Yeshiva University Wants Students To Let Go Of Themselves

People would like to think that Yeshiva University is a Jewish haven in a modern world where influences of the outside world haven’t taken hold. During my time there, we didn’t have high-speed internet connections in the dorms, (I was using 56K dial-up to connect to the schools UNIX modem pools and used PINE for email back then) and I don’t think anyone would have thought of filtering USENET newsgroups. But if I had to guess, I would say that students were using USENET newsgroups to read erotic stories and view pornographic images back then. Flash forward 15 years when the school now has have high speed internet connections in every dorm room, with everything that the internet has to offer, and I think its safe to say that there are students viewing pornographic content over that high speed network. Not everyone is accepting of this though.

This is what happens when you search for Jewish and sex.

Mentioned in an article by The Wall Street Journal on pre-marital sex at the Stern College for Women is a piece about the official Yeshiva College newspaper, The Commentator, reporting on a plan to install internet censor/filtration software to block pornographic and other objectionable content from the network on the men’s uptown campus.  Rabbi Reiss, Dean of the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (RIETS), said he had no idea that pornography on the school’s network was even a problem until an anonymous group of porn addicted Yeshiva students proposed an internet filter. The Big Brother-esque type of filtering would report questionable internet usage to a list of people, presumably friends or rabbis, and the fear of being reported alone would keep you on the straight and narrow. Thankfully, that idea was promptly shot down because of pure creepiness alone. Without any solid evidence that objectionable content was being viewed on the university’s network, this anonymous group and the university administration persevered to find another solution. Eventually, the university decided to go with an unnamed, software-based filter, but that the implementation timeline was as yet undetermined.

Maybe the anonymous group should ask the university to go back to PINE and Lynx, and then they only have to deal with ASCII pornography.