[Editors’ note: An earlier version of this essay appeared in the Jewish Press. This version, prepared for Cross-Currents, greatly expands upon it.]
Understand where I am coming from. I graduated college with a political science degree from Columbia University, where I was elected by the undergraduate student body as University Senator to represent all the college’s students. Later I graduated UCLA School of Law, where I was Chief Articles Editor of Law Review. I then clerked in the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, followed by practicing complex business litigation for more than a decade at two of the nation’s leading firms, JonesDay and Akin Gump. For the past fifteen years, I also have been a law professor at two major Southern California law schools, where I teach Advanced Torts, Civil Procedure, and Remedies. None of this is to brag. Rather, it is to advise the reader that I am the beneficiary of a deep American secular education that I cherish having had. With it I have been able to live an interesting life that now includes not only being rav of a Young Israel but also serving as a Contributing Editor at The American Spectator and a regular contributor to other publications.
I used to define myself as “Modern Orthodox.” By the 1990s, I started identifying instead as “Centrist Orthodox.” If I were voting in Israel, I would be voting for Bayit Yehudi, Smotrich, or Bennett-Shaked. That is my world. And it is for that reason that I write this article primarily for “Modern Orthodox” (M.O.) parents of teens and pre-teens. Because I love the world of Torah U-Mada, and that world no longer exists in America. The simple reality is that Modern Orthodoxy is in very perilous trouble because, as a general matter, the model as it took full shape in the late 1950s and 1960s never contemplated the current utter public debasement of American culture and society, and in particular the socialist-brainwashing-reeducation-camp intimidation that has overtaken American colleges. Today’s America is not the America in which we grew up, and today’s colleges reflect the worst of today’s America.
The vast majority of Modern Orthodox kids, by definition, (i) go to college (ii) but not to YU/Touro. That simply is the reality. Do the math. In that reality, notwithstanding how much money, time, and love American M.O. parents have invested in giving their children the best of the secular world and the best of the Torah world, most of those children simply will not survive four years of contemporary American college. It goes beyond a question of whether the Modern Orthodox yeshiva high school system and its education values and methods fail. Even so, by and large the schools do fail. Just look around and talk to the M.O. Yeshiva High School grads who subsequently also have finished secular college. If you honestly feel “Hey, Rav Fischer, you are so wrong. Fully 75% of the kids from frum homes still are frum after four years of college,” then we have a disconnect. Because even if we had a 75% survival rate and that is what we are discussing: survival — that still would be a catastrophe, with 25% attrition in four years. And the numbers are worse. Just look around in your own world.
Even if the system were rock-solid, with the greatest teaching and with fostering the greatest of classmate friendships and with uniformly great high school rebbes as pedagogues and with a “Gap Year” at an Israeli yeshiva thrown — it still collapses for so many M.O. collegiates that every parent deserves a simple “head’s up” warning to proceed at peril.
Rather than looking exclusively at the impressive “ben Torah” or “bat Torah” you now successfully are rearing, look at what is happening to the kids of other people you know who have sent their b’nei and b’not Torah graduates of yeshiva high school to college. Look furthermore at the children of non-Jews you may know, people who reared their scions with excellent measures of decency and with values, who have gone to college. It manifestly is not the campus environment that we attended. Rather, there now is mass indoctrination — not liberal arts education and the broad pursuit of knowledge. The current social climate is so intense and rife with psychological and social intimidation that it comprises brainwashing.
You read and see the news. Was your college experience like this? Was it impossible for you then to find safety in expressing traditional values and Torah morality and ethics without enduring public shaming? If you did not believe in gay marriage as a sacrament, would you have feared expressing your Torah belief in a classroom discussion as part of a respectful give-and-take with others? And would you have felt so defensive about Israel that, by your senior year, you would be saying whatever you had to say about “Palestinian suffering” in order to get through with your B.A.?
Continue reading…
From Cross Currents, here.
