Commencement 2015

The Oberlin Review

MAY 22, 2015 VOLUME 143, NUMBER 24

ESTABLISHED 1874 www.oberlinreview.org

ONLINE & IN PRINT

Effie Kline-Salamon

COMMENCEMENT 2015 EDITION: the year in review NEWS

OPINIONS

Tuition Protests

Students protested the four percent tuition hike during the last few weeks of the spring semester.

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Michelle Obama

Michelle Obama is speaking at Commencement thanks to a video by the Ninde Scholars program.

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Strategic Plan

The Strategic Planning Steering Committee met throughout the year to write a new Strategic Plan, the document the Board of Trustees use to guide its decisions.

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ARTS

Student Health

With the College’s inadequate health services in the spotlight, a writer examines the policies surrounding taking a leave of absence.

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Sustainability

Students disapprove of a climate change skepticism debate, as Oberlin is known for its commitment to environmentalism.

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A current student discusses the media’s portrayal of Baltimore and the protests erupting over the death of unarmed Freddie Gray.

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Opinions

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Making Noise

Rookie Sensations

Late-Night Laughs

Race to Victory

New York based noise artist Pharmakon shakes the ’Sco in a politically charged set.

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New Oberlin-centric talk show, Good Talk with Luke Taylor, brings topical comedy to Oberlin.

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Rose on the Rise

Black Lives Matter

News

SPORTS

Caroline Jackson-Smith discusses her work wih multitalented Dessa Rose cast.

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index

The Review sat down with Ana Richardson and Monique Newton, first-year track and field stars, to discuss their opening season competing at the collegiate level. Page 34

The women’s cross country team finished seventh in the nation at the NCAA Championships with two members earning All-American honors for their top finishes.

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Moving Forward

The Transgender Participatory Advisory Committee revised Oberlin’s transgender inclusion policy to update language and increase accessibility.

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Arts

Sports

This Week

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40

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COMMENCEMENT CALENDAR

There’s another way to see our complete coverage from the 2014–2015 school year: visit The Oberlin Review’s website at www.oberlinreview.org.

News

year in review Page 2

The Oberlin Review, May 22, 2015

College junior Lisa-Qiao MacDonald (left), double-degree junior Caylen Bryant, College junior B.J. Tindal, College junior Ariana Abayomi and others protest outside the Conservatory on Monday, Dec. 1. After a grand jury announced its decision not to indict police officer Darren Wilson on Nov. 24, students joined protests in Cleveland and initiated actions across campus to speak out against police violence.

Courtesy of Cheyenne Rubin

Students Protest Systemic Racism, Police Violence Madeline Stocker News Editor Dec. 14, 2014 After College President Marvin Krislov refused to suspend the standard grading system and call a school-wide meeting addressing recent national instances of police brutality against Black communities, a group of students of color decided they would hold one themselves.

Roughly 200 students huddled in Wilder Bowl on Dec. 13 to attend the three-hour “emergency convocation,” which was preceded by weeks of student-led protests, demonstrations and other actions.

At the meeting, students called for the administration, which many had accused of remaining inappropriately silent in the past weeks, to take action.

“There are a number of ways these violences are enacted on

us every day, every minute,” said College junior and organizer Kiki Acey. “This institution should be held accountable to that. I’m done with the excuses.”

Though the convocation was focused in part on sharing experiences, students of color also used it as a space to update their peers on their attempts to convince Krislov to suspend the standard grading system.

Acey, in conjunction with other students of color, authored a petition demanding the suspension of the standard grading system this semester. The petition, which was circulated widely among students last week through email and social media, called for the College to institute a “no-fail mercy period” that would eliminate all failing grades and make a “C” the lowest possible grade a student could receive.

The request came directly from

students disproportionately affected by the recent cases of police brutality, many of whom had been continuously missing classes and study time to work within their own communities and to protest the non-indictments.

The deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Tamir Rice — as well as the non-indictments of the white officers who killed Brown and Garner — have gained national attention as representative of the country’s historic and systemic marginalization, brutalization and dehumanization of Black and brown Americans.

After meeting with Krislov on Friday, a group of seven student organizers told the crowd that Krislov “didn’t understand” why they felt his decision not to endorse the petition, which garnered 1,300 signatures, demonstrated a lack of solidarity that was detrimental to their efforts.

NEXUS Pipeline

Dean Baquet The Review talks with Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The New York Times.

See page 11

“He spent an hour telling us that he was on our side, that he loves ‘kids of color,’ but that he did not have the power to endorse a petition,” College senior Khalil Habrih said.

The students then played back a recording of the meeting, in which they highlighted several of the reasons why they believed that Oberlin College, an institution that regularly cites its “commitment to diversity and social justice” throughout its mission statements and strategic plans, should be putting more effort into supporting students of color.

“What I heard in this meeting was a lot of nothing,” said College junior and organizer Amethyst Carey. “I heard the president making excuse after excuse after excuse after we presented emails from faculty that were ridiculously racist.”

In the recording, Krislov said

Council Divided City Council was deeply split in 2015 over the job performance of City Manager Eric Norenberg..

See page 4

Oberlin residents proposed a reroute of the gas pipeline to avoid endangering buildings, wetlands and community members.

See page 5

that the administration was doing “the most it could,” and that he did not have the authority to tell professors what grades they should give their students.

However, the students in the meeting — as well as many of their peers in the crowd — found this to be an unacceptable answer.

“Who is this invisible person that can make these decisions?” asked College junior B.J. Tindal, who had performed a spoken-word poem earlier in the convocation.

“We have no other option.”

Others pushed back against Krislov’s claims by citing former College President Robert K. Carr’s decision to suspend the standard grading system, institute “education for liberation”–style projects and support student activism in 1970 as a commendable precedent.

President Carr suspended the See Petition, page 3

Community Activism Inside Oberlin Policy Changes

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News

The Oberlin Review, May 22, 2015

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Petition Calls for Emergency Academic Leniency Continued from page 2 grading system after students pressured the administration to take action regarding the National Guard’s killing of four unarmed students at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio and America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. “What is different today?” Habrih asked the crowd. “The U.S. is waging war all over the world, and Black people are not subjected to the same laws as white people in this country. What is different? We have the precedent for the administration [and] the College to stand with us. Now it’s on their side to make this happen. And if they don’t, it’s up to us to make them.”

After playing back the recording, several Black students took the microphone to share their personal experiences. Some spoke to the lack of institutional support that they have experienced at Oberlin and explained that the emotional toll of recent events may result in their academic suspension.

“This is just the beginning,” Acey said.

“These are all just the beginnings. We leave this place, and it’s just the beginning, and we must all be just as invested. It can’t be one person; it can’t be five people; it can’t be 10 people. All of us.”

The day after the convocation, Krislov sent an email to the student body publicly announcing that he would not endorse the petition. In his email, Krislov announced that the Pass/No Pass and incomplete application deadlines would be extended until the end of final exams. “We are in firm agreement that suspending grading protocols is not the way to achieve our shared goal of ensuring that students have every opportunity and resource to succeed,” the email said.

Other than the announcement that the administration was willing to offer more

flexible considerations of students’ incomplete applications, the administration has released relatively few public statements in response to student outcry.

In his weekly Source column published on Wednesday, Dec. 3, Krislov announced the formation of a working group designed to determine the “best principles and practices for ensuring campus safety in an inclusive and equitable fashion.”

On May 2, the presidential working group on Safety and Security sent students a survey asking for their experiences with and perceptions of Safety and Security. The working group — which consists of faculty, students and administrators — is currently gathering information and tentatively plans to submit its recommendations for changes to Safety and Security policies before the start of the fall semester.

“Our job is not to independently assert our ideas,” said Charles Peterson, associate professor of Africana Studies and a member of the working group. “We’re a filter; we gather information and then we form our recommendations. … This is a good time for all well-meaning institutions to review campus security policies.”

Though the administration agreed to exercise flexibility in granting emergency incomplete requests for students struggling academically, a number of students have accused the institution of extending little other support for those who have been disproportionately affected.

“People’s communities are being mercilessly murdered and beaten in the streets every day around the world,” Acey said in a Facebook post regarding the state of Oberlin’s final examination period. “Others are being locked away by the millions for petty crimes. And many of us are still working every day just to be able to afford this educa-

tion that fails to tell us how to free ourselves.”

The idea to request a suspension of the standard grading system was brought up during one of the many actions that students of color organized last week.

During these protests, students highlighted what they identified as the College’s complicity in the systemic oppression of people of color.

“It’s an inability to compartmentalize what’s going on in your life and around the world and on campus,” said College senior Megs Bautista, who met with Dean of Students Eric Estes in an attempt to garner institutional support for the petition. “This isn’t conducive to anyone doing well or to keeping up with their peers who are able to deal with this.”

Students Challenge Board of Trustees Over 100 students occupied the Board of Trustees forum in Stevenson Dining Hall on Thursday, Dec. 4, crowding along the walls and dispersing themselves throughout the space in order to ensure that their voices would be heard.

“I look at the disdain in your faces, and I can see that you don’t respect me or the people who look like me,” one student said to the trustees, many of whom were white men.

“Don’t admit students into this college just to make this college look good,” said another.

“You limit access to students of color at this school,” a third said. “You limit our access into your classrooms. Why is it that the only people I know who have ever heard of Oberlin are rich and white?”

The action, which was organized by several students of color, called attention to what many have identified as Oberlin’s institutional marginalization of low-income students and people of color.

Many of the students who spoke at the forum demanded the Board take accountability for what they viewed to be the Board’s apathetic approach to making Oberlin hospitable for students of color, as well as for the racist microaggressions that some used in their responses.

“Hands up,” several students of color shouted when they heard language they identified as violent or oppressive. “Don’t shoot,” the rest of the demonstrators yelled back.

According to Acey, the chant was a way for students to express the pain that comes from destructive and dehumanizing language.

“If they kick us, we will say ouch,” said Acey.

Other students used the forum to address specific concerns and demands. College junior Amethyst Carey asked the Board why the Multicultural Visit Program had been expanded to give even more access to white students, while College junior Lisa-Qiao MacDonald demanded that the trustees take part in anti-racist and anti-oppression trainings — a comment that garnered much support from the protesters.

While these remarks elicited responses from several trustees, many other comments went unaddressed.

“These issues are central to our conversations,” said Board member Diane Yu, OC ’73.

Other board members agreed and stressed that their goal was to serve students.

“We want to [allocate resources] where they can best be used,” said trustee Alan Wurtzel, OC ’55.

Wurtzel went on to say that the Board was between a fiscal rock and a hard place when it came to earning revenue, as the ColSee Protestors, page 9

Protestors Demand Financial Accessibility, Tuition Freeze Katherine Kingma, Melissa Harris and Oliver Bok Contributing Writer, Staff Writer and News Editor May 1, 2015 On the afternoon of Saturday, April 18, College senior Zachery Crowell shouted out to a Wilder Bowl full of sunbathing students to encourage them to participate in a meeting to organize students against the College’s planned 4 percent increase next year in total cost of attendance.

Within the first five minutes, Crowell had five students. Ten minutes later the meeting had 30.

“We are one of the most expensive academic institutions in the entire world and because of this we have much less racial and socioeconomic diversity than we should,” Crowell said at the meeting. “We need to ask ourselves: Is [this] the Oberlin we want to be?

I know I want an Oberlin with a diverse student body instead of one that runs the rat-race with other institutions to be prestigious in rankings.”

The cost of attending Oberlin — a number that includes tuition, a multi-occupant room, a standard meal plan and additional fees — will rise from $61,788 this year to $64,224 for the 2015–16 school year.

The meeting on April 18 marked the beginning of a series of protests organized by members of the Student Labor Action

Coalition and Defending Oberlin Financial Accessibility that persisted throughout the rest of the semester.

At the meeting, students began to draft a list of demands that they collected from the student body to send to the administration. “[We’re] drafting really clear demands for the administration in language that’s digestible for people who sit on the financial board of this College,” said College first-year Sofia Smith-Hale.

“Another main task that we’ve been working on is thinking about the demands not solely regarding financial accessibility but workers’ rights and accessibility for the disabled, who are struggling with all sorts of other things. We’re really trying to take into account other people’s needs and desires and make sure people are heard.”

The list will incorporate a variety of demands, including moving from providing merit aid to need-based scholarships, loosening on-campus dining and housing requirements, reducing food waste and temporary workers in Campus Dining Services, cutting certain administrative pay and strengthening relations between the College and the city of Oberlin. The students also hope to establish an Accessibility and Affordability Committee that would include students, administrators and Oberlin residents.

The protestors also circulated

Students occupy Cox Administration Building on Friday, May 1, to protest the 4 percent tuition hike and celebrate May Day. The protestors ate food, played music, chalked on the walls and talked among themselves. According to College senior Zachery Crowell, top administrators vacated the building shortly before the students arrived.

Nick Farfan

an online petition in support of a tuition freeze that eventually garnered over 1,000 signatures.

“We came up with the tuition plan because it seemed like the most immediate [way] to freeze the total cost of attendance, but the College obviously responded, ‘No, that’s not possible,’” said Crowell. “We fully expected that, but they also said no to things that they could do immediately for more information of metrics of economic diversity at this College and things like what the actual

average student was graduating with in loans.”

About 100 students participated in a tuition hike protest on April 24. The protesters marched through the Science Center, King Building, Carnegie Building and Bibbins Hall chanting, “They say tuition hike, we say student strike!” and “Stand up, walk out!”

Some students and faculty not involved with the protest criticized it for disrupting classes. The protest ended in the lobby of Carnegie, where the students discussed

their demands and future plans.

“I thought the turnout was very strong, and the overall protest achieved all its objectives,” Crowell said. “We had three local and two student newspapers cover us and almost 900 signatures all within one week of the General Assembly. This is a very pressing issue, especially for low-income students, students of color and international students, who are all disproportionately affected by rising costs.”

See Frandsen, page 6

News

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The Oberlin Review, May 22, 2015

community

Council Releases Goals for Embattled City Manager Elizabeth Dobbins and Kate Kingma News Editor, Contributing Writer April 10, 2015 After presenting City Manager Eric Norenberg with a letter requesting his resignation on Jan. 8 with the signatures of four out of seven Council members, City Council made its expectations for Norenberg public on Thursday, April 16. The goals include completing evaluations of all the department heads in city government, developing a diversity plan and providing regular updates to the Council and the public. In addition, the goals include several concrete tasks, such as preparing the Hamilton Recreation Complex soccer field and installing bike racks.

Burgess and fellow Council members Sharon Pearson, Elizabeth Meadows and Kristen Peterson signed the letter; all gave Norenberg low yearly scores with the exception of Pearson, who did not participate in the numerical portion of the evaluations.

City Council member Ron Rimbert also presented Norenberg with low scores but did not sign the letter.

Norenberg received an average of 1.7 out of 3 possible points across seven evaluation categories, including leadership, planning and organization, communication, problem-solving and community, employee and intergovernmental relations. The average scores were low across all categories.

In the evaluation, Council raised a variety of concerns, including questions about the city’s decision to cooperate with the county on Oberlin’s storm water plan, a request for better support of Climate Action Plan projects and issues surround-

ing Norenberg’s communication with the Council, such as the decision to purchase the Green Acres property.

The request for resignation stated that the “sense of trust” between the Council and the city manager has been strained due to the free reign of department heads, “reactive rather than proactive” management and the failure to consult the Council on certain staff-level decisions.

However, City Council President Scott Broadwell and Vice President Sharon FairchildSoucy both gave Norenberg’s yearly performance a high rating.

The city charter requires a 5–2 supermajority and the opportunity for a public hearing to officially dismiss a city manager.

The vote to request his resignation was 4–3.

Burgess said the request for Norenberg’s resignation stemmed from multiple problems: “It’s been a culmination of things over the past year. Not any one issue.”

Norenberg defended his management decisions, stating that his job required guiding employees without always first consulting the Council and balancing many different projects.

“I think that I have done an excellent job of being city manager, and some of the responsibilities as city manager involve making administrative decisions that don’t necessarily require Council authorization ahead of time,” he said. “I try to manage the department heads that report to me without micromanaging. … It’s a balancing act as a manager in any kind of situation where you’re supervising a complex operation.”

This is the first time Norenberg received a low score on his yearly evaluation since he took the position in 2007. In both 2012

City Council member Bryan Burgess, Council Vice President Sharon Fairchild-Soucy and Council President Scott Broadwell participate in a meeting on Monday, April 6. Council was divided between those who think City Manager Eric Norenberg should be replaced and those who believe he should stay.

Effie Kline-Salamon

and 2013, Norenberg received an average score of 2.7 out of 3.

In the months following the resignation request in January, the issue has continued to sharply divide City Council.

“The Council is crippled right now,” Fairchild-Soucy said to the Review in April. “I don’t know what will heal the rift in the Council because it’s strong, and it’s deep, and it’s not very well understood by us. It seems to me on one side we have all these new [Council members] who want to get rid of the city manager, but they haven’t really articulated what they’re unhappy about.”

When asked if problems about communication and unity within the Council could be rectified, Fairchild-Soucy said, “I don’t think current problems can be rectified with this Council. We have a new election in Novem-

ber, and I’m looking forward to Council changes so the city can be governed more effectively.”

Broadwell also seemed to have low expectations about the possibility of reconciliation in this current City Council.

“I think it’s ridiculous,” Broadwell said. “I think they are hateful and vindictive, and they’re trying to get back at Eric.

Why? I’d prefer not to say. … Let’s just say I’m very much looking forward to the new election in November.”

When asked about the possibility of repairing the breach on City Council, Council member Sharon Pearson, who signed the request for Norenberg’s resignation, said, “Since the letter requesting Norenberg’s resignation was released, I see an improvement in communication between Council members. … I think we

can all move forward if we can believe we can do it. It’s a matter of attitude and belief.”

Pearson also said that the causes of this rift between two polarized sides of the City Council were reflected in the disparity in the time served by members — the veterans versus three newly elected members of the Council — and their opposing views about how effectively the city was being run.

“We have this newer segment of the Council that’s more progressive, and Oberlin is a community that prides itself on innovative and creative change,” Pearson said. “It is my belief we have a status quo way of doing things right now; we’ll only do things if it’s comfortable or if it’s the right time. In my opinion, we should always be working on these things.”

Ninde Scholars Video Brings Michelle Obama to Oberlin Elizabeth Dobbins News Editor April 24, 2015 First Lady Michelle Obama is speaking at Commencement thanks to a short video showcasing the Ninde Scholars Program.

“We’re so excited and proud. I would say overwhelming excitement and pride,” said Katie Hayes, Ninde Scholars Program college access coordinator.

In February, College senior and Bonner Scholar Patrick Gilfether sat down with Ninde Scholar Morgan Smith and her tutor, College junior Amethyst Carey, to meet and discuss the filming of a short video. Over the next week and a half, Gilfether and several collaborators shot, edited and submitted the video to the Office of the First Lady’s Near-Peer Mentoring College Challenge and promptly moved on to the next project. On April 21, Gilfether, along with the rest of the student body, was reminded of the video when the Office of the First Lady announced that the project had won the contest, securing First Lady Michelle Obama as a 2015 Commencement speaker alongside previously announced Marian Wright Edelman, founder and president of the Children’s

Defense Fund.

“I sent it off and felt really good that I made it for them and didn’t really think much of it; that was a month and a half ago,” Gilfether said. “I was just like, ‘OK, cool. On to the next project that I have to work on.’ And I woke up [Tuesday] and got the news, and I was just floored. I really didn’t expect that we were going to win, not because I didn’t think it was good, just that it was Michelle Obama.”

Associate Director of Media Production in the Communications Office Zach Christy produced the video, but the project was ultimately student-led, with direction by Gilfether and music by doubledegree junior Kirk Pearson.

Gilfether said he tried to make a competitive video that was both short and, by focusing on only two people, emotionally involving. However, in addition to making a competitive video, Hayes said the organization wanted a video that could provide publicity and communicate the goals of the program even if it didn’t win the contest.

“When we first found the contest we thought, ‘Wow, we think Ninde is a really good example of exactly what they’re looking for.’ One thing as a very small or-

ganization — we only have three full-time staff people — one thing that we struggle with is to tell our story, and so for us we thought this would be the thing that pushes us to prioritize [that]. … For us we thought, ‘Well, it would be amazing if we won, but worst case scenario we come out of it with a video that helps us tell our story and helps us recruit future scholars and tutors and share with donors.’”

The Ninde Scholars peer tutor program is an application-based program for talented seventh through twelfth graders in the Oberlin school district, particularly individuals from low-income backgrounds or potential first-generation college students. The organization also provides resources for students who are not Ninde Scholars, such as ACT test prep classes and assistance in filling out FAFSA forms.

Hayes said the program is similar to many others in the nation but also uniquely tailored to the needs of the Oberlin community. As an example, she cited Lorain County’s transportation troubles since public transit was cut in 2009. Many students would sign up for the ACT but find it difficult to get to the testing location, so the Ninde Program began provid-

ing a bus, complete with care packages, to transport students from Oberlin High School to the ACT site.

Since the program was started in 2005, a total of 67 students have graduated from the program — 93 percent of who enrolled in college. Out of the 2006 to 2009 high school graduates in the program, 41.3 percent had earned a bachelor’s and 10.3 percent had earned an associate’s degree as of fall 2014. This percentage falls far above the 11 percent national average for low-income and first-generation students.

In recent years, the program has grown to its current 43 Ninde Scholars and 22 Oberlin College tutors. Director of the Education Outreach Programs Susan Pavlus emphasized that the Ninde Scholars Program is a town-gown collaboration between the College and local organizations including the Oberlin City School District, the Community Foundation of Lorain County and the Lorain County Urban League.

“All of those partners work together in order to support this program in some way,” Pavlus said. “Without those partners working together, this program is not possible. Without the support of the community, this program is not possible.”

News

The Oberlin Review, May 22, 2015

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community

Organization Proposes Pipeline Reroute Sarah Conner Staff Writer April 10, 2015 The Coalition to Reroute NEXUS presented an alternate route for the NEXUS pipeline to the Lorain County Commissioners on April 1, continuing the debate surrounding the path of the pipeline, a 250-mile Spectra Energy project which crosses through Ohio, Michigan and Canada. If NEXUS accepts, the proposal will move the project’s path slightly south of the original expected route and prevent the pipeline from crossing through Oberlin.

Paul Gierosky, a spokesperson for CORN, a group of residents and business owners concerned about the pipeline, said the proposal would minimize the pipeline’s interference with wetlands and structures such as houses and schools.

“The proposal that we made used industry standard software — the same software that NEXUS is using — to manage our route,” Gierosky said. “Our goal is to minimize the conflict. The two things we were able to analyze were the conflict with structure — so you’ve got residences, churches, schools — and the other piece was wetlands, acres of wetlands.”

The new route would minimize the amount of times the pipeline would interfere with existing structures by 75 percent across all affected counties. In Lorain County alone, the reroute would cause a 50 percent decrease in structural conflicts and a 99 percent decrease in wetland and environmental conflicts.

Overall, the pipeline is planned to cost around $1.5 billion. Gierosky explained that at that cost, the pipeline should cost about $6

million per mile to build. The new path would add 9.3 miles to the route, resulting in a $55 million cost increase. However, this figure doesn’t take into account the construction benefits of placing the line in less-populated areas and creating a straighter path, according to Gierosky.

In November, the City Council submitted its Community Bill of Rights informing Spectra that it considers the pipeline illegal.

The City Council has not been corresponding with Spectra in accordance with the Bill of Rights, which prohibits the city from aiding the company in any way.

According to City Manager Eric Norenberg, Council and community members were told several weeks ago that all of the pipeline’s gas would travel to Canada. Norenberg was not able to confirm that Oberlin would have access to the gas or whether or not the city would choose to use it.

“One of the things about natural gas is that once it’s in the pipeline, you can’t tell where it came from. So we have had some conversations over the past couple of years knowing some of our residents have concerns about fracking and its safety. There isn’t a way to buy or not buy gas based on its source.”

