Telshe Yeshiva Chicago: Student Discipline, Dismissal & Federal Court

How do student discipline and dismissal cases work at Telshe Yeshiva?

Telshe Yeshiva Chicago is a private Jewish rabbinical college for men on West Foster Avenue in Chicago, Cook County. Founded in 1960, it has been accredited since 1976 by the Accreditation Commission of the Association of Advanced Rabbinical and Talmudic Schools, which renewed its accreditation on May 25, 2025 for a period ending September 1, 2032. Federal data put its enrollment at 91 students, 78 of them undergraduates. The single most useful fact for a student in trouble is a negative one: Telshe Yeshiva’s rules are not public. Its website is closed to search engines and to automated review, and no catalog, conduct code, academic-standing policy, appeal procedure or sexual-misconduct policy is available from any public source I could reach. Everything below is built on what is public — and on what to ask the yeshiva for in writing.

Telshe Yeshiva Chicago is a private institution. There is no state action, so there is no constitutional due process claim, and arguing one wastes an appeal. The theory is contract: Illinois holds that a college and its students have a contractual relationship whose terms come from the catalog and the handbook — Raethz v. Aurora University, 346 Ill. App. 3d 728 (2004), restated by the Fourth District in Urso v. Bradley University, 2023 IL App (4th) 230165 — while adding that the relationship “is unique and cannot be strictly categorized or characterized in purely contractual terms.”

The limit is the standard of review, and it decides most of these cases before anyone reaches the facts. A student has a remedy for an adverse academic decision only if it was made arbitrarily, capriciously, or in bad faith. Frederick v. Northwestern University Dental School, 247 Ill. App. 3d 464 (1993), puts it bluntly — courts have been loath to review, much less overturn, academic dismissals — and Bosch v. NorthShore University Health System, 2019 IL App (1st) 190070, holds that a school which departs somewhat from its handbook still wins unless the departure was material. The federal courts in Chicago apply the same test: in Doe v. Columbia College Chicago, 933 F.3d 849 (7th Cir. 2019), the Seventh Circuit affirmed dismissal of a student’s contract claim where the college had investigated and reasoned its way to a decision, and in Gash v. Rosalind Franklin University, 117 F.4th 957 (7th Cir. 2024), it held that calling a process arbitrary or predetermined, without specific facts, is not enough. What survives is specific: in Liu v. Northwestern University, 78 F. Supp. 3d 839 (N.D. Ill. 2015), a former law student’s claim went forward where the school imposed what amounted to an integrity charge while denying her the handbook procedure for contesting one. Which federal statutes reach Telshe Yeshiva depends on facts worth confirming early — whether it receives federal financial assistance, and, for a religiously controlled institution, whether it claims the religious exemptions some of those statutes allow.

A federal claim arising at Telshe Yeshiva Chicago is filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois — Cook County sits in its Eastern Division under 28 U.S.C. § 93(a), and the statute fixes the places of holding court for that division at Chicago and Wheaton. I am a member of the general bar of that court, admitted on my Florida license under its Local Rule 83.10, which opens the general bar to an attorney in good standing before the highest court of any state. That means a Title IX, Section 504 or ADA complaint for a Telshe Yeshiva student is one I file and litigate under my own name, with no pro hac vice motion. The Northern District abrogated its local-counsel designation rule in July 2023, so a member of its bar with no office in the district no longer has to designate local counsel. One limit, stated plainly: the court keeps a separate trial bar, and under Local Rule 83.12 a general-bar member who is not on it — that is me — appears alone in everything except testimonial proceedings, meaning evidentiary hearings and trial, where a trial-bar member must sit as advisor unless the judge grants the rule’s narrow waiver.

