A Campus Profile in Courage: Professor Jeffrey Poelvoorde. One story from the front lines of the ideological war on America’s campuses

Photos: Len Weinstein

In mid-August, my radar screen for stories of “woke” campuses began picking up reports about a professor at Converse College, in Spartanburg, South Carolina, who had run afoul of his administration by refusing to participate in mandatory anti-bias training.

What particularly piqued my curiosity was a description of Professor Jeffrey Poelvoorde as Converse College’s only “Orthodox Jewish faculty member.” When I saw that, I knew I wanted to speak to him.

Why was Professor Poelvoorde being forced to attend anti-bias training? And why did he refuse?

After the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody, Converse College president Krista L. Newkirk issued a statement attributing Floyd’s death to America’s “systemic racism.” She pledged that her institution — a private women’s liberal arts college with some 1,000 students in a small Southern city — would dedicate itself to purging its own systemic racism, including instituting mandatory anti-bias training for all faculty.

Newkirk’s statement was fairly typical of college presidents in 2020, perhaps even mild compared to her colleagues at better-known schools such as the University of Pennsylvania, Amherst, Cornell, and UC-Davis, where administrators made sweeping statements about structural racism and pledged to extirpate any such blemishes in their own institutions.

At Converse College, 249 out of 250 faculty members complied with Newkirk’s directive to attend anti-racism training. Only Poelvoorde held out.

Standing Firm

In a long, somewhat meandering letter to Converse’s leadership and the wider college community, Poelvoorde explained why he would not participate in the training.

He argued that the program had an ideological content and substructure, and whatever other benefits it might offer, he had no wish to have it forced upon him: “My quarrel is not so much with the content of these materials the administration would impose on us, but rather the coercive imposition itself.”

He drew an analogy between what the college was asking him to do and the persecution medieval Muslims and Christians inflicted on Jews. Leading Torah giants like the Ramban were forced to engage in disputations with their adversaries at great personal danger. Those “courageous individuals shine as examples of the power of the free mind to overcome the deprivation of freedom, of the power of the human spirit to triumph over coercion,” he wrote in his letter. He made clear that those courageous Jews were his models.

Converse College unwittingly acknowledged the ideological content of its anti-bias training by offering to have a college official answer the questions necessary to complete the course in Poelvoorde’s place. Like Chanah’s seventh son, whom the Seleucid emperor Antiochus offered a face-saving compromise of bending down to pick up the emperor’s signet ring and only appearing to bow down to him, Poelvoorde was offered a chance to only appear to affirm the “correct answers” on the course final exam. And like Chanah’s youngest son, he refused.

Professor Poelvoorde did not deny in his letter that there are racists at Converse College, just as there are anti-Semites. But, he insisted, the existence of racists, even very large numbers of them, does not establish that there is systemic racism.

Apparently, as a member of the smallest campus minority — conservative, Orthodox Jews — Poelvoorde was considered well-suited to advise minority students. He described his years as faculty advisor to the Association of African-American Students at Converse, listening to students pouring out their hearts about the abuse and prejudice they faced from white students. He also served for years as the unofficial advisor to Jewish students, some of whom were berated for their denial of Christianity or challenged to reveal their “horns.”

He himself has not been immune from critical comments for occasionally missing college functions due to his Shabbos observance. And when a three-day Yom Tov impeded his completing final grading on time, a senior college administrator told another faculty member, “I’m under no obligation to respect that man’s religion.”

Dignity and Firmness

Professor Poelvoorde offered to both black and Jewish students an alternative response to racial or religious slights — the very approach he employed when they were directed at him. Not anger, lawsuits, or violence, but rather the example of the most influential black leader in the first decades of the 20th century: Booker T. Washington, who proved that “dignity and self-respect are not the gift of any man or any law.” They must come from within.

And one key to cultivating that confidence, Poelvoorde wrote, is a genuine and rigorous liberal education that equips students with intellectual depth and spiritual fortitude. But such an “enlightened mind,” he averred, cannot emerge “without freedom of thought.” As commendable as attempts to remove bigotry might be, “they must occur in the framework of a liberal education, guided by an essential respect for the freedom of the individual to think and learn on his or her own. I do not tell President Newkirk or Provost Barker what to read or watch or think. I demand the same respect from them.”