Norenberg’s concerns have been echoed by a large number of College students and community members. Negative effects of hydraulic fracturing, more commonly known as “fracking,” include numerous environmental, safety and health concerns. One of the most troubling issues is the large quantity of carcinogenic radon that exists within the Marcellus Shale, a profitable natural gas reserve underneath eastern Ohio that is currently being extracted.

The proposed NEXUS pipeline will run through northeast Ohio and into Michigan. Oberlin residents have proposed an alternate route to the pipeline in an attempt to safeguard wetlands and the community.

Hazel Galloway

Members of the community are also concerned about the risk that the pipeline could leak or cause an explosion. Creating a new route and a safety corridor would help offset these risks, according to Lorain County Commissioner Lori Kokoski.

Kokoski said the reroute would implement a 1,500-foot buffer zone, or a pipeline safety corridor. The blast radius is 1,500 feet, so should the pipeline explode, everything outside of the safety corridor would be undamaged.

Gierosky said creating this safety corridor is CORN’s main goal.

“A pipeline safety corridor would be thoroughly engineered and carefully located,” Kokoski said. “We would put it in a place that would protect the safety of the public, the pipeline, people’s property values and demonstrate respect of people’s rights.

If these pipeline companies had to put these pipelines in designated areas that were already set aside, they wouldn’t have the power to use eminent domain.

They wouldn’t choose the route; it would be chosen for them, and the safety standards would be built in. In order to get this, we need some government agency to take action.”

Kokoski said that the reroute would mostly affect farmland which, unlike residential land, is still useable even after the construction of a pipeline. She also said that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has to approve the route, and then NEXUS has to review and accept it. Currently, NEXUS is reviewing the proposal but has not commented on its viability. If the reroute is not accepted, the land can still be seized through eminent domain laws.

“We can’t stop them from putting it in, but we can try to get them to put it in a place where it has less effect on people’s property,” Kokoski said.

Chemistry Professor Jesse Rowsell Remembered Elizabeth Dobbins News Editor Feb. 6, 2015 Grieving students, faculty and staff filled bulletin boards in Love Lounge with stories and drawings in memory of Assistant Professor of Chemistry Jesse Rowsell during the first week of February.

“I am convinced, along with all of my Chem 101 friends, that he was completely brilliant, but he was so much more than that,” read one anonymous note. “Vibrant, funny, inspiring and wise, he treated us as people first, then as students and never as numbers on a page.”

Rowsell passed away at age 37 on Jan. 30 on a hiking trip in Ottawa, Canada, leaving behind his wife, Associate Professor of Chemistry Rebecca Whelan, his sister, Rima Rowsell, and his parents, Shelley Rollins and Murray Rowsell. He will be remembered for his passion for research, his classroom antics and his contributions to both his students and the Chemistry department.

“Jesse’s pairing of high academic standards with a caring persona inspired his students to achieve things they might not have thought possible,” said Biggs Professor of Natural Science Matthew Elrod in an email to the Review.

“His passing is all the more difficult because of the sheer number of students he touched as an instructor, advisor and research mentor. He will be greatly missed.”

Rowsell came to Oberlin in 2005 when Whelan was appointed to a position in the Chemistry department. He began teaching as a visiting assistant professor in 2009 and became a tenure-track assistant professor in 2012.

While at Oberlin, as well as during his education in the undergraduate program at the University of Waterloo and

PhD program at the University of Michigan, Rowsell studied materials chemistry with application in energy and the environment. His PhD thesis won the Kasimir Fajans Award for best dissertation in chemistry at the University of Michigan, and he was awarded both the Outstanding Graduate Student Researcher and Student Instructor Awards.

Over the course of his career, he published 22 articles in peer-reviewed publications, including six first-author papers as an undergraduate. Rowsell continued his research as a faculty member at Oberlin, collaborating with students and Professor of Physics Stephen FitzGerald.

“We each, in turn, taught the other a wealth of chemistry and physics,” said FitzGerald in an email to the Review.

“We brainstormed ideas for future projects, analyzed our results and spent countless hours side by side working on the latest paper. Jesse was meticulous in this work.”

Rowsell studied supramolecular chemistry, crystallography, porous materials and the environmental aspects of gas adsorption.

“He was a specialist in metal organic frameworks, which are exquisitely structured molecular entities,” Elrod said. “Most of us thought it was no accident that Jesse was attracted to beautiful molecules, as he clearly had other artistic interests as well.”

Outside of teaching and research, Rowsell worked on many artistic projects, such as designing the neon sign for the Chemistry department, participating in the Oberlin Chalk Walk, taking pictures of science objects, making music and hosting two shows on WOBC: Blue Light Scintillations and Patio Season. He also enjoyed having long, open conversations with friends.

College President Marvin Krislov said that Rowsell’s

Jesse Rowsell, assistant professor of Chemistry, passed away on Jan. 30.

Courtesy of John Seyfried

passing is a great loss to both the College and the Oberlin community.

“Jesse Rowsell was a wonderful teacher, scholar, friend and colleague, and we will miss him,” said Krislov in an email to the Review. “Our community mourns his loss.”

News

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The Oberlin Review, May 22, 2015

activism

Frandsen Meets With Students, Explains Finances

Continued from page 3 A week later on May 1 — otherwise known as May Day or International Workers’ Day — student protestors occupied Cox Administration Building to protest the tuition increase. The students ate food, played music, chalked on the walls and talked among themselves; according to Crowell, top administrators vacated the building shortly before the students arrived.

Ten students, including members of Student Senate, met with Dean of Students Eric Estes and Vice President of Finance and Administration Mike Frandsen on Monday, April 27. Wanting more clarity and transparency, students used this meeting to understand where the money was going and how students could be more involved in the financial decision-making process.

During the meeting, students asked Frandsen how information concerning the College’s finances could be made more accessible to students. Frandsen responded that he held a presentation last fall where he asked members of Student Senate how he could get more information accessible to the students.

“There’s going to be some information that’s not going to be shared, but there’s more information that can and should be,” Frandsen said.

On Thursday, April 30, Frandsen held a meeting similar to last fall’s in Dye Lecture Hall to discuss the College’s finances. After the meeting, there was a question-and-answer session with President Krislov, Dean Debra Chermonte, Vice President Kathryn Stuart and Dean Estes.

Frandsen Presents on College Finances Frandsen gave students a broad overview of Oberlin’s revenue and expenses on Monday Dec. 1.

According to Frandsen, gross tuition — the sticker price that does not include financial aid — has increased by 4 percent on average over the last five years.

Net student tuition — the actual amount of money collected from students after factoring in financial aid — has increased by 5.9 percent per year since 2011.

Financial aid has increased by an

Protestors call for financial accessibility as they march in front of King Hall. The College declined the students’ request for a tuition freeze.

average of 5 percent per year during the same time period.

“Eighty-two percent of our projected revenues for the next fiscal year are net student revenue, so the net amounts that will come on your behalf, either from you or others, for tuition, fees, room and board. … Student revenue drives the revenue side of the budget,” Frandsen said. “We’re tuition-dependent, and more so than our peers.”

According to Frandsen, 8 percent of the rest of the operating budget comes from the endowment. Before the 2008–2009 economic downturn took a sizable toll on Oberlin’s endowment, the rise in the endowment payout — the money Oberlin chooses to use from the endowment for its annual operating budget — typically matched the growth in financial aid. Frandsen stated that due to the recession, that was no longer the case.

“Since that endowment downturn in 2008–2009, the endowment payout leveled out. … But the student aid amount kept growing and growing and growing. So that has created a challenge not unique to Oberlin but a challenge for colleges,” he said.

According to a graph shown

by Frandsen, the percentage of American families that have a household income that’s more

than three times Oberlin’s tuition fell from over 50 percent in 2002 to just under 30 percent in 2014.

“Can we sustain annual tuition rate increases? I imagine that’s part of what your question is. But at the same time can we remain competitive with compensation?

You want the best professors in the classroom. They’re not free.”

According to Frandsen, about two-thirds of Oberlin’s expenses comes from salaries, wages and benefits, and 40 percent of total compensation goes to faculty.

The remaining third of expenses pays for maintenance and repair costs as well as operating costs such as heating and lighting.

“For every dollar that we spend, 56 cents is going directly to instruction,” said Frandsen.

“Another 15 percent goes to academic support — things like the library. Institutional support, people like me and the administration, get 17 percent.” Most of the remaining money goes to student services, according to a graph shown by Frandsen.

Frandsen said that for the last five years, revenue and expenses mostly rose together, with expenses growing slightly more than revenue. However, Frandsen predicted that Oberlin would face “pressure” in the years ahead on both the revenue and expenses sides of the equation.

Frandsen said that going forward, the finance department would focus on controlling unnecessary costs and gaining potential new, non-tuition-based revenue sources, such as renting Oberlin’s facilities out more frequently.

Several students in attendance wanted a more detailed breakdown of financial aid at Oberlin, but Frandsen said that he did not have those figures.

“At the end of the day, students as a class versus administrators as a class have competing interests,” Crowell said. “The people in finance, the people in admissions, the people in financial aid, as the 2005 Strategic Plan said, they have to lower the discount rate, they have to increase net revenue. … We want to make sure that [increasing revenue] isn’t preventing low-income and racially diverse students from coming here.”

Krislov Responds to Tuition Freeze Demand In President Krislov’s weekly column on Thursday, April 30 in The Source, he defended the tuition hike by saying that freezing tuition would necessitate painful budget cuts.

“If we do not raise tuition, we probably could not replace the revenue we would lose in

Bryan Rubin

the short-term and probably not completely in the long-run,” Krislov wrote. “We have been working and continue to work on generating revenue from sources other than tuition, including fundraising, bringing conferences and summer programs to campus and through partnerships with other institutions. But to make up a budget shortfall, we would have to reduce costs. Some reductions could be realized through greater efficiencies, and we are working on that. But we are already fairly efficient. So at some point reductions are likely to result in a degradation of the quantity or quality of the education and support services we currently offer.”

In an interview with the Review, Krislov also defended financial decisions that allocated funds to facilities and merit-based aid instead of need-based aid. “[The Oberlin Inn and the new athletic complex] are facilities that needed to be replaced.

The Inn was at the end of its life, and [the] complex didn’t even have a women’s locker room. ...

Donations were given specifically for these facilities. We give a lot of financial aid and most of it is need-based aid. Our merit scholarships are mainly for the Conservatory to reduce competition, but that is an ongoing discussion.”

Students Protest Economist’s Actions, Not Views Madeline Stocker News Editor Oct. 31, 2014 Spectators who expected developmentalism to be the only policy deconstructed at Jeffrey Sachs’s convocation on Wednesday, Oct. 29 were in for a surprise.

Sachs, an American economist and former economic advisor to governments worldwide, began his convocation speech in front of a relatively large audience of students, faculty, staff and community members. However, his voice was soon drowned out by shouts from a group of students scattered throughout Finney Chapel.

“Jeffrey Sachs has spent his life using vulnera-

ble populations in mass economic experiments,” the students proclaimed from their vantage points. Banners denouncing neoliberalism unfurled from both sides of the chapel’s balconies as the students continued to protest the economist, who they claimed “propagat[ed] the death and mass poverty of millions of people” and “obliterat[ed] the working class in Bolivia, Poland and Russia.”

After completing their demonstration, a calland-response “mic check” in which several student leaders shouted each phrase and other students resounded the call, the protesters exited the chapel, shouting, “No justice, no peace. Keep Sachs out of international relief,” over Sachs’ request for quiet.

According to the students who led the demonstration, the purpose of the protest was to speak out against Sachs’ actions, not views, as well as focus accountability on the College for funding a speaker they accused of promoting a neoliberal capitalist agenda.

In order to achieve their goal, protesters lined the pews with fliers directing attention to some of Sachs’ more controversial tactics, hoping to encourage attendees to think critically about the speaker’s actions before choosing how to perceive the content of his convocation.

Sachs, who The New York Times called “the most important economist in the world,” is known to many as the father of shock therapy,

a term that refers to the intentional instigation of instability and conflict within a country. This tactic is often achieved by suddenly dropping price and currency controls, withdrawing state subsidies and privatizing publicly owned assets.

“These policies pass the cost of economic stabilization onto lower classes, leading to widespread unemployment, low average purchasing power and increased poverty,” read the program that student protesters passed out to audience members.

For many, however, the success of these policies cannot be denied. In 1985, Sachs advised the Bolivian government to use shock therapy See Demonstrators, page 14

News

The Oberlin Review, May 22, 2015

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activism

Administration Expands Student Health Services Louis Krauss, Molly Brand and Elizabeth Dobbins Staff Writer, Staff Writer, and News Editor May 8, 2015 With prompting from student activists, administrators worked this semester to open Student Health’s clogged appointment schedule.

The administration made two significant changes to Student Health Services: The student health fee was raised to pay for more psychiatrists in the Counseling Center, and Student Health Services now has Saturday hours.

The changes were a response to student activism; members of Student Senate’s Student Health Working Group and the Oberlin Mental Health Alliance pushed for a variety of initiatives this semester to improve the accessibility, visibility and quality of Student Health Services, particularly mental health services, which many feel are not serving their needs.

Next year, the student health fee will rise from $200 to $230 in order to hire more psychiatrists. The health fee, which was introduced in the 2013–2014 year, pays for the counselors and psychiatrists who visit the Health Center several times a week to give free appointments to students.

According to Dean of Students Eric Estes, who discussed the fee hike with Student Senate in March, the additional $30 will increase the number of psychiatrists from two to four or five next year, thus increasing the number of available student appointments by 50 percent.

Student Senator, Chair of the Student Health Working Group and double-degree sophomore Jeremy Poe said he believes this fee increase will help reduce the long wait times for psychiatric meetings.

“My understanding is this $30 increase is in line with something we’ve been hearing from students for quite a while: asking for more frequent psychiatrist and counselor meetings,” Poe said. “In scheduling a psychiatric appointment, you’re looking

at a three-to-four-week wait. So what’s great about this is it really functions to collectively better campus with only a modest increase.”

Poe said that even though some administrators claim students will always get appointments made the same or the next day, reconciling student schedules with the psychiatrists’ visits makes the process much more complicated.

College senior and OMHA co-chair Christine Antonsen said her own experience with the Counseling Center has been alternately positive and unhelpful, and she feels students often only share the problems they’ve had with the service and not the good experiences.

“Not everyone’s experience at the Counseling Center is going to be beneficial, but no one really talks about how great it is,” Antonsen said. “If they have a problem with it, they’re going to talk about it, [but also] I’m not [trying to] delegitimize anyone’s problems. They are so real.”

Despite concerns, the Counseling Cen-

ter is frequently used by students. So far this academic year, 530 students have visited the Center, with many returning multiple times. Between 2008 and 2013, the Counseling Center served on average 21 percent of the student body, according to year-end reports. According to the 2012–2013 Association of University and College Counseling Center Directors’ Survey, the national average for all colleges and universities is far lower at 9 percent.

However, the rate of depression is also higher at Oberlin than the national average. According to a 2012 survey by the American College Health Association, 45.1 percent of Oberlin students — over 15 percent higher than the national average — reported feeling “so depressed it was difficult to function” within the last 12 months.

While the Counseling Center is a resource, it does not provide long-term help, and students in need of these serSee Students, page 15

Feature Photo: Demonstrators Protest Sommers’ Lecture

April 24, 2015 Christina Hoff Sommers leans over the podium during her lecture. The lecture hall was nearly full when approximately 15 protesters, their mouths covered with red duct tape, filed in and silently took their seats in the first few rows. More protesters followed, standing in the only room remaining at the back of the hall.

Protesters and other students who opposed the event could not be reached for comment, but they described their opposition in a letter published in the Review last week.

“By bringing her to a college campus laden with trauma and sexualized violence and full of victims/ survivors, [Oberlin College Republicans and Libertarians] is choosing to reinforce this climate of denial/ blame/shame that ultimately has real life consequenc-

es on the wellbeing of people who have experienced sexualized violence,” they wrote. “We could spend all of our time and energy explaining all of the ways she’s harmful. But why should we?” (“In Response to Sommers’ Talk: A Love Letter to Ourselves,” The Oberlin Review, April 17, 2015).

According to Nick Loucks, a current member of OCRL and 2016–17 president of the club, the group extended the invitation after donors suggested Sommers as a speaker to include in the lectureship series.

He said that before the suggestion, some members of OCRL, including Loucks, had not heard of her.

“Usually individual members will suggest certain topics or suggest certain speakers,” Loucks said. “This particular suggestion came from a couple of our donors. … We wanted to talk about feminism in general — whether or not it was too radicalized, specifically on this campus.”

Loucks declined to name the donors who suggested Sommers. Young America’s Foundation, an organization that aims to bring conservative ideas to students, lists Sommers’ speaker’s fee as $3,000 to $5,000. According to Loucks, OCRL paid a little more than $5,000 in order to cover Sommers’ travel costs.

Students’ opposition drew the attention and anger of many of Sommers’ fans unaffiliated with the College on both Facebook and anonymous forums, such as the GamerGate board on 8chan. Many protesters have changed their Facebook profile pictures to black and changed their Facebook names to avoid online recognition and harassment.

Text by Emma Paul, staff writer Photo by Nick Farfan

News

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The Oberlin Review, May 22, 2015

inside Oberlin

Senate Strives for Financial Accessibility Sarah Conner, Louis Krauss and Elizabeth Dobbins Staff Writer, Staff Writer and News Editor May 8, 2015 Student Senate grappled with making Oberlin more financially accessible this year, leading to a few concrete successes.

In February, President Krislov doubled the emergency textbook fund after student senators appealed to him about the burden that high textbook prices inflict on low-income students.

“Students have been making do with electronic copies, photocopied library books, four-hour rentals of books on reserve and guerilla PDF sharing, which simply isn’t fair if the College [claims] to meet all of their demonstrated financial need,” said Megs Bautista, a College senior and one of the few student senators who identifies as low-income.

According to Krislov, the fund is meant to supplement students’ overall financial aid package. “There may be individuals who have even more needs because of either the subjects they take or because certain things happen, medical problems or something like that. That’s why these emergency funds are so valuable and important,” Krislov said.

“Doubling the fund might mean exponentially increasing the amount of students who have access to these funds — students who might’ve always demon-

strated need in some areas but didn’t recognize that they could turn to the College for financial assistance outside of grants and scholarship money,” Bautista said. “In the long run, increasing the fund will at the very least start a real, frank conversation on campus about class privilege and the ways in which Oberlin is structured,” Bautista said.

Several student senators worked with Community and Government Relations Assistant to the President Tita Reed and First Church Pastor David Hill to organize a program to offer students free meals during spring break. The program was intended to assist students who can’t afford to return home for break and need help paying for food, as Campus Dining Services does not operate during spring and fall break.

The meals were provided by several of Oberlin’s local churches, including Christ Episcopal, First United Methodist Church, the First Church in Oberlin UCC and the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship.

Senator and College junior Ty Wagner, who helped formulate the plan, read online about the issues low-income students face when staying on campus for break.

“Fall break was coming up, and people were posting on Oberlin Confessions and Yik Yak that they were going to struggle to eat healthily or eat at all over fall break,” Wagner said. “And I thought that was extremely unacceptable and sad in this place with so many resources, so we wanted to

do something about it.”

However, despite Senate’s effort to make Oberlin more hospitable for lowincome students, the biggest financial accessibility issue still remains: the 4 percent tuition hike.

Student Senate did not endorse the tuition freeze proposal that over 1,000 students signed, an action that inspired a letter to the editor on May 1 condemning Senate’s inaction and questioning the organization’s relevance (“Silence on Tuition Hike Proves Senate’s Irrelevance,” The Oberlin Review, May 1, 2015).

College senior Dan Quigley, the main author and a signer of the letter, said the piece was a tool to push Senate into action.

“The letter was a means to an end — an idea based on public leveraging of Senate to not beat around the bush,” Quigley said.

“That letter and the public indictment of Senate [was] for not being immediately, or very, very quickly being, behind the student body. That was more of a tool than a wholesale condemnation of the Senate.”

Student Senate passed a resolution supporting the tuition protests and recent action around financial accessibility — but not the tuition freeze — during plenary on Sunday, May 3.

According to Senator and College junior Machmud Makhmudov, Senators supported the tuition protests but disagreed on the specifics.

“The disagreement was more so on

tactics and specificity and not the general goal. I think everyone was very much in support of financial accessibility.”

Senator and College senior Molly Brand said Senate wanted to consider different ideas and approaches before releasing a resolution.

“The major qualms that I share and that people talked about is wanting Senate to be more than just a rubber stamp,” she said. “We’re an elected body and, in my opinion, we’re elected to have discussions and produce our own thoughts that incorporate and include student input.

So it’s so significant that 1,000 students supported a petition that endorses that specific language specifically calling for a tuition freeze, but that doesn’t mean that Senate is required to get behind that exact proposal.”

Brand said she, along with other Senators, knew the administration was not going to support the tuition freeze. She said she felt that the resolution Senate endorsed should instead try to use Senate’s capital with the administration to take an immediately productive stance.

The resolution Senate passed calls for increased transparency, the presentation of “a set of concrete proposals related to cost-cutting and financial accessibility” to students next semester and the creation of a financial accessibility working group that would include students, faculty and administrators.

Students Lobby Trustees for Fossil Fuel Divestment Melissa Harris, Oliver Bok Staff Writer, News Editor May 8, 2015 A group of five students — College sophomore Ellie Lezak, double-degree sophomore Hayden Arp, College sophomore Jasper Clarkberg, College first-year Naomi Roswell and College senior Stephen Lezak — is pushing the Board of Trustees to approve its proposal to divest the College’s endowment from fossil fuels. The Board is currently in the process of deciding how to proceed and, according to student activists, will probably begin discussing the issue at its next meeting in June.

Last June, the Board of Trustees released a divestment resolution that created a specific institutional pathway for divestment proposals. While any student, employee or alumnum may make a divestment request, any divestment proposal needs to be approved by two-thirds of the Board to come to fruition.

“It’s a strange process,” said Jasper Clarkberg, College sophomore and member of the Responsible Investing Organization, a student group that calls for investing the endowment ethically.

“There’s no timeline, it appears to be entirely behind closed doors, there’s no implementation specifics, and then there’s kind of a little notice about if we’re invested in things that are in a larger fund, then they throw their hands up and say, ‘Well, we’re going to pretty much give up on that.’”

The resolution required successful divestment proposals to meet three criteria.

“The proposal had to show

how investments in the target companies ‘shock the moral conscience,’ in the language [the Board] used. It had to be supported by the Oberlin community, and it had to have a specific negative impact on the companies,” Roswell said. “And so our proposal addressed those three topics.”

The students propose that the Board of Trustees oversee a reallocation of any direct endowment investment holdings over the next two years in the top 12 companies responsible for greenhouse gas emissions globally.

“Together, these corporations and their predecessor companies are responsible for 24 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions between 1854 and 2010,” says the proposal. Among the 12 companies, some of the largest carbon emitters listed in the proposal include the Chevron Corporation, ExxonMobil, Saudi Arabian Oil Company and BP. To the students, the science on climate change makes divestment from fossil fuels the only wise choice.

“It is widely understood among the scientific community that if the United States is to meet its commitment to the global goal of climate stabilization at 2 degrees Celsius above Holocene mean temperature, it must reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 80–90 percent relative to 2010 levels by 2050,” the proposal says. “In light of this reality, it is hard to imagine a medium-term future in which the carbon-based fuel industry could be called a sound investment opportunity, economically, politically or reputationally.”

The students also suggested

A group of students in favor of the College divesting from fossil fuels march in the Big Parade on Saturday, May 2.

Students submitted a divestment proposal to the Board of Trustees.

Elizabeth Dobbins

that divesting from fossil fuel companies makes economic sense. To the students, fossil fuel companies are currently overvalued because current valuations include the companies’ massive fuel reserves, which are “unburnable” if global warming is to be kept below 2 degrees Celsius.

Eventually, governments may force companies to refrain from burning these reserves. According to the students, the College should divest from fossil fuels before the “carbon bubble” breaks.

John Petersen, Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies, argued for divestment by describing how divesting from fossil fuels had previously

proved financially beneficial for the city of Oberlin.

