President Joel emailed all Yeshiva University students yesterday with an open letter he wrote to Virginia Tech:

Dear President Steger,

I am overwhelmed with sorrow and shock at the unfathomable tragedy that occurred on your campus. As former President and International Director of Hillel: The Foundation of Jewish Campus Life, I visited hundreds of campuses around the country and can only imagine the shattering impact this act of carnage is having on the idyllic and harmonious campus of Virginia Tech.

I admire your courage and forthrightness in coping with this horrific loss as you strive to comfort students, faculty, and most of all, the parents whose children have been torn from them in the prime of their lives. Our prayers are with you and it is my hope that you will find the strength and fortitude to heal the wounds of your community as you mourn this terrible, terrible tragedy.

Richard M. Joel

Another email, this one from the undergraduate student councils, went out, acknowledging Yeshiva students’ desire to share condolences and sympathy with students at VT, and announced the opening of a blogspot account to post those condolences. The email read:

News of the shooting at Virginia Tech has shocked and horrified many of us. Many students expressed the desire to respond to the attack with condolences, comments of support and reflections. We have the opportunity to do so, as individuals and as a group of YU students, through a link on the YU homepage.

Please take a moment to post your thoughts by clicking on the link. Send a message of condolence (http://yustandswithyouvt.blogspot.com/) to the Virginia Tech community at www.yu.edu and encourage your friends to join you in this act of solidarity.

Your comments and notes will be sent to Virginia Tech University’s Hillel as an expression of our condolences and support.

May we only share and join as a community for good things, be’ezrat Hashem, Undergraduate Student Councils and OSA

At this moment, President Joel’s open letter has a number of comments on the blog, including messages like, “I can’t imagine what you are going through. All I can do is send my love and hope that everyone will be comforted and find peace. God Bless,” by Danny YC ‘06, and “This terrible tragedy has been on our minds the last few days. We can’t even begin to imagine what the Virginia Tech community is going through at this time. Stand strong and don’t lose hope- our thoughts and prayers are with you,” by Stern Student ‘07.
The President of the Student Organization of Yeshiva, Josh Vogel, released an open letter as well:

To the students at Virginia Tech:

My heart and prayers are with you in this difficult time. The idea that someone would be so distressed to the extent that he took 32 lives, and injured many others, is unfathomable. Words of wisdom at this time are hard to find, but it is often said that through tragedy we become stronger. It is my sincere hope that in the future we will be able to support the Virginia Tech community in times of good as well.

Blessings,
Josh Vogel
President, Student Orgranization of Yeshiva

On the front page of NYTimes.com recently:

The subjects, mostly overlooked in their lifetimes, have been memorialized — “retrieved from oblivion,” as the collection’s founder, Golda Tencer, put it — in an exhibition of 450 sepia-toned and black-and-white photographs that will be on display starting tomorrow at the Yeshiva University Museum, in the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan. The show, “And I Still See Their Faces: The Vanished World of Polish Jews,” has been seen over the last decade in two dozen cities around the world, including Warsaw, Los Angeles and Detroit.

The article reviews the YU Museum exhibit.

The lead story in the Commentator this week is the story about Yeshiva University’s “D-” grade in being environmentally active. In the report, which I helped to produce, Joel responded to the question of whether the bad grade was due to Yeshiva University’s lack of participation in the study poll:

President Richard M. Joel defended his office’s silence to the SEI’s request, citing the large volume of surveys which the Office of the President regularly receives. “We are very deliberate with responding to any of the surveys we have to respond to, such as government surveys and accreditation surveys. But we do not respond to a survey just because someone e-mails it to us.”
In light of the fact that this was the first survey of its kind from the SEI and directed by a Harvard doctoral student, President Joel stated, “I am not prepared to say that someone who is a self proclaimed policeman is actually a policeman.” He added, “I am not embarrassed about this university’s stance on sustainability.”

An Op-Ed that ran in the same issue as the article condemned the administration’s lack of participation:

Unfortunately for Yeshiva, the survey was published and received wide circulation. Though we don’t vie for rankings, the Report Card doesn’t help us when it comes to U.S. News and World Report. In its listings of the top 100 national universities, 25% of a school’s grade - the largest of any contributing factor - is in a category called “Peer Assessment,” which translates into a popularity contest. We are already in the third tier for this significant category; our failing grade on the Report Card does not exactly help our cause.