2008 Woodie Awards
My Yeshiva College Experience
Robert Kantowitz
Issue date: 5/16/05 Section: YUdaica
- Page 1 of 1
I attended Yeshiva College at an interesting time, under interesting circumstances and for interesting reasons.
As my fellow seniors at MTA assembled in the fall of 1972, few of us had begun to think seriously about college. Like legions before and after us, we had taken the SATs and achievement tests the previous spring, but traditionally, mid-fall was the time to begin the process of college applications. To our surprise, we discovered that some of our classmates were missing; several had stealthily managed to decamp to college after three years of high school, apparently without the benefit of transcripts or recommendations. Yeshiva College was concerned that it could lose many of its target students to the city colleges that had early admissions programs. By the same token, Yeshiva College was keen to attract students who might otherwise go to the Ivy League universities. In those times, there were far fewer feeder high schools to Yeshiva College: MTA and the old BTA were the main ones; Frisch had yet to graduate a class, and those of us who would later found D.R.S. [the HALB Yeshiva High School for Boys] were yet students ourselves. Moreover, even for observant high school students who were interested in continuing their Torah studies, if one had high enough grades and scores, the YU in New Haven was considered as attractive an option as the YU in Washington Heights.
In an amazingly short time (for an institution where change is often glacial at best), Yeshiva College announced that it would entertain applications for early admission in January from current high school seniors. I viewed this as a no-lose proposition; I could try out college and still decide whether or not to continue at YC or - as I fully expected - go to MIT or Columbia in the fall. I matriculated in January with about thirty others.
To fulfill the entrance requirements for other colleges, I still needed to complete another semester of physics. Pre-computer registration procedures being what they were in those days (mostly a combination of chance and "connections"), the only physics course that fit into my schedule was a section labeled "physics for physics majors." Today, we would say that it was on steroids - five hours a week rather than the usual three. But it was all that fit into my program; out of necessity, therefore, I officially became a physics major.
Among other things that happened that semester, some wonderful professors in the now-defunct Belfer Graduate School of Science brought the subject to life. Indeed, because this was not supposed to be the regular watered-down course for pre-med students, the professors taught it as aggressively (some would say ruthlessly) as they would teach an advanced course at an elite science-oriented institution. They demanded that we master material far beyond our backgrounds and mathematical training, and somehow we rose to the challenge. I remember late nights working out the equations line by line with a friend, much as we would puzzle over a difficult section of Gemara, and we learned as much math in these physics courses as we did in our math courses. The Belfer professors also encouraged a few of us to enroll in the new "BA-MA" program - another gimmick -- in which we could theoretically get both degrees in four years. The precise details had not even been fully worked out, yet no one did anything to dispel my utterly outrageous presumption that I could complete the entire program in a half year less than that.
The principal initial attraction of Yeshiva College to me was, perhaps paradoxically, the secular studies, especially physics. The undergraduate department was tiny, with but one full-time professor, the wonderful Peretz Posen, who embodied Torah u-Madda, a European-born gentleman learned in Torah who delivered his physics lectures without notes. The Belfer School was populated with relatively few students, but they included some from places like Korea and Argentina, not exactly what one normally saw at Yeshiva. (I'm not kidding. I recently glanced at the Yeshiva University alumni directory and chuckled to discover that I attended school with, and remember, two of the four Yeshiva graduates in India and the single Yeshiva graduate in Nigeria.) The Belfer professors fervently believed in their mission, and they gave us a top-notch, if somewhat narrow and traditional, grounding in the subject. With about 90 of my credits in physics and associated subjects, there was little room for anything else; the 14 credits of Hebrew on my transcript may have set a record for the lowest total ever.