“Three or four years ago now, the city [of Oberlin] decided to vote down a long-term investment in coal-fired electricity,” Petersen said. “The Oberlin Municipal Power and Light was being pressured to make a long-term investment in a new coal-powered fire plant, along with 30-something other local municipal utilities. Oberlin was one of two communities to vote down that investment, and because we voted down, we saved a lot of money because that plant was never built, and all of the communities that voted yes for that fossil fuel investment were in for planning

costs that we saved for voting it down. We saved over a million dollars by voting it down.”

The students hope that if the College divests from fossil fuels, other academic institutions will follow the College’s practices. The push for colleges and universities to divest from fossil fuels is an international movement: Oxford University, Syracuse University, Stanford University and the University of Maine have all announced plans to divest from fossil fuels.

To promote their divestment proposal, the students looked for endorsements from different See Board, page 11

News

The Oberlin Review, May 22, 2015

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inside Oberlin

Protestors Hold Action at Board of Trustees Event Continued from page 3 lege has very few income channels and cannot afford to vastly reallocate its assets.

Peters Protest Denounces Respectability Politics While the Board of Trustees sipped pre-dinner drinks in the lobby of Peters Hall earlier that evening, a group of protesters congregated upstairs.

“Ferguson is all around us. We need to pop the bubble that insulates us from the rest of the world.

We do not get to compartmentalize these issues,” Bautista said.

When the time came for the students to interrupt the gathering, they split into two groups.

The white students descended the

staircase first, filling the lobby with shouts and other loud vocal noises that called attention to the demonstrators. They were soon followed by students of color, who silently dispersed themselves throughout the lobby.

According to Bautista, the demonstration was purposefully chaotic and inconvenient and was designed to have white students enter the lobby first.

“We need to reverse the racial paradigm that is associated with activism,” Bautista said. “Not just on campus but nationally. It’s a paradigm that allows people to be apathetic and police other students. This policing has been mostly coming from white students on this campus, unfortunately, and when you see a cohort of people

who look just like you, it’s a little bit harder for you to criminalize them and demean them and invalidate everything they’re saying, because they are you.”

While the rest of the students descended into the lobby, Bautista remained on the stairwell to request the crowd take four and a half minutes honoring the memory of Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager who was shot by white police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, MO, this summer.

In demonstrations across the country, the four and a half minutes of silence was specifically chosen to represent the four and a half hours that Brown’s body was left lying in the street.

During the silence, trustees craned their necks to see the dem-

onstrators, some of whom were holding posters of other Black and brown Americans who have been murdered by white police officers.

Others were holding posters of the 43 Mexican students that disappeared in southern Mexico this September.

Other students passed out a list of demands to the trustees, which were a direct reproduction of the demands that were presented at the Board of Trustees meeting in October of 2013.

The demands called for increased institutional transparency, divestment from companies that profit from Israel’s occupation of Palestine, creation of a scholarship program for undocumented students, a ban on fracking on College-owned property and the

official formation of an AsianAmerican Studies minor.

“We were highlighting the fact that there has been complicity and inaction [ from the trustees] despite student protest,” Bautista said. “How will trustees wield their privilege moving forward?”

Though the trustees and other dinner attendees were largely silent during the demonstration, Dean of Students Eric Estes said the protest had an important message.

“I think they thought it was incredibly powerful,” Estes said. “I was just talking to a trustee who actually occupied this building during the Vietnam War protests.

We were having a fascinating conversation. … I love and respect our students very much.”

Off the Cuff: Ishmael Beah, OC ’04, human rights activist and best-selling author Sept.12, 2014 Human rights activist and Sierra Leonean author Ishmael Beah, OC ’04, rose to fame with his best-selling memoir A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. One of the world’s leading advocates for children affected by war, Beah sat down with the Review to discuss his rehabilitation experience, the narrative structure of Mende, his native language, and his perception of beauty.

Obviously you’ve experienced more tragedy and brutality in the span of a few years than most people have in a lifetime, the kind of tragedy that most people would want to run from. What fueled your want — or need — to construct a memoir from your experiences?

When I started writing it, it was more that I wanted to make sure that I was living in the United States and experiencing newer things. I felt that I wanted to document some of it, perhaps for when I had a child. It also started by the fact that I wanted to prepare myself to have a very elegant or succinct debate about what had happened if I had the opportunity, because there had been a few moments where I had a chance to speak, but I wasn’t prepared enough to say.

With time, it became something that was more out of frustration of how my country — and the war that occurred there and the issue of children and armed conflict — was spoken of in the international media. I wanted to say something from somebody who had experienced it personally — to give the context that was missing. The Western media was more sensationalizing things; it was a way of speaking about it as though we all just wanted to be in this madness — that people just woke up one morning and they wanted a war. Even when my country was spoken about, it wasn’t that there was a Sierra Leone before the war or things that led to the war. There was no way that we woke up one morning and said, “Let’s have a war today.” There were things that led to the war, and that context wasn’t presented.

So for people who came to know my country through that, that’s all they knew.

You’ve clearly had a lot of experience with child soldier rehabilitation services, both through your own personal experience and through your work with your foundation. What are some of the things that you’ve learned both through your own rehabilitation process and subsequently

Ishmael Beah, OC ’04, former child soldier and best-selling author, gives a convocation speech on Tuesday, Sept. 9.

through assisting the rehabilitation of others?

What I’ve learned is most important is that people have good intentions, to go to these places and want to assist. But often times they belittle the intelligence of the people they want to help. In the long run, they need to put structures in place that will allow people to continue the work that they start. Because when you go and try to rehabilitate, you have to do it in communities they’re coming from and create structures that will sustain themselves. If you don’t do that, then when you leave the whole thing will collapse.

There hasn’t been much market research done to see how you provide opportunities to people coming from conflict, not just rehabilitating them psychologically. Because after that, what do they do with themselves? You need to talk to people to see how they can be a part of it, instead of imposing what you think they should be doing. For example, when I was coming out of the war, people would come and say, “We think everyone should be a mechanic or a plumber.”

Well, OK, if somebody wants to be one, yes. But if you’re in a country that has no more than 10,000 cars and you’re training 20,000 people to become mechanics, that doesn’t fit.

There’s a mistake when people think that when [others] come out of the war, they don’t know what they want, or they can’t think soundly. But you have experienced life enough to not want to waste any time. You’re intelligent enough to know what you want, because to survive war requires a lot of intelligence.

I was reading a little bit about the narrative structure of Mende, your native language, which is inherently image-rich. Can you describe how growing up with this language may have influenced the way that you see the world, or how you tell stories?

When you grow up in the culture, you don’t think it’s exceptional. It’s just what you do daily — just how people speak. It was only when I started trying to translate that into English that I thought it was beautiful. For example, how you say that you’re upset in Mende literally translates into saying that your heart is on fire. When you are upset, you feel that way. Or, for example, if you say that you are not upset anymore, you say that your heart is like cold water, because it means that your heart is normal temperature.

There are things that are just part of the way we spoke. [To] talk about a ball, you call it a nest of air. It’s never in our minds flowery — it’s just how we spoke, how things were. Because of the orality of how we tell stories, you don’t have them go back to read a sentence. You need to capture their imagination. I think the language has a lot of techniques to do that — of imagery, of things like that. So when I started writing, I would think in that language and try to find the English equivalent. That’s when I discovered that it was an advantage to me as a writer.

You reference beauty continuously throughout your memoir. Can you speak to how your experiences with violence and brutality influenced your perception of beauty?

I think for me, what I’ve seen is that often times we want to see things black or white, good or bad. Beauty only exists when everybody’s laughing — absolutely not. Just like life, being alive or having life within you exists through hard times and through good times, so beauty exists, even in the most horrible things.

It doesn’t die away completely. But you have to be able to see it. And sometimes you can see it more, because it’s the only thing that you can hold on to. So, for example, I think, during the war I had moments when I stopped just to feel a breeze, and you realize it feels so good to feel a breeze because you nearly just got killed, and you appreciate it.

So I think what happens is because you begin to realize how fragile moments are, you begin to slow down to appreciate it — the simplicity, the beauty of every action.

There are also a lot of relationships that get formed in the war. It’s not just in my war, the civil war, because I was a kid — you talk to veterans from Vietnam, from Iraq, and they also tell you about brotherhood. Seeing the worst and the best of each other. When you see the worst and the best in each other you get to know them perhaps deeper than you would if they were your brother. There is beauty in all of these things.

You’ve asked in other interviews how one can “move into the future while the past is still trying to pull at you.” How would you answer that question?

In my case, what I’ve learned is to take lessons from the past. Don’t allow the negative aspects of it to weigh you down. So I take things that strengthen my character and then move on with it. When something happens to people, I think our natural response is to think that it’s all bad. And for a while I did that, but I couldn’t function. Having been a child who fought in the war was horrible, … yet it strengthened my character.

You know, I learned discipline being in the army, and I used that in my studies. Because I knew how to sit somewhere for hours and tell myself that I was going to focus, and I won’t be distracted. I’m very observant. It’s something I learned from being a soldier, because you have to pay attention to details very quickly, otherwise things happen. And that helps me with my writing now. I can observe people very deep and go just beyond what I’m seeing. So that’s how I use them.

Interview by Madeline Stocker, News editor Photo by Effie Kline-Salamon

News

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The Oberlin Review, May, 22, 2015

policy changes

Steering Committee Releases Preliminary Report Oliver Bok, Sarah Conner and Louis Krauss News Editor, Staff Writer and Staff Writer May 8, 2015 More resources for health and wellness, an “innovation zone” in which to pilot new programs involving technology and integration between the Career Center and the Alumni Office: All of these changes and more may be coming to Oberlin, according to the preliminary report for the Strategic Plan.

The Strategic Planning Steering Committee released its preliminary report on the Plan, the document the Board of Trustees refers to when making decisions, on Wednesday, May 6. The preliminary report gives an early indication of what may eventually make it into the final draft. The College goes through the Stra-

tegic Planning process roughly once every 10 years.

Much of the student body has shown skepticism about the Strategic Planning process, particularly regarding the College’s financial future and financial accessibility. In the spring of 2014, many students saw the administration’s attempt to adjust financial aid according to whether or not they are in OSCA — a measure that would have cost some students thousands of dollars more to attend Oberlin — as a result of the goals reflected in the 2005 Strategic Plan, which called for increasing “net tuition revenue per student” by “gradually lower[ing] the institutional discount rate” and “retain[ing] the same number of full pay students.”

“I’d like to see the College admit that it maintains at least partial culpability — and more

culpability than a lot of its peer institutions — in the student debt crisis in the United States and [that] it commit itself to increasing economic diversity on this campus,” College senior Zachery Crowell said at the beginning of the Strategic Planning process in September. “I think I can speak for a lot of people who would like to see a more diverse campus — not just racially, not just culturally but also economically.”

In contrast to the 2005 Strategic Plan, the preliminary report states that Oberlin should focus on “reorienting Oberlin’s financial model towards greater long-term stability by reducing the rate of growth of tuition (total student charges) and our reliance on it, maximizing endowment growth, developing new revenue streams, re-engineering to achieve greater efficiencies and synergies in operations.”

To Committee member and College junior Avalon McKee, the Strategic Planning process has gone well.

“Creating this preliminary plan with the committee of faculty, staff, trustees and alumni has helped me realize just how in tune all these bodies of people are in terms of our values in areas like diversity, justice and education,” McKee said. “After several drafts, I think we have done our best job yet of capturing those values. Moving forward, I think a challenge will be maintaining and showcasing those values in the changes we decide to recommend.”

According to College sophomore and member of the Committee Sarah Minion, the ideas included in the preliminary report reflect the Committee being as imaginative as possible without thinking about the constraints of

College finances. The Committee is now trying to figure out ways to make the ideals in the preliminary report feasible.

Both Minion and McKee were added to the Steering Committee in February after Student Senate and the administration announced the introduction of six new student positions on the Committee, bringing the total number of students on the panel to nine.

After demonstrators challenged the administration’s lack of transparency in the fall, Student Senate began working with President Marvin Krislov, Diane Yu, OC ’73, and the other trustees to add six spots for current students to the Committee. Student Senate pushed for this change at the end of fall semester when it realized students needed more of See Six, page 15

Feature Photo: General Faculty Finalizes Tobacco Ban

Feb. 13, 2015 College junior Nick Canavan lights a cigarette. According to Student Senate, General Faculty finalized the tobacco ban during a meeting in December. The meeting was the last step in a severalyear push to ban the use of all tobacco products on College property starting in 2016.

Though Safety and Security may have to actively enforce the ban at first, College junior Machmud Makhmudov hopes that campus culture will eventually change so people simply aren’t smoking.

“I think everyone understands the purpose [of the ban] is not to be punitive; it’s to change the culture on campus, so eventually [we’re] not policing each other,” Makhmudov said.

In the past year, a number of schools, including Kenyon College, have adopted tobacco-free policies. College President Marvin Krislov feels that Oberlin needs to shift with the national trend.

“We need to understand the national context in that most campuses are going to be smoke-free in the next year or two, I think,” Krislov said. “There are obviously a lot of different concerns, and the health

concern is obviously the primary one, but you also have to sort of look at the context, and I do think there are some disandvantages to Oberlin being seen as outside what is a norm in our society.

Smoking is considered something that is not safe for people.”

Text by Louis Krauss, staff writer Photo by Nick Farfan

News

The Oberlin Review, May 22, 2015

Page 11

policy changes

Board of Trustees to Consider Student Divestment Proposals Continued from page 8 groups on campus. They received letters of support from the Committee of Environmental Sustainability and Student Senate, both of which were published in the Review on May 1.

“Our goal, as Student Senate’s voice, as representatives of the student body, is for a larger push for it, so we hope that our participation will lend more legitimacy to the work of the smaller group of students who are pushing for

divestment by showing that the student body’s representatives are in support of divestment from fossil fuels,” said Student Senate member and College senior Molly Brand.

In addition, the students have received letters of support from different student organizations and two alumni groups: EnviroAlums and Oberlin Alumni for a Responsible Endowment. The five students said that they have been trying to work collaboratively with the Board of Trustees,

as well.

The fossil fuel divestment proposal is not the only proposal the Board of Trustees must consider.

Students for a Free Palestine has also submitted its own divestment proposal in accordance with the divestment policy instituted last fall.

“As a Palestine solidarity organization, we are calling for divestment in accordance with the global anti-violent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement called for by Palestinian

civil society in 2005,” SFP said in an email to the Review in October.

“It is unacceptable to remain invested in these corporations any longer, and Oberlin has an opportunity here to set a precedent for other universities across the country.”

The SFP proposal names six corporations that it believes “profit from and perpetuate Israel’s militarized occupation of Palestine” and that Oberlin should divest from: SodaStream, Elbit Systems, Veolia, Hewlett-

Packard, Group 4 Securicor and Caterpillar.

“We believe and reaffirm the following: that the six corporations discussed materially contribute to conditions that shock the conscience, that student opinion is significantly in favor of divestment and that the potential impact of divestment from these corporations would represent a landmark achievement that would play a crucial role in radically altering their practices,” concludes the proposal.

Off the Cuff: Dean Baquet, executive editor of The New York Times April 3, 2015 Dean Baquet is the executive editor of The New York Times and the former editor of the Los Angeles Times. Baquet started his career as a reporter at The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, his hometown. Baquet later won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism with his reports on corruption within the Chicago City Council for the Chicago Tribune.

Before becoming executive director, Baquet worked at the Times as a reporter, managing editor, national editor and the Washington Bureau chief. As executive editor, Baquet occupies the top position in the newsroom and oversees every aspect of reporting. Baquet is the first African-American executive editor in the history of the Times. He sat down for a group interview with several campus news organizations a few hours before his convocation speech in Finney Chapel on Tuesday. The full version of the interview can be found on the Review’s website.

What was your reasoning behind not publishing the Charlie Hebdo cartoons in the wake of the Paris shooting? Why did you call USC professor Marc Cooper an asshole on Facebook after he criticized your decision?

He was an asshole. [Laughs.] That was a really difficult decision. Some decisions I make I will stand here and tell you they were clean and easy. We were right; it was about integrity and anybody who disagrees can go jump in a lake. That was a really hard one, and the reason I got so upset with that guy is I think he made it seem like it was just a glib, easy decision. I sat in a room, and I looked at the Charlie Hebdo cartoons. And I looked at many of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons. And I sat with a Muslim staffer who helped me understand the cartoons. And I sat with a French translator who helped me understand the cartoons.

And they are, by the American vernacular, truly insulting. That doesn’t mean that they don’t have a right to do it. The newspapers that said, “Look, we ran a Charlie Hebdo cartoon,” just ran the one of the prophet. To be honest, I don’t think that was a courageous act. … That was the tepid [cartoon]. The cartoons that really upset everybody are the cartoons [like the one with] the pope with his balls in the air. That’s the kind of stuff that Charlie Hebdo did — lewd cartoons, … a graphic depiction of the Virgin Birth. If you really wanted to give readers a sense of what the Charlie Hebdo cartoons are like, you would have to run those.

And I don’t think that the readers of The New York Times expect to see that in The New York Times. That’s the first thing.

The second thing is that I think there are ways today, if you really want to see it, you can go online and see it. But that was hard.

I’m not going to sit here and say that everybody who disagrees with me is a jerk. The

the NSA had become. So all we had, with all that reporting, was that there was a closed door, it was mysterious and the government wouldn’t talk about it. And I don’t think that was enough for a story. So we didn’t write a story. It wasn’t because the government told us not to write a story, it was because I didn’t think we had enough for a story. If you look at what people wrote at the time, because eventually The New York Times wrote a modest inside story about the guy’s allegations, all it said was that an engineer at AT&T thinks that there’s a door down the hall that’s locked, etc. So I don’t have any regrets about that one.

It turned out it was part of NSA spying, but jeez, if we published everything where people are concerned about closed doors and mysteries like that, mostly we’d be wrong.

Dean Baquet, executive editor of The New York Times and former editor of the Los Angeles Times.

editor of The Washington Post, one of my best friends, ran one of the cartoons. … Look, I get that. The reason I got so upset with this guy on Facebook is that he pulled out, and you will not go far as a journalist thinking like this. He begins with: “How many people have to die before The New York Times has to [publish the cartoons]” — that’s bullshit. I worked hard at this decision. I might be wrong, but I wasn’t glib about it, and I’m totally tolerant of people who disagree. I get it. People in my newsroom disagreed with me. But I’m not very tolerant of the people who make it a glib, easy decision. That sort of minimizes what we went through in the newsroom to make that decision.

You’ve expressed regret that Edward Snowden went to The Guardian and The Washington Post to make his NSA disclosures instead of going to The New York Times. But looking at the Times’ history, when it sat on the warrantless wiretapping story during the Bush administration, and also during your career, when you sat on an NSA story at the LA Times, didn’t Snowden make the right choice?

Why should the next big whistleblower come to the Times?

Was he right? No, I don’t think he was right. I understand why he made his decision.

I don’t think he was right. First off — and I wasn’t at The New York Times for the [warrantless wiretapping] NSA story — it did publish it, it didn’t kill it.

But only after the [2004] election.

It had nothing to do with the election. If you read the accounts at the time, Jim Risen was about to put it in a book. It wasn’t because of the election, it was because Risen was about to put it in a book, and that forced

the hand of the editors of The New York Times.

I wasn’t there, so I’m not going to judge how they made the decision. I was at the LA Times at the time, but they did publish it.

If you were to say one reason he didn’t come [was because] The New York Times screwed up in the post-war coverage before the U.S. went to war in Iraq, he’s right, The New York Times did. So did the LA Times, which I ran at the time. Everybody did. … But I think that if he looks at our overall track record, we publish stuff very aggressively. We published the NSA stuff, we’ve published other Risen stories, we’ve published hard-hitting reports about the Obama administration that they hate, we’ve published lots of stories about drones [and] we’ve published other stories about surveillance. And it breaks my heart that he went elsewhere, but I think my appeal to him and future Snowdens would be, “We do publish.” You’re isolating a couple of things where you thought we were too slow or did something off, but if you look at the whole history of The New York Times, you have to include the Pentagon Papers, you’ve got to include coverage of Vietnam [and] you’ve got to include our aggressive coverage of the world.

I think our track record is really good.

The LA Times thing has always been misunderstood. The allegation was that when I was editor of the LA Times, an engineer in AT&T or an employee of AT&T became very suspicious about a room at the headquarters in San Francisco where he was convinced there was some surveillance going on. Nobody could go into the room and the room was always locked. So he came to the LA Times, and we reported the hell out of it. We went nuts to report it, but we could never prove it was anything other than a mysterious closed door. This is before people realized how much spying there was, before people realized what

Why does The New York Times use a paywall for its articles? Do you envision The New York Times of the future relying more heavily on subscription fees or advertising? Will it always be a mix of both?

The thing that people have to understand is, running a 1,200 or 1,300 person newsroom, maintaining bureaus all around the world [and] sending those reporters to Yemen is real expensive. So when I hear people say they don’t want to pay for news, I don’t get that formulation. If you don’t pay in some way or another, what you’re going to get is a bunch of people sitting around in their underwear, writing stories from their living room. If you want people in places who have families to support, it’s going to cost. In print, the construct used to be [that] most of the costs of newsgathering and printing the paper came from advertising. That balance has started to change, and now consumer revenue — people who pay for the print paper or subscribe online — has become a bigger part of our revenue. … We created a paywall because we needed to generate revenue to make up for the lost revenue as advertising started to go away in print.

I don’t know what the future revenue model for news organizations looks like.

It’s going to depend on the organization.

Smaller papers will not be able to charge as much as we do. Small regional papers — it’s harder for them to construct a paywall because you can find their stuff anywhere.

What I have to do, my half of the equation, is that I have to work really hard so that we have a news report that you have to have no matter how much you pay for it. My calculation is that without The New York Times, you can’t be an informed citizen; that’s my goal.

There are things in The New York Times, in print and online, that you will not find anywhere else.

Interview by Oliver Bok, News editor Photo by Yingran Nan Zhang

COMMENCEMENT CALENDAR

FRIDAY M AY 2 2

8 9 10

26th Annual Alumni Bowling “Fun Raiser” 10 a.m. –noon Oberlin Lanes, Hales Annex

11 12 1 2 3

Graduating Seniors’ Art Exhibition 1–5 p.m.

Richard D. Baron ’64 Gallery, 65 E. College St., Suite 5

Graduating Seniors’ Art Exhibition 1–5 p.m.

Richard D. Baron ’64 Gallery, 65 E. College St., Suite 5

Student Art Show 1–5 p.m.

Allen Art Building, Fisher Hall Gallery

Student Art Show 1–5 p.m.

Allen Art Building, Fisher Hall Gallery

The Oberlin Review Open House 3–5 p.m.

Burton Hall, Basement

5

7

9

Kickoff Dinner Under the Big Tent 7–8:30 p.m.

Wilder Bowl Cinema Studies: The Best Student Films of the Year 8 p.m.

Apollo Theatre

$ The Grand Piano Extravaganza 8:30–11 p.m.

Conservatory, Warner Concert Hall

10 $

11 COMMENCEMENTS

SUNDAY

M AY 2 3

M AY 2 4

Morning Yoga 8–9 a.m.

Warner Center Dance Studio

Morning Yoga 8–9 a.m.

Warner Center Dance Studio

Theater Production: What We Look Like 7:30–9:30 p.m.

Hall Auditorium, Little Theater

Astronomical Observation and Tours 9:30–11:30 Peters Hall, Observatory

Finney Chapel Organ Demonstration 10–11 a.m. Finney Chapel

Rhinos Rugby Alumni Game Noon–2 p.m.

North Fields, Rugby Pitch

OCTaiko 3–4 p.m.

Tappan Square Oberlin Contra Dance 2–6 p.m.

Hales Gym

$

Cinema Studies Faculty Screening 8 p.m.

Apollo Theatre

Organ Pump: Late Night Music and Antics 11 p.m.–12:30 a.m. Finney Chapel

Oberlin Swing Society Dance 8 p.m.–midnight Hales Gym

Commencement Recital Part I 8–10 p.m.

