In October of 1997, four Jewish Yale undergraduates (initially five) filed a federal law suit against Yale University charging that the school’s housing policy requiring unmarried freshmen and sophomores to live in coed dorms was discriminatory against Orthodox Jews. Required coed housing and being denied single-sex bathrooms was a violation of the laws and teachings of the Jewish concept of modesty and thus untenable to the plaintiffs.
The students complained to Dean Trachtenberg over their requirement to listen to talks on safe sex and live in an environment that practically encouraged premarital relations. Some students were more assertive than others – but all of them were the least likely rebels.
Leah Friedman remained silent during the meeting. Her own parents had failed to grasp why the issue was so vital – until they actually saw the dormitories. These were not the college dormitories of the 1970s, and when they saw first-hand what they otherwise could not have imagined, they no longer had any critique of their daughter’s position.
Dean Trachtenberg asked Leah for her opinion. “Would you,” asked the bashful student, “have wished to have lived in a dorm like this when you were 17-years-old?”
It was a good question, but it did not merit an answer. Yale’s policy was probably best summed up by President Richard Levin, “Why come to a university like this one if you won’t open your mind to new ideas and news perspectives? This is not a place where people who close themselves off to the world can thrive. That’s why we sort freshman-year roommates randomly and believe so strongly in the residential college system.”
Dean Trachtenberg was not willing to accommodate. Since the students knew the housing rules in advance they should not have picked Yale hoping for an exception in their instance. The Yale Five did not have a strong defense against this warning, other than the truth. They decided to come because they were desirous of a Yale education. One of them mused, “If presidents went to Yale, why shouldn’t I?” Dean Trachtenberg clarified that the education was a package deal: “You can’t have a full education without the cultural component.”
She tried to allay the students’ fears that their religious beliefs would not be violated as A) freshmen could live on a single sex-floor B) sophomores were allowed to choose roommates who shared their religious beliefs and C) just because a bathroom was coed it did not mean that it would be occupied. And as a parting swipe the dean, not an individual ignorant about Jewish tradition concluded, “How do you ever expect Orthodox Jews to integrate into the real world?”
Could it be that the dean of student affairs was unaware of what was really going on in the dorms? That promiscuity was the rule and not the exception.
Factually, Leah Friedman and several of the other “five” would have been inclined to pay for housing on campus as required, and rent off campus. This would have been a costly and infuriating solution, but it would have resolved the problem, as Betty Trachtenberg herself said, “We do not perform bed checks.”
Three-fourths of the Yale Five (remember one had wed civilly prematurely to avoid the dorm restriction) were not looking for confrontation or headlines. Paying for on and off-campus housing would have been the preferred solution over going public.
But it was the fourth student, backed by an ideologically-motivated family, which refused to capitulate to Yale’s terms. There was no way that they were going to pay $6,850 for a lifestyle that they maintained was forbidden and was unconstitutionally foisted upon freshmen and sophomores. Silently moving off campus to shelter one’s soul was abdicating responsibility – the responsibility of every decent person to protest how egregiously promiscuous campus life was.
Chodesh Tov ‑ have a pleasant month!