Lest I give the wrong impression, limmudei kodesh were not unimportant to me. As I suggested above, I just believed, as did many of my contemporaries, that we could find learning wherever we went to college. A modest number of students in those days chose to spend a year in an Israeli yeshiva before college, but it was not considered an almost automatic rite the way it is now, and shana bet was practically unheard of. In the same vein, in terms purely of college choice, Yeshiva was viewed as a reasonably decent option, but one that required serious compromises in academic quality. In my case, though, because I was going into a small department with serious instructors, I believed that I was going to get a great secular education, and I was not disappointed. It was still a difficult decision, but after a merry-go-round of changing my mind from one day to the next, I opted to stay at Yeshiva, and in the end it was the desire to have the best access to limmudei kodesh that made the difference.
Once at Yeshiva, and increasingly over the years since, I have realized that there is a world of difference between the limmudei kodesh and the atmosphere at Yeshiva and what was, or even today is, available elsewhere. At Yeshiva, there are no scheduling conflicts between college and limmudei kodesh, other than the high-quality self-imposed problem of not having enough hours in the day or week to pursue as much of both as one would like. In another setting, I might have easily remained observant and perhaps matured materially as a person and in my commitment to Torah Judaism, but I would not have experienced the kind of growth in learning that I had at Yeshiva.
Learning in what is now known as Isaac Breuer College (I.B.C.) with R. Israel Wohlgelernter and R. Aron Kreiser, and then in MYP in the shiurim of R. Hershel Schachter and R. Dovid Lifshitz, provided me, more than I could know at the time, with a love of learning and the tools to make it a lifelong part of what I am.
There were other things about Yeshiva that made the years go quickly. Classes were almost always small - in advanced physics, one could find himself and a classmate alone in the room with the professor - so that we were by necessity active participants, whether prepared or not, rather than spectators in large lecture halls. Almost all the students were packed into just two dormitories, so we got to know each other well. As important as the absence of scheduling conflicts between limmudei kodesh and secular classes, the extra-curricular activities involved no compromise of Shabbat or kashrut, an oft-overlooked problem on other campuses. Because the class days were so long, we worked on things like The Commentator and the Yeshiva College Senate well into the night.
The Vietnam War was still going on, and one was always cognizant of other students' draft issues and their frequent interactions in this connection with the registrar's office. I myself barely missed the draft; although I had number 16 in the lottery for my year, the Army closed the draft boards just in time. And through a series of maneuvers - an oddly scheduled summer section in thermodynamics, a custom-designed lab not in the catalogue, a couple of stare-downs with the chairman of the chemistry department to get credits and to get into courses, a midnight rendezvous with a sympathetic assistant registrar to check precedents in the files to support a negotiated deal on workload maximums - I had the last laugh and I got both physics degrees in three-and-a-half years on a warm, sunny, late spring day in 1976.
And by dint of good grades and scores, and through the good offices of Dr. Michael Hecht, I got in to as fine a law school as I would have had I gone elsewhere to college (hint: it begins with "H"). Ah, yes, law school; I was one of a growing number of science majors who, worried about the slim employment prospects, tried out law school. After all, what else could one do with all those science and math credits? For me it was a great choice; I loved it and never returned to the labs. I practiced law for a few years and then went into banking. I still read physics and math articles and occasionally go back to the books, both because I remain interested in the subjects and because I need to stay a step or two ahead of my own children, who are now approaching college themselves.
Obviously, some things have changed. The Yeshiva College educational product has improved to the point that it's far less of a compromise than it once was, relative to other top schools, to opt to go to YC for the limmudei kodesh. The Yeshiva degree always has impressed graduate and professional schools as an indicator of students' perseverance and ability to tackle incredibly large amounts of material (and in the turbulent post-Vietnam years not to be too belligerent); now it also bespeaks a high quality secular education as well. YC is not perfect, but it is better than ever, and we who care deeply about our school hope that it is continuing to improve all the time. The administration of President Richard M. Joel has been questioning ossified positions and challenging everyone to look at themselves and try new things.
