Reply To: The infamous club at YU – gone?

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#2119883

These are not easy issues. Someone at my (non-Jewish) university once invited one of the famous sonei isroel as a speaker. Jewish students met in advance to advocate for boycott, protest, disrupting the speech. The Rov, a survivor, gave a passionate speech how the words matter, history of Shoah, etc. Then the school President (Rov’s friend) gave an equally patient speech about academic freedom and assured everyone if they come armed with sharp questions and the speaker will evade them, they should be confident that the college community will see through this and no harm will happen. Whatever it was, nobody observed any increase in anti-semitism on campus after that anti-Semite visit. After that president was gone, it is probably worse now with active woke policies, but not due to his position of neutrality.

What is the lesson here – there might be different approaches here. If YU is built for mature students, there might be no harm from allowing whatever opinions are out there. They are already in the middle of NYC with no adult supervision. Do you see students flocking to those clubs and skipping mincha?