Finney Chapel

Commencement Contact Jam 4–5:30 p.m.

Warner Center

Theater Production: What We Look Like 7:30–9:30 p.m.

Hall Auditorium, Little Theater

Astronomical Observation and Tours 9:30–11:30 p.m.

Peters Hall, Observatory

Radicals and Reformers History Walk of Westwood Cemetery 11 a.m–12:15 p.m.

Westwood Cemetery

Black Parents & Family Appreciation Ceremony & Dinner 3–4:30 p.m.

Conservatory, Warner Concert Hall 4:30–6:30 p.m.

Afrikan Heritage House

$

$

5K Fun Run and Walk 8:30–10 a.m.

Tappan Square, Memorial Arch

$

Group Bike Ride to Krieg’s Frozen Custard 4:30–6:30 p.m.

Meet behind Keep Cottage

OCTaiko 3–4 p.m.

Tappan Square OCircus!

4–6 p.m.

Hales Gym

Improv Extravaganza 4:30–6 p.m.

Cat in the Cream

Right: Lanterns are hung in preparation for Illumination night in Tappan Square in 1964.

Tappan Square Opens 8 a.m.

Warner Concert Hall Opens for Live Streaming 8 a.m.

Streaming begins at 9:15 a.m.

Post-Commencement Boxed Lunches $ 1:15–2 p.m.

$

Theater Production: What We Look Like 2–4 p.m.

Hall Auditorium, Little Theater

$ Oberlin Bike Co-op BBQ 4–6 p.m.

Keep Cottage, Rear

Koreo Dance Performance 3–5 p.m.

Wilder Hall, Main Space

Tickets, distributed to seniors and families, are required for guaranteed seating in Tappan Square. Unticketed standing room is also available. All attendees are will be required to pass through airport security; the College advises that any article turned away at the entrance (backpacks, signs, umbrellas, etc.) will not be held by security.

Attendees will not be permitted to enter Tappan Square after Commencement exercises begin at 10 a.m.

$ Oberlin Baroque 5–7 p.m.

Bosworth Hall, Fairchild Chapel

Social on the Square 7–10 p.m.

Tappan Square

$ Campus Illumination and Commencement Concert 9:30 p.m.–midnight Tappan Square

A Capella Concert 10:15–11:45 p.m.

Finney Chapel

Autumn Burnett, ’15, and the Blue Selkie Band 9–10 p.m.

Bosworth Hall, Fairchild Chapel

Commencement Recital Part II 8–10 p.m.

Finney Chapel

$ Left: Martin Luther King, Jr. addresses a crowd of 2,500 at Commencement in 1965. This year’s crowd is expected to be the College’s largest ever as a result of Michelle Obama’s visit.

M AY 2 5

Commencement Exercises 10 a.m.–1:15 p.m.

Champagne Luncheon Noon–1:30 p.m.

Wilder Bowl, Big Tent

Student Art Show 1–5 p.m.

Allen Art Building, Fisher Hall Gallery

MONDAY

Academic Processions Form 9–9:45 a.m.

Faculty: Across from Finney Chapel Graduates: Tappan Square, SW Corner Stage Participants: Next to Memorial Arch

Presidential Address 10:30–11:30 a.m.

Finney Chapel

Graduating Seniors’ Art Exhibition 1–5 p.m.

Richard D. Baron ’64 Gallery, 65 E. College St., Suite 5

Oberlin Shansi Open House 1:30–3:30 p.m.

Shansi House, 58 E. College Street

Theater Production: What We Look Like 2–4 p.m.

Hall Auditorium, Little Theater

Koreo Dance Performance 3–5 p.m.

Wilder Hall, Main Space

$

$ Oberlin Women’s History Tour 11 a.m–12:15 p.m.

Tappan Square, SE

OSCA Alumni Picnic Noon–2 p.m.

Old Barrows Co-op

Oberlin Ultimate Annual Alumni Game 1–3 p.m.

North Fields

Oberlin Shansi Breakfast 8–9:30 a.m.

Stevenson Dining Hall $

Tappan Square Tree and History Tour 9:30–10:30 a.m. Tappan Square, SE corner

Permaculture Workshop 10 a.m. –noon George Jones Farm & Nature Preserve

Oberlin Talempong 11 a.m.–noon Tappan Square

Scholars and Settlers History Walk 5–6 p.m. Tappan Square, SE

Graduates and Families Reception 5:30–7:30 p.m.

Allen Memorial Art Museum

6

8

SATURDAY

Warner Concert Hall Organ Demonstration 9–10 a.m. Warner Concert Hall

4

HISTORIC

Walk for Birders with Keith Tarvin, Professor of Biology 7–9 a.m.

Oberlin Arboretum

Astronomical Observation and Tours 9:30–11:30 p.m.

Peters Hall, Observatory

$ indicates a TICKETED EVENT Information and tickets available at the Commencement/Reunion Welcome Center, at 65 East College Street, Suite 4 (behind Slow Train).

This calendar is not exhaustive; for complete details on all events, see the official Commencement booklet.

This Week editor: Hazel Galloway

Left: A long daisy chain, picked by junior men and woven by junior women, was traditionally used at the Commencement ceremony to symbolically pass the position of female class president from the graduating senior to elected junior. This photo was taken in 1914.

Left: President William E. Stevenson with Thomas W. Graham, the dean of the Graduate School of Theology, during the commencement exercises in 1948.

Photos courtesy of the Oberlin College Archives

COMMENCEMENT CALENDAR

FRIDAY M AY 2 2

8 9 10

26th Annual Alumni Bowling “Fun Raiser” 10 a.m. –noon Oberlin Lanes, Hales Annex

11 12 1 2 3

Graduating Seniors’ Art Exhibition 1–5 p.m.

Richard D. Baron ’64 Gallery, 65 E. College St., Suite 5

Graduating Seniors’ Art Exhibition 1–5 p.m.

Richard D. Baron ’64 Gallery, 65 E. College St., Suite 5

Student Art Show 1–5 p.m.

Allen Art Building, Fisher Hall Gallery

Student Art Show 1–5 p.m.

Allen Art Building, Fisher Hall Gallery

The Oberlin Review Open House 3–5 p.m.

Burton Hall, Basement

5

7

9

Kickoff Dinner Under the Big Tent 7–8:30 p.m.

Wilder Bowl Cinema Studies: The Best Student Films of the Year 8 p.m.

Apollo Theatre

$ The Grand Piano Extravaganza 8:30–11 p.m.

Conservatory, Warner Concert Hall

10 $

11 COMMENCEMENTS

SUNDAY

M AY 2 3

M AY 2 4

Morning Yoga 8–9 a.m.

Warner Center Dance Studio

Morning Yoga 8–9 a.m.

Warner Center Dance Studio

Theater Production: What We Look Like 7:30–9:30 p.m.

Hall Auditorium, Little Theater

Astronomical Observation and Tours 9:30–11:30 Peters Hall, Observatory

Finney Chapel Organ Demonstration 10–11 a.m. Finney Chapel

Rhinos Rugby Alumni Game Noon–2 p.m.

North Fields, Rugby Pitch

OCTaiko 3–4 p.m.

Tappan Square Oberlin Contra Dance 2–6 p.m.

Hales Gym

$

Cinema Studies Faculty Screening 8 p.m.

Apollo Theatre

Organ Pump: Late Night Music and Antics 11 p.m.–12:30 a.m. Finney Chapel

Oberlin Swing Society Dance 8 p.m.–midnight Hales Gym

Commencement Recital Part I 8–10 p.m.

Finney Chapel

Commencement Contact Jam 4–5:30 p.m.

Warner Center

Theater Production: What We Look Like 7:30–9:30 p.m.

Hall Auditorium, Little Theater

Astronomical Observation and Tours 9:30–11:30 p.m.

Peters Hall, Observatory

Radicals and Reformers History Walk of Westwood Cemetery 11 a.m–12:15 p.m.

Westwood Cemetery

Black Parents & Family Appreciation Ceremony & Dinner 3–4:30 p.m.

Conservatory, Warner Concert Hall 4:30–6:30 p.m.

Afrikan Heritage House

$

$

5K Fun Run and Walk 8:30–10 a.m.

Tappan Square, Memorial Arch

$

Group Bike Ride to Krieg’s Frozen Custard 4:30–6:30 p.m.

Meet behind Keep Cottage

OCTaiko 3–4 p.m.

Tappan Square OCircus!

4–6 p.m.

Hales Gym

Improv Extravaganza 4:30–6 p.m.

Cat in the Cream

Right: Lanterns are hung in preparation for Illumination night in Tappan Square in 1964.

Tappan Square Opens 8 a.m.

Warner Concert Hall Opens for Live Streaming 8 a.m.

Streaming begins at 9:15 a.m.

Post-Commencement Boxed Lunches $ 1:15–2 p.m.

$

Theater Production: What We Look Like 2–4 p.m.

Hall Auditorium, Little Theater

$ Oberlin Bike Co-op BBQ 4–6 p.m.

Keep Cottage, Rear

Koreo Dance Performance 3–5 p.m.

Wilder Hall, Main Space

Tickets, distributed to seniors and families, are required for guaranteed seating in Tappan Square. Unticketed standing room is also available. All attendees are will be required to pass through airport security; the College advises that any article turned away at the entrance (backpacks, signs, umbrellas, etc.) will not be held by security.

Attendees will not be permitted to enter Tappan Square after Commencement exercises begin at 10 a.m.

$ Oberlin Baroque 5–7 p.m.

Bosworth Hall, Fairchild Chapel

Social on the Square 7–10 p.m.

Tappan Square

$ Campus Illumination and Commencement Concert 9:30 p.m.–midnight Tappan Square

A Capella Concert 10:15–11:45 p.m.

Finney Chapel

Autumn Burnett, ’15, and the Blue Selkie Band 9–10 p.m.

Bosworth Hall, Fairchild Chapel

Commencement Recital Part II 8–10 p.m.

Finney Chapel

$ Left: Martin Luther King, Jr. addresses a crowd of 2,500 at Commencement in 1965. This year’s crowd is expected to be the College’s largest ever as a result of Michelle Obama’s visit.

M AY 2 5

Commencement Exercises 10 a.m.–1:15 p.m.

Champagne Luncheon Noon–1:30 p.m.

Wilder Bowl, Big Tent

Student Art Show 1–5 p.m.

Allen Art Building, Fisher Hall Gallery

MONDAY

Academic Processions Form 9–9:45 a.m.

Faculty: Across from Finney Chapel Graduates: Tappan Square, SW Corner Stage Participants: Next to Memorial Arch

Presidential Address 10:30–11:30 a.m.

Finney Chapel

Graduating Seniors’ Art Exhibition 1–5 p.m.

Richard D. Baron ’64 Gallery, 65 E. College St., Suite 5

Oberlin Shansi Open House 1:30–3:30 p.m.

Shansi House, 58 E. College Street

Theater Production: What We Look Like 2–4 p.m.

Hall Auditorium, Little Theater

Koreo Dance Performance 3–5 p.m.

Wilder Hall, Main Space

$

$ Oberlin Women’s History Tour 11 a.m–12:15 p.m.

Tappan Square, SE

OSCA Alumni Picnic Noon–2 p.m.

Old Barrows Co-op

Oberlin Ultimate Annual Alumni Game 1–3 p.m.

North Fields

Oberlin Shansi Breakfast 8–9:30 a.m.

Stevenson Dining Hall $

Tappan Square Tree and History Tour 9:30–10:30 a.m. Tappan Square, SE corner

Permaculture Workshop 10 a.m. –noon George Jones Farm & Nature Preserve

Oberlin Talempong 11 a.m.–noon Tappan Square

Scholars and Settlers History Walk 5–6 p.m. Tappan Square, SE

Graduates and Families Reception 5:30–7:30 p.m.

Allen Memorial Art Museum

6

8

SATURDAY

Warner Concert Hall Organ Demonstration 9–10 a.m. Warner Concert Hall

4

HISTORIC

Walk for Birders with Keith Tarvin, Professor of Biology 7–9 a.m.

Oberlin Arboretum

Astronomical Observation and Tours 9:30–11:30 p.m.

Peters Hall, Observatory

$ indicates a TICKETED EVENT Information and tickets available at the Commencement/Reunion Welcome Center, at 65 East College Street, Suite 4 (behind Slow Train).

This calendar is not exhaustive; for complete details on all events, see the official Commencement booklet.

This Week editor: Hazel Galloway

Left: A long daisy chain, picked by junior men and woven by junior women, was traditionally used at the Commencement ceremony to symbolically pass the position of female class president from the graduating senior to elected junior. This photo was taken in 1914.

Left: President William E. Stevenson with Thomas W. Graham, the dean of the Graduate School of Theology, during the commencement exercises in 1948.

Photos courtesy of the Oberlin College Archives

News

Page 14

The Oberlin Review, May 22, 2015

Demonstrators Walk Out of Sachs’ Convocation Continued from page 6 during a time of heightened hyperinflation and subsequently reduced inflation by 11,375 percent. He has also played a large role in the stabilization of the Polish, Estonian and Slovenian governments and is the founder of the Millennium Villages Project, which has achieved notable success in raising agricultural production and cutting the child mortality rates of more than a dozen African countries.

He has been named one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World” by TIME magazine and one of the “500 Most Influential People in the Field of Foreign Policy” by the World Affairs Councils of America as a result of his economic policies.

The economic influence of his policies, however, is often far from black and white. “Shock therapy was largely successful in Poland, albeit possibly at high social costs in the short run, but utterly failed in Russia,” said Professor of Economics Tobias Pfutze. “It is, however, a stretch to say that without it Poland would be a much poorer country today than it actually is. In Russia, on the other hand, shock therapy failed because the society had [an] institutional heritage of modern, market-friendly institutions to fall back upon. But [I] expect that other, more gradual approaches would have equally failed. The flipside is that approaches other than shock therapy would also have worked in Poland. The transition may have been longer, and today Poland would be a little poorer, but the country would not be fundamentally different.”

Aside from prompting a reaction from Sachs — who chastised the protesters for refusing to debate and learn — the demon-

stration also received criticism from students who questioned its efficacy.

“It’s presumptuous on the part of the students to yell something at a Nobel Prize winner, not listen to his response and then walk out as if we have all the information,” said College junior and Student Senate Liaison Machmud Makhmudov. “It strikes me as kind of arrogant.”

Makhmudov said he believed that the protestors should have stayed in an attempt to create a dialogue with Sachs and subsequently educate audience members on the purpose of their demonstration.

“If they had organized well, they could have made sure that a lot of the questions were voiced from protestors,” Makhmudov said. “The opportunity was there. To deny that there wouldn’t have been any discourse if they stayed doesn’t make sense.”

In a wider discussion of the efficacy of Oberlin activism, some of which took place on public social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, several other students said they believed that the protesters would have made a greater impact if they stayed until the end of the convocation, citing Sachs’ many accolades as evidence of his value as a convocation speaker.

Several of the protesters said that their aim was not to respect the speaker but to challenge the information that the College presents as unbiased truth.

“The objective of the action was not to respect the liberalism and violence over Third World working classes that Sachs and the College uphold by having a dialogue or a debate.

The objective was to support the concurrent and more important events Black Lives Matter, historicizing anti-Black violence, and Carry That Weight, supporting survivors of sexual and domestic violence — violences that are all

Students protest Jeffrey Sachs at convocation on Wednesday, Oct. 29. Protesters entered Finney Chapel during Sachs’s talk to speak out against his actions and the College’s decision to fund a speaker the protesters called a “neoliberalist capitalist”.

Olivia Scott

buttressed by capitalism and continue to be eclipsed and silenced by dominant narratives such as Sachs,’” protesters and College seniors Ana Robelo, Megs Bautista and Gian Parel said in a statement to the Review.

The students also called attention to the fact that for some, both the administration’s decision to invite Sachs to speak and the rhetoric used in the College’s program flyer indicates that Oberlin values capitalist and white supremacist ideologies.

“For us and many around the world, he is representative of neoliberal, imperialist ideologies that continue to have destruc-

tive impacts and have become models for economists all over the world,” they said.

“This is part of a larger trend that continues in order to indoctrinate the Oberlin College community with values of neoliberalism and elitism.”

For Makhmudov and others, however, the College is not responsible for the actions of its convocation speakers.

“It’s the responsibility of the speaker to voice their own views, and it’s the responsibility of the protesters to respond to the speaker and create a dialogue and discussion,” he said.

City Council Tables Green Acres Project Indefinitely Hannah Jackel-Dewhurst Staff Writer May 8, 2015 Green Acres, a proposed mixed-income housing development, may have just been put out to pasture.

At a City Council meeting on Monday, May 18, City Council voted 5–1 to table Green Acres indefinitely, pending more community input. Only Council member Sharon Pearson voted against tabling the project.

The Oberlin Community Benefits Coalition, an organization dedicated to creating opportunities for community members, asked Oberlin City Council to delay moving forward with the Green Acres project during City Council’s meeting on Monday, May 4. Members of OCBC said they feel that City Council has not heard enough feedback from residents about the project and

should wait to begin the rezoning process until OCBC can gather more community input.

“We’re not here to stop the project. Our aim is to define the community requirements,” said OCBC co-chair Arlene Dunn at a City Council meeting Monday May 4.

In the letter from OCBC, members of the community expressed concern about “job opportunities for local residents, contract opportunities for local businesses, well-defined objectives for affordability, sustainability and diversity and assistance for current homeowners in distressed housing.”

Some residents of College Street are not eager to see a multifamily unit built in an area of predominantly single-family homes.

“I have yet to meet any of my neighbors that approve of the project as it exists right now,” City Council member Bryan Burgess

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said. As a resident of East College Street who lives right next to the proposed development site, Burgess recused himself from voting on issues relating to the project.

In Burgess’ opinion, the current plan, which calls for a three-story apartment unit to be built on the south quadrant of the property, needs to be reworked. Burgess said that he believes a more suitable alternative would be to construct the apartment complex on the north side of the property. He also said that the Council needs to include public suggestions more and that the current plan is not popular among citizens.

Other Oberlin community members are excited about the prospect of new affordable housing.

“My personal concern is that the plan include low-income housing,” said Sharon FairchildSoucy, vice president of City Council. “We want to have some

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low-income, some market-price units and some individual affordable middle-class market value homes.”

The OCBC letter also called for better communication between city government and the community.

“The city’s process for pursuing this project has been ineffective thus far, especially in soliciting community input and support for the project and that there is a need for much better communication on many levels.”

OCBC, which was formed just over a year ago, continually pushes for what it refers to as Community Benefits Agreements — agreements between community groups with input from local residents and either the developer of a project or the city government.

“These agreements list what the community wants to get out of the proposed project, like union standards and wage agreeProduction staff

ments, might include having green space provided for, people being displaced — what are the community’s needs in this upcoming project?” Dunn said. “We don’t feel as if we’re at the point of entering into a Community Benefits Agreement right now.”

Several members of City Council have qualms about the project, such as Oberlin Planning Commission’s decision to not to recommend rezoning the site. However, City Council has the final say on rezoning.

“I’m not sure why we’re continuing along this path. … Generally with a project of this magnitude, we go with the recommendation of the Planning Commission,” Council member Elizabeth Meadows said at the Monday meeting.

After tabling the project, City Council agreed to start a market research study to find out what needs to be done at the site.

Abby Bisesi Joseph Kenshur Lya Finston

Editors’ Note

In the Commencement issue, writers are credited with the positions they held at the time the articles were written. Many Review staffers have changed positions over the course of the academic year or for the Commencement issue. For a list of the past semester’s staff, please visit our website: oberlinreview.org/about.

CONGRATULATIONS, GRADUATING Corrections SENIORS! The Review not aware of Stoloff; Editors-in-Chief JuliaisHerbst and Rose any corrections this week.

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News

The Oberlin Review, May 22, 2015

Page 15

Six Students Added to Strategic Planning Steering Committee

Students Work to Improve Health Services Accessibility

Continued from page 10

Continued from page 7

a voice on the Steering Committee, according to Student Senator and College sophomore Jordan Ecker.

“It’s a 37-member committee, and prior to this they only had three students, but it’s pretty clear to me that the decisions they’re making are going to be affecting the students more than any other group,” Ecker said. “So because of this, I think you need to involve students’ voices as much as possible.”

Three of the six new students were chosen by a vote open to all students, while Student Senate selected the remaining three.

The Steering Committee is split into three working groups: Education Futures: Cultivating a New Learning Environment, The Students of the Bicentennial: Who We Teach, and Resources and Sustainability: How We Support Our Mission.

Throughout the year, students on the Steering Committee have hosted listening sessions to hear from students about what direction they think the College should head toward when formulating the Strategic Plan.

Striking a balance between maintaining academic excellence and financial accessibility was an important issue to the students in

attendance at listening sessions on May 6 and 7. Students discussed the tuition hike, growing the endowment and the fact that, according to Vice President for Finance Mike Frandsen, Oberlin will start to operate with a deficit in 2016.

Students also talked about the College-city relationship by saying that they felt the document needed to explicitly state that it only held jurisdiction over the College because the city of Oberlin was not represented on the Committee.

Others said they felt that the College should respect and support the city through taxes and general awareness of the importance of the relationship.

Students seemed to agree unanimously on changes to ResEd and Campus Dining Services.

All the students in attendance felt that CDS was overpriced for what it was serving and that ResEd functioned with the intention of making money and not supporting students.

“I left last night’s discussion feeling very inspired and confident that students will have some of the best suggestions for the Committee regarding specific changes that can be made to represent the values from the preliminary report,” McKee said. “Moving forward, the Committee will be creating specific goals that can be put into effect in the next three to five years that stem from the values of the current report.”

The Steering Committee will meet next on June 4. The Strategic Plan is scheduled to be completed in December 2015.

Thursday, Feb. 26

Thursday, April 30 8:12 a.m. Members of the grounds staff reported a vehicle parked perpendicular in the Union Street Housing Complex parking lot. It appeared that the vehicle was moved by individuals and not involved in an accident. The owner of the vehicle was contacted to move the vehicle.

Friday, May 1 10:31 a.m. Officers responded to a report of three individuals on the roof of the Oberlin Inn. The students were taking pictures of the town from the roof for a project. Officers told them they were not allowed on the roof.

Saturday, March 7 8:38 a.m. Officers and members of the Oberlin Fire Department responded to a fire alarm on the second floor of Burton Hall.

Smoke from burnt eggs triggered the alarm.

The area was ventilated and the alarm reset.

9:49 p.m. A resident of the Goldsmith Apartments reported several students making noise and throwing bottles as they boarded a party bus. The bus was leaving the area as the officers arrived. Several beer bottles were observed on the ground, which were picked up by the student who issued the complaint.

Sunday, March 8 10:20 a.m. An officer patrolling Peters Hall discovered that the basement was flooded and could not enter.

7:38 p.m. A facilities technician responded to a low temperature alarm on the first floor of Kahn Hall. The technician found the window open, causing the thermostat to malfunction. There was an odor of burnt incense, and the smoke detector was found off its base. The smoke detector

Security Report 2014-15: By the Numbers* “Substances consistent with marijuana”

8

22

Parties shut down

Instances of vandalism

23

35 Intoxicated students

* These totals are taken from consolidated reports, and therefore the actual number of instances may be higher.

was repaired and the window closed.

Monday, March 2 5:09 p.m. A student reported chalk writing on the porch of Wilder Hall. A facilities manager was contacted for cleanup.

Friday, Feb. 20

vices are asked to seek treatment off-campus.

“A lot of students, if they’re looking [at] longer than a semester with having a personal therapist, … have to go to outside resources, and then your options become limited to where you can walk,” Poe said.

In another significant change, Student Health Services is now open on Saturdays in addition to its Monday to Friday hours. The first Saturday hours were held May 2 from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., and the pilot program will continue next year.

On May 2, five students took advantage of the new hours, which was a good showing, according to Estes.

“I’m sure [participation] will increase,” Estes said in an email to the Review.

One administrative assistant and two nurse practitioners will be present at these Saturday hours, according to co-chair of OMHA, member of the Student Health Working Group and College junior Avalon McKee. All regular services will be provided, including distribution of the Plan B emergency contraceptive.

