Volume 67, Issue 3

PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS

"I am announcing my intention [to resign] ... so that the Board may put into action an appropriate succession plan, with sufficient time to identify appropriate candidates for the dual presidency of YU and RIETS ... I believe that the time is right to identify a President who can lead Yeshiva University into this century toward even higher goals and greater achievements."
--Dr. Norman Lamm, announcing his resignation to Yeshiva's Board of Trustees, March 13, 2001

Dr. Lamm and the Board may or may not have fully realized at the time how challenging it would be to fulfill this mandate. As the search for our next President unfolded throughout the past nineteen months, however, we all began to better appreciate its difficulty. Dr. Lamm's stated task -- that the Board will identify a President/Rosh Hayeshiva who will achieve great things for YU -- has led the Presidential Search Committee and the Yeshiva community at large on a paralyzingly frustrating wild goose chase. 

Besides for his Chag HaSemicha speech where he urged the Board to appoint one person who is both President and Rosh Hayeshiva, Dr. Lamm did not and will not go into any further detail. Claiming that it is not up to him "to pre-empt the prerogatives" of his successor, Dr. Lamm will rightfully not offer his opinion about the many relevant issues that will necessarily extend beyond his Presidency. He can, indeed, offer general guidelines, but it is really up to Yeshiva University's constituents to outline some sort of theoretical vision.

For the most part, however, this has not been achieved. Everyone loves to offer his or her opinion on the matter, but most of the opinions turn out to be clichéd tweakings (however well-phrased) of Dr. Lamm's generality. "My personal vision really boils down to one thing," a fellow student recently wrote to The Commentator. "I want someone who lives and breathes the ideology of Torah U'Madda, who sees the world with the breadth that knowledge offers but with the integrity...that only... commitment to Torah can provide." 

Now, this vision is great, and we agree with it, but that really doesn't do too much for us. At this crossroads of the Search process, over a year and a half since Rabbi Lamm's fair warning, with little to nothing looming over the horizon, we, representing the students, wish to present a rough outline of what we expect of our next leader:
The future of the undergraduate colleges. With Wilf Campus enrollment reaching 1400 students and an unprecedented shortage of housing, the 2002-2003 academic year is quite possibly the very last year that the administration can shove everything under the rug by overtallying class after class and monopolizing unwanted, Ethernet-less, off-campus Independent Housing Program apartments. Our next leader must decide ASAP whether our institution will continue to grow, in which case new teachers must be hired and that phantom, much-talked-about new dorm must be built, or whether our selectivity will dramatically increase and enrollment will be rigidly capped.

Fiscal reorganization. Sheldon Socol's financial grip is ubiquitously palpable. Whether we've tried to procure funding from the deans after they've been censured by their superiors or commiserated with teachers over the pathetic hypocrisy of Yeshiva's academic ideals (we claim to be a research institution, yet Socol's financial deficit makes research so difficult), we've all somehow experienced Yeshiva's financial bureaucracy.

It is unacceptable for a university to employ an entrenched Vice President for Business Affairs who has absolutely no interest in the students and faculty and in their academic development. And it's ridiculous that we have no system of checks and balances when it comes to the management of a nine hundred and something million-dollar endowment. Our mandate for our next President, while simply stated, needs a strong leader to fulfill: get rid of Socol, establish a system of financial accountability, and insure that the next generation of our business leaders start spending Yeshiva's money for the betterment of its constituents, not for the purpose of furthering the personal legacies of Yeshiva's upper echelon.     

Combating the growing polarization of the university. And this is where the idealistic mission comes into play. We need a leader who will set an example for Roshei Hayeshiva, faculty, and students. We need someone who will hire rabbeim like Rabbis Michael Rosensweig and Jeremy Wieder (assuming the former is not the subject) and will urge those rabbeim who support "Torah U'Parnassa" (and there are many of them) to stop indoctrinating influenceable students with this type of ideology. We want a President who will set a standard for general studies hirings and course offerings, who will not hire or will, if necessary, fire those administrators who show little respect for Torah U'Madda.

And this soul-searching necessarily extends well beyond Yeshiva College and Stern. From the "Yeshiva" perspective, our next President must decide how to respond to Lander College on the right and to Chovevei Torah on the left: he must formulate concretized expectations of RIETS's Semicha graduates and clarify a mainstream hashkafa and derech halimud that can serve as points of reference to compare with those other schools.

Dr. Lamm's successor must also determine how to treat Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Cardozo School of Law, whether as full-fledged components of a Jewish university on the one hand or as in-name-only affiliates on the other. Responding to the demands and threats of Yeshiva's prestigious graduate schools will no doubt be a major task.

Now all this has and will continue to scare candidates out of the job. But we have to clarify: these elements don't all lie directly in the hands of the next Yeshiva President. People enjoy justifying the delayed search process by claiming that the job is impossible for just one person; no one would be able to fulfill any sort of substantive vision, after all, let alone that which has just been outlined, and that's why no one has been found for the job.

But that's not a valid argument. How does the President of the United States handle his myriad responsibilities? Through his cabinet, his ideologues who aid him in fulfilling his objectives. Just as an architect constructs plans for builders to build, we rally for a President who will provide an ideological framework within which administrators, rabbeim, faculty, and students will operate. Such a leader would guide us all in making our own decisions, place a President's Stamp of Approval upon certain initiatives, and push for those initiatives to take effect, exerting an influence that only a President can wield.

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