What is public, and what is missing

What can be confirmed comes from the yeshiva’s accreditor and from data it reports to the federal government:

• Accreditation. The Association of Advanced Rabbinical and Talmudic Schools lists Telshe Yeshiva-Chicago among its accredited members as of June 2026, with the First Rabbinic Degree and the Second Rabbinic Degree as its accredited degrees. Federal data report them as bachelor’s and master’s awards.
• Character and size. The federal College Navigator listing shows a men-only, Jewish-affiliated school with campus housing, 91 students and six full-time instructional faculty in fall 2024.
• Mission. The yeshiva’s mission statement in that listing calls it “a traditional school of higher Talmud learning” whose course of study “is not different in its essentials from the curriculum developed centuries ago in the Talmudic academies of Eastern Europe.”
• Federal aid. The listing says eligible students may receive Pell Grants and other federal aid, and it links a “Disability Services” document on the yeshiva’s own website.

What is missing is everything procedural: who decides discipline or dismissal, on what standard, with what notice, whether a student may respond or bring anyone, and whether there is any appeal and by when. The school may well have written rules; they are simply not reachable through any public source I could find, and search engines cannot index its site. Under the contract theory above, the terms come from the catalog and the handbook — so the first task is getting the yeshiva’s catalog and any written rules, in the version that applied to you, before responding to anything. More on contract claims against schools is on its own page.

Dismissal, discipline and sexual misconduct without published rules

Because nothing procedural is published where I could reach it, there is no deadline to quote and no standard to hold the yeshiva to except what it tells you. That makes the written request the most important document in any case: it asks the yeshiva to name the rule, the decision-maker and the procedure before it acts, and it fixes the date. If a decision is communicated in person, ask for it in writing, with its reasons and any route to reconsider it. If a letter names a deadline, treat that date as your deadline and put it on your calendar the day it arrives. The page on academic dismissal explains how these decisions are usually contested.

For sexual misconduct, the federal rule is the 2020 Title IX regulation: the 2024 rule was vacated nationwide on January 9, 2025, in Tennessee v. Cardona, and on September 29, 2026 the Department of Education formally repealed it and restored the pre-2024 text (91 Fed. Reg. 61,308).

Telshe Yeshiva enrolls men only, and I could find no published sexual-misconduct policy or grievance procedure. The Illinois statute described below reaches every higher education institution in the state, private ones included, so a student involved in a complaint should ask the yeshiva in writing for its policy, the name of its confidential advisor and the procedure it will follow. Whether federal anti-discrimination statutes reach the yeshiva is the question flagged above. More on Title IX cases is on its own page.

What a student defense lawyer can do here

Most of the value is early and quiet. It is getting the rules that actually govern you and reading them against what the yeshiva did; writing the response or the appeal so it argues the grounds those rules recognize rather than the ones that feel most unfair; preserving the federal issues — Title IX, Section 504 and the ADA, FERPA — so they are in the record if the case ever leaves the school; and identifying comparators, because a sanction far outside what similar cases drew is one of the few arguments that reliably moves a decision-maker.

At Telshe Yeshiva the first move is documentary: a short, respectful written request for the catalog, any handbook or rules, the procedure that will govern the decision and the identity of the decision-maker, so that the yeshiva commits to its terms before it acts. The response is then written to those terms, with any disability or accommodation issue put on the record.

What a lawyer cannot do is turn an internal decision into a trial. The rules of evidence do not apply, there is no discovery, and the school decides its own case at first instance. That is exactly why the written record built during the internal process is the whole ballgame: by the time a court looks at it, the record is closed.

The one Illinois statute that gives you procedure

Illinois has no general statute setting notice periods, hearing formats, standards of proof or appeal rights for college students. The Illinois School Code, 105 ILCS 5, has a detailed suspension and expulsion scheme, and it applies to elementary and secondary schools, not here. The exception is the Preventing Sexual Violence in Higher Education Act, 110 ILCS 155, and it is a real one. It reaches every higher education institution in the state — public universities, community colleges, and private not-for-profit and for-profit institutions alike — and it requires timely written notice of the allegations to all parties, an investigation that is adequate, reliable and impartial, written notice of the outcome, and appeal rights. It requires the school to make confidential advisors available, trained to a statutory standard and kept separate from the people deciding the case. Both parties are entitled to an advisor of their choice, and that advisor may be an attorney — although the institution may limit how far an attorney-advisor participates in a hearing, which is why Telshe Yeshiva’s own rule on that — which it does not publish in any source I could reach — still governs what your lawyer may do in the room. The standard of proof is preponderance of the evidence, applied the same way to both sides.