Working alongside Estes, the Student Senate Student Health Working Group has pushed for expanded hours at Student Health over the past several semesters.

The pilot Saturday hours are being financed by the Student Support Initiatives Fund, which was established in March 2015 by members of the Board of Trustees. The purpose of the fund is to support students who are deemed “at-risk,” which often includes low-income students, students of color and students with disabilities.

According to McKee, these students are expected to benefit from Saturday hours.

“Often [at-risk] students … are really overwhelmed during the workweek, during business hours, and so we’re opening up that space for them on the weekend.”

12:43 p.m. Officers and members of the Oberlin Fire Department responded to a fire alarm on the fourth floor of Noah Hall. A rapid temperature spike in the bathroom activated the detector. The alarm was reset with no further problems.

8:51 p.m. A resident of a Woodland Street village house reported the theft of an ornamental goat head from a party the previous night. The goat head is a traditional piece handed down each year by the men’s rugby team.

Friday, Feb. 13 3:31 p.m. Officers and members of the Oberlin Fire Department responded to a smoke alarm on the third floor of Harkness House. A strong odor of burnt marijuana was detected and smoke was observed.

The officers confiscated several smoked marijuana cigarettes, a green pipe with residue consistent with marijuana and a marijuana grinder containing a substance consistent with marijuana from one room.

In a second room, officers confiscated smoked marijuana cigarettes, incense, a candle and a half-full gallon of tequila.

They transported the items to the Safety and Security office before turning them over to the Oberlin Police Department.

Tuesday, Feb. 17 7:51 p.m. A custodial staff member reported a snow shovel missing from the Conservatory Annex area near the first floor elevator lobby. The identity of the shovel thief remains unknown.

Sunday, Nov. 16 11:23 a.m. A student staff member reported that unknown individuals threw

hot sauce on the walls of the third floor of Fairchild House. A weekend custodian responded for cleanup.

Thursday, Nov. 6 8:35 a.m. A custodial staff member reported finding empty condom wrappers in a practice room at the Conservatory. The room was secured and a work order was filed for cleaning.

Tuesday Sept. 30 4:36 p.m. A student staff member reported a strong odor consistent with burnt marijuana coming from a room on the first floor of Asia House. An officer made contact with occupants of the room, who admitted to smoking marijuana.

Friday Sept. 26 2:42 p.m. Officers and members of the Oberlin Fire Department responded to a fire in a trash can on the north side of Dascomb Hall. An officer extinguished the fire.

Tuesday Sept 23 5:06 p.m. A grounds staff member requested assistance from officers at the ash dump where two contractors were arguing over mulch. It was agreed that there was a misunderstanding, and the incident was resolved.

Sunday, Sept. 21 7:46 a.m. An officer on patrol observed the letter “C” missing from the aluminum pedestal sign at the Science Center. A work order was filed.

Opinions

Page 16

The Oberlin Review, May 22, 2015

student health

No Excuse for Administrative Inaction on Student Support

Content Warnings Needed as Accommodations

Sam White Contributing Writer May 8, 2015

Cyrus Eosphoros Columnist Feb. 27, 2015

In September, when my dear friends and classmates return for their final year at Oberlin College, I’ll be going elsewhere.

I’ll be joining the unspoken masses of Obies taking time off to go anywhere, frankly, that isn’t here. Miraculously, through luck and persistence, I’ll be leaving in good academic standing, on personal rather than medical leave, with good prospects for returning and finishing my degree. Stories and numbers from semesters past, however, serve as reminders that there are no guarantees and that some of these students will not be so fortunate.

My ambitious, half-baked, exciting, eccentric plans for the fall — an unmapped road trip, a journalistic video blog on food justice and hopefully a few performances of my original music along the way — don’t fully capture my urgent need for a leave of absence. I’m excited about the project, but I’m equally excited to be out. After a hellish journey through Oberlin’s uncoordinated bureaucracy sparked by comparatively simple health difficulties, I’m excited to temporarily escape an environment that has grown toxic for me. After two years of trying to prove to dean after unbelieving dean that I am in fact chronically ill, I’m excited to leave an institution that has grown intent on proving me unworthy of its education.

My situation, as the deans like to remind me, is unique: I’m the exception to the rule. I had the misfortune of getting sick mid-semester, forcing me to withdraw from courses after add-drop deadlines. I had bad luck finding good doctors who would advocate for me. I fell through cracks in the College-offered health insurance, and I happened to come down with two chronic illnesses of the hard-todiagnose kind — the kind with names that don’t mean much on paper, with the kinds of treatments that don’t translate into profits for the doctors or pharmacies. I was unlucky.

“Just get more documentation,” the deans said paradoxically, “and we’ll be here to help you.”

To help me.

I want to believe these deans, these administrators of an institution known for using its educational power to help turn the tides of oppression. I want to believe they share their institution’s historical commitment to justice — justice, in my “unique” case, for those with invisible disabilities. I want to believe they’re there to help me, but more importantly, I want to believe they’re there to help every student who faces exceptional challenges in navigating an educational system designed by and for the privileged. I want to believe they’re there to help students from across all marginalized communities gain access to the reins of power, so that future students who follow in their wake will no longer face the same challenges.

This, I believe, is the job of every Oberlin College dean and administrator: to carry on Oberlin’s legacy of challenging and dismantling oppressive power structures and to do this by prioritizing the student — every student — before the system, the status quo or the bottom line. This, I believe, is the job that Oberlin’s deans and administrators are not doing, so long as students fall through the cracks. So long as there are exceptions to the rule. Unique, unlucky exceptions like me.

Education, so the saying goes, is the great equalizer, but each year students are pushed out of Oberlin College and its peer institutions because they are not given the tools necessary to overcome their individual setbacks. When a college has the power to accommodate these setbacks but chooses not to, it is reinforcing those setbacks and using its power to discriminate.

Relative to some students, I have unique advantages. I stand to benefit, unjustly, from many of the systems of oppression that have contributed to other students’ exclusion. I’m also fortunate to have made it through the worst of my

own bureaucratic struggles, and I likely would not have been able to take course incompletes and appeal an academic suspension without a stable home environment, a supportive family and middle-class cultural capital.

I am not the exception that Oberlin’s administrators should worry about, as my own safety nets will catch me where theirs have frayed. Come September, though, I will become one more data point of proof that they need to worry about my peers. The deans’ purported desire to help, their good intentions and their institution’s legacy will do no good unless matched with action and leadership. Oberlin must work tirelessly to dismantle an education system that reproduces privilege and power for those who already have it, and it must lead the effort to replace that system with one that produces equity and justice. Each exception to the rule — each unique, unaccommodated student pushed out of a college that claims to be diverse and inclusive — represents one big institutional step toward the former and away from the latter.

Yes, I say to the deans: My circumstances are unique. But so too are the circumstances facing every student who struggles to graduate on time — or at all — because of challenges their more privileged peers (myself included) do not share. And it would be ironic, to say the least, if individual uniqueness is truly an insurmountable challenge at a school that professes to prospies that “one person can change the world.”

At heart, I believe that most of these deans are sincere in their desire to help.

However, they must stop using their intentions as excuses for their increasingly flagrant failures. It is up to them to take the initiative to make Oberlin accessible, not the students who are already on the verge of being pushed out by administrative inaction. It is up to them to practice empathy, not the students to practice respectability. It is up to them to include and amplify the voices their current practices disenfranchise. It is up to them, in short, to practice what they preach.

Letters to the Editors

College Must Accomodate Health Crises Feb. 13, 2015

Editors’ Note: College sophomore Goo Mattison posted the following letter on Facebook on Jan. 25 and has given permission for it to be printed in its entirety. The recent dissatisfaction with Oberlin College’s health services has been a major issue on campus this year, with the Oberlin Mental Health Alliance communicating with the administration and the Counseling Center to improve access to resources for those with disabilities.

To the Editors: I was debating whether or not I should publish this, as it’s fairly personal, but the importance of communicat-

ing the extent to which Oberlin does not care about the health of its students won out.

Before the week of finals began, I was doubting whether I could realistically finish the amount of work I had been assigned. I started right away, working three days nonstop without time to sleep, shower or even eat. I began seeing/hearing things, and my body was severely weakened. I realized the toll being taken on my health wasn’t worth it to finish in time. I requested and was granted an incomplete based on the documentation of previous health issues. I finished the rest of my finals to the best of my ability and took the limited free time I now had to rest.

Unfortunately, the night before move-out, after taking a dosage of my usual medication (for said disability), I fell unconscious. An ambulance

was called and I was brought a day away and requested an to the hospital. As Mercy Al- extension, explaining in detail len Hospital did not have the exactly what had happened to facilities to care for me, I was me. They asked for documenairlifted by helicopter to a dif- tation, which I provided, and ferent hospital in Cleveland my mother called the dean of and taken to the ICU. I had studies to confirm my story. stopped breathing and had After hearing that I had literto be resuscitated and intu- ally died during the semester, bated. My parents were called in part due to circumstances and told that their child most created by the school itself, I likely would not survive that was granted one week to finnight. ish the work I owed. This, of I woke up disoriented and course, was told to me a day in so much pain I was sure I late, giving me only six days to had been hit by a truck. I was finish the work. released two days after wakDespite documentation ing up. I could not shower of my disability, weekly meetor walk by myself. While re- ings with Disability Services covering, all I did was sleep. to manage and keep tabs on Oberlin’s administration was my health and documentanotified of what happened, tion of my actual death just and my parents met with the two weeks before the day, dean of studies on my behalf. the school decided six days While focusing on regain- was plenty of time for me ing my health and struggling to recover and complete a to attend my Winter Term in- month’s worth of work. ternship, I barely realized the date to turn in my work was See Incompletes, page 23

Content Warning: This post contains discussion of common triggers, ableism on the part of the Oberlin administration and descriptions of media and conversations containing suicide, rape and parental abuse.

The first movie I had to watch for a literature class this semester contained, among other things, rape, suicide and physical and psychological abuse by a parent.

I stopped watching somewhere around 40 minutes in, before the suicide, after everything else, and mentioned none of this in class. Neither did anyone else, setting aside any acknowledgement of these heavy and possibly triggering topics in favor of discussing whether a woman being a chef was sexist.

In theory, this didn’t have to be the case. Last semester, after one of my professors made a joke about child abuse in passing, I emailed Disability Services before the class had even ended and asked what accommodations they had in place for people in need of content warnings.

The fact that the answer was “none” shouldn’t have surprised me at all; it’s been the answer to my questions often before. They said they’d think about it.

That alone is telling. This should have already been their business. Ignored as the fact is, content warnings are an issue of accessibility. They are an accommodation — a modification to the environment a disabled person interacts with, in order to attempt to put them on even footing with their abled peers. Not only that, but they’re trivially simple. I see no reason why they shouldn’t be as common as wheelchair ramps — although admittedly, ramps are nowhere near ubiquitous on campus either.

This absence of accommodation stems from ignorance and cowardice from people unwilling to admit that their actions have consequences and their experiences are not universal.

Then there’s the solution I was offered after that email.

It started, “Please think about exactly what would trigger your PTSD so we can articulate that well to faculty.” Upon handing in the resulting scrawled list, shaky penmanship and all, I got to watch someone transcribe it and send it to my professors. Verbatim. With my name attached.

“Cyrus Eosphoros, a student in your class, requests warnings for…” (“We would like you to know everything Cyrus Eosphoros, a student in your class, hesitates even to tell close friends and family and await your judgment…”).

Adding insult to injury, after that the list was relevant enough that someone remembered to warn me just once.

This is so jarring partly because the solution is trivially simple. For one thing, professors only relaying warnings to the single student who requested them is a waste of effort. Why not at least give every person access to those warnings?

And what about a completely different system? Consider, for example, always offering warnings to all students for common triggers and allowing students to anonymously submit requests for other warnings as well.

This would offer students — individual adults with minds of their own — the option to make an informed decision about how they interact with the world around them. A few lines of text are ignorable should the reader choose to do so.

This shouldn’t have to be a question of luck and willingness to sacrifice available only to people who can hand in paperwork attesting to their histories and then beg the administration to recognize it as proof. So this year, when I’ve already had to email professors copies of my medical records to get them to believe that I was in a hospital instead of a classroom, I’m opting not to give near-strangers anything more. I can’t find that in me again — to reveal all this to eight or ten people with power over me year after year at this College. They’ve already decided they have a right and an obligation to know everything that goes on with my body. If I have to choose — since I have to choose — between handing in a summary of the goriest parts of my autobiography or playing Russian roulette with triggering literature content until May, I’ll give up security for privacy, for liberty, for at least an ounce of dignity. And I’ll know, all the while, that it’s a sacrifice that could be avoided with a couple of keystrokes.

Opinions

The Oberlin Review, May 22, 2015

Page 17

sustainability

Brine Storage, Not Fracking, Warrants Concern Sophia Ottoni-Wilhelm Contributing Writer March 6, 2015 Ohio’s Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday, Feb. 17 that the decision to ban hydraulic fracking can only be made by the state government and no longer by county and city municipalities. As staff writer Bob Downing summarized in the Akron Beacon Journal on Feb. 17, “The decision takes local control of drilling away from communities and supports the state as the continued main overseer of drilling.”

The 4–3 vote comes to the great disappointment of many in our community, as it counteracts the city of Oberlin’s Nov. 2013 vote to prohibit all extraction of natural gases in this district. While the Supreme Court’s decision is a definite step back, it should be used as motivation to refocus our attention within the local environmentalist movement.

As a community, we are clearly on the right track. The City Council’s ruling makes Oberlin’s negative attitudes toward fracking clear — an attitude that, frankly, should be adopted by more communities in the area. However, it was a decorative statement and nothing more. Geologically, this region is not structured in a way that is conducive to the formation and storage of natural gas. Dennis Hubbard, chair of the Geology department, said, “The oil and gas reserves near Oberlin that were exploited in the early

20th century have been largely depleted, and the industry focus has moved to the southeast.”

Frankly and simply put, hydraulic drilling won’t be happening here. If it did happen, I guarantee it wouldn’t result in “teeth ‘snapping off like pretzels,’” (“Campus Relies on Fracking in Transition to Coal,” The Oberlin Review, Nov. 15, 2013) or any of the sensationalist fallacies often accidentally circulated by the media. These kinds of statements should not be used to garner support for a cause. The anti-fracking movement will be largely unsuccessful “unless we [as a community] home in on a facet of this problem that can be combated locally,” as CJ Blair wrote in last week’s column (“Social Movements Must Incorporate Environmental Justice,” The Oberlin Review, Feb. 20, 2015).

For the northeast Ohio anti-fracking movement, the Big Bad Wolf is brine storage. Brine is definitely something to get upset about. The first rule of war is to know your enemy. Brine is the enemy. It is the name given to the mixture of fluids resulting from the piping of millions of gallons of water a day at high pressure into the earth in order to force out natural gas. Brine is typically around 90 percent water, 9.5 percent sand (used to prop open subterranean cracks that result from the high pressure drilling) and 0.4 percent chemicals that make the fluid more friction-resistant. Halliburton reports that the 0.4 percent is made of “acids, slickants [and] surfactant,” which are churned up into 6,000–

640,000 gallons of water used to pump natural gas out of a single well. The variability is dependent on the amount of natural gas contained in the subterranean structure.

The components I listed in the previous paragraph do not total 100 percent. To be perfectly honest, I can’t tell you what’s in brine. No one in the scientific community can.

This last 0.1 percent is loosely called “biocides” by the natural gas companies that use it.

The only people who know what brine is made up of are workers at the companies that produce it. Aside from that, the only people who are able to study it closely are the doctors who have to sign over their right to disclose what it is in order to treat its victims. Professor Hubbard noted, “Many of these deep shales contain naturally occurring radioactive materials.”

These materials are forced to the surface during hydraulic fracking, adding a radioactive element to brine and making its careful storage of utmost importance.

Very recently, several wells in Pennsylvania adopted the practice of recycling a third of their brine into reusable water for the fracking process. While this is a step in the right direction, brine is still being stored — and in Ohio, too. The Environmental Protection Agency reported in December of last year that “much of the frack water produced in Pennsylvania gets trucked to Ohio, which has more disposal wells.” It is trucked here, accruing a carbon footprint, only

to be stored temporarily in underground wells around us. Our sub-ground geologic formations, such as the 6,000-year-old Clinton Sandstone, are targeted as brine disposal wells because of their permeability, or their ability to take up water. These more permeable strata of rock can be used to hold brine, while less permeable rocks lie above and below. These less permeable rocks, composed of shale and schist, are called structural caps.

Nothing lasts forever. Eventually these underground storage structures give way and bits of brine leak out into nearby water supplies, affecting the health of community members and damaging the soil in an agriculture-dependent state. The week before last, CJ Blair commented on local anti-fracking initiatives in his column.

Blair wrote, “By virtue of the movement, the goal is not to reverse a systemic injustice, but to invest in the future” (“Social Movements Must Incorporate Environmental Justice,” The Oberlin Review, Feb. 20, 2015).

With a little creativity and some hard work, I believe that Oberlin has at least somewhat prepared me to work toward sustainable change in my community. Here at Oberlin, attention and energy should be directed toward banning the storage of brine beneath our homes, schools and workplaces. As Wendell Berry once wrote, “The soil under the grass is dreaming of a young forest, and under the pavement, the soil is dreaming of grass.” We should let the Earth dream.

Social Movements Must Incorporate Environmental Justice CJ Blair Columnist Feb. 20, 2015 There’s no doubt that Oberlin is a place known for its conscientious and progressive students. While Oberlin’s sustainable Adam Joseph Lewis Center, as well as a handful of environmental organizations, demonstrate concern about environmental issues, day-to-day conversations between students tend to favor social, rather than environmental, justice. This is by no means a bad thing, but such conversations often fail to see the ways in which environmentalism is just as pressing a concern as social justice, as well as how the two are inextricably tied.

If it sounds like I’m going to condemn the social justice initiatives on campus, let me assure you that I’m not. The way that Oberlin students re-

sponded to the horrendous incidents of police brutality this fall was the most powerful and moving experience I could’ve imagined for my first semester of college. Even when tension between students and the administration was at its peak, there was no denying the ability of the student body to use powerful rhetoric to promote action on campus. After speaking to John Elder, OC ’53, who has served on the Board of Trustees for years, he said that this passion has characterized Oberlin since he was a student.

Why, then, is environmentalism not being so ardently championed?

Part of the reason may be a lack of urgency in environmental campaigns.

With social justice initiatives, particularly issues like marriage equality that are currently being reviewed by courts and law-makers, the end goal is attainable and not too distant. Of course, it will be a very long journey

False Science Hurts College Reputation Oct. 10, 2014 To the Editors: We are writing this letter because we are disturbed, upset and above all embarrassed by an event that took place at Oberlin College last Wednesday. As part of the Oberlin Illuminate Debate Series, two of America’s most widely recognized climate change skeptics came to “debate” the state of the climate. Dr. Judith Curry and Dr. Patrick Michaels, both climatologists who each receive significant amounts of funding from the fossil fuel industry, stood before us and presented poor scientific evidence to argue against the widely recognized scientific consensus that anthropogenic climate change is a severe problem that must be addressed.

before social acceptance of LGBTQ identities is the norm, but at least there is great potential for short-term achievement in the form of new laws or changes in policy.

In spite of all the media attention surrounding global warming, environmentalism provides less room for immediate satisfaction. By virtue of the movement, the goal is not to reverse a systemic injustice but to invest in the future. Conservationists are not wrong when they say that their movement is working to ensure a clean planet for future generations, but it’s quite a bit harder to fight for something you know you’ll never live to see than something you could possibly fix in a year, such as the lack of diversity in Student Senate.

There is, however, some common ground here. Whether social or environmental, justice movements have the most power and potential to suc-

ceed when the focus is narrow. I work with Oberlin College Anti-Frack, and we are currently trying to stop Spectra Energy’s NEXUS Gas Transmission pipeline, which is due to go through the town of Oberlin when it’s installed.

From the name of our group, you can tell that we’d like to see the end of the hydraulic fracturing of land for natural gas. Yet we know we won’t accomplish anything unless we home in on a facet of this problem that can be combated locally. Focusing on a concrete and definite line of activism provides urgency and capacity for change.

It’s also worth noting that environmental and social injustice, when seen on a smaller scale, can be combatted simultaneously. The proposed route for the NEXUS pipeline, for example, is slated to go through many lowincome communities of color where Spectra Energy is less likely to find resistance from residents toward this

immensely dangerous pipeline. In my home state of Kentucky, mountaintop removal for coal mining has left vast tracts of the Appalachians barren and forever ruined. This occurred in some of the state’s most impoverished regions, and the residents have known nothing but poverty and urban decay for generations as a result.

Oberlin is a place of amazing energy, and that shouldn’t change. However, there is vast potential for that energy to be augmented if it grows to encompass environmental justice.

The type of person who comes to Oberlin is one who can apply ample intelligence to solving problems, and when such people come together to fight, the results are always powerful.

As long as I am here, I am going to fight for environmental justice, and I can only hope that even more bright and passionate minds will join me.

Letters to the Editors As a college that considers itself at the forefront of campus sustainability and environmental citizenship, this event severely damaged Oberlin’s credibility. College President Marvin Krislov introduced both speakers and announced that this was an important debate for us to be having at Oberlin College. We can hope that President Krislov, the Oberlin administration and whoever was involved in bringing these climate change deniers to our “progressive” campus have since realized their mistake; regardless, that does not change the fact that Oberlin College invited Dr. Curry and Dr. Michaels to speak here. How is it possible that no administrators or professors organizing this “debate” took the time to research how these speakers address the issue of climate change?

Perhaps even more distressing than the fact that Oberlin College funded these people to speak at our campus is that Dr. Curry and Dr. Michaels confidently ad-

dressed an audience of over 100 people and faced little to no opposition. Several students asked pointed questions, but in a room full of scientists and faculty, no one stood before the microphone when it was time for questions and called out their research for what it was: a sham.

Here we ask the Oberlin faculty and administration: If you are unwilling to stand up and argue for this most basic thing, the reality of anthropogenic climate change, what will you stand up for? Why was no one willing to stand up in the face of lies and insults to science and education? We urge you to think about what kind of message this sends to students.

In preparation for this event, the authors of this letter produced a fact sheet with information about climate change and both speakers to distribute at the door. We are grateful to those faculty and staff who supported us; however, the majority of the people that we contacted were unwilling to endorse or support our

document on the basis that it engaged in political discussion of a topic that is “strictly scientific.” Regardless of whether or not we want climate change — or anything, for that matter — to be apolitical, if a group of people, however small, declares an issue to be political, it becomes so. Silence is not neutrality. Silence does not make us apolitical. If we say nothing, they win.

Furthermore, we should not avoid confrontation under the guise of being respectful. When controversial speakers are invited to speak at Oberlin, we are constantly reminded to maintain “civil discourse” and “healthy debate” by the administration and many of our professors. This is why we chose to produce a fact sheet rather than incite a more direct course of action Wednesday. It was the wrong choice. We must acknowledge that when Oberlin gives credibility to people See Climate, page 23

Opinions

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The Oberlin Review, May 22, 2015

Black Lives Matter

Letters to the Editors Feature Photo: Cleveland Protests Safe Haven for Black Students Required Feb. 6, 2015 To the Editors: This year represents 180 years of Black students at Oberlin. As African-American alumni, we carry that distinction in our hearts and minds every day. We are proud “descendants,” for example, of George B. Vashon, OC 1844, Oberlin’s first Black graduate. We are also descendants of our shero Mary Jane Patterson, the first Black woman to receive a BA degree when she graduated from Oberlin in 1862. However, after reading a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education by Professor of History Steven Volk, we found ourselves asking the question, “Do we need to remind Oberlin of its historic commitment to Black students and the struggle for social justice?”

