It is nearly two decades since five Orthodox Ivy-League students made headlines. In the subsequent columns we shall relate their story.
The rumor that Jewry is shy of publicity is true of all American Jews, but it’s truer of the Orthodox. Jewry at large, from the time of its arrival on the shores of America, did everything possible to try and quietly conform. They adopted American-sounding names, did not wear a yarmulke in public and would surely never display anything Jewish on their front lawn. Even the small minority that maintained distinctions did so in a low-profile way, usually confined to a Jewish neighborhood.
Because of this venerated policy, it was considered nothing less than scandalous when four Orthodox students, in October of 1997, 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.
(Initially there were five – hence the name “The Yale Five” – but by the time the suit was filed Rachel Wohgelernter had undergone a civil marriage three months prior to her religious ceremony in order to be exempt from the campus housing regulation, and was therefore not a plaintiff.)
The housing regulation, it was argued, violated the First and the Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution which guarantee the free exercise of religion and forbid the government from discriminating against religious belief and practice. Yale could not claim, the suit asserted, that it was a private university and not subject to governmental regulations because it received federal and state grants and enjoyed a long-standing, historical relationship with the State of Connecticut.
The proof was that since October 1701 Connecticut has been intimately involved in the management, financing and administration of Yale. The Connecticut Constitution confirms the charter of Yale and requires the state governor and lieutenant governor as well as six senior senators of the Connecticut legislature to sit on the school’s board. If Connecticut treats Yale as a “state actor” then it would be subject to federal antidiscrimination laws.
The suit also charged that Yale was in violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act because it monopolized the student housing and tied together two businesses – education and housing. These are just two of the ten claims that were leveled against Yale in the suit.
The controversy commenced during the 1995-6 academic year when Yale altered its housing policy and required all unmarried freshmen and sophomores, including those from New Haven, to live in the campus dormitories. Patterned after the “college system” of Oxford and Cambridge, dormitories were to conform to the university’s educational mission which embraces residential life as an integral component of college education.
Living on campus, the university argued, meant living in the real world, with all of its complexities and challenges. As university president Richard Levin put it, “We believe the undergraduate experience is more than just the classroom… And we believe these aren’t just dormitories, but communities. The university has been committed to offering an encounter with difference as part of its educational mission.”
Yosef Hershman, an incoming freshman whose admission was deferred for a year of yeshiva study in Israel, wrote Dean of Student Affairs, Betty Trachtenberg, in March 1996 requesting a waiver from the Yale housing requirement. Dean Trachtenberg replied that Yale is responsive to all of its students needs including religious, but living in a residential college was “at the very center of a Yale education.” Accordingly, the request could not be honored.
One year later, Yosef and three other students – who also had their enrollment deferred for a year of study in Israel – requested a meeting with Dean Trachtenberg when they returned to America for the Passover vacation. Betty Trachtenberg readily agreed to the meeting, but failed to see why living in a coed dorm was an impossibility for them. It would have been interesting to know if Quakers had made the same request if her reaction would have been any different.
Chodesh Tov – have a pleasant month!