The prevalent attitude of high school students has also changed. For a great number, a year or more in a yeshiva in Israel is a given and Yeshiva College is the only acceptable college choice, whether because of the perceived campus evils elsewhere or because of the limmudei kodesh. This trend assures YC of a pool of high quality, motivated students.
Not all the change is entirely for the better. Because so many students come to Yeshiva College with a year or more of Israel yeshiva study under their belts, they are indeed more mature than average freshmen, but they then expect to get a full college education in only three years. In that short a time, one can rush through the curriculum and the requirements (as I did), but as I realize in retrospect, a proper college education really requires more time. Moreover, one unfortunate by-product of students' having such strong religious convictions as they seem now to have at such an early age is polarization and tension. In our day, there were jokes made about the differences between the religiosity of students in the various Jewish studies programs, and in one case, a student council election appeared to turn on these considerations; yet today the two opponents are brothers-in-law. We generally respected each other and did not have the dogmatic view that "anyone to the right of me is a fanatic and anyone to the left of me is a goy." At the same time, anyone who was inclined not to be as observant as his peers had the proper sense of decorum and respect to keep his infractions, such as they might be, private. It's really time to turn down the heat and realize that whatever differences occasionally come to the surface, the points that unite us matter much more. As with Torah u-Madda itself, none of the Jewish studies programs is a b'dievad; each, in its own way, is a lechatchila.
And some things stay constant. Yeshiva, as it improves, remains the one undergraduate institution whose combination of a particular kind of student body and dedicated faculty, limudei kodesh and academic opportunity offer to Orthodox students the setting they need to grow, progress and prepare for life as they move from high school to adulthood. I have stayed active, in the alumni association, as a founder of the President's Circle and on the Yeshiva College Board since its inception, and I encourage students and alumni who read this to stay active and involved as well. Here's to the next 75 years and beyond.
Mr. Robert Kantowitz, YC '76, received his MA in physics from Yeshiva's Belfer Graduate School of Science that same year. He received his JD from Harvard Law School and now is a banker with Societe Generale in New York. He presently serves as Vice-Chairman of the Yeshiva College Board of Trustees.
As my fellow seniors at MTA assembled in the fall of 1972, few of us had begun to think seriously about college. Like legions before and after us, we had taken the SATs and achievement tests the previous spring, but traditionally, mid-fall was the time to begin the process of college applications. To our surprise, we discovered that some of our classmates were missing; several had stealthily managed to decamp to college after three years of high school, apparently without the benefit of transcripts or recommendations. Yeshiva College was concerned that it could lose many of its target students to the city colleges that had early admissions programs. By the same token, Yeshiva College was keen to attract students who might otherwise go to the Ivy League universities. In those times, there were far fewer feeder high schools to Yeshiva College: MTA and the old BTA were the main ones; Frisch had yet to graduate a class, and those of us who would later found D.R.S. [the HALB Yeshiva High School for Boys] were yet students ourselves. Moreover, even for observant high school students who were interested in continuing their Torah studies, if one had high enough grades and scores, the YU in New Haven was considered as attractive an option as the YU in Washington Heights.
In an amazingly short time (for an institution where change is often glacial at best), Yeshiva College announced that it would entertain applications for early admission in January from current high school seniors. I viewed this as a no-lose proposition; I could try out college and still decide whether or not to continue at YC or - as I fully expected - go to MIT or Columbia in the fall. I matriculated in January with about thirty others.
To fulfill the entrance requirements for other colleges, I still needed to complete another semester of physics. Pre-computer registration procedures being what they were in those days (mostly a combination of chance and "connections"), the only physics course that fit into my schedule was a section labeled "physics for physics majors." Today, we would say that it was on steroids - five hours a week rather than the usual three. But it was all that fit into my program; out of necessity, therefore, I officially became a physics major.
