The Forward reports:
The tradition of removing the mechitzah when celebrating the Torah would seem to stretch back at least a century. A YIVO archival photo (circa 1900) of a celebration in honor of the completion of a Torah scroll in Dubrovno, Belarus, shows women and men in the same room looking on as the rabbi dances with the freshly penned Torah.…
With the increased demand in recent years for greater ritual opportunity for Orthodox women, rabbinic authorities have been pressed to examine the tradition barring women from dancing with the Torah. Their findings showed that "from a purely halachic point of view, there is no prohibition at all preventing a woman from touching a Sefer Torah or even from reading from it — even while she is menstruating," according to Shlomo Riskin, founding rabbi of New York's Modern Orthodox Lincoln Square Synagogue and chief rabbi of the West Bank settlement of Efrat. This position opened the way for women's hakafot in many synagogues.
Those opposed to women's hakafot — like Rabbi Herschel Schachter, professor at the Yeshiva University-affiliated Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary — argue that the movement to allow women to dance with the Torah springs from the "impure motivations" of rebelliousness and self-aggrandizement rather than a pure desire to connect with God. Another issue of contention is the fact that according to rabbinic tradition, a long-held Jewish custom attains the status of a halachic ruling.
Rabbi Schachter does not speak to the press and does not defend or explain his positions to the public, so any specuation on the "purity" of his motivations will have to remain that. That being said, the man is proven himself time and again to be unfit to lead.
UPDATE: Chakira has left a strong critique of this post in the comments below. The Rachel Adler article he mentions can be downloaded as a pdf by clicking here.