This is an invigorating time in the life of Yeshiva College. As faculty members of the College, with previously limited opportunities to participate collectively in the development of our institution, we are now united in a shared commitment to the hopeful and ambitious vision of the future as articulated by the President, Provost, and Deans. Some of us are young men and women embarking upon our first academic jobs. Others are more senior faculty who have made mid-career moves, eager to bring our knowledge and experience to bear on the re-imagining of a venerable institution. Still others are longer-term faculty of the College now energized by a renewed dedication to excellence coupled with a strategic commitment of financial resources, and, importantly, a sense that we will finally be treated as allies in the mission to ennoble and enable a new generation of young men. We have made substantial progress toward coalescing as an intellectual community: through meetings to discuss the culture of Yeshiva College and the question of student comportment; new colloquia in a
multitude of disciplines; an elected committee drafting proposals for a formal faculty governance structure; and perhaps most saliently, a challenging and ambitious review of our undergraduate curriculum, which has generated provocative, thoughtful discussions about what we want our college to be—for ourselves, for the communities we serve, and, most importantly, for our students.

    It is in this spirit of sustained optimism that we express our dismay and disappointment at recent developments in the Yeshiva College Honors Program, developments that seem to compromise Yeshiva’s increasing commitment to collegiality and professionalism. Our frustration centers on the plans for the Program announced by its director, along with decisions related to them, some exercised at the administrative level where clarity and direction are crucial. An April 14 email memorandum from Dr. Otteson to the faculty and a subsequent notice on April 15 unveil the planned retooling of the Program’s internal organization and its linkage to the rest of the College, announce two new administrative hires that threaten to be faits accomplis, and describe the current and prospective financial support for the Program. Our concerns fall into three categories: the process by which such activities have been undertaken, the substance of those proposals, and the sources of their funding.

After a year in which the elected members of the faculty Honors Committee have had diminished opportunities to contribute to planning and decision-making—the same year, notably, in
which the faculty has embarked upon a curriculum review that emphasizes transparency and consensus—the memoranda from Dr. Otteson represent the first extensive description of program design, staffing, and funding that the faculty as a whole has seen—plans which now appear to be taking shape without our consent or input. Conciliatory gestures have followed, and we appreciate them. We are sensitive to the ambiguous and unnecessarily awkward position in which the Honors director has been placed. We also realize how hard he has worked, and we admire his resolve and dedication. Our unease, however, remains, as it feels late in the day for us to influence the outcome.

While its director has a certain amount of discretionary authority, the Honors Program requires the broad-based teaching participation of the YC faculty, and since the Program is part of our curriculum, the faculty has final authority over its curricular policies and practices. Senior administration has a coordinating role to play here as well; many opportunities for oversight, bridge-building, and crossdepartmental conversation have been missed. Most disturbingly, two faculty meetings presumably scheduled to discuss matters related to the Program were cancelled at the last minute.

The recent memos announce the identification of two new administrators for the Program, an historian and a political scientist. Neither the History nor the Political Science department was informed that faculty were being hired in their fields, nor were they included in the vetting of candidates. As a result, despite the small size of the History department and the need for coverage in multiple areas, the College will now, if these plans go forward, have a second specialist in the French Enlightenment. Nor does the proposed Political Science hire reflect the needs of the department as it defined them, with the Dean’s approval, prior to its recent, national search. A similar lack of consultation occurred with regard to the new course on “Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome,” which was initially listed in the schedule as a History course without any input from the department, and without discussion about its rationale and curricular value. Courses at Yeshiva College are currently offered and listed by the departments that have responsibility for staffing them. We also express our concern about the proposal that future courses in the Honors program be listed simply under “Honors,” which risks truncating the role played by departments in crafting their curricula.

Moreover, as Dr. Otteson himself makes clear, no vetting of candidates has taken place at all—no competitive national searches, no committee established to evaluate the scholarship and teaching records of candidates, no respect for the expertise each department possesses. Absent information to the contrary, candidates seem to have been confined to professional colleagues of the Director. Such practices recall the less-than-professional procedures that once characterized certain aspects of Yeshiva College (which, at their worst, earned us the AAUP censure which we have yet to slough off).

The contradiction between the stated desire on both the Honors Program director’s part and that of the administration to create a nationally recognized liberal arts college and their failure to follow standard academic practices in implementing that goal is striking. The University cannot attract the students who are opting to matriculate at Columbia, Brandeis, or the University of Pennsylvania if our institution does not recruit teachers and scholars—especially those who will teach in its Honors Program—through rigorous national searches that seek to identify and attract the very best candidates.

At the same time, if we are to establish a high-quality Honors Program, its very design and conceptualization need to become the subject of vigorous discussion and critical dialogue by faculty. It is precisely this question of academic standards in the most comprehensive sense—procedural conventions, consultation with colleagues at all ranks, and intellectual foundations—that lies at the core of our concern. The current lack of transparency and the accompanying unilateral action with apparent executive endorsement undermine the very project we are all engaged in, do great harm to faculty morale, and ultimately fall short of our mandate to best serve our most talented students. Dr. Otteson’s memoranda explain that “because of the nature of the negotiations” with one of the donors, he was “not at liberty to discuss the conversations publicly, despite wanting to do so.” This alone gives us pause. Do we want to encourage the University to solicit funding that requires us to avoid the standard academic practices to which we all want to adhere? It is, for example, standard
practice for institutions to conduct just such searches, by proper means of peer review, with job announcements that state, simply, “pending budgetary approval.” Or, one might ask the donor to delay the start of the grant period for one year so that people are hired in a way that maximizes the effectiveness of its grant. Does a program most of whose students do not fulfill all of its graduation requirements immediately need three high-level administrators?