In refusing to comply with the administration’s mandate, he concluded, “I have tried to follow the example of my Jewish predecessors by meeting coercion with dignity and firmness.”

Professor Poelvoorde’s letter did not go unnoticed. Two hundred Converse students called into the student health services to say they felt threatened by it, though there was not one vaguely menacing word. In the new language of “wokeness,” disagreement with the BLM narrative is itself threatening. It was enough for Poelvoorde to have mentioned the rioting following Floyd’s death, and the murder of a black ex-policeman, David Dorn, by looters, to constitute a threat. And his reference to a KKK letter he received after conducting a mock Seder for a colleague’s class was another trigger.

Predictably, one student wrote to President Newkirk describing Professor Poelvoorde’s letter variously as “racist,” “not okay,” “harming,” and “dishonorable.” Poelvoorde wasn’t surprised by the charge. Terms like “racist,” for which the student had offered not one iota of support, are not intended to refute an opponent, but rather to silence him or her, he replied. “They are the verbal equivalent of a brick tossed or a baseball bat swung.”

Accidental “Rabbi”

When I first called Professor Poelvoorde, he answered the phone, “Baruch hametalpein [Blessed is the one who telephones],” in a far better Israeli accent than I can muster after more than 40 years living among sabras. I was somewhat consoled when he mentioned that he speaks or reads 12 languages to varying degrees.

“I have the habits, if not the discipline, of a scholar,” he says.

He was obviously in an emotionally fraught state as we spoke. The deadline for compliance with the president’s edict had passed, and he considered it highly likely that the college would fire him, thereby ending a very satisfying 40-year teaching career, 34 of which have been spent at Converse College. Regardless of his youthful appearance, there is little chance of his being hired anywhere else at the age of 68 and embroiled in controversy. Worse, in his mind, was the prospect of no longer being able to engage in his life’s passion: opening young minds and teaching them “how to think, not what to think,” while sharing with them some of the greatest works of human thought over the millennia.

One thing is clear: Poelvoorde loves teaching and is good at it. “I believe I was put into the world to teach,” he told me. His student evaluations are high, albeit with warnings: “get ready to read,” “hilarious,” “able to connect the everyday to hard philosophical texts,” “best professor I’ve ever had” are just some. He was awarded Converse’s highest award for reaching excellence in 2000.

Terms like “life of the mind,” “community of scholars,” a “liberal education,” are not quaint anachronisms for him, but guiding principles. Already in his first teaching job at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, he complained in an interview with the campus newspaper that students there were “hardworking, but not necessarily devoted.” Their approach to learning tended to be utilitarian, not for the love of knowledge itself — if you will, lo lishmah.

His love for teaching extends to Torah subjects as well. Throughout his long career, Jeffery has almost always lived in places with small Jewish communities. As a consequence, he has often found himself cast, in his words, as the “accidental rabbi.” In that role he has officiated at five weddings, 17 funerals, numerous brissim, and has run two day schools, led three congregations, and taught 54 bar and bas mitzvah students. One of his happiest memories is of the late Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz playfully throwing an empty plastic bottle at him, as a sign of appreciation for his devar Torah, at a Chabad shul in Jerusalem.

Potent Affirmation

I sense that Professor Poelvoorde relishes the opportunity to speak with a fellow Torah Jew. Our opening efforts at both Jewish and academic geography net much fruit. The reference in his letter to “Jewish predecessors” (and not “Jewish ancestors”) leads me to deduce that he is a ger, but I do not want to ask him directly. So I mention that Poelvoorde is not a common Jewish name. He replies that it is a Belgian name (pronounced “pohl vohr dee”), and means something like “mud puddle.” My comment about his name has the desired effect, and he launches into the story of his conversion.

It began when he was 14, with his cello teacher in East Moline, Illinois, on the Mississippi River, lending him Leon Uris’s novel, Mila 18, about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. He devoured the book, and began to delve deeply into Jewish history and study Hebrew, while still in high school.

