Charles wrote:... some of them (Yale) are mired in the ancient past and are still teaching from outdated methods like the Jorden textbook.
I hated the Jorden text we used at my uni. Students called it the Jodan (joke) method. They made us memorize dialogues and had us recite them verbatim in class. This was about 80% of our grade. I can't even remember PIN numbers so it was hell! The woman who co-authored the book with Jorden was a prof at my university and is perhaps one reason why they used it.
The main textbooks were all romanized without any kana or kanji, even in the graduate level classes. The only things those books were good for was to start fires!