We note further that the two non-vetted hires Dr. Otteson has proposed either duplicate or overlap with his own scholarly pursuits, as do the Centers that he has proposed to form the new core of the Program. One of the virtues of the Program in the past has been the breadth of its offerings and the diversity of its critical and analytic approaches. The Program’s proposed core curriculum is arguably inconsistent both with the principles determined by the faculty when it established the Honors Program and with the outcomes voted on by the faculty in the course of our current curriculum review. It is also out of step with current academic paradigms promoted by professional organizations across many disciplines in the arts and sciences. The prepackaged quality and general thinness of vision and scope demonstrated here worry us as scholars and as members of a burgeoning intellectual community both
within the college and in the greater academic world. Why would YC opt for a narrowly-conceived Honors track at the very moment it has embarked upon an ambitious curriculum review and an investment in its faculty through aggressive recruitment at every rank? Why the administration has not more effectively managed the multiple interests and constituencies at play here also has us at a loss.

The new sources of funding represent an additional source of concern, since each foundation that has been mentioned—The Tikvah Fund, The Templeton Foundation, and The Jack Miller
Center—propounds political, rather than strictly educational, agendas. The Miller Center, for example, seeks to create programs on college campuses with ideological (and some of us would add, antiintellectual) missions. The following are comments by Miller himself in an online interview: “It always ground on me that students going to American universities are being taught by professors who hate America and Western civilization. . . . We do not want to contribute money directly to colleges, though, because we fear the colleges would hijack the money. Instead, we help our allies in the faculty or administration at a particular college set up a special fund, which would be under the control of a professor or whoever is running the center.” (See www.philanthropyroundtable.org-/article.asp?article=1457&cat=149.) The avowed stances of these organizations, their relationship with the proposed administrators
of the Honors program, even the language that describes new courses and the establishment of the various centers—all this indicates that these are not likely to be “values-free” grants that leave the faculty free to adopt the best curriculum we can envision. Besides the divisions within the faculty that such politicized grants are likely to arouse, these associations risk marginalizing us within both the larger Jewish and academic worlds. At this expansive moment, do we want to mark ourselves as a “parochial school?” We therefore need to reconsider whether identifying Yeshiva College with partisan goals serves the University’s best interests or those of our students, who will have to compete with the graduates of schools that offer a broader and more comprehensive education. The risks to our national and international reputation, as well as our ability to recruit outstanding undergraduates and faculty, outweigh any ostensible benefits we might derive from the acceptance of such funds. To allow even a small part of the YC curriculum to be dictated by external forces is unacceptable. It risks the
distortion of our own vision of what a Yeshiva College education should be and mean in exchange for a relatively insignificant amount of funding at a time of modest retrenchment. For a college that is determined to see other liberal arts institutions as its proper cohort (and not just Jewish institutions of various sorts), a college talked about already as an analogue to Swarthmore, Williams, or Amherst, this does not seem wise.

So that our reservations not be misunderstood, we must state clearly that we do not see this at its core as an issue of left vs. right, liberal vs. conservative, or other dueling ideologies. Some of us have distinctly conservative views of what a college curriculum should look like. Our shared objection, however, is to any project that results in politicizing education and circumscribing the boundaries of “acceptable” inquiry, analysis, and debate, which, we believe, should alarm the administration as much as it does us. Indeed, among the goals that the faculty has formally ratified for a new curriculum are to foster an “openness to new knowledge and ways of thinking,” “knowledge of world cultures,” and “an intellectually critical point of view.” Compare those goals and the arduous process by which they were consensually arrived at with the way matters have been handled recently in the Honors Program.

Many of us are also concerned by indications that the Program might become a separate academic undertaking, an elitist college within the College with its own curriculum, administration, and faculty. Indeed, when the Yeshiva College Faculty created the Honors Program, we specifically rejected the creation of an Honors College. There were many good reasons for doing so, not the least of which was the question of further fragmenting an already multiply-divided student body.

To sum up: many of us seriously question whether the recently outlined programs serve the best interests of Yeshiva College. If “leadership” is to be one of the new program’s specified fields of inquiry, then it needs to be modeled in practice. The irregularities at the planning stage do not bode well for our collegial vision or, equally important, citizenship. With concern about a new director apparently asserting unilateral decision-making powers, and apprehension on the part of many faculty members about polarizing discussions to come, morale has already begun to suffer. Our trust in the administration’s willingness to match its aspirational rhetoric to its deeds is also being undermined.
Both will need to be reclaimed.

As we have heard in a recent public lecture, “We thrive by casualties.” In the interests of the community we so earnestly want and deserve, we therefore suggest the following corrective measures.

We would like to see the process decelerated and made transparent. The prospective two appointments should be placed on hold, and replaced by proper searches next year. The question of funding needs to be addressed by the entire faculty, probably over the course of several meetings. At a minimum, we should be seeking money from a broad spectrum of institutions and donors (Jewish philanthropy is itself a wide world). Similarly, the senior administration should exercise a far more active role in coordinating dialogue between the Honors Program and YC departments in order to help shape the Program’s vision and better integrate its structure and content into the ongoing curriculum review.

The faculty is proud to have created the Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein Honors Program at Yeshiva College, and is committed to working as partners with the administration and the director in developing the Program in directions that will be as intellectually challenging to ourselves as to our students. Our criticism emerges from our commitment to these goals, and from our continuing desire to embrace this auspicious moment of institutional renewal.

Respectfully submitted and signed,