IVY LEAGUE GOMORRAH?

By John Cloud

For most freshmen starting college this fall, dorm life brings the sweet, beer-tinged scent of freedom. No more curfews, no more chores and, best of all, no more tangled, furtive interludes in the backseat of the family minivan.

Not so for Yale freshman Elisha Hack. When the 20-year-old Orthodox Jew toured a dorm last month, he was aghast to see how closely men and women live together--on separate floors, to be sure, but just a tempting staircase away. The tour guide breezed by the condom stash, labeled "the goods." Finally, Hack ducked out of a required safe-sex seminar complete with demonstrations on dental dams. In short, he says, life at Yale seems to follow a basic dictum: Anything goes. "Exactly the biblical description of Sodom and Gomorrah," he notes.

None of this really surprised Hack. The brother of a Yale grad, he knew the campus was no yeshiva. So he proposed a simple solution: live off campus. Trouble is, like many private colleges, Yale requires frosh to live in those steamy dorms. Administrators say dorms are a crucial part of the education; students learn to cope with one another's differences. "At Yale," says Dean Richard Brodhead, "students live and learn together."

What to do when one student's viewpoint (in this case, Hack's strict ideas about sexual modesty) conflicts with the university's desire to toss all views into an educational blender? Unlike students of yesteryear, who pushed for diversity with scruffy demonstrations on behalf of minorities, Hack and four other Orthodox Jews have chosen a thoroughly contemporary method of attack: mount a p.r. campaign.

Hack and the others, snappily calling themselves the Yale Five, are threatening to sue Yale for discriminating against them on the basis of their religion. In this case, the form of the discrimination seems to be...temptation, temptation everywhere! There's a precedent at a public school: last year, in a little-noticed local ruling, a judge said the University of Nebraska had to allow Douglas Rader, a devout Christian fretting over the dorms' laxity, to live off campus. The Nebraska case was the first of its kind.

There's no chance the Yale case will proceed as quietly. Yale has weathered several controversies in the past few years, most recently the contretemps over its refusal of $5 million to fund programs for gay students. And last week the Yale Five created something of a media juggernaut to get its message out. Hack wrote an op-ed for the New York Times, and the students went on TV and radio. "If you need my help," Harvard legal star Alan Dershowitz gushed on Court TV, "you can count on it."

They don't. The students' families have already enlisted superlawyer Nathan Lewin, veteran of 27 arguments before the Supreme Court, including a 1989 case requiring the city of Pittsburgh, Pa., to display a menorah next to its Christmas tree.

The students point out that Yale has winked at off-campus housing for Orthodox pupils in the past as long as they paid their room and board, now $6,850. Indeed, Lewin says college officials have offered that arrangement to his clients, who find it offensive. The students say Yale's concern over the money lays bare its vaunted rhetoric about the value of dorm life.

Spokesman Tom Conroy counters that Yale has never explicitly allowed off-campus living. But, he told a local reporter, "we don't monitor where students sleep"--only whether they have a Yale address, issued when the fee is paid. Besides, he told TIME, "they knew about [the residential rule] when they applied."

The case seems a pale echo of the fiery debates over diversity in the early '90s, when, for example, a Harvard student erected a swastika to protest a classmate's Confederate flag. Today, says UCLA director of residential life Alan Hanson, "multiculturalism isn't really a hot topic." But the growth of religious conservatism could rekindle the flames. "Today you have a larger interest among students in religion, whether it's Orthodox Judaism or...Fundamentalist Christianity," says David Merkowitz of the American Council on Education. One survey indicates that half of freshmen identify themselves as Protestant, up from a third 15 years ago.

In other words, Yale could be the first battleground. "I don't think it's a uniquely Jewish issue," says Yale Fiver Rachel Wohlgelernter. "It's a moral issue."

--With reporting by Gabriel Snyder/New Haven

With reporting by GABRIEL SNYDER/NEW HAVEN