In his Jan. 8 article, “A Season of Anger,” Professor Volk chastised Oberlin’s current student activists for their “unrecognized entitlement” and “bullying behaviors” (“A Season of Anger,” The Chronicle of Higher Edu-

cation, Jan. 8, 2015). In the article, he also made metaphorical comparisons to his student activist days, when he and other “college-educated white boys” marched to end the Vietnam War. However, we are not sure that Professor Volk truly understands the war that is going on in this country right now — against Black and brown people. And any current Black or brown Oberlin student could easily be a casualty of this war at any time and in any place.

To borrow from a popular post on Twitter last year, young Black people — even college-educated ones — know that they are just “one bullet away from being a hashtag.”

It is crucial that we not demonize this generation’s young freedom fighters. Let us not forget that, if not for young people across this country taking a stand and literally putting their lives in jeopardy — long before it became popular to do so among older folks — we would not even be talking about Ferguson, Staten Island, etc. as a nation. Therefore, the “bullying behaviors,” as Professor Volk calls them, have been absolutely necessary to bring the current life-and-death issues of racial injustice to our collective attention.

We also feel compelled to note that Professor Volk’s piece is ahistorical in that it presumes that students’ recent behaviors are solely related to recent events on the national scene. They are not. Since 2009, we have seen with our own eyes (and unfortunately via national media outlets) the disintegration of Oberlin College as a safe haven for students of color, particularly Black students. And given Oberlin’s history and commitment to freedom and social justice — which drew so many of us to Oberlin when we were applying to college — it has been particularly painful to know that so many current Black students feel helpless and unprotected.

Black people around this country are under siege. Many of us are traumatized. Many of the current Black students at Oberlin feel traumatized.

So, instead of demonizing or chastising them, let us love, support, empower and create a safe haven for them. Oberlin, please be that safe haven again for Black students.

– Carolyn (Cunningham) Ash, OC ’91

May 22, 2015 Students took to the streets and highways of Cleveland to protest the non-indictment of Darren Wilson and the murders of 17-year-old Michael Brown of Ferguson, MO, and 12-yearold Tamir Rice of Cleveland, OH, at the Puncture the Silence demonstration on Nov. 26. Holding homemade posters reading “No Justice No Peace” and “Black Lives Matter” and chanting “Whose Streets? Our Streets!” and “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot,” Oberlin students and Cleveland activists alike participated in a march, a four-and-a-half-minute “die-in” and even a demonstration blocking traffic on Route 2.

The Ferguson protests have sparked a national uprising against the U.S.’s militarized police state and systemic racism. Multiple events occurred on the Oberlin campus in response to the College’s institutional marginalization of students of color, despite its history as an abolitionist school. On Monday, Dec. 1, approximately 200 students marched in the Hands Up, Walk Out national day of solidarity. Students also protested the Board of Trustees forum on Thursday, Dec. 4, calling for inclusion of low-income students and students of color.

– Cornelius Graves OC ’14

Text by Kiley Petersen, Opinions editor Photo courtesy of Libby Salemi

Media Paints Inaccurate Portrayal of Baltimore Kyle Tribble Contributing Writer May 1, 2015 All my life, my mother has stressed to me the importance of having “common sense.”

Whether it was getting my homework in on time, treating my elders with respect or simply making responsible choices, there have been myriad lessons my mom has imbued in me during my short life, most of which I still follow today. Yet one lesson has always stuck with me, plastered to the back of my mind: Avoid the police. When I was a child, this meant little more than staying within eyesight of my mom and speaking only when spoken to.

When I entered adolescence, it meant dressing nicely and behaving myself. And now, as an adult, it has come to mean driving slowly with the music low, not walking alone at night, never looking “suspicious” and never, under any circumstances, challenging or confronting the police. Ignoring these directives, according to my parents, could leave me in jail, a hospital or worse, a grave. For many, such extreme consequences may seem foreign, unwarranted or even excessive. Yet I am certain my mother’s lessons in “common sense” are more than familiar to others in Black communities, particularly those found in my hometown of Baltimore, MD. I’ve lived in and around Baltimore my entire life, bouncing between the suburbs of Randallstown, Greenspring Avenue near Druid Hill Park and Mondawmin and eventually Catonsville in southwest Baltimore County. Because of this, I frequently have had the opportunity to be a witness to several facets of Baltimore

simultaneously. From middle school onward, of something that I have known to be true all I went to private school in the wealthy, white my life: Though we are a city often divided, we area of Baltimore called Roland Park, though care deeply, passionately and honestly about I was still living in a ’hood near Druid Hill. Ev- our town and are more than willing to unite in ery morning I’d don my uniform and make the peace to protect it.

10-minute commute, leaving my completely There seems to be some widely held belief Black neighborhood to study Latin and Shake- that Baltimore is one of the worst places on speare with rich white kids from all over the ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– county. However, whether I was living in the city proper or in the greater Baltimore County In Baltimore, it is simply underarea, and even if I was surrounded by carefree white friends, my relationship with the police stood that if you are Black and it can’t be helped, you don’t call remained uneasy and untrustworthy.

In Baltimore, it is simply understood that the police. The BPD has always if you are Black and it can be helped, you been more of a threat than a don’t call the police. The BPD has always been more of a threat than a helping hand and a helping hand and a hindrance hindrance rather than a source of confidence. rather than a source of confiThe police exist to hurt you, not protect you. It dence. The police exist to hurt should come as no surprise then that the protests and riots that have occurred are so point- you, not protect you. edly furious — what has happened since the ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– April 12 arrest of Freddie Gray is indicative of a long, upward battle that residents of Baltimore earth — a stain on America’s East Coast. The have fought against our police force, econom- media wants you to believe that Baltimore is ic hardships and weak elected officials doing nothing more than The Wire: a wasteland of little to protect Baltimore’s citizens. Parts of a city made up solely of criminals and backBaltimore look like the result of some ancient alley drug dealing. CNN wants you to believe nuclear war, leaving blocks of townhouses that we are only capable of being violent, that and business boarded up and abandoned. cars burning and stores getting looted was all Around a quarter of Baltimore’s population that happened at the protests. Let me make lives in poverty, with many families living as this clear to you right now: Baltimore is a the victims of appalling unemployment rates place filled with beautiful, intelligent people and poor education. Yet, despite a frustrating, who want more than anything for our city to decades-long history of hardship, and amidst succeed. the anger, violence and destruction that took Over 10,000 marched peacefully since April place during the riots on Monday, April 27, 12, uniting in opposition to the systematic pomy fellow Baltimoreans reminded the world lice brutality that Baltimore and the U.S. are

plagued with. Unsurprisingly, however, most news outlets chose to ignore this fact, focusing solely on the violent few taking advantage of the inherent disorder involved in such a massive uprising. Headline after headline told of the “chaos in Baltimore,” coupled with images of a teen smashing a police vehicle, a CVS aflame and depictions of Black looters raiding some roadside store. What many media outlets overlooked, however, was a protester protecting a line of policemen from rioters, a Vietnam vet asking kids to stay home, local community organizers absolutely destroying Fox News and CNN correspondents on live television and rival gangs ignoring their differences to peacefully protest and protect local businesses amidst the violence seen on the night of April 27.

Many flooded the streets accompanied not by the noise of aggression and destruction but by the sound of music and dance and with hopeful hearts and smiling faces. This week, despite national news depicting our city as a war zone filled with “thugs,” local news brought light to several articulate, passionate Baltimorean organizers fighting in the name of peace. And though so many people who have never set foot in Baltimore seem to have a loud, negative opinion of my town this week, I have seen nothing but love spread from a people who share little more than an area code and a sports team.

In a city of neighborhoods where simply crossing the street can land you in either a ghetto or a chic shopping plaza, Baltimore can often be a tense and divided community. But when it’s time to protect its own, Charm City has always stood strong and always will.

Opinions

The Oberlin Review, May 22, 2015

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world

Syria’s Refugee Crisis Requires Ongoing Attention, Concern Chloe Vassot Contributing Writer Nov. 7, 2014 When it comes to matters that do not directly concern it, the Western world has the attention span of a small child.

This is, in a way, understandable; people have lives and worries of their own, and the only international events that manage to catch the public’s collective eye are the flashy ones. There are many, many awful problems facing the world that land in the spotlight for an instant and are then forgotten.

This is the normal way the world functions, but that does not make it entirely justifiable.

Human rights crises and injustices continue unchecked because the public tires of hearing about them and because governments aren’t pressured to take action.

A prime example of this is the ongoing Syrian refugee crisis that began during the country’s civil war. In August, the number of Syrian refugees in neighboring countries surpassed three million. The U.N. refugee agency called the crisis “the biggest humanitarian emergency of our era,” yet that classification has not helped the situation.

Every so often the public is swept up by a wave of humanitarian altruism; thinkpieces are published, and the call for international aid grows. But as the breaking news shifts, so does the public conscience.

I’m as guilty of this forgetfulness as anyone else. My memory was only sparked when David Miliband, former British foreign secretary and current president and CEO of the International Rescue Committee, appeared on the Oct. 30 episode of The Colbert Report to talk about his organization’s work assisting displaced refugees and vulnerable communities around the world.

Miliband mentioned how so many refugees are left in limbo — “almost left without a future at all.” I wondered how over three million people with destroyed lives and in great need of assistance could be so easily ignored.

The truth is that it’s simple to forget.

The thinkpieces have disappeared, and countries like the U.S. are focusing on their own conflicts in the Middle East rather than on responding to humanitarian crises.

Now, brave souls like António Guterres, the U.N.’s high commissioner for refugees, are valiantly attempting to keep Syrian refugees on the minds of foreign leaders. Guterres recently pleaded for “a radical qualitative and quantitative change” in the international community’s response to the refugee crisis, citing the inaction that has caused innocent families to suffer tremendously.

The Syrian war has displaced 10.6 million of the country’s 22 million residents, and four-fifths of the three million refugees in the neighboring countries of Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq are women and children.

Miliband’s International Rescue

Committee recently published a report detailing the harsh lives of women refugees. Leaving their homes to walk to the store — or anywhere else — exposes them to constant threats of harassment and assault, and one in three women said they feel too scared or vulnerable to leave their homes at all. The report was called “Are We Listening?” Right now, the answer is no.

It’s difficult to completely comprehend three million people when we can’t see each face or hear each story.

The numbers dehumanize the situation. They make it easier to ignore these people whose entire existences have been upended — all too quietly, from an international viewpoint — by war and poverty.

Nada, a Syrian refugee living in Jordan, told the IRC, “We ask for humanity — for people to treat us like human beings.” This is precisely what we, as leaders and as community members, have failed to do. The viral video of a woman being catcalled in New York City engendered a tremendously strong response, but refugee women are exposed to similar and greater dangers every day without eliciting nearly as much attention.

In the street harassment video, we see the woman’s face and understand her individual story. By ignoring the individual in the three million Syrian refugees, we’ve given ourselves permission to easily ignore one of the most pressing global humanitarian issues of our time.

We must ask ourselves: Are we listening? The answer needs to be yes.

International Women’s Day Fails to Recognize Diversity of Global Experiences, Intersectionality Editorial Board March 13, 2015 Content warning: This editorial contains discussion of sexualized violence.

In a country with more CEOs named John than CEOs that are women, the need for an International Women’s Day is clear. This year’s event centered around the hashtags #MakeItHappen and #PaintItPurple to shed light on the broad topic of “gender equality … justice and dignity,” according to the IWD website. While this effort at uniting women across the globe under the umbrella of gender inequality is no doubt well-intentioned, International Women’s Day glosses over the intersecting factors that compound women’s inequality; race, class, religion, ethnicity, ability, sexual orientation and trans status all play into how women are treated.

Furthermore, safe buzzwords like “inequality” and “the wage gap” are thrown about almost to excess; meanwhile, words drawing attention to the

institutional forces at play — including misogyny, patriarchy and white supremacy — are noticeably absent from popular rhetoric. Though these terms are very academic and easily ignored, their sentiment is important nonetheless.

The need for these sorts of conversations is dire, given the shaky grasp that many have on issues of gender equality.

According to a 2010 Pew Research Center survey, 97 percent of Americans polled said that men and women should have equal rights, but only 64 percent of that group believed that the U.S. still needed to make changes to implement those equal rights. The phrasing “gender equality” is fairly undisputed; what is lacking is an understanding of what American gender inequality looks like. Similarly, while 97 percent of Americans polled believe that women should be able to work outside the home, 25 percent believe that marriages are best when men are the primary breadwinners. This disconnect shows that

though “workplace equality” is well-supported on the surface, the actual logistics of accomplishing it — more women in higher education, more women in the workplace in better-paying positions — are opposed at a far more fundamental level.

The overly simplistic branding of International Women’s Day on social media doesn’t do much to alleviate this issue. While raising awareness through #PaintItPurple, #womenyoushouldhaveheardof and spouting various statistics, IWD organizers glorify accomplished women who have transcended barriers while failing to examine both why those barriers exist in the first place and why they are so much more difficult to overcome for those less privileged. Oft-touted statistics, like the fact that (white, abled) women make 77 cents to every dollar (white, abled) men make, are easy ways to recognize the wage gap.

But the conversation too frequently ends there and fails to look critically at the reasons why women often work fewer hours

or receive less pay in the first place. Only one in 25 of the major Standard & Poor’s 1,500 companies have a woman as its CEO, and women rarely take up more than one seat on corporate boards. We’ve progressed far enough to recognize that an all-male board looks bad, but it’s a rarity to find two or more women sitting on the board of a large firm. As long as prominent firms have one woman and one person of color in a senior position, they seem to be safe from criticism.

Of course, many of the problems that IWD seeks to address go beyond the tokenization of women in the boardroom, including the global epidemic of sexualized violence.

However, it’s crucial to be intentional in the way in which these conversations take place. On the international level, Western countries often address and acknowledge violence against women as a problem that is more widespread outside their own borders. American politicians are quick to lament See Editorial, page 23

After Charlie Hebdo, Free Speech for Some Chloe Vassot Contributing Writer Feb. 6, 2015 For obvious and grim reasons, January was a difficult month for France. Thinking about the massacre at the headquarters of Charlie Hebdo in Paris on Jan. 7 and the complex and heated reactions that followed has made my mind run in circles.

The recent attacks revealed many contentious problems France has faced. But perhaps no issue is as delicate as what many perceive as the hypocrisy in France’s laws regarding freedom of speech and expression.

In France, there is no First Amendment that guarantees a near-absolute right to verbal liberty like in the U.S. French laws draw complicated lines around what types of speech are permissible, and hate speech directed against individuals or groups based on ethnicity, religion or race is left out of those laws.

The charge against France’s laws is that they are discriminatory and biased, punishing certain types of offensive speech more than others. Comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala has battled French law multiple times over charges of anti-Semitism in his work, and he is about to go to court again over a Facebook post that allegedly sympathized with the terrorist attack at a kosher market following the Charlie Hebdo shooting.

Meanwhile, the French government has wholeheartedly supported the right of Charlie Hebdo to publish cartoons that some French citizens view as extremely –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

French laws draw complicated lines around what types of speech are permissible, and hate speech directed against individuals or groups based on ethnicity, religion or race is left out of those laws.

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– offensive. Criticizing the Prophet Muhammad is legal in the eyes of the law, despite outrage from the Muslim community.

France, which has the largest population of Muslims of any European country and has also recently seen the rise of a powerful anti-immigration political party, has an undoubtedly contentious atmosphere when it comes to Islam. But are its laws actually biased?

The crux of the debate is whether the Charlie Hebdo cartoons can be viewed or perceived as intended to promote hatred towards the Muslim population. Lampooning the Prophet Muhammad is deeply offensive, but the cartoons ostensibly targeted the religious institution of Islam and not Islam’s followers — this is a crucial distinction. While the cartoons have been protected as free expression, anti-Semitism — on the rise in France — is punishable speech because it attacks a group on the basis of its religion. Similarly, Holocaust denial is also illegal and punishable by law.

There may also be anti-Muslim biases in other components of French laws aimed at limiting freedom of religious expression in favor of a secular society. Yarmulkes, large crosses and headscarves are not permitted in France’s public schools because of the government’s insistence on secularism as the solution to religious conflicts in French society. Whether this approach works is certainly questionable. Does the law discriminate against Muslims because of the disproportionate impact of a headscarf ban, or is it simply to be expected and understood that lifestyles dictated by strict religious observances will be affected the most by a push for a publicly secular society?

The Charlie Hebdo tragedy has highlighted the widening rift between the ideals of the French government and those of its Muslim population. Laws that force Muslims to alter the practice of their religion will not end this conflict — yet a society that has reaffirmed the right to satirize all faiths will not easily bend to compromise. The current test in France is whether conservative religions and irreverent ridicule can coexist, and I fervently hope they can.

Opinions

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The Oberlin Review, May 22, 2015

financial accessibility

Lack of Internship Funding Hinders Career Development

Tuition Increase Bears Consequences for Accessibility

Vida Weisblum Arts Editor Dec. 12, 2014

Editorial Board May 8, 2015

Getting a job largely depends on the quality of one seemingly simple document: the résumé.

Yet for many college students, résumé-building comes at a price. Internships, aside from being personally rewarding, are advantageous in accruing work experience; however, students who struggle to afford the steep costs of transportation and housing are limited in the opportunities they can pursue.

About 80 percent of Oberlin students receive financial aid to pay for tuition. Despite the roughly $30,000 in aid students receive each year on average, the journey to funding internships frequently results in a financial dead end. Every student who attends Oberlin undoubtedly deserves the same chance to pursue Winter Term opportunities regardless of financial position. This accessibility requires efforts by not just students but also the administration.

Though Oberlin does provide means to find potential hosts, such as OBIEWeb and Switchboard, the results vary by student. College sophomore Emma Baxter still revels in her experience staying with two Oberlin alumni while working at

the Hirschorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. “I still stay in touch. … I felt like I formed a strong relationship with them,” Baxter said. “I miss them.”

In other instances, these online platforms proved disappointing. “I went through OBIEWeb to find housing, Switchboard and the classifieds, which were all completely useless,” said College sophomore Olivia DeToma, noting that none of her matches accepted her housing requests, and hardly any of them responded to her emails.

“My housing-finding process was asking around to see if friends] would host me, which puts people in a weird spot,” she said. “[I had to ask myself], ‘Am I close enough to this person to ask this big favor?

How would I ever repay them? Money?’”

College sophomore and Environmental Studies and Economics major Julia Murphy is facing a similar situation. Because she had not anticipated her acceptance to a green housing project in LA, Murphy now must find last minute affordable housing.

Due to logistical issues and current inability to finance travel and housing on such short notice, Murphy fears that she will spoil potential future opportunities. “By turning down an intern-

ship, you’re probably setting yourself up to not be able to do that internship in the future,” Murphy said. She added that she wishes the opportunity had presented itself this summer so that she could have had more time to navigate finances and perhaps even get a job.

College sophomore and New York City native Linda Diaz feels passionate about making transportation feasible for students, even if they are interning while living at home. “I didn’t apply to a lot of New York City internships because they did not offer a metro card to get to work, and I would be spending a lot of money coming back and forth,” Diaz said. Because students cannot receive pay for projects they complete during Winter Term, students like Diaz and Murphy often have to find additional means to support their journey.

With internship application responses coming in anywhere from a week to a month after students’ initial requests, students have a hard time planning so far in advance.

Unfortunately, many students, including Murphy and DeToma, strongly considered turning down internships for the sole reason of not having financial backing.

Declining these offers could mean permanently forfeiting internships

at esteemed establishments. Not all companies are aware of the difficulties students routinely face trying to pay their way through internships; declining a competitive internship could be mistaken as disinterest, flakiness or unreliability, even if the student responds with an explanation of their situation.

If the student is ultimately able to reclaim the internship in the future, doing so comes at the expense of time. As a college student at the edge of the Oberlin bubble and the daunting black hole that is the real world, time, and the time to gain early experience, means everything. Given more options and accessibility for internship funding, students would not have to scurry to find last-minute jobs or scavenge for little-known grants in order to snag exciting work opportunities.

While Oberlin does offer grants for students interested in interning off-campus, both Murphy and DeToma expressed dismay at the inaccessibility and lack of advertising for such financial aid. “The Career Center and the employers were incredibly late with getting back to us about [financing] rejections or offers and did not push the deadline for submitting our forms,” DeToma said.

“There are few grants

available, but they were only emailed about once and only to those who applied for internships.

[Some students] probably didn’t even bother to apply because they didn’t know there were opportunities for funding.”

Financing internships creates a mess that affects everyone at Oberlin. At an institution of higher education that attempts to provide all of the necessary tools to enter the workforce, it’s unfortunate that students who cannot readily afford the inherent costs of interning spend much more time trying to figure out how to afford the opportunities sitting in front of them while others are free to take the fast lane. The questions I pose are: Why can’t everyone take the fast lane, and what resources are necessary to allow all students to access the same opportunities?

Rumors have floated among the student body of restarting Winter Term scholarships, but, irritatingly, these efforts have not gained institutional recognition. While the administration does clearly provide some opportunities to receive funding, it needs to devise a more effective way to communicate what opportunities are available for financing, and it must work with students to create more of them.

Temp Workers Require Support of Student Body for Equal Treatment Maxime Berclaz Contributing Writer April 24, 2015 Following the name and mission of last year’s Defending Oberlin Financial Accessibility protests, students are once again protesting the College’s plans to make Oberlin less financially accessible. While the majority of

the movement has focused on combating the upcoming $2,500 raise in tuition and pushing for a tuition freeze, organizing has also focused on fighting antiBlackness, racism and the exploitation of workers at Oberlin. Here I want to specifically draw attention to the College’s treatment of temporary workers and how a movement for economic justice

must be in solidarity with workers’ struggles.

Essentially, temp workers have next to no rights at Oberlin College. There are no official handbooks, no codes of conduct and certainly no procedures for collective bargaining available to the workers to defend their interests. If the College wants to fire a temp worker, all they have to do

is send a “denial of return” notice to the staffing agency, effectively banning the worker from ever returning to work at CDS. No reason needs to be provided for this, and no severance pay or unemployment benefits comewith the firing. While an appeal process exists, See Solidarity, page 23

College Fiscal Plan Edges Out Low-Income Co-opers Taylor Field Managing Editor Oct. 3, 2014 During the week of Oct. 3 at the Board Night in Oberlin’s co-ops, representatives of OSCA’s Board of Directors introduced a caucus based on the covert changes made to Oberlin College’s financial aid policy last semester, reopening discussion on the detrimental impact these changes will have on coop accessibility.

The policy, which originally did not reduce financial aid based on a student’s choice to live or dine in OSCA, changed without warning last semester to read, “If you choose to live or dine in a co-op, your financial aid will be adjusted accordingly.” On April 13, after extensive student protests, College President Marvin Krislov announced in an email to the student body that the policy change would be delayed by one year.

When news of this policy change broke last spring, I wasn’t on campus, but informa-

tion and outrage flooded my social media feeds. After parsing through this informational overload, I was able to reduce the policy change to the following simple, albeit deeply unsettling, terms: Behind our backs and without notice, the College administration has entirely eliminated OSCA’s position as an affordable alternative for students struggling to save money on a $239,787 education.

That figure — $239,787 — is calculated based See OSCA, page 23

At the “Occu-party” on the grounds outside the Cox Administration Building on the afternoon of Friday, May 1, students protested the tuition hike for next year, asking the crowd, “Can you afford to stay silent?” The Board of Trustees recently approved a $2,400 increase in tuition for the 2015–2016 school year, covered in last week’s front-page story (“Students Meet with Frandsen After Protests,” The Oberlin Review, May 1, 2015).

The increase would disadvantage underprivileged students, furthering the inaccessibility of an Oberlin education. The trend of increasing sticker prices isn’t an Oberlin-specific phenomenon; tuition prices at public universities have quadrupled in the past 35 years, while average family income over the past decade has either stayed level or fallen. In President Marvin Krislov’s interview with Vice President of Finance Mike Frandsen, published in The Source on Wednesday, both Krislov and Frandsen said that the tuition hike was “the topic in higher education,” and Krislov added, “Everybody’s talking about it” (“President’s Desk Q&A: Mike Frandsen on Oberlin’s Tuition Increase,” The Source, May 6, 2015).

