Orthodox Jews Protest Yale’s Required Coed Dormitories

When freshmen arrived at Yale University this fall, they were greeted with an article in the Yale Daily News about places on campus to have sex: in the library stacks, in the stadium and atop Harkness Tower, the school’s highest vantage point.

For five Orthodox Jews, such thinking is a problem.

The Yale 5, as they call themselves, are demanding the right to live outside Yale’s coed dormitories, where they say the easy sex and close, everyday contact between men and women are an affront to their faith. They have threatened to sue the Ivy League school on religious grounds.

“The atmosphere in the dormitories is at odds with Judaism,” said Jeremy A. Hershman, a 19-year-old sophomore from Cedarhurst, N.Y. “I have nothing against what they want to have in their dormitories, but for them to impose it on everybody, I can’t live like that.”

Yale requires all freshmen and sophomores to live on campus. During freshman year, students live in buildings where the sexes are divided by floor. In the second year, they move into single-sex suites. But members of the opposite sex often live next door.

The five Orthodox Jews say their religion prohibits living with members of the opposite sex unless they are married.

The issue has stirred debate on and off campus, and alumni such as William F. Buckley Jr. and Alan Dershowitz have taken part.

Among the many ironies, some Yalies point out, is that where once it was hippies in tie-dyed T-shirts and torn jeans who staged protests, today it’s the conservative students.

“The political climate of the world today is inherently more liberal than it was in the ‘60s,” said Phillip Kwun, a 21-year-old senior from Tulelake, Calif., majoring in philosophy and economics. “We’ve come to accept certain things that used to be nonstandard as standard.”

Like Kwun, many students are unsympathetic to the Jewish students’ cause.

“You have to expect certain things when you go to college, especially at a place like Yale,” said freshman Catherine Cochran, 18, of Tappan, N.Y.

Buckley, a 1950 graduate, has weighed in on Yale’s sexual mores in his syndicated column, observing: “The idea is certainly conveyed to freshmen that sex on campus is what one . . . does, like canasta or lacrosse.”

The university has said it is not discriminating against devout Jewish students but merely wants to enrich their studies by immersing them in dormitories where men and women learn to cope with one another.

“I don’t think it’s really a debate about whether life in the dorms is acceptable or not,” Yale spokesman Thomas Conroy said. “We want to attract students who want to integrate themselves in the community.”

He said the students knew about the residency requirement before they enrolled.

Some critics have noted that Yale is a private university, that the Orthodox students chose to attend, and that if they don’t like it, they can go elsewhere.

But the students reject that possibility.

“Yale is one of the top schools in the country, in the world. I don’t think I should be deprived and have to go to the back of the bus because they can’t accommodate me,” said freshman Batsheva Greer, 18, of New Haven. “Why should I have to go to another Ivy League school? Presidents have gone here, so why shouldn’t I?”

Her father, Rabbi David Greer, likened the dormitories to Sodom and Gomorrah.

“The ethos of today--everything goes--is incompatible with a religious lifestyle,” he recently wrote to a university official. “I cannot imagine any truly devout person, whether Christian, Muslim or Jew, living in a mixed-sex environment.”

Last year, two of the students paid $6,850 each to Yale to maintain a dorm room while they actually lived off campus. They said they were threatened with discipline. This year, they have refused to pay the fee. Tuition alone costs $23,100 at Yale.

Conroy conceded that the school is largely powerless to enforce residency but does demand payment. “We’re not going to have a dormitory police force do bed checks to see if students are utilizing their dorms sufficiently,” he said.

Yale allows exceptions to the residency requirement only in cases where a student is married or over 21.

Yale accommodates Jewish students in other ways. Kosher meals are available and key-locked entrances allow Jewish students access to the dorms on the Sabbath, when use of electronic devices is prohibited.

Dershowitz, a 1962 Yale Law School alumnus, wrote in his syndicated newspaper column that Yale’s willingness to take the students’ money while tacitly accepting their off-campus living arrangements is, in effect, a “religious tax.”

“It means that students who can afford to pay twice for their room and board will be able to exercise their religious freedom while those who cannot pay twice will be required to compromise their religious practices,” wrote Dershowitz, who is Jewish but not Orthodox.