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Richard Joel tries to take the middle path at Yeshiva University.
Richard Joel has a vision.If Joel could have his way, the campus Hillel centers he was instrumental in cultivating for 15 years as international director of their parent organization, would be emptied of nearly all their Orthodox students.
There would be a mass exodus of Orthodox Jews from places like Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, Brandeis and Princeton, and they would follow Joel to a new promised land: Yeshiva University, where Joel is now president.
"I built the competition for 15 years," Joel said, "but I always told parents: If you're a modern Orthodox Jew, the first question is, 'Is YU a fit for my child?'"
It has been only about two years since Joel, 54, left Hillel to take over the presidency of YU, but Joel already is trying to reposition the flagship educational institution of centrist Orthodoxy in relation to Jewish life.
He has started a host of new community-based programs to raise YU's national profile among American Jews, is establishing several new academic centers and is hiring new deans and university professors known for their strong commitment to centrist Orthodoxy.
"A lot of it now is about a new vision," Joel said. As "the educational fountainhead of American Orthodoxy," he explained, "we have a primary responsibility for the advancement of Jewish peoplehood."
JOEL TOOK over from Rabbi Norman Lamm, who presided over the university for more than a quarter of a century and remains the rosh yeshiva of YU's rabbinical school, the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (RIETS). YU has more than 6,000 students and 17 schools and campuses, including schools of law, medicine, business and social work.
In a wide-ranging interview recently with The Jerusalem Post at his office in Manhattan, Joel trotted out a host of catchphrases to expound on his vision for YU, using trinkets around his office as explanatory props.
The "think outside the box" statuette on his desk symbolized the formula Joel needs to succeed: to be figuratively suspended on a limb outside the box of conventional ideas, yet balanced by a counterweight (translation:...