I. Atribe

Steven I. Weiss

Yeshiva’s deep, dark secrets.  You hear about them from time to time; I tend to hear about them a lot.  If there is anything that you think is worth changing at Yeshiva, somewhere there’s a deep, dark secret that will explain why you are wrong.  This is so dumb.

If all of us got together and agreed to share all of our important information, we would have a better university.  Intellectual cross-fertilization is what the academic pursuit is supposed to be about.

A small tangent to respond to the column left of mine.  “Constructive criticism” is a very good thing.  While Lou is actually talking about slander, not constructive criticism, in his parable, he is somewhat correct about some of the literature that was distributed this week.  Those who attacked Dov Zakheim were clearly acting in a slanderous fashion.  Where Lou is wrong, though, is in assuming that distributing information about an individual is necessarily distasteful.  That students distributed Zakheim’s statements or biographical details under the assumption that they were “derogatory characteristics” does not mean that they were in the wrong.  These students distributed facts; if the reader thinks those facts speak poorly of Zakheim, well, he is entitled to his opinion.  It would behoove our president, as I argued last spring, to begin approaching his own position with the kind of transparency that someone like Dov Zakheim, as a presidential appointee, is required to maintain.  I made the campaign promise last year to keep a copy of the student council’s financial records available to the student body in Morgenstern Hall’s lobby; if Lou is going to expect any student group to take a budget cut, as he has prposed, he has to open the books now and let us know why the money isn’t there.  This is constructive criticism, and I hope he takes the time to consider it.

Secrecy at Yeshiva does not begin with the student council, of course – it merely ends there.  The Office of Student Services has somehow kept secret all kinds of information that federal law requires publicized.  If you are expelled, good luck trying to find out why, because Student Services won’t give you a written explanation.  The only understandable rationale for such behavior that I’ve been able to come up with is that Student Services feels that it makes up for its silence by publicizing students’ confidential information, including psychological consultations and grade point averages.

Moving further up the Yeshiva hierarchy, we find all of our mythical budgetary problems.  Get this: in all past negotiations with employees’ unions at Yeshiva, administrators have given the sob story that the institution is hemorrhaging cash, and simply can’t afford salary inflations.  Even forgetting the expected 7% tuition increase, Yeshiva has recorded profits for several consecutive years.  One would imagine a university would be proud of having achieved such fiscal prudence; when you’re trying to cheat the people who make your school run out of a fair salary, I guess you keep such information on the down low.

And then there are the deep, dark secrets about “the way Yeshiva really runs.”  The rumors about Sheldon Socol’s iron grasp upon all Yeshiva operations necessarily contain some myth; doubtless, lightning doesn’t bolt from his wallet.  Regardless, if what most of the murmuring masses say is actually true, that Socol hoards far more of Yeshiva’s dough than his publicized salary of $309,165 (plus benefits of $9,471), that is something that Yeshiva would discover if it required more transparency throughout.  Yeshiva’s inner working are the be-all, end-all of secretive dealings.

Surely we would find out that there is some fallacy in our holy trinity of finanacial subterfuge:  That Socol is a financial wizard that saved Yeshiva, that we have $1.3 Billion in assets, and that we are consistently losing money.  The city of New York faced the largest terrorist attack in history and the mayor is only calling for a 5% budget cut; Socol is calling for 15%.  We are losing money all the time, yet Socol is a financial wizard.  Mmmph!

What is ironic, though, is that those same people who constantly complain about Socol uphold the culture of secrecy; they’d like to see him disposed of in much the same way that he operates.  That’s why some at Yeshiva were pleased to hear of Zakheim’s nominations.  To quote one professor, “Zakheim is the kind of guy who wakes up in the middle of the night to go over the books.”  That he’d furtively discover what Socol was up to, sack him, fix some basic administrative problems and then resign within a few years was the hope of this professor; his preference was almost unanimously shared by Yeshiva’s institutional hegemonists.  If these individuals are so scared of Socol’s influence, they should approach it in a serious and public manner.  Abandoning Yeshiva’s Torah U’Madda leadership – even for a short time – just to get a guy to peruse the books is not a serious approach to solving the problem.  If they want to effect change, they should make a public demand for a public accounting of Yeshiva’s financial status and procedural policy; otherwise, they should quit their whining.

One group that happened to be surprisingly open with its procedures has been the Presidential Search Committee.  They’ve said, clearly and openly, that they looked for the ultimate three-pronged leader, and couldn’t find one.  So they assumed that we would be better off with an individual who has administrative skills than a scholar who did not.  I think that they were wrong, that Yeshiva can hire all the COO’s and CTO’s and CIO’s it requires, but that it needs a delicate balance of ideology – not bookkeeping – up top.

The systemic problems at Yeshiva are not exclusively ameliorable by a new, tough-guy president.  An ideal system requires ideal participation from all of its parts, and all of us can contribute to that by making our own programs accountable and transparent; to expect more of Yeshiva’s higher-ups without our own participation is hypocritical.

If all of us contribute as we’re supposed to, all we will need is a University President and Rosh HaYeshiva who can serve as an ideological figurehead, with plenty of VP’s to help him or her out.  If we’re honest and earnest in working from below, we’ll hopefully be met with the same kind of methods from above; until we have made such a commitment, we can’t be sure that such an equation does not hold true.

After Zakheim withdrew his candidacy, one board member jokingly said, “I’d be happy to chair Rabbi Lamm’s thirtieth anniversary dinner.”  Well, assuming we can get our own acts together, so would I.