A recent New York Times op-ed by Paul Campos challenged the rationale used to excuse college tuition increases; according to the commonly understood explanation, tuition has increased because more people have flocked to higher education while state funding drastically decreased (“The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much,” The New York Times, April 4, 2015). Campos counters this narrative by pointing out that public funding has actually increased tenfold since 1960, and total state appropriation per student is much higher now than in the 1960s and 70s.

Graduates leave four-year colleges with both degrees and a burdensome load of student debt.

Even though the average financial aid discount for first-year students is 46 percent, about half of students will stay an extra semester or year to finish their degree requirements, and 45 percent of students will stay even longer. Most scholarships last only for the allotted four years, leaving students dependent on loans and family assistance for their extra semesters. Even financial aid, which might seem to unilaterally mitigate high tuition, often causes undue burdens, as student debt is beginning to outlive students themselves.

Although Frandsen has offered opportunities to learn more about Oberlin’s finances, including the recent Source column, there is simply a limit to our ability to understand College management. No matter how many pie charts Frandsen shows students, the bottom line is that the increase is distressing to students, including the members of the Editorial Board. Oberlin has the 14th highest sticker price in the country, and no number of transparency workshops can explain why. If tuition continues to increase, Oberlin’s resulting inaccessibility is unavoidable. Krislov’s hope that to face current and future financial challenges we “need to look for solutions both on the revenue side and on the cost side” is just not enough. We need to be coming up with those solutions now to stop the trend. A long-term plan to slow down this increase isn’t doing anything to help the families that won’t be able to afford Oberlin next year.

At a time when a college education is becoming more and more necessary in a tougher job market, the rising cost is excluding students entirely or unfairly punishing them with lifelong debt. A 3.9-percent tuition increase is not a change the student body or the Editorial Board will condone, not this year and certainly not for every year after that.

Opinions

The Oberlin Review, May 22, 2015

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Student Hypocrisy Part of Prob- Student Hypocrisy Result of Systemic Limitations, Not Intentions lem, Contributes to Injustice James Tanford Contributing Writer Feb. 13, 2015 Every year, 250 gallons of oil, 10 million trees and 1 billion gallons of water are wasted in the United States alone to remind people that at 3 a.m. they bought a pack of Skittles and a sixmonth-old issue of People magazine. Nothing is more frustrating than the slow degradation of our planet by paper receipts — except that I do nothing about it. Rather than try to incite change, I merely crumple up my receipts and pretend they don’t exist. In fact, I do this with lots of things in my life: I crumple up my problems and throw them away, angered but distancing myself from any involvement.

I’m not alone. The biggest problem with society, regardless of religion, race, gender or political affiliation, is that nobody is a part of “the problem.” In their own eyes, they are always innocent.

Name an issue and Oberlin students contribute to it. Global warming? I see trash cans literally overflowing with beer cans, plastics and cardboard boxes every day.

Easing racial tensions? During the police brutality demonstrations, one of my friends feared leaving his classroom after protesters repeatedly called him racist and threatened him and his classmates for not joining the march, and the petition to postpone first-semester finals produced some of the most intense, racially fired and naïve arguments I’ve ever heard from both sides. As someone who chose not to participate in the demonstrations or sign the petition for reasons other than my — according to some — blatant racism and rejection of cis white male privilege, I felt like I was walking on eggshells in every conversation. I felt ostracized.

This is not the way to ease underlying tension.

Showing religious tolerance? Some people showed no mercy (no pun intended) when mocking the conservative Christian protesters in Tappan Square during the fall, but even more disturbing to me was hearing about a pro-life protester on campus verbally attacked for his beliefs. Whether you decide their opinions are wrong or not, did your actions do anything except make a few people chuckle and, in the process, irk me?

Not only was I stunned by the underlying campus tensions but by my own — and others’ — sense of detachment; I assumed that since I wasn’t directly involved in the situation, I was not at all involved in the larger societal problem.

I thought I was the voice of reason, the single outlier in a sea of injustice, but I realized that I was just as much a part of the issue as everyone else. In these situations, I did nothing to ease the tension and merely assumed that my opinion was right and everyone who didn’t agree with me was wrong. I found myself throwing out recyclables and leaving my lights on unnecessarily, making uninformed remarks about race, religion and sexuality and standing by while others did the same things. I would tsk-tsk as someone nonchalantly dropped their homework into a trash bin, only to do literally the same thing minutes later. I was a hypocrite — but so was everyone else telling me about the overarching problems that others contribute to.

This, however, is a problem that can be remedied. It’s not difficult to respectfully disagree — I grew up with very religious friends, and we had discussions all the time that rarely strayed beyond the academic and into the emotional.

The fact of the matter is, there will always be someone who disagrees with you, and the important thing is to voice your opinion without being degrading. Stop letting emotions get the best of you in discussions. Passionate outbursts only end the conversation, and the point of these discussions is that they don’t end, or else there is no change.

Reducing your carbon footprint is even easier. If you throw out a plastic water bottle, feel bad because there are recycling bins all over campus. Make an effort to take care of the planet before it implodes from massive amounts of trash and the carbon dioxide levels make it impossible to breathe. Don’t be overindulgent, be open to new ideas, don’t be judgmental, and if you find yourself having judgmental thoughts, don’t say them aloud. You would be surprised how often people hear these comments. (Hint: It is most of the time.)

Next time I get a receipt, sure, I’ll hate it, and I’ll grin as I imagine blowing its ashes into the sky, but maybe I’ll feel a little better if I recycle it and email WalMart explaining why they should switch to electronic notifications instead.

Ryan Murphy Contributing Writer March 13, 2015 In the Feb. 13 issue of The Oberlin Review, contributing writer James Tanford wrote an op-ed titled “Student Hypocrisy Part of Problem, Contributes to Injustice” on his problems with student activism.

Before reading the op-ed, I hoped to find a criticism of the number of white bodies in activist spaces on this campus or maybe the blatant cissexism that so often occurs in “feminist” organizing. Instead, I found a piece describing the thoughts of a cisgender white man who is made to feel “ostracized” and “irked” by those involved in social justice circles on campus. Never once does the author of this piece consider that people of color are ostracized, either through microaggressions or obvious exclusion, from almost every social space at Oberlin.

The thesis of Tanford’s op-ed was basically that oppressors don’t view themselves as contributing to oppression. This is true. I agree with this idea outside of the context of this piece. However, Tanford didn’t define “oppressors” as people with systemic power or privilege. He seems to speak of oppressors simply as people who are intimidating, specifically when it comes to expressing their political beliefs. This point of view is what allows social justice movements to be dismissed as “extremist.” Intimidating direct action tactics are intimidating for a reason. There are no other options at this college, or in this country, when increasingly militarized state violence continues to disproportionately target Black and trans lives. No matter how “peaceful” a protest is, it will be met with institutional resistance and violence from the law.

One needs to look no further than the infamous pepper-spraying incident at UC Davis during the 2011 Occupy protests.

The “hypocrisy” that Tanford speaks of is, in reality, the fact that we are all culpable in oppression. The problem with injustice is that we live in a system

that is designed to perpetuate it. Tanford specifically speaks of environmental justice. We throw things in the trash every day. That doesn’t mean that we don’t care about the environment; we all have to throw things in the trash because that is the way disposable products are designed. This is why we are angry at the system. We are angry that we are forced to be “hypocrites” and to sometimes act in such a way that contributes to the oppression of another. Our ideology cannot always come out in our practices, and this is why we are angry.

Finally, I am most frustrated by Tanford’s assertion that “nobody is part –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

The problem with injustice is that we live in a system that is designed to perpetuate it. … This is why we are angry at the system.

We are angry that we are forced to be “hypocrites” and to sometimes act in such a way that contributes to the oppression of another. Our ideology cannot always come out in our practices, and this is why we are angry.

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– of the problem.” Part of the problem is when a cisgender white man polices the actions of marginalized students on this campus. Maybe nobody thinks that they are a part of the problem. But even this is an objective truth that we don’t agree with. Student protesters don’t contribute to injustice by making a privileged person feel uncomfortable or on the spot.

This isn’t about you. This is about a system that listens to you more than it listens to anybody else. That’s why protesters are loud. You will choose not to hear them if they are quiet.

Conservative Rural Stereotype Diverts Attention from Urban, Liberal Racism Kiley Petersen Opinions Editor May 1, 2015 “White people are racist. Not all of them. But white culture is.

Our white country is. Our nation is. Our American culture is full of white supremacy. We live in a white supremacist culture that caters to white people, [where everything from] the media to education to art to culture to politics is white-washed. What is not white-washed? … This country was built for white people.”

You might expect the above quote to have come from an article on the basics of white supremacy from an anti-racist blog or from a short on the Baltimore uprising from The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore on Comedy Central. So the face of white, middle-aged, self-described “fat redneck” Dixon White, staring out from an April 4, 2015 viral YouTube video titled “I’m a redneck and I love America,” might surprise you.

White, using a pseudonym to

avoid trolls and anonymous hate online, is an actor and filmmaker raised in Tennessee, where he grew up in an environment steeped in religious white supremacy stereotypical of the South. It wasn’t until college, when he befriended his Black roommate, that he understood his learned prejudice and began actively writing and speaking on anti-racism in the U.S., specifically in the South.

Some folks might get angry that I am centering this piece on a white man talking about white supremacy rather than a person of color recounting their lived experiences. While I think it’s essential that people of color speak about their lives and the oppression they experience in the U.S., I also think White adds a couple of very interesting ideas to the discussion on white supremacy that might be lacking from other narratives: He’s from the South. And he’s a redneck — a derogatory term he reclaims proudly from its classist roots.

So much discussion centers around young urban activists, but

by focusing only on the actions and protests happening in cities, we lose a lot of content with regard to the rural, oft-forgotten regions of our country. The South is commonly dismissed as a place –––––––––––––––––––––––––––

So much discussion centers around young urban activists, but by focusing only on the actions and protests happening in our cities, we lose a lot of content with regard to the rural, oft-forgotten regions of our country.

––––––––––––––––––––––––

of rampant racism and homophobia. In many circles, the white rural poor are frequently judged as rude, uneducated and ignorant of the systems governing our politics and social spheres.

This stereotype invalidates the determined activism occurring in those areas because it’s generally less powerful or dramatic than ur-

ban-centered protests. Additionally, the rural working poor, who often survive by the exploitation of natural resources through mining or fracking, are judged as environmentally unfriendly compared to the liberal vegans, locavores and environmentalists populating urban centers.

I’ve talked before about how the class issues in Oberlin affect the town-gown divide (“Watergate Reveals Disparities in Urban, Rural Communities,” The Oberlin Review, March 13, 2015). When the majority of Oberlin students come from urban coastal regions and are hurled into the rural Midwest for four years, there are a lot of disparities in culture, amenities and opinions. I have felt uncomfortable at some points, as a queer woman, in interactions with the “townies.” It can’t be easy for trans individuals or people of color to be surrounded by this largely conservative Midwestern uniformity, either.

But what is important to remember is that the redneck stereotype is often used by urban,

upper-middle-class white liberals to distance themselves from the racism and general “conservative” culture of the rural Midwest and South. Whereas in reality, it’s most likely the urban middle-class, college-educated individuals who are denying housing and healthcare to Black people, running the national mass media coverage on Ferguson and Baltimore and making other far-reaching decisions that affect marginalized communities in the U.S. The stereotype of the hillbilly is a shameful attempt of white, college-educated liberals to ignore their own complicity in the problem by diverting their scrutiny to a region rife with lynch mobs, Confederate flags and other symbols analogous to the “real problem of racism.” As a majority-white, urban, progressive and upper-middle-class school, we can challenge that divide. Engage with community members, maybe even begin a dialogue. White supremacy is a system that plagues all of the U.S. and all of the world, not just one region or class.

Opinions

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The Oberlin Review, May 22, 2015

Hiring Standards Discriminate Against Women Elizabeth Bentivegna Contributing Writer April 17, 2015 On April 1, I interviewed for a programming job at OnShift, a Cleveland-based tech company that makes medical scheduling software. Two weeks later, I received a phone call from the recruiter who had contacted me about the position, saying that they would not be hiring me.

The hiring director had relayed to her that they would have hired me based on my personality and technical abilities but would not be doing so because of the way I looked. I was informed that my outfit “looked more like I was about to go clubbing than to an interview,” and that the run in my tights, coupled with my mild lateness — which I had informed them of earlier, due to my afternoon class — suggested to them that I was “unprofessional and not put together.”

Essentially, I was denied a job on an all-male development team for what I looked like.

My friend Alanna Bennett, OC ’13, a staff writer for BuzzFeed, tweeted about the incident.

It has since gone viral, sparking debates about workplace attire, with my words being twisted by third-party media outlets. And while this interview and the ensuing controversy has definitely helped me care less about what people think, I have a few more things to say to OnShift and anyone in tech who considers themselves an ally of women.

How dare you. You laud yourselves as beacons of diversity and progressiveness, yet refuse to pull your heads out of the sand and face the

OCRL Lecture Series Fosters Diverse Opinions April 17, 2015 To the Editor: The Oberlin College Republicans and Libertarians are proud to host Christina Hoff Sommers as part of the Ronald Reagan Political Lectureship Series.

Since its beginnings in 2006, the Reagan Series has brought many distinguished scholars and commentators to our campus. As the Series’ organizers, we have endeavored to bring speakers who articulate the value of political and economic liberty, freedom of speech and thought, respect for individuals, national defense or voluntary association. We have aimed to offer views that we believe are underrepresented at Oberlin. We have also worked to promote the exchange of reasons, rather than recourse to rhetoric, on controversial topics.

We look forward to Christina Hoff Sommers’ appearance Monday, and we hope to see many of you there.

Sincerely, – Seth Flatt College senior, OCRL President 2014–2015 – Taylor Reiners OC ’14, OCRL President 2013–2014 – Nick Miller OC ’13, OCRL President 2011–2013 – Mary V. Burke OC ’10, OCRL President 2007–2008 – Allison (Lint) Boyt OC ’09, OCRL President 2006–2007

winds of change. The concept of “professionalism” in terms of dress is outdated and oppressive from many angles. You cannot cherry-pick which parts of progressivism you embrace. You cannot stretch out your hand to those in need and yank it back on a petty whim.

For the curious: I was wearing a fitted black T-shirt, a red skater skirt, black tights (Yes, with a run. The horror!) and a black cardigan. I wore fairly heavy makeup. But it doesn’t matter what I looked like: If I had been a man, would it have mattered what I was wearing? Would the word “clubbing” have even come up? When ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

The concept of “professionalism” in terms of dress is outdated and oppressive from many angles. You cannot cherry-pick which parts of progressivism you embrace. You cannot stretch out your hand to those in need and yank it back on a petty whim.

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– a man needs to look “professional,” he puts on a suit. Done. When a woman does so, as I was attempting to do, she has to anticipate every possible way her outfit could be misconstrued — as too sexy, too frumpy, too nonchalant, too revealing, too formal — and somehow modify

her clothes to avoid judgment. What’s more, everyone has their own ideas of what is considered “professional” — Hillary Clinton is constantly criticized for wearing pantsuits — and again, women are expected to magically know how they are going to be perceived before it happens. There is no giant rulebook for how a working woman should look, but everybody seems to think there is and that their copy is the correct one. My attempt to be “professional” was construed as sexual. If I had actually intended to look sexual, would this have had any impact on my ability as a programmer? Many tech companies don’t require their programmers to wear anything fancier than jeans and a T-shirt. Many men I know received job offers while wearing polos and jeans. Why was my ability to code not enough?

There are too few women in technology, and many are finally starting to ask why. I can tell you. It’s because of things like this. It’s because even though the doors are finally opening for us, women are looking inside and are afraid of what we see. We can feel that we are not yet welcome here. Tech companies can claim that they want a female programmer, but if they do not show their candidates adequate compassion, they’re not going to get one. They got the vibe from a candidate’s outfit that she’s not puttogether? Call her references and see what they say. So you think she’s a brilliant programmer but doesn’t seem professional enough? Hire her so you can mentor her and help her become a better worker. We don’t need to have our actions scrutinized and ripped apart in search of

error. We need guidance and an opportunity to show the world what a woman in technology looks like. And after everything we have been ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

When a woman [attempts to look professional] … she has to anticipate every possible way her outfit could be misconstrued — as too sexy, too frumpy, too nonchalant, too revealing, too formal — and somehow modify her clothes to avoid judgment.

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– subjected to, you need to roll out the red carpet for us.

Since the posting of the initial tweet, I have been contacted by numerous news agencies and even potential employers, so I suppose I really should be thanking OnShift instead of blowing them out of the water. Thank you, OnShift, for giving me a taste of what this minefield is going to be like. You can rest assured that you have been an inspiration to at least one person.

Thank you to all the media, the Review especially, for giving my voice a stage. And thank you to everyone who has poured out their hearts in support. You and I both know that change is coming and that we are the ones who will bring it. We aren’t going down without a fight.

Letters to the Editors

In Response to Sommers’ Talk: A Love Letter to Ourselves April 17, 2015

Content Warning: This letter contains discussion of rape culture, online harassment, victim blaming and rape apologism/denialism.

Dear community members: The Oberlin College Republicans and Libertarians are bringing Christina Hoff Sommers to speak on Monday, April 20. This Monday happens to be a part of Sexual Assault Awareness Month, which makes the timing of this talk particularly objectionable. Though OCRL advertised Christina Hoff Sommers as a feminist with a “perspective that differs from the general Oberlin population,” they failed to mention that she is a rape denialist. A rape denialist is someone who denies the prevalence of rape and denies known causes of it. Christina Hoff Sommers believes that rape occurs less often than statistics (those which actually leave out a plethora of unreported rapes) suggest. She also believes that false rape accusations are a rampant issue and that intoxication and coercion cannot rightly be considered barriers to consent. OCRL additionally failed to mention that she participates in violent movements such as GamerGate, a campaign that threatened feminists advocating against sexism in video games via threats of death and rape. If you need proof, examples or explanation of that, just Google her. Better yet, look at her Twitter. Here are some examples:

On April 13, Sommers tweeted, “The wage gap is a myth. So is ‘rape culture’ & claims of gender bias in science. But women’s grievance industry goes on.”

On April 15, Sommers retweeted Adrian Chmielarz’s tweet: “Thanks for showing how trolls exploit #GamerGate. This account has NEVER used the tag before.” Chmielarz was referring to a tweet by Feminist Frequency, in which Anita Sarkeesian publicized an offensive tweet from @ cox4vox. The tweet contained a misogynistic, anti-Semitic rape threat that used the hashtag #GamerGate.

“Reminder: I’ve been bombarded with messages like this one on a daily basis since GamerGate began,” Sarkeesian wrote.

On April 15, Sommers also tweeted, “Looking forward to visiting Oberlin next week. I see my talk is already the focus of a lively campus discussion.” She shared OCRL’s event page with all of her followers on Twitter, after which many of them flocked to the page to defend her viewpoint.

By denying rape culture, she’s creating exactly the cycle of victim/ survivor blame — where victims are responsible for the violence that was forced upon them and the subsequent shame that occurs when survivors share their stories — whose existence she denies. This is how rape culture flourishes. By bringing her to a college campus laden with trauma and sexualized violence and full of victims/survivors, OCRL is choosing to reinforce this climate of denial/ blame/shame that ultimately has real life consequences on the well-being of people who have experienced sexualized violence. We could spend all of our time and energy explaining all of the ways she’s harmful. But why should we?

Anger is productive, and critiques

are necessary. At this point, though, why don’t we stop spinning our wheels and burning ourselves out on conversations with Christina Hoff Sommers’ Twitter followers? We need to let survivors lead the conversation — to let them define their experience for themselves and to let them tell us what they need. We’re never going to get what we need from Christina Hoff Sommers or her Twitter followers, so let’s pull together and take care of each other. She can prioritize debunking statistics on sexualized violence; let’s prioritize each other healing from and refusing to tolerate violence. Her talk is happening, so let’s pull together in the face of this violence and make our own space to support each other.

She exists but so do we.

From centering survivors, their needs and community support, there are so many ways to engage. It is valid and necessary to both create alternative spaces for healing and to directly challenge the violence that is happening.

A few concrete examples of ways to engage: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

Listening to your friends who’ve been harmed Using your social and financial capital Challenging violence and harm Participating in actions and conversations in response to the event Recognizing and prioritizing intersectional feminism and survivor support Genuinely caring for one another Educating yourself on the impacts of trauma and symptoms of posttraumatic stress/reactions Silence

While navigating these many forms of support, it is important to underscore both that safety is a priority and that it’s not possible to be neutral about rape culture. A decision not to support survivors/ victims is a decision to permit the actions of the perpetrators.

So let’s engage in some radical, beautiful community care, support and love. Let’s make space for everyone to engage at whichever level they want/need. Let’s come through for each other, both now and in the future. Trauma is an experience that threatens a person’s bodily, spiritual and emotional integrity. The psychological, emotional and somatic impacts extend beyond the experience of trauma. Healing is a process that looks different for each person. Let’s make space to care for all experiences of trauma and to respect those we care for. Let’s focus our energy on taking care of each other and ourselves. Let’s make her talk irrelevant in the face of our love, passion and power.

Love, – Sarah MacFadden College senior – Sophie Meade College senior – Tanya Stickles College sophomore – Akane Little College sophomore – Juliana Ruoff College senior A full list of signees as of Friday, April 17 at noon can be found on the Review’s website.

Opinions

The Oberlin Review, May 22, 2015

Letters to the Editors Incompletes Do Not Consider Mental Health Continued from page 16 I can’t find the words to describe how I feel right now. I know it’s ridiculous for me to be shocked after witnessing and experiencing this school’s disregard for the well-being of its students more times than I can count, but being shown that actually dying still isn’t enough to receive adequate health accommodations or even sympathy has jarred me. For years I have been telling myself my disability is not my fault, but believing that to be true is so fucking hard when I keep being told that yes, it is, and that I need to be better than what I am.

I don’t know what to say at this point. To fellow students struggling: I know, I’m sorry, and you’re worth so much more than the way this place makes you feel you are.

– Goo Mattison College sophomore

Climate Change Skepticism Damages Credibility Continued from page 17 like Dr. Curry and Dr. Michaels, it is disrespectful to the student body and our education. When it comes to events like the “climate debate,” student and faculty dissent must be welcomed and encouraged. Dissent is productive and educational. We exist in a campus culture that discourages and pacifies public protest, and because of that, we all missed an opportunity Wednesday night. Let us, as the Oberlin community, take this event and use it as a chance to reevaluate the way we discuss and engage in political confrontation.

– Rachel Berkrot College senior – Zia Kandler College junior – Mae Kate Campbell College sophomore

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OSCA Needs to Stay Accessible

Continued from page 20

on tuition, required fees and the cheapest non-OSCA housing and dining plans, each individually determined based on options available to first-years, sophomores, juniors and seniors. As long as OSCA functions as an alternative living and dining system, students have the option to reduce this hefty total by $14,914. This reduction can mean the difference between a student who can afford an Oberlin education and one who cannot. The administration’s actions speak loudly: These students are not a valuable source of revenue. These students do not matter.

What angers me is not only the secretive way the College went about this change but the very language used in the policy. “If you choose to live or dine in a co-op, your financial aid will be adjusted accordingly,” the policy reads. When it comes to affording college, choosing a meal plan is not a free choice based on whim or taste; for some students, housing and dining options are among few other areas where it’s possible to cut costs. For many, the cheapest option is the only option; this choice is not always a matter of want but is often a matter of financial need. Choosing OSCA may be choosing to stay in school. Is that really a choice worth punishing?

This financial aid policy issue returned to the table as the College underwent a financial self-reflection — the Strategic Planning Steering Committee meetings. I had heard the phrase “Strategic Planning” thrown around but never quite had a solid grasp on what it was. In the Sept. 12 issue of the Review, College sophomore and News Editor Oliver Bok’s article, “Committee Convenes to Plan College’s Fiscal Future,” defined the Steering Committee as “an organization whose purpose is to determine the future of Oberlin’s educational and financial endeavors.” While this is the most succinct definition I’ve heard, the concept and purpose of this omnipotent Strategic Planning Steering Committee still seem vague. How does any organization begin to go about determining the future of Oberlin College?