What to do first

1. Ask for the rules in writing. Write to the yeshiva’s administration for the current catalog, any student handbook or rules, the procedure that will govern your matter and any deadline to respond or appeal. Keep a copy and note the date.
2. Get every decision in writing. If you are told of a suspension, dismissal or loss of standing in person, ask for a written decision with its reasons.
3. Collect what you already have. Enrollment papers, any catalog or rules you received, financial-aid letters, emails and texts — these are the documents any later review would start from.
4. Ask about aid rules if you receive federal aid. If a decision affects your aid, ask for the written satisfactory academic progress policy and its appeal route.
5. Raise disability early. Ask for the yeshiva’s “Disability Services” document and put any accommodation request, or any disability-related explanation for your performance, in writing now under Section 504 and the ADA.
6. Read the overview. The Illinois student defense hub explains how the federal and state pieces fit together.

One honest caveat about geography. Illinois has three federal districts. I am admitted to two of them, the Northern and the Southern. A federal claim arising at a school in Springfield, Peoria, Champaign-Urbana or the Quad Cities falls in the Central District; I am not a member of that bar, and those matters I handle with local counsel in that district or by pro hac vice admission. Appeals from the Northern District go to the Seventh Circuit, which keeps its own bar; my appellate admission is in the Eleventh. I say so before a retainer rather than after.

Where I am licensed. I am licensed to practice law in Florida. I am admitted to the bars of the U.S. District Courts for the Southern, Middle and Northern Districts of Florida, the District of Colorado, the Northern and Southern Districts of Illinois, the District of Nebraska, the District of New Mexico, and the Western District of Wisconsin, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. Federal court admission is not a license to practice the law of the state in which the court sits. I am not licensed in Illinois and do not advise on Illinois state law or appear in Illinois state court.

Other schools in the Northern District of Illinois

Every school writes its own dismissal, appeal and conduct rules, and the deadlines are rarely the same from one campus to the next. These pages set out the procedure at other schools in the Northern District of Illinois:

• Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago
• University of Chicago
• University of Illinois Chicago
• University of Illinois Chicago School of Law
• University of Saint Mary of the Lake (Mundelein Seminary)
• University of St. Francis

Common questions about Telshe Yeshiva student cases

Does Telshe Yeshiva publish a code of conduct or an appeal procedure?

Not in any public source I could find. The yeshiva’s website is closed to search engines and automated review, and its accreditor and federal listings describe the school without setting out discipline, academic-standing or appeal rules. That does not mean none exist. Ask the administration in writing for the catalog, any handbook or rules, and the procedure and deadline that apply to you, and keep both the request and the answer.

Is Telshe Yeshiva accredited?

Yes. The Accreditation Commission of the Association of Advanced Rabbinical and Talmudic Schools first accredited it in 1976 and, on May 25, 2025, renewed its accreditation for a period ending September 1, 2032. The association lists its accredited degrees as the First Rabbinic Degree and the Second Rabbinic Degree, which federal data report as bachelor’s and master’s awards.

How long do I have to appeal a decision at Telshe Yeshiva?

No appeal deadline or appeal procedure is published in any source I could reach. If the yeshiva gives you a decision in writing that names a date, treat that date as your deadline and put it on your calendar the same day. If the decision names no date or no route, ask in writing whether reconsideration or an appeal is available, to whom, and by when — and keep the answer.

Can I bring a lawyer to a meeting with the yeshiva?

No rule on advisors or attorneys is published in any source I could reach, so ask in writing before the meeting rather than arriving with one. For a sexual-misconduct complaint, the state’s Preventing Sexual Violence in Higher Education Act entitles both parties to an advisor of their choice who may be an attorney, although a school may limit how far that advisor participates in a hearing.

Where would a federal case involving Telshe Yeshiva be filed?

In the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. The yeshiva is in Cook County, which sits in that court’s Eastern Division, where court is held at Chicago and Wheaton. Whether a particular federal statute reaches the yeshiva depends on facts worth confirming early, including federal financial assistance and any religious exemption it claims.