Debauchery U.

Reprinted with permission from The Jewish Week

Like many of his classmates at Frisch, a Modern Orthodox high school in Paramus, N.J., Gil Perl continued on to an Ivy League education. But Perl, now 25 and completing a graduate degree at Harvard, says that when it comes time to send his own children to college, he's not so sure he'll opt for a secular university.

Perl and fellow graduate student Yaakov Weinstein are generating a buzz in the centrist Orthodox community with their attention-grabbing monograph titled "A Parent's Guide to Orthodox Assimilation on University Campuses."

The 11-page guide, posted last month on the Internet, warns of something it alternately describes as "ominous," "tragic," "pernicious," and a "disease": the challenges secular universities pose to Orthodox students.

"A significant number of our children are entering secular universities and despite having received the best our day school system has to offer, despite having had Orthodox values emphasized in their homes, and even despite a year or two of intense Torah study in Israel, no longer consider themselves Orthodox Jews by the time they graduate," Perl and Weinstein write.

Their manifesto--which is being widely discussed among Orthodox rabbis, educators and other leaders--is another sign of the long-simmering fissure in the Modern Orthodox community between those who lean toward the more isolationist approach of the fervently Orthodox and those committed to interaction with the broader Jewish--and non-Jewish--world.

The debate comes six years after five Orthodox Yale students grabbed national headlines for refusing to live in the college dorms because they believed the environment to be immoral.

It also takes place as Orthodox enrollment at secular campuses is believed to be at an all-time high and as Orthodox groups are stepping up their presence on campus.

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