Freshman year at college is generally considered a period of transition: You need time to make your way out from under the avalanche of free condoms and learn how to study with a constant hangover. And universities can be quite insistent on subjecting all their new students to the mandatory acculturation that takes place in freshman dorms. That is why a conflict has broken out between Yale and five Orthodox Jewish freshmen. The kids have requested permission to live off-campus, saying that the co-ed dorms are incompatible with their sense of privacy and the religious principle of modesty. Yale has refused, citing its rule that freshmen and sophomores must live in the campus community.
The New York Times picked up the story and ran a quote from history professor Ivan Marcus: "The university would be in chaos if it bent over backward to accommodate everyone's sensitivities." Funny, universities across the country are already in chaos precisely because they do bend over backward to accommodate everyone's sensitivities. There are women's centers to accommodate the feminists, needle exchanges to accommodate drug users, multicultural centers to raise cultural awareness, academic departments for the literature of every marginalized society around the world, and shared bathrooms in co-ed dorms for the gender egalitarians. God forbid, so to speak, that anyone should be allowed to opt out for religious reasons.