Integration of Jewish Campus Life into Community Plans Urged

The “power structure” of the American Jewish community was criticized today for its failure to integrate Jewish campus life into the community’s “plan, programs and leadership.”

Members of the National Commission of B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundations, many of team university educators, strongly endorsed the view of Rabbi Benjamin M. Kahn, Pillel’s national director, that the Jewish community is “unwisely overlooking an important potential of creative support” by its tendency to regard the college campus as “an appendage to rather than an integral part of the total community.”

“An evocative development of Jewish life on campus is that it is acquiring its own continuity as a rooted community and can no longer be dismissed as merely a four-year transitory period,” Rabbi Kahn told the Pillel Commission at its annual meeting here. This growing stability, he said, is drawn from one-fifth of the Jewish students who enroll in American universities, “This is the large proportion that, after graduation, marries and establishes a family life while remaining on campus many more years for post-graduate work, and even, in increasing numbers, staying put in academic careers.”

On the same theme, Rabbi Jay Kaufman, B’nai B’rith’s executive vice-president, contrasted the American Jewish student organization “which begins and ends its activities on campus and is allowed little involvement in adult communal affairs” and its counterparts in Europe and elsewhere that are encouraged to be a part of the decision-making process and not limited to the periphery of Jewish community life.” He called for a “community awareness” of the changing American campus and “stubborn efforts to involve it in Jewish affairs with at least the same organized intensity as is given to Jewish suburbia.”

JEWISH ACADEMICIANS WELCOME DISCUSSIONS ON THEIR HERITAGE

An indication of the burgeoning growth of a permanent campus community is a Hillel estimate that by 1970 the number of Jewish faculty members “will have doubled in a decade.” This was based on reports from directors at many of the 235 American colleges where Hillel now functions. Further evidence of this growth was given by Dr. Louis Gottschalk of the University of Chicago, Commission chairman, who reported that a Hillel program to encourage Jewish study, scholarship and research among faculty members, begun as a “pilot effort at 17 schools three years ago, has since spread to 103 colleges.

“These beginning results are a convincing demonstration that many Jewish academicians welcome a continuing opportunity to probe, interpret and discuss their religious heritage and cultural traditions on a level reflecting the intellectual needs and standards of the academic community,” Dr. Gottschalk said. He described the faculty program as “self-motivated and self-determined” by Jewish faculty members “who consciously feel a need for some kind of affiliation with Jewish interests.”

Many of these academicians, he said, “largely removed from organized Jewish life, can be persuaded to take on active identities with the larger Jewish communities when the isolation of their own campus community is diminished.