Among other things that happened that semester, some wonderful professors in the now-defunct Belfer Graduate School of Science brought the subject to life. Indeed, because this was not supposed to be the regular watered-down course for pre-med students, the professors taught it as aggressively (some would say ruthlessly) as they would teach an advanced course at an elite science-oriented institution. They demanded that we master material far beyond our backgrounds and mathematical training, and somehow we rose to the challenge. I remember late nights working out the equations line by line with a friend, much as we would puzzle over a difficult section of Gemara, and we learned as much math in these physics courses as we did in our math courses. The Belfer professors also encouraged a few of us to enroll in the new "BA-MA" program - another gimmick -- in which we could theoretically get both degrees in four years. The precise details had not even been fully worked out, yet no one did anything to dispel my utterly outrageous presumption that I could complete the entire program in a half year less than that.
The principal initial attraction of Yeshiva College to me was, perhaps paradoxically, the secular studies, especially physics. The undergraduate department was tiny, with but one full-time professor, the wonderful Peretz Posen, who embodied Torah u-Madda, a European-born gentleman learned in Torah who delivered his physics lectures without notes. The Belfer School was populated with relatively few students, but they included some from places like Korea and Argentina, not exactly what one normally saw at Yeshiva. (I'm not kidding. I recently glanced at the Yeshiva University alumni directory and chuckled to discover that I attended school with, and remember, two of the four Yeshiva graduates in India and the single Yeshiva graduate in Nigeria.) The Belfer professors fervently believed in their mission, and they gave us a top-notch, if somewhat narrow and traditional, grounding in the subject. With about 90 of my credits in physics and associated subjects, there was little room for anything else; the 14 credits of Hebrew on my transcript may have set a record for the lowest total ever.
Lest I give the wrong impression, limmudei kodesh were not unimportant to me. As I suggested above, I just believed, as did many of my contemporaries, that we could find learning wherever we went to college. A modest number of students in those days chose to spend a year in an Israeli yeshiva before college, but it was not considered an almost automatic rite the way it is now, and shana bet was practically unheard of. In the same vein, in terms purely of college choice, Yeshiva was viewed as a reasonably decent option, but one that required serious compromises in academic quality. In my case, though, because I was going into a small department with serious instructors, I believed that I was going to get a great secular education, and I was not disappointed. It was still a difficult decision, but after a merry-go-round of changing my mind from one day to the next, I opted to stay at Yeshiva, and in the end it was the desire to have the best access to limmudei kodesh that made the difference.
Once at Yeshiva, and increasingly over the years since, I have realized that there is a world of difference between the limmudei kodesh and the atmosphere at Yeshiva and what was, or even today is, available elsewhere. At Yeshiva, there are no scheduling conflicts between college and limmudei kodesh, other than the high-quality self-imposed problem of not having enough hours in the day or week to pursue as much of both as one would like. In another setting, I might have easily remained observant and perhaps matured materially as a person and in my commitment to Torah Judaism, but I would not have experienced the kind of growth in learning that I had at Yeshiva.
Learning in what is now known as Isaac Breuer College (I.B.C.) with R. Israel Wohlgelernter and R. Aron Kreiser, and then in MYP in the shiurim of R. Hershel Schachter and R. Dovid Lifshitz, provided me, more than I could know at the time, with a love of learning and the tools to make it a lifelong part of what I am.
There were other things about Yeshiva that made the years go quickly. Classes were almost always small - in advanced physics, one could find himself and a classmate alone in the room with the professor - so that we were by necessity active participants, whether prepared or not, rather than spectators in large lecture halls. Almost all the students were packed into just two dormitories, so we got to know each other well. As important as the absence of scheduling conflicts between limmudei kodesh and secular classes, the extra-curricular activities involved no compromise of Shabbat or kashrut, an oft-overlooked problem on other campuses. Because the class days were so long, we worked on things like The Commentator and the Yeshiva College Senate well into the night.