“The very existence of the Jewish People, whom the fires of Auschwitz could not extinguish,” he tells me, “seemed to me to be the most powerful testimony to a power of Goodness beyond any power of evil that the world could summon, and the Jewish People to be the embodiment of the Torah’s injunction, ‘Choose life.’ ”

As so often happens when speaking to a ger, I’m awed by Jeffrey’s ability to see so clearly, and almost entirely on his own, what completely eludes the vast majority of those born Jewish: “I wanted to be part of the People whose very existence is the most potent affirmation of life and its goodness, and the concrete proof of G-d’s presence in history.”

In the spring of his freshman year at Northern Illinois University, he underwent a Conservative conversion. The next fall, he began traveling with an older friend, Nate Gordon, who was president of the campus Hillel, to study at a small yeshivah in Chicago, Yeshivas Chesed L’Avraham–Nachlas David, headed by Rabbi Leon Friedlander. A year later, he underwent an Orthodox conversion under Rabbi Friedlander’s auspices. He refers to that conversion 48 years ago as “the decision that determined the course of my life to this very day.” Not only did Jeffrey become a Jew, but, eventually, so did his widowed mother.

Poelvoorde would go on to earn his PhD in political theory at the University of Virginia. There was a short stint in grad school when he served as a “head flusher” in a slaughterhouse, cutting off 900 cow heads per day. He jokes that his career arc took him from being a “head flusher to a brainwasher.” He taught at six different small colleges — including Minnesota’s prestigious Carleton College and William & Mary College in Williamsburg, Virginia — before accepting a position at Converse in 1986.

He says that his chosen field, political theory and American constitutional history, derives from his intense patriotism. He tells a humorous anecdote illustrating that. After he moved to Charlotte, to be closer to an established Jewish community, he bought a new car for his 90-minute commute to Converse. To pass time on the first drive, he began singing “The Star Spangled Banner” to himself — all four verses, which he knows by heart.

As he crossed the state line into South Carolina, he was really belting it out, and overcome by emotion. But flashing lights in the rearview mirror compelled him to pull over. The highway patrolman began the standard line of questioning. Do you know how fast you were going? And why not?

Poelvoorde replied to the officer, “Because I was weeping.”

The interrogation was now redirected to the cause of his lachrymosity. Poelvoorde explained to the disbelieving officer that he’d been singing the entire national anthem.

“There are not four verses,” insisted the officer.

Poelvoorde proceeded to repeat his performance for the patrolman — who let him go without a ticket.

Lawyering Up

Now, with his refusal to take the anti-bias training course, Jeffery Poelvoorde faced the very real possibility of losing his livelihood and life’s work.

Fortunately, Professor Robert George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University, learned of the case. Professor Poelvoorde has taught summer programs for high school students in the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, of which George is the director.

When he heard that Jeffrey was in danger of being fired, Professor George tapped his donor base to hire a top-notch lawyer for him. And to calm Jeffrey’s concerns about the loss of his livelihood, George informed him that if needed, an award would be created for him for academic courage, equal to two years’ salary.

If those fighting to maintain the traditional idea of a university could be said to have a general, it is Professor George. And should American academia ever emerge from the dark ages that have descended, it is virtually certain that the students of Professor George will be the ones who kept the light of civilization alive.

When I contact Professor George about Professor Poelvoorde’s case, I add that I also hope he’ll convince me that the situation in American academia is not as dire as I fear.

He writes back, “These are pretty dark times, but we’re fighting back. We didn’t let the Woke devour Joshua Katz [see sidebar] or Jeff Poelvoorde, and we are re-learning from experience the old wisdom that bullies are cowards and the way to defeat them is to defy them.”

Attached to that email are the founding protocols of a new alliance of “college and university faculty members dedicated to upholding the principles, values, and virtues that are required for scholars to fulfill their vocation as truth-seekers, and for colleges and universities to be faithful to their mission as truth-seeking institutions.” The members pledge “to regard an attack on academic freedom anywhere as an attack on academic freedom everywhere.” Professor Poelvoorde is one of the first beneficiaries of that commitment.

Of most immediate relevance to Professor Poelvoorde’s case is Principle 3 of the Declaration of Principles of the alliance George and his colleagues are building: “Every member of the faculty has the right to be free of the imposition by the academic institution of requirements of conformity to ideological or political programs, as well as to reject submission to initiatives that seek... to inculcate such conformity, including any measure that requires a professor or instructor to aver, whether expressly or implicitly, anything the individual does not believe.”

Credential Value

Professor George begins our subsequent conversation with a description of how Princeton has changed since he joined the faculty in 1985. At that time, he was the only openly conservative faculty member (though there may have been one or two Eisenhower Republicans). The campus was dominated by old-style liberals, which was fine with him, as they believed in truth and argument. Today, there are something like 25 conservative professors, but the old-time liberals have nearly disappeared, replaced by followers of the new “woke” dispensation.

And if once students came to college to be indoctrinated by left-wing professors, that is no longer necessary: They now enter “pre-indoctrinated,” George says. The left has penetrated deeply and systematically into high school curricula around the country.

The third change, he quips, is that it is impossible to any longer find a parking space on the Princeton campus. Not because there are many more professors than in 1985, but because of the endless proliferation of administrators, many drawing large salaries and charged with promoting diversity and inclusion. Those bureaucrats are often the chief enforcers of campus orthodoxy.

Professor George had hoped to find allies among parents in his efforts to reverse some of these trends. But to his dismay, he found that even when made aware of the declining quality of their children’s astronomically expensive education, parents care more about the credential value of an Ivy League degree for a job at Goldman Sachs than about whether their children learn to think.

Ray of Hope

A New York Times feature once called Professor George “America’s most influential conservative and religious (Catholic) thinker.” Remarkably, he has remained unscathed on an Ivy League campus for 35 years, despite being a full-throated defender of traditional marriage, opponent of abortion, and an unabashed combatant in the cultural wars.

Professor George’s influence is only partially due to the power of his ideas. It lies, as well, in his ability to build institutions, form alliances, and his willingness to engage in the unpleasant task of fundraising to realize his vision.

His interpersonal skills are unrivaled. (We have met a number of times in the past at Tikvah Fund symposia.)

“I’m not given to anger or fear,” he confides.

For a number of years, he has co-taught courses with Cornel West, a black professor at Harvard and self-described “radical Democrat,” examining classic works across the political spectrum. Though coming from opposite ends of that spectrum, they collaborated in 2017 on a joint manifesto against “campus illiberalism,” the attempt to “immunize from criticism opinions that happen to be dominant in [a] particular community,” after Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute was prevented from speaking at Middlebury College, and the faculty sponsor of his talk suffered a concussion in the ensuing melee.

George emphasizes that the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions of which he is the director is not designed to be a campus safe space for conservative students. The 240 undergraduate fellows and 16 postdoctoral and visiting fellows, including two from Israel this coming year, are not selected by political affiliation. Indeed, the more liberal students, the better, as far as Professor George is concerned. He describes having the opportunity to expose liberal students to new perspectives as akin to the advantage of being “Robin Hood in Sherwood Forest.” The program’s home page proclaims: “Think Deeply; Think Critically; Think for Yourself.”

The James Madison Program has inspired similar interdisciplinary projects on more than 20 other elite American campuses. Though these programs, which receive grants from another George brainchild, the Foundation for Excellence in High Education, differ from one another by virtue of the academic interests of the directors and faculty, they are all committed to exploring the conditions of “human flourishing.”

Professor George does not deny that there is a crisis in American higher education. But he does provide at least a ray of the hope I was seeking in two respects. First, by pointing to redoubts where serious students can still be challenged and encouraged to grow in a spirit of free inquiry; and second, by demonstrating that there are those who have the backs of academics like Jeffrey Poelvoorde who refuse to submit to the prevailing campus political orthodoxy.

Town and Gown

In the case of Professor Poelvoorde, “having his back” meant hiring attorney Samantha Harris to represent him. Harris is no stranger to the world of infringements on academic freedom. She worked for 15 years at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), whose mission is to defend individual rights of students and faculty at America’s colleges and universities. While she is still a senior fellow there, she has recently gone into private practice so she can represent private clients in ways FIRE did not.

By the time I speak to Harris, the worst of Jeffrey’s ordeal is over. Converse College has informed him that they will content themselves with a negative letter to his file and a denial of any pay raise over the next two years. (A symbolic move, given that the college had already informed faculty that no one would receive pay raises for two years.)

I ask Harris why she thinks Converse blinked. “Negative publicity,” she surmises, was a major factor. “In media interviews, Jeffrey came across as honest and forthright — a man of principle.” She notes that public relations is an integral part of her client representation.

Professor George adds another factor: No college relishes the prospect of going to trial before a local jury, since the surrounding “townies” generally have a healthy dislike for the “gowns” in their midst. A recent $25 million verdict against Oberlin College for harming a local bakery leaps to mind.

Harris’s private practice representing academics who have run afoul of their university administrations has burgeoned quickly and provides a glimpse of the pressures that are being brought to bear to toe the line with respect to the Black Lives Matter narrative.

My conversations with her have to be scheduled around her preparation for a campus disciplinary hearing against Professor Charles Negy of the University of Central Florida (UCF) — a case that demonstrates how far universities will go to harass a professor for protected remarks, for which he cannot be fired directly.

Negy’s ordeal began when he tweeted on his private Twitter account, “Black privilege is real. Besides affirmative action, being shielded from legitimate criticism is privilege.” In response, mobs gathered in front of his house and on campus demanding his firing.

Until that moment, Negy had been an enormously popular psychology professor teaching subjects bound to be controversial, connected to cross-cultural psychology and gender. While his classroom style was blunt, and he pushed students to refine their arguments and to support them with facts, his student reviews were almost uniformly excellent, with just one or two students every year who found his style too rough-and-tumble for their tastes.

After the offending tweet, UCF president Alexander Cartwright admitted that a public university subject to the First Amendment could not directly fire Negy for the tweet. But in the same breath, he announced a university hotline for any students past or present who felt subjected to discriminatory or abusive behavior by any faculty member or staff — specifying that anonymous complaints were also acceptable. Thus, UCF almost explicitly invited informers so it could build a case for firing Negy for discrimination, or make life so miserable for him that he would simply resign.

Harris describes the nine hours of questioning by a university official, in two meetings, as an “inquisition,” with no effort to group complaints together or provide Negy with any information he could use to defend himself against the charges, most of which related to his pedagogy.

Against the Whole World

In our subsequent phone conversations after he learned that he will not be fired, Jeffrey Poelvoorde offers several antidotes to the ideological coercion so many teachers and students face.

One is a traditional liberal arts education devoted to viewing every aspect of human life in all its complexity. He quickly rattles off a long reading list he would offer on racism and black responses, from the ex-slave Frederick Douglass to contemporary black thinkers, including opponents of the notion of “systemic racism,” like Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, and Shelby Steele.

The ideological orthodoxy that has swept campuses, Jeffrey suggests, begins with a passion for social justice that fosters an overwhelming sense of self-righteousness — which, in turn, gives birth to the impulse to stamp out opposing ideas by any means. But German-Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss, of whom Jeffrey is a second-generation student, taught that “Indignation is a bad counselor. Our indignation proves at best that we are well-meaning; it does not prove we are right.”

This poisoned mindset, Jeffrey tells me, deprives its fanatic devotees of any capacity for self-consciousness or embarrassment. They cannot even allow words to express basic truths, such as “All lives matter.” To dissent from the regnant ideology of “systemic racism” is to ensure that one will be labeled a racist. To insist that an issue is complex is, again, proof of one’s racism, for which the only cure is “re-education” or therapy, as in the asylums of the former Soviet Union.

What is lacking among campus totalitarians — to put the matter in Jewish terms — is a failure to recognize that none of us is the sole repository of truth. That, Jeffrey offers, may have been the sin for which Rabi Akiva’s talmidim were punished: They did not honor their fellow students by treating their views as worthy of their attention. Jeffrey’s attorney, Samantha Harris, made the same point to me quoting Pirkei Avos: “Ben Zoma taught: ‘Who is wise? He who learns from every man’ ” — i.e., the one who recognizes that he does not know everything.

*****

The past few months have been an ordeal for Poelvoorde. Not more than a handful of longtime colleagues expressed any support, even in private. Throughout Jeffrey has prayed for the strength to stand up for what is right. His closest advisors and supporters have been Rabbi Yosef Groner of the Chabad of Charlotte and Rabbi Chanoch Oppenheim of the Charlotte Torah Center.

He has been buoyed by the hope that “if even one person, like Avraham Avinu, who stood on one side against the entire world, tells the truth, some people will pay attention.” And he has received thousands of supportive emails from across the country, about half of them from fellow professors. One wrote simply, “You give me hope.”

