Dear President Joel, Provost Lowengrub, and Dean Srolovitz:

We have recently learned that the administration has asked for the resignation of Professor James Otteson from his directorship of the Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein Honors Program at Yeshiva College.

We find this news deeply disappointing and disconcerting. We would like to express some of our concerns to you in order to affirm our support for Professor Otteson and in the hope of arriving at a full accounting of what is transpiring.

The arrival of Professor Otteson at Yeshiva College was met with great enthusiasm and excitement by both members and non-members of the Honors Program. President Joel expressed our views eloquently: “We know that his keen erudition, creative pedagogy, and commitment to imparting the highest ethical values will have a profound impact on our students, as well as our institution as a whole.” We wholeheartedly agree, and we applaud the vision and leadership of our esteemed administrators for bringing Dr. Otteson to us. We especially appreciate the efforts our Dean expended to integrate Dr. Otteson into our college and the commitment he has demonstrated to work with all the College's various constituents – university administration, faculty, and students – to ensure the successful development of the Honors Program under Dr. Otteson's able leadership.

In our experience, Professor Otteson has far surpassed the high expectations with which he was introduced. Under his guidance and vision, our best hopes for the Honors Program are quickly coming to fruition. We find Professor Otteson's ambitions for the Honors Program to be inspiring: “The overall goal is to make this the most exciting, challenging, and vigorous Honors Program we can – a place, that is, where students interested in an intellectual adventure will want to come and where, once here, they won't want to leave.”

We are also deeply impressed by Professor Otteson's ability to get things done in an institutional culture still acclimating to the enterprising spirit we associate with the new administration at Yeshiva. The success of Professor Otteson as a university leader in such a short time is incredible. In particular, his capacity to attract academics the caliber of Professor Achinstein has breathed new hope and promise into the Honors Program. The millions of dollars that have been awarded to the Honors Program since his arrival speak to his leadership abilities, his academic reputation, and the extremely promising future for students of the Honors Program. To quote one student: “In almost four years at Yeshiva University, I never participated once in an Honors program event. With Dr. Otteson's arrival, it seems that will change.” Professor Otteson has also proved extraordinarily respectful and professional in his dealings with students.

Beyond his professionalism and dynamism as an administrator, Professor Otteson has proven to be among the finest individuals in our institution. His award-winning work in ethics is mirrored by his refined character. For those of us who have come to know Professor Otteson personally, he has never been anything but a model of prudence, reason, and goodness.

In light of his aforementioned accomplishments, we are extremely distressed to discover that Professor Otteson's role in the Honors Program is being reconsidered.

We were told that Professor Otteson had kept a pseudonymous blog that contained statements which obviously proved Professor Otteson to be unbefitting of the moral stature of the Honors Program directorship.

Having collectively read through the entirety of Professor Otteson's pseudonymous blog, Proportional Belief, we have found nothing that merits a request for his resignation. While we may or may not personally agree with either the style or substance of the blog, we find it very difficult to understand the university's dramatic action. As it seems now, removing Professor Otteson would constitute a disproportionate response to the blog on the part of Yeshiva. Besides the blog’s relative harmlessness, it also had a meager readership, it was pseudonymous, and it was not associated with the university. As such, we would appreciate more details about the problematic passages in the blog and why they called for such drastic measures.

In addition to the above concerns, we, the students of Yeshiva College and its Honors Program feel it necessary to censure the authors of “An Open Letter to the Administration and Faculty.” In that letter, the students of Yeshiva College were grossly misrepresented. Although the faculty claimed to speak  for the students’ “best interests,” our voices and opinions were not taken into account, as they have similarly been ignored in past years when other beloved faculty members and administrators were forced out of the university. We recognize and appreciate that the President, Provost, and Dean were not signatories to that letter, and, indeed, did their best to defuse the situation. At the same time, the faculty have falsely represented us and, in doing so, they have greatly harmed us.

As Honors Program Director, Dr. Otteson partnered with students like no other professor to improve our education and overall college experience. From our perspective, his position has more to do with us than with faculty, so it disappoints us tremendously that faculty comprise both judge and jury without even an attempt to solicit student input. Before an administrative decision is finalized, the voices of students must be heard. Professor Otteson's removal will critically damage our prospects of achieving the education we thought possible at Yeshiva, as well as the prospects for incoming and future students.

The consequences of his potential removal are drastic and troubling for many reasons:

Removing Professor Otteson for exercising his freedom of speech, let alone pseudonymously and unaffiliated with the university, constitutes an attack of the worst kind on academic and personal freedom. As a university with a mission to represent the best of modernity to the world of Orthodox Judaism, such a move appears medieval. The silencing of mainstream if fairly debatable opinions has no place in a university devoted to the world of ideas. Such a move, especially when made official in such dramatic form, runs counter to the values of respect and tolerance that Yeshiva endeavors to embrace.