The Vietnam War was still going on, and one was always cognizant of other students' draft issues and their frequent interactions in this connection with the registrar's office. I myself barely missed the draft; although I had number 16 in the lottery for my year, the Army closed the draft boards just in time. And through a series of maneuvers - an oddly scheduled summer section in thermodynamics, a custom-designed lab not in the catalogue, a couple of stare-downs with the chairman of the chemistry department to get credits and to get into courses, a midnight rendezvous with a sympathetic assistant registrar to check precedents in the files to support a negotiated deal on workload maximums - I had the last laugh and I got both physics degrees in three-and-a-half years on a warm, sunny, late spring day in 1976.
And by dint of good grades and scores, and through the good offices of Dr. Michael Hecht, I got in to as fine a law school as I would have had I gone elsewhere to college (hint: it begins with "H"). Ah, yes, law school; I was one of a growing number of science majors who, worried about the slim employment prospects, tried out law school. After all, what else could one do with all those science and math credits? For me it was a great choice; I loved it and never returned to the labs. I practiced law for a few years and then went into banking. I still read physics and math articles and occasionally go back to the books, both because I remain interested in the subjects and because I need to stay a step or two ahead of my own children, who are now approaching college themselves.
Obviously, some things have changed. The Yeshiva College educational product has improved to the point that it's far less of a compromise than it once was, relative to other top schools, to opt to go to YC for the limmudei kodesh. The Yeshiva degree always has impressed graduate and professional schools as an indicator of students' perseverance and ability to tackle incredibly large amounts of material (and in the turbulent post-Vietnam years not to be too belligerent); now it also bespeaks a high quality secular education as well. YC is not perfect, but it is better than ever, and we who care deeply about our school hope that it is continuing to improve all the time. The administration of President Richard M. Joel has been questioning ossified positions and challenging everyone to look at themselves and try new things.
The prevalent attitude of high school students has also changed. For a great number, a year or more in a yeshiva in Israel is a given and Yeshiva College is the only acceptable college choice, whether because of the perceived campus evils elsewhere or because of the limmudei kodesh. This trend assures YC of a pool of high quality, motivated students.
Not all the change is entirely for the better. Because so many students come to Yeshiva College with a year or more of Israel yeshiva study under their belts, they are indeed more mature than average freshmen, but they then expect to get a full college education in only three years. In that short a time, one can rush through the curriculum and the requirements (as I did), but as I realize in retrospect, a proper college education really requires more time. Moreover, one unfortunate by-product of students' having such strong religious convictions as they seem now to have at such an early age is polarization and tension. In our day, there were jokes made about the differences between the religiosity of students in the various Jewish studies programs, and in one case, a student council election appeared to turn on these considerations; yet today the two opponents are brothers-in-law. We generally respected each other and did not have the dogmatic view that "anyone to the right of me is a fanatic and anyone to the left of me is a goy." At the same time, anyone who was inclined not to be as observant as his peers had the proper sense of decorum and respect to keep his infractions, such as they might be, private. It's really time to turn down the heat and realize that whatever differences occasionally come to the surface, the points that unite us matter much more. As with Torah u-Madda itself, none of the Jewish studies programs is a b'dievad; each, in its own way, is a lechatchila.
And some things stay constant. Yeshiva, as it improves, remains the one undergraduate institution whose combination of a particular kind of student body and dedicated faculty, limudei kodesh and academic opportunity offer to Orthodox students the setting they need to grow, progress and prepare for life as they move from high school to adulthood. I have stayed active, in the alumni association, as a founder of the President's Circle and on the Yeshiva College Board since its inception, and I encourage students and alumni who read this to stay active and involved as well. Here's to the next 75 years and beyond.
Mr. Robert Kantowitz, YC '76, received his MA in physics from Yeshiva's Belfer Graduate School of Science that same year. He received his JD from Harvard Law School and now is a banker with Societe Generale in New York. He presently serves as Vice-Chairman of the Yeshiva College Board of Trustees.