Though the Steering Committee continuously preaches transparency, I don’t think I’m the only one who’s been left scratching their head over this “Strategic Plan” concept. Committee member and Politics Department Chair Chris Howell is quoted in Bok’s article as saying that the last Strategic Planning meetings proved “disastrous” and that “there is a healthy skepticism” among faculty regarding the effectiveness of the Strategic Plan. And despite his unwavering support of the plan, even Krislov — a Committee co-chair himself — has spoken about the impossibility of constructing it.

“How can Oberlin plan for a future that’s inherently unpredictable?” Bok quotes Krislov as saying. If the president doesn’t know how to do it, and the majority of the student body can’t define it, how can this Strategic Plan possibly be transparent, much less effective?

My doubts about the Strategic Planning process aside, the Plan historically hasn’t been conducive to making Oberlin more affordable. The last version of the Strategic Plan from 2005 defined the College’s financial goals in the following terms: “To remain a great institution of American higher education, Oberlin must enhance each of its revenue streams. Currently its most critical financial priority must be to realize more net tuition revenue per student and to do so in ways that honor Oberlin’s long traditions of racial and socioeconomic diversity.”

In simple terms, the last Strategic Plan called for the College to profit more off its students — to increase tuition and decrease financial aid. While the Plan does mention lower-income students at the end of the passage, the proposed policy change spits in the face of “Oberlin’s long tradition of socioeconomic diversity.”

The Plan also defines OSCA as a nonprofit organization, one that is committed to providing housing and dining at actual cost, not for profit or to “enhance revenue streams.” Thus, the revenue from decreased financial aid would not go to OSCA but instead would be absorbed by the College, according to the OSCA Board.

Last Sunday the Board sent out the OSCA Member Survey, which asks a num-

ber of questions about demographics and OSCA’s effectiveness and role in student life. The survey ends with a section on the proposed financial aid policy change, and the final question outlines a newly proposed stipend system that would compensate students in co-ops at approximately minimum wage for the hours they work in OSCA. There are so many disturbing problems with this that I don’t even know where to begin. First of all, if it comes to compensating co-op members for their labor, minimum wage is not even close to accurate.

Within any co-op, students are collectively responsible for buying food for the co-op, planning meals, tracking dietary needs, training members in food safety, leading discussions, handling complaints and concerns, managing finances, maintaining functional industrial kitchen equipment and organizing a workchart, plus the dayto-day cooking and cleaning. All of this for $8.50 per hour in a four-hour co-op and just $6.79 per hour in a five-hour co-op?

By comparison, student wages in CDS jobs range from $8.50 per hour for serving food to $9.40 per hour for washing dishes. Furthermore, co-op members sacrifice more than just their labor hours to eat in OSCA: Co-ops offer only one food option per meal, and meals are at set times around which students must adjust their schedules. A stipend that makes up a minuscule fraction of co-op members’ current savings is both immensely unfair and terribly illogical, not to mention disrespectful.

I would like to call on those in OSCA to take the Member Survey and to use your responses to express outrage and disgust at how this proposed financial aid policy disregards lower-income students and impacts all co-op members. I would also like to call on all students to make their voices heard by the Strategic Plan Steering Committee at the next listening sessions. Not being in OSCA is no reason to ignore language that defines students as “revenue streams.” Let the 2005 Strategic Plan be a warning, not merely a premonition. Don’t let the administration “strategically plan” to turn the student body into a profit margin.

Solidarity Necessary for CDS Temporary Workers’ Rights Continued from page 20 workers often are not even told about this, and the process is really little more than the worker asking management for their job back. Despite performing the same work as student or permanent workers, temporary workers are not even considered workers but rather labeled by the College as “guests.”

What this does is make temp workers a disposable workforce, subject to the arbitrary decisions of those

above them and impeded in organizing for their own interests. Because of how easily they could be “denied return,” workers are unable to speak out for fear of being fired. Even if they retain their jobs, they can still be discriminated against and denied rights granted to other workers.

For example, two years ago the Director of Business Operations and Dining Services Michele Gross decided that temp workers would no longer be allowed to eat on their shifts,

though the same rules did not apply to student workers. Working with temp workers last December, the Student Labor Action Coalition started a petition against this and obtained more than a thousand signatures, securing temp workers the right to eat.

Yet even now the workers are not allowed to eat on their breaks; instead they have to get the food at the beginning of their shift, put it in a hot box and wait four hours until they clock out to be allowed to eat it.

Temp workers at Oberlin are still denied rights that are readily available to students.

There are five staffing agencies that provide CDS with temp workers. Each one is paid $12 per hour for each worker, of which the worker only receives $8.10, the minimum wage required by the State of Ohio. The overall system is managed by Bon Appétit, the same company that overcharges us on unwieldy meal plans. Bon Appétit is also a subsidiary

of the largest food service corporation in the world, Compass Group, which has contracts in prisons, military bases and offshore oil rigs. To put it simply, we have here a company that takes advantage of students as a captive market, exploits workers and profits from imprisonment, war and environmental destruction.

Students must use their protected position to support temp workers in ending discriminatory policies and preventing unjust fir-

ings. Those of us who work in CDS should get to know our co-workers and find out what they want to see changed at this College.

In turn, worker support is essential to the success of a student movement. It seems like year after year we fight the same battle, just trying to hold on to what we already have.

Solidarity between students, workers and the town is essential to win any ground, and support for temp workers is a key aspect of that.

Editorial: Gender Discrimination Enforced in Different Ways Globally Continued from page 19 the atrocity of using rape as a weapon of war in countries such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Rwanda, and rightfully so. But condemning the human rights violations of other countries creates the incorrect perception that violence against women is not also an American problem.

Sexualized violence is as American as

apple pie, and like in many non-Western countries, it is used as a tool to oppress marginalized groups, including women, trans and nonbinary people. The difference is that sexualized violence in the U.S. doesn’t usually happen systematically, and it rarely follows the “stranger in a dark alley” trope that most people associate with rape and sexual assault. But IWD’s generalization of sexual assault ignores the fact

that most rapes occur between two people who know each other well.

International Women’s Day can and should be a productive time to reflect on the accomplishments of women throughout history and the progress we have made for women’s rights. But its focus is only surface-level and undermines the very real struggles that women encounter day to day, both in the United States

and abroad. Misogyny is ubiquitous, but it looks different in varying geographic and demographic contexts.

To be successful, International Women’s Day needs to move away from the safe political tropes it touts about the need for equal pay and women in positions of power to an emphasis on the intersecting systems of oppression that create barriers for women across the globe.

Opinions

The Oberlin Review, May 22, 2015

Letters to the Editors Incompletes Do Not Consider Mental Health Continued from page 16 I can’t find the words to describe how I feel right now. I know it’s ridiculous for me to be shocked after witnessing and experiencing this school’s disregard for the well-being of its students more times than I can count, but being shown that actually dying still isn’t enough to receive adequate health accommodations or even sympathy has jarred me. For years I have been telling myself my disability is not my fault, but believing that to be true is so fucking hard when I keep being told that yes, it is, and that I need to be better than what I am.

I don’t know what to say at this point. To fellow students struggling: I know, I’m sorry, and you’re worth so much more than the way this place makes you feel you are.

– Goo Mattison College sophomore

Climate Change Skepticism Damages Credibility Continued from page 17 like Dr. Curry and Dr. Michaels, it is disrespectful to the student body and our education. When it comes to events like the “climate debate,” student and faculty dissent must be welcomed and encouraged. Dissent is productive and educational. We exist in a campus culture that discourages and pacifies public protest, and because of that, we all missed an opportunity Wednesday night. Let us, as the Oberlin community, take this event and use it as a chance to reevaluate the way we discuss and engage in political confrontation.

– Rachel Berkrot College senior – Zia Kandler College junior – Mae Kate Campbell College sophomore

Page 23

miscellaneous

OSCA Needs to Stay Accessible

Continued from page 20

on tuition, required fees and the cheapest non-OSCA housing and dining plans, each individually determined based on options available to first-years, sophomores, juniors and seniors. As long as OSCA functions as an alternative living and dining system, students have the option to reduce this hefty total by $14,914. This reduction can mean the difference between a student who can afford an Oberlin education and one who cannot. The administration’s actions speak loudly: These students are not a valuable source of revenue. These students do not matter.

What angers me is not only the secretive way the College went about this change but the very language used in the policy. “If you choose to live or dine in a co-op, your financial aid will be adjusted accordingly,” the policy reads. When it comes to affording college, choosing a meal plan is not a free choice based on whim or taste; for some students, housing and dining options are among few other areas where it’s possible to cut costs. For many, the cheapest option is the only option; this choice is not always a matter of want but is often a matter of financial need. Choosing OSCA may be choosing to stay in school. Is that really a choice worth punishing?

This financial aid policy issue returned to the table as the College underwent a financial self-reflection — the Strategic Planning Steering Committee meetings. I had heard the phrase “Strategic Planning” thrown around but never quite had a solid grasp on what it was. In the Sept. 12 issue of the Review, College sophomore and News Editor Oliver Bok’s article, “Committee Convenes to Plan College’s Fiscal Future,” defined the Steering Committee as “an organization whose purpose is to determine the future of Oberlin’s educational and financial endeavors.” While this is the most succinct definition I’ve heard, the concept and purpose of this omnipotent Strategic Planning Steering Committee still seem vague. How does any organization begin to go about determining the future of Oberlin College?

Though the Steering Committee continuously preaches transparency, I don’t think I’m the only one who’s been left scratching their head over this “Strategic Plan” concept. Committee member and Politics Department Chair Chris Howell is quoted in Bok’s article as saying that the last Strategic Planning meetings proved “disastrous” and that “there is a healthy skepticism” among faculty regarding the effectiveness of the Strategic Plan. And despite his unwavering support of the plan, even Krislov — a Committee co-chair himself — has spoken about the impossibility of constructing it.

“How can Oberlin plan for a future that’s inherently unpredictable?” Bok quotes Krislov as saying. If the president doesn’t know how to do it, and the majority of the student body can’t define it, how can this Strategic Plan possibly be transparent, much less effective?

My doubts about the Strategic Planning process aside, the Plan historically hasn’t been conducive to making Oberlin more affordable. The last version of the Strategic Plan from 2005 defined the College’s financial goals in the following terms: “To remain a great institution of American higher education, Oberlin must enhance each of its revenue streams. Currently its most critical financial priority must be to realize more net tuition revenue per student and to do so in ways that honor Oberlin’s long traditions of racial and socioeconomic diversity.”

In simple terms, the last Strategic Plan called for the College to profit more off its students — to increase tuition and decrease financial aid. While the Plan does mention lower-income students at the end of the passage, the proposed policy change spits in the face of “Oberlin’s long tradition of socioeconomic diversity.”

The Plan also defines OSCA as a nonprofit organization, one that is committed to providing housing and dining at actual cost, not for profit or to “enhance revenue streams.” Thus, the revenue from decreased financial aid would not go to OSCA but instead would be absorbed by the College, according to the OSCA Board.

Last Sunday the Board sent out the OSCA Member Survey, which asks a num-

ber of questions about demographics and OSCA’s effectiveness and role in student life. The survey ends with a section on the proposed financial aid policy change, and the final question outlines a newly proposed stipend system that would compensate students in co-ops at approximately minimum wage for the hours they work in OSCA. There are so many disturbing problems with this that I don’t even know where to begin. First of all, if it comes to compensating co-op members for their labor, minimum wage is not even close to accurate.

Within any co-op, students are collectively responsible for buying food for the co-op, planning meals, tracking dietary needs, training members in food safety, leading discussions, handling complaints and concerns, managing finances, maintaining functional industrial kitchen equipment and organizing a workchart, plus the dayto-day cooking and cleaning. All of this for $8.50 per hour in a four-hour co-op and just $6.79 per hour in a five-hour co-op?

By comparison, student wages in CDS jobs range from $8.50 per hour for serving food to $9.40 per hour for washing dishes. Furthermore, co-op members sacrifice more than just their labor hours to eat in OSCA: Co-ops offer only one food option per meal, and meals are at set times around which students must adjust their schedules. A stipend that makes up a minuscule fraction of co-op members’ current savings is both immensely unfair and terribly illogical, not to mention disrespectful.

I would like to call on those in OSCA to take the Member Survey and to use your responses to express outrage and disgust at how this proposed financial aid policy disregards lower-income students and impacts all co-op members. I would also like to call on all students to make their voices heard by the Strategic Plan Steering Committee at the next listening sessions. Not being in OSCA is no reason to ignore language that defines students as “revenue streams.” Let the 2005 Strategic Plan be a warning, not merely a premonition. Don’t let the administration “strategically plan” to turn the student body into a profit margin.

Solidarity Necessary for CDS Temporary Workers’ Rights Continued from page 20 workers often are not even told about this, and the process is really little more than the worker asking management for their job back. Despite performing the same work as student or permanent workers, temporary workers are not even considered workers but rather labeled by the College as “guests.”

What this does is make temp workers a disposable workforce, subject to the arbitrary decisions of those

above them and impeded in organizing for their own interests. Because of how easily they could be “denied return,” workers are unable to speak out for fear of being fired. Even if they retain their jobs, they can still be discriminated against and denied rights granted to other workers.

For example, two years ago the Director of Business Operations and Dining Services Michele Gross decided that temp workers would no longer be allowed to eat on their shifts,

though the same rules did not apply to student workers. Working with temp workers last December, the Student Labor Action Coalition started a petition against this and obtained more than a thousand signatures, securing temp workers the right to eat.

Yet even now the workers are not allowed to eat on their breaks; instead they have to get the food at the beginning of their shift, put it in a hot box and wait four hours until they clock out to be allowed to eat it.

Temp workers at Oberlin are still denied rights that are readily available to students.

There are five staffing agencies that provide CDS with temp workers. Each one is paid $12 per hour for each worker, of which the worker only receives $8.10, the minimum wage required by the State of Ohio. The overall system is managed by Bon Appétit, the same company that overcharges us on unwieldy meal plans. Bon Appétit is also a subsidiary

of the largest food service corporation in the world, Compass Group, which has contracts in prisons, military bases and offshore oil rigs. To put it simply, we have here a company that takes advantage of students as a captive market, exploits workers and profits from imprisonment, war and environmental destruction.

Students must use their protected position to support temp workers in ending discriminatory policies and preventing unjust fir-

ings. Those of us who work in CDS should get to know our co-workers and find out what they want to see changed at this College.

In turn, worker support is essential to the success of a student movement. It seems like year after year we fight the same battle, just trying to hold on to what we already have.

Solidarity between students, workers and the town is essential to win any ground, and support for temp workers is a key aspect of that.

Editorial: Gender Discrimination Enforced in Different Ways Globally Continued from page 19 the atrocity of using rape as a weapon of war in countries such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Rwanda, and rightfully so. But condemning the human rights violations of other countries creates the incorrect perception that violence against women is not also an American problem.

Sexualized violence is as American as

apple pie, and like in many non-Western countries, it is used as a tool to oppress marginalized groups, including women, trans and nonbinary people. The difference is that sexualized violence in the U.S. doesn’t usually happen systematically, and it rarely follows the “stranger in a dark alley” trope that most people associate with rape and sexual assault. But IWD’s generalization of sexual assault ignores the fact

that most rapes occur between two people who know each other well.

International Women’s Day can and should be a productive time to reflect on the accomplishments of women throughout history and the progress we have made for women’s rights. But its focus is only surface-level and undermines the very real struggles that women encounter day to day, both in the United States

and abroad. Misogyny is ubiquitous, but it looks different in varying geographic and demographic contexts.

To be successful, International Women’s Day needs to move away from the safe political tropes it touts about the need for equal pay and women in positions of power to an emphasis on the intersecting systems of oppression that create barriers for women across the globe.

Opinions year in review

Page 24

The Oberlin Review

May 22, 2015

Students march through campus after the May 1 “Occu-party” on the Cox Administration Building grounds calling for financial accessibility. The Board of Trustees recently approved a $2,400 tuition hike for the 2015–2016 school year.

Bryan Rubin

Oberlin’s Unique Climate Shapes Journalistic Practices Julia Herbst, Taylor Field and Rose Stoloff Senior Staff May 22, 2015 It’s hard to imagine spending a Thursday evening — or a Wednesday evening or a Friday morning for that matter — anywhere other than in our cluttered basement office working on the latest issue of the Review. In an attempt to curb our graduation-induced sentimentality in our final editorial, we’ve tried to situate our experience at the paper within a larger journalistic context.

As a college paper, we’re inherently different than professional publications, which serve a wider, less insular community. Most writers at any publication are at least tangentially part of the communities about which they report, but on a college campus as small as Oberlin’s, this is even more true. Without a formal journalism program, our staff is composed of non-communications majors, and the burden to recruit and train writers and editors falls largely on us. Our writers and editors are students first, not to mention that many also devote time to other important pursuits, such as athletics, art and activism. Though the lack of guidance can sometimes be trying, the self-sufficiency of the Review has enabled us to understand our own capabilities and learn how to implement them efficiently without a safety net.

More importantly than its size, Oberlin’s progressive

Student Health

16

Sustainability

17

World

19

Activism

21

climate shapes the way in which we approach journalism, even compared to student journalists on other campuses.

Professional writers typically adhere to strict conventions of reporting and follow a regimented style guide. These rules are slow to change and often fail to keep up with broader language trends, especially with respect to how people identify. For example, most mainstream news sources do not capitalize “Black,” despite the fact that many people on social media and blogs, as well as publications that serve predominantly Black audiences, such as Ebony or Essence, prefer to capitalize the word. We decided to capitalize the term, though the practice is uncommon in traditional media. The progressive nature of Oberlin as a whole prompts us to question the validity of certain established practices and encourages us to be more accountable to the preferences of our readers.

In addition to making changes to our style rules, this critical perspective has taught us to consider fundamental questions about our role in shaping discourse that many other publications have not. We decided to include trigger warnings at the beginning of sensitive articles, recognize the importance of safe spaces when photographing and conducting interviews and, as a policy, ask interviewees their gender pronouns.

This is not to say that we’ve always been successful, and we recognize that we have a long way to go in terms of en-

CHS Talk Creates Debate Christina Hoff Sommers causes controversy about safe spaces and rape culture.

See page 22

suring that our reporting practices are sensitive and up-todate. As an institution and established media presence, we wield a significant amount of power and sometimes still play into oppressive systems which marginalize certain voices. The choices we make about what voices we amplify inevitably play into these systems, and we must do a better job at challenging them in order to serve the entire community. We want our guiding principle to be to err on the side of doing less harm, even if that means we vary from mainstream journalism standards and are outright condemned on more conservative platforms.

One of the ways in which we want to do this is by considering our approach to objective reporting. Specifically, because we must make countless decisions — what to cover, what goes on the front page, who to interview and what questions to ask — our inherent biases manifest every time we produce an issue. Fundamentally, our goal remains to report information accurately to our readers, but given our understanding of the impossibility of complete objectivity, we struggle to decide how this should influence our work.

Though our tenure at the paper has come to a close, conversations about how best to reflect and respect the experiences of our community will certainly continue among future senior staff. As we begin to imagine our lives without the Review, we will take these guiding principles and use them to inform our priorities beyond Oberlin.

Student Activism Questioned

Two writers debate the productivity of protests.

See page 21

Environmental Justice Necessary Despite Anti-Frack and community efforts, the NEXUS pipeline will pass through Oberlin.

See page 17

Arts

year in review

Page 25

May 22, 2015

The Oberlin Review

College sophomore Annika Hansteen Izora passionately delivers a spoken word poem at OSlam’s Spring Showcase on May 2. OSlam held auditions for the first time this year due to a formidable increase in student interest.

Nick Farfan

OSlam’s Growth Reflects Spoken Word Surge Vida Weisblum Arts Editor May 8, 2015 Oberlin’s student-run slam poetry organization, known as OSlam, underwent a critical transformation to manage an overwhelming interest in slam poetry on campus this year. OSlam began auditions Oct. 9 to select finalists for eight additional spots on its performance team. While the OSlam club, which meets on Monday evenings to workshop poems and performance, is open to all writers, this selected performance team appeared at events on campus, collaborated with other student organizations and traveled to the College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational.

The slam poetry movement first became popular in the 1990s.

The term “slam” refers to a type of competition in which poets recite original work with themes often related to social justice. Slam poets are craftspeople of meticulously metered and passionate verse, and

seasoned performers typically write about vulnerable topics, often recounting highly personal stories to large audiences. Slam poetry is a performance art and is intended to be delivered orally in the same deliberate manner an actor would perform an impassioned Shakespearean monologue.

OSlam, which just three years ago consisted of only six poets who would convene weekly at one student’s house, faced a challenge this fall when more than 60 students showed up unexpectedly at the general interest meeting. With so many prospective members, the team had difficulty achieving the acute vulnerability that is so crucial to OSlam’s existence and therefore found auditions to be its only option.

For College sophomore Zachariah Claypole-White, a Creative Writing major and OSlam’s treasurer, OSlam was a perfect fit. “I wanted a space to write in, and I wanted to work on bringing more aspects of performance into my poetry,” he

said. After Claypole-White’s Intro to Poetry teaching assistant introduced him to the club at the beginning of his first year, he soon became part of a close-knit community of fellow writers and performers through his involvement with it. “I think OSlam is an amazing community, and I love everyone who’s involved with it,” he said, later describing OSlam as being “like a family.”

OSlam founder and College junior Alison Kronstadt, who currently co-chairs the group alongside College junior B.J. Tindal, led her high school slam poetry club and wanted to continue writing and performing on campus. As a first-year at Oberlin, she had heard rumors of a slam poetry club, but when no actual group emerged, she and College junior Hannah Rosenberg, a fellow poet, decided to start one of their own.

Claypole-White said OSlam has striven to uphold a spirit of inclusivity and celebrate individual uniqueness since its inception; these qualities have strengthened the bond

Feminist Footwork

Freaky Folk Johanna Warren offers spooky tunes in intimate Tank set.

See page 27

between its members and driven the creation of poetic content. “Everyone came into OSlam with different backgrounds — people who’ve been involved [with slam poetry] for a long time and people who are just getting into it,” he said. Tindal, too, commented on the openness of the OSlam environment. “Every time you sit down to write, it is coming from a very personal place inside of you, so you have to take that and speak it in front of whoever is in the room,” he said. “What we do our best to do is create a space that is open and allows for people to make mistakes.”

Kronstadt said that the unique vulnerability of being immersed in an OSlam workshop is satisfying and cathartic. “Mondays are hard days,” she said. “I go [into our Monday club meetings] feeling like, ‘Ugh, college,’ and leave feeling like I am the luckiest person in the world that I get to be here listening to these people be so brave and say such beautiful things and that I’m helping to make that happen.”

Sounding Off Christine Sun Kim walks the line between visual and audio art.

See page 27

Oberlin Dance Company piece underlines political themes through dance.

See page 30

Tindal said he plays a lot with sound in his work and described poetry as a narrative art form. “I’m just inspired by this idea of storytelling,” said Tindal, “and that very small moments can spark an entire poem or an entire story, … and getting to play with your own story is very fun and empowering.”

“Slam is to me, first and foremost, a medium for people who have not been allowed to tell their stories,” said Kronstadt. She emphasized the importance of “fostering an environment where all levels of storytelling are accepted.”

According to Kronstadt, the vulnerability she witnesses in writers’ work is not exclusive to Oberlin slam poets but “comes with the territory of the art form,” which is why OSlam’s leaders are doing their best to preserve the intimacy of last year’s experience. “I think [with the influx of applicants] we would be doing everybody a disservice to keep things going the way they See Tindal, page 27

Music

page 26

Features

page 28

Performance

page 30

Arts

Page 26

The Oberlin Review, May 22, 2015

music

Pharmakon Blurs Line Separating Noise Music, Performance Art Danny Evans Arts Editor March 6, 2015 Pharmakon, New York performance artist Margaret Chardiet’s experimental noise project, evoked visceral reactions in ’Sco-goers Feb. 27