One does not need to read Actual Ethics to appreciate the great ethical weight of this decision. Professor Otteson has only recently moved his family to New Jersey from Alabama. He was invited to Yeshiva with the warm welcome and backing of many, including the President, whom he thanked personally: "The President in particular, has really put his institutional weight behind the program and wants it to succeed, and I'm very grateful for his support." President Joel has said that Professor Otteson is “one of the most outstanding young scholars and thinkers in the country.”  Not only will you deprive us of such a gem, but removing Professor Otteson under these circumstances will unfairly tarnish his career. Worse, it would constitute an undue betrayal, as well as the potential for a chilling chillul Hashem, a desecration of God's name.

Professor Otteson will no doubt be humiliated and Yeshiva will follow in kind. When the news of this action spreads, the university will face even more criticism from the American academy. It will certainly be an ugly situation for Yeshiva in general, but it will have a particularly damning effect on us students, your customers.  Will this add to or detract from our ability to recruit quality faculty, funding, and students? It seems to us very clearly the latter.

In addition to the moral implications of this action, the removal of Professor Otteson will drastically impact our Honors Program. Professor Otteson's clear vision will be replaced by a long list of dire questions: What will happen to the upwards of $1.5 million that Professor Otteson secured for us? What will happen to Professor Achinstein and the other exceptional new professors hired? What will happen to the student-run conferences, Honors lounge and library, and all the myriad programs Professor Otteson streamlined and oversaw? Most significantly, who will replace Professor Otteson? Will we find another scholar equal to Professor Otteson's personal, academic, and professional excellence? Will that scholar care to work in an environment so seemingly politically charged and volatile?  And, most importantly, how will those of us currently involved in the Honors program regain a sense that the culture of ideas that we so desperately worked for and want can thrive when it has been crushed, suddenly and without explanation?

The effects of Professor Otteson's potential removal and the circumstances surrounding it suggest that political considerations of some form affected this decision, a thought we can only label as shameful.  Yet, ultimately, the consideration of Professor Otteson's removal was not given over to those select faculty members pitted against Professor Otteson. It remains a decision of the administration. We thus turn to you for a full account of the situation.

To close, those of us who had the fortunate opportunity to study directly under Professor Otteson fondly recall that Professor Otteson stressed constantly and consistently the importance of presenting an opposing argument as charitably as possible. We believe this charity is reflected in the evenhanded fairness we have always experienced with Professor Otteson. In that spirit, we respectfully request a complete explanation so that we can fully understand what process is driving our Director away, and what solutions can rectify the situation. We trust that you are extending such charity to Professor Otteson, as is only decent and expected. While we understand that students are not entitled to know everything, in this case, where students will feel the consequences more directly than anyone, with the exception of Professor Otteson and his family, we urge your transparency and openness. Additionally, we hope that the university will not take any irreversible action before the concerns of students and the full consequences of that action are seriously considered. Finally, we urge you to reconsider the removal of Professor Otteson as Director of the Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein Honors Program at Yeshiva College.

We will be contacting your assistants and we hope that you will be able to meet with us soon.

Thank you in advance for your forthrightness and for respecting the student body with which you work.

Respectfully submitted,

Students of Yeshiva College and the Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein Honors Program

Elli Ausubel
Moshe Bengio
Ari Bernstein
Yehuda Bernstein
Noah Samuel Cheses
Michael Cinnamon
Jeffrey Dawidowicz
Jacob Deutsch
Ben Ehrenkranz
Ethan Eisen
Avinoam Erdfarb
Jaime Gitler
Chayim Goldberg
Michael Greenberg
Benjamin Greenfield
Noah Greenfield
Simcha Gross
David Y. Harari
Jonathan Hefter
Chaim Yehudah Hollander
Julian Horowitz
Arshia Hourizadeh
David Isser
Ben Kandel
Jonathan Kandelshein
Ori Kanefsky
Jerry M. Karp
David Lasher
Dov Lerner
William I. Lerner
Dovi Meles
Chaski Naor
Ezra Pinsky
Nadav Recca
Aryeh Reinstein
Donny Rosenberg
Ayol Samuels
Elyasaf Schwartz
Yosef Schwartz
Shaul Seidler-Feller
Immanuel Shalev
Eliezer Stavsky
David Stein
Rafi Stohl
Ezra Sutton
Ilan Tokayer
Noam Weissman
David Wermuth
Uri Westrich
Jonathan Ziring
Edmond Zuckier