and this is where things get really fun. Bringing the Rav back to the discussion, it's worth mentioning that his Maimonides school has always taught girls Talmud from an early age, yet, strangely, the topic is still considered a matter worth debating among many Stern women. When I was at Stern for Shabbos recently, I asked the women in the bais medrash there what they thought about increasing women's ritual participation at their campus. (The halachic material behind such measures is plentiful; the only question about these things tends to be the potential "shakeup" in communities as a result of their implementation. One would imagine that such would not be a big issue at Stern, where the ruling class is, ostensibly, women.) Their response was that they had no desire "to be men," a funny, and all-too-common response to the feminist question. It's so strange how an ideology that is supposed to engender the ultimate form of female expression becomes viewed as an expression of maleness; that sure says a lot about male hegemony. It should be noted that Stern professor Dr. Sidney Langer published a study in which he found that Stern women did not particularly enjoy women's minyanim; of course, no comparable study has been done of YC students' enthusiasm with male minyanim.

Given as much, it's no big wonder that Stern students are repeatedly kicked out of class for wearing pants, when the halachic matter has already been decided in favor of pants. It's not surprising to read Elana Soleimani remarking of a club that would take students to visit battered-women's shelters, "Everything we do deals with women's issues... having a Women's Club would be somewhat repetitive."

It's clear that the situation for feminism at Yeshiva is rather poor. Until such time as Stern hires administrators who spend more of their time engaging in a serious approach to feminism, instead of poring over Yeshiva publications, looking for every mistaken mention of the word, "girl," it's hard to imagine that the situation will change. In the meantime, promoting student initiatives instead of quashing them is the least that Stern's student leadership can do. And being appropriately sympathetic is the least that we guys can do.