People … operate with beliefs and biases. To the extent you can eliminate both and replace them with data, you gain a clear advantage. Many people think they are smarter than others in the stock market and that the market itself has no intrinsic intelligence –as if it’s inert. Many people think they are smarter than others in baseball and that the game on the field is simply what they think it is through their set of images/beliefs. Actual data from the market means more than individual perception/belief. The same is true in baseball.

- E-mail from Red Sox owner John Henry, quoted in Michael Lewis’ Moneyball (pp. 90-91)

Growing up Orthodox in America almost invariably involves living in a cocoon. Absorbing the knowledge and folkways of an Orthodox-based lifestyle requires constant immersion and reinforcement, which results in a degree of separation from the rest of the world. To take the most obvious example, most self-professed Orthodox Jews would not dream of sending their children to anything other than 12+ years of Orthodox day school. And the necessity of living in the vicinity of such a school, along with synagogues, kosher food supplies, etc. creates an environment where kids grow up primarily (though rarely solely) associating with other Orthodox Jews.
For all but the most fanatically oriented segment of Jewry, the cocoon must be left at some point; few people can or wish to earn a living wholly within the cocoon. When is the “right” time to do so? For many Orthodox Jews graduating high school and considering where to attend college, this question is paramount. And there typically is no shortage of people volunteering for the conservative role of conscience, whispering messages of fear and caution.
21st century America, where a self-professed Orthodox Jew can come within a few hanging chads of the Vice-Presidency, has in many respects never been an easier place to be Orthodox. Yet as the larger society has grown more accepting of difference, Orthodoxy-style, the sense of fear over the prospects of preserving an Orthodox way of life (on both the individual and communal levels) has only grown for many people.
(Of course, the two factors are linked, and the link deserves its own discussion. And that discussion - for which the term “magisterial” should have been invented - has already been written by Dr. Haym Soloveitchik. Go and study. End of digression.)
With regard to the question of college and cocoons, some segments of American Orthodoxy have been discussing a pamphlet that has been widely circulated via the Internet. It is a well-written, well-reasoned journal of fear. It comes down squarely on the side of maintaining the cocoon through college. The piece is a worthy contribution to the discussion, though not nearly as important as its authors believe.
As an aside, the authors are imprecise in their initial definitions. While the pamphlet refers to “secular college,” the authors clearly don’t mean that term literally, as they approve of commuting to colleges other than parochial ones and living at home; the piece isn’t solely a brief for Yeshiva University. Thinking of the question as “cocoon v. non-cocoon” rather than “secular v. parochial college” makes the pamphlet more comprehensible, and the authors clearly assume that their readers will understand the distinction. But I thought I’d explain it for my readers who aren’t already familiar with the discussion.
I’m not going to further discuss the larger theological issues raised by the pamphlet or how certain details glossed lightly (at best) in the pamphlet can make all the difference in the Orthodox student’s college experience, nor will I base a critique on my own anecdotal experiences, for reasons that will be clear by the end of this post. (Full disclosure: I graduated Columbia College in 1995, and as for how it affected my religiosity, literally only God knows - though I’m sure that hasn’t stopped people’s speculations, to which they are welcome.) Rather, I’m going to focus on a few specific aspects of the authors’ arguments.
Despite an explicit disavowal of scientific rigor, the pamphlet’s authors clearly make several empirical assumptions. First, they assume that the experience they describe is paradigmatic and reflects the experience of at least a substantial number of Orthodox students on such campuses. Second, they assume that the intellectual and social temptations they describe accurately describes the causation of the deteriorating observance of such students. Third, they assume that those temptations are either unique in fact or effect.
The third assumption is most notably reflected when the authors argue that “The challenges facing Orthodox students in secular universities are wide–ranging, complex, and far more ominous than anything they might later encounter in the professional or business world.”
I will refrain from making a cheap comment about how that assessment of the professional or business world was made by two Ph.D students who (by their count) have spent a total of 22 semesters on campus. It is actually a very serious point, which contributes to the other two assumptions as well.
The authors know the stories of the students who succumb in the fashion they describe. It is very likely that the following students’ experiences don’t make the same impact:
- the student whose connection to Orthodoxy and observance was tenuous at best before college attendance, and who violates most of the 613 mitzvot before the end of freshman orientation;
- the student who attends YU or commuter college and rebels or otherwise becomes disillusioned, which may be held in abeyance during college but not for long afterwards;
- the student who samples the forbidden fruits during college but returns to a full-fledged identification with Orthodoxy afterwards (whether for social or other reasons), and most importantly;
- the student whose connection to Orthodoxy does not suffer in college (regardless of the choice) but does suffer attrition afterwards, due to the pressures of the “professional or business world.”
It is natural for those whose lives are spent in the context of campus to focus on college as the most formative experience of a student’s life. It is the focus of their own experiences, and it makes up the sample of their observed students’ experiences. (It also makes sense that high school teachers would have an exaggerated sense of the impact of college; they may be acutely aware of what happens to their alumni immediately after graduation, but how often is that leavened by a longer-term context? And it is also natural for high school teachers to attribute a sharp, sudden deterioration in a student’s observance to the outside temptations of college, rather than a pre-existing weakness of commitment.) And it is natural to over-generalize from one’s own experience. (If “the beginning of wisdom is the fear of God,” as set forth in Proverbs 9:10, the second part of wisdom is not giving excessive credence to what you see.) The result is that the authors’ perspective is very limited; the lack of context creates an exaggerated assessment of the relative risks. Even if the authors’ description of the risks to Orthodox students is 100% valid, the relevant question is “Compared to what?” This is a purely subjective statement, but I think many Orthodox-raised people in the “professional or business world” (including ones who left the cocoon for college) would disagree that the risks in that world are easier to handle than the ones on the college campus.
And despite the disavowal of scientific rigor noted above, the authors clearly assume that the experience they describe is widespread. Yet without further context, it is impossible to know if that assumption is correct – all we have are dueling anecdotal, subjective experiences, formed in a limited context and prone to distortion.
A good study will be far more valuable to the discussion than a thousand screeds. It shouldn’t be impossible to do. Without that kind of evidence, though, discussions such as the pamphlet are of limited utility at best.