Meanwhile, Jeffrey shares that he has greatly increased his mussar learning so as not to lose sight of the humanity of those on the other side. His letters to President Newkirk and his student critic are strewn with compliments amid his arguments for his position.

“If you let your anger carry you away, it will destroy you,” he tells me.

Instead of focusing on his mistreatment, he prefers to focus on the blessings — and the future.

“I have been granted a remarkable and meaningful life,” he tells me. “What would bring that life to its ultimate fulfillment would be the opportunity, after I retire, to learn Torah in a yeshivah full-time, b’ezrat Hashem, in Eretz Hakodesh.”

I offer him a chavrusa when he arrives.

Progressives or Terrorists? The Joshua Katz Case

On July 4 this year, over 350 faculty members, staff, and graduate students at Princeton published a letter that began, “Anti-blackness is foundational to America,” and then listed multitudinous demands to the administration, including higher pay and more sabbaticals for minority staff members; a core distribution requirement on the history and legacy of racism in America; reparative action for the Black Justice League, a student group active on campus between 2014 and 2016; and the defunding of campus police.

Most notably, the letter demanded the creation of a faculty committee to investigate and discipline “racist behaviors, incidents, and research and publication on the part of the faculty.”

Princeton classics professor Joshua Katz was quick to respond on July 8 with his own “Declaration of Independence by a Princeton Professor.” Fulfillment of the demands, wrote Katz, would lead to civil war on campus and a further erosion of “public confidence in how elite institutions of higher education operate.”

He rejected the call for certain perks based on nothing more than pigmentation, and termed the Black Justice League a “terrorist organization that made life miserable for many on campus, including black students who did not agree to its demands.” But scariest of all for Katz was the proposal that a faculty committee police their colleagues’ academic research for signs of racism. Such a committee would be a “star chamber with a low bar for cancellation, punishment, suspension, and even dismissal,” he wrote.

Princeton president Chris Eisgruber, a former Supreme Court clerk and law professor, reacted with equanimity to the demands, but not to Katz’s declaration, which he termed “reprehensible.” Subsequently, a Princeton spokesman said the university was “looking into” Katz’s declaration. For Robert George, that was the signal that Katz should “lawyer up,” and he recommended attorney Samantha Harris, as he would subsequently do for Professor Poelvoorde. (Harris was also a student of Professor Katz at Princeton.)

I ask both Samantha Harris and later Professor George what could have provoked President Eisgruber’s anger, and on what possible grounds the university could have threatened Katz, a tenured full professor, such that he needed an attorney. With respect to the first question, George speculates that Eisgruber was angered by Professor Katz’s reference to the Black Justice League as a “terrorist group,” though they had not committed acts of physical violence.

But that clearly was not Katz’s intent. He referred to a confrontation recorded on Instagram between the former leader of the group, egged on by 200 supporters, and a former classmate, as a “struggle session,” a form of public humiliation and confession before a large crowd used in Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Katz described that confrontation as one of the “most evil things I have ever seen.”

Both Harris and Professor George acknowledge that given Princeton’s commitment to the so-called “Chicago principles” guaranteeing academic freedom and free speech (so named for the University of Chicago, where they were introduced), Princeton probably could not have fired Katz without being sued for breach of contract. But university administrators have other means of punishment at their disposal, such as taking away class assignments.

Thus Ted Ruger, the dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, for instance, has denied chaired professor Amy Wax any teaching responsibility for mandatory first-year classes on the grounds that minority students may feel “threatened” by her advocacy of bourgeois values — such as hard work, punctuality, marriage before parenthood, two-parent families — as the best road to success for underprivileged students. And Professor George feared that something similar could have happened to Professor Katz, especially without a signal to the university that they would have a fight on their hands.

When a Princeton alumnus circulated a petition of support for Professor Katz’s declaration, one respondent wrote that his company would fire him if he signed the petition; another that his career in academic life would be “finished”; and yet a third apologized that as a junior tenure-track professor, she could not afford the luxury of support.

Though Princeton ultimately took no action against Professor Katz, his case illustrates how deep the fear of running afoul of the BLM party line runs in corporate America and academia.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 830)