‘A life of Torah cannot be compartmentalized,’ Yeshiva University declares in announcing its new ethics initiative. Forty-two years after covering a similar announcement for The New York Times, the author asks whether that principle also applies to the university itself.

Forty-two years ago, as a freelance reporter for The New York Times, I covered the announcement by Yeshiva University’s Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (RIETS) that it planned to expand the curriculum of its Semikha (ordination) program to better prepare future rabbis for the ethical dilemmas of the modern world.

The message was inspiring. Jewish law, university leaders explained, could not remain frozen in an earlier age. Future rabbis would confront questions raised by medicine, technology, business and public life. Halakha had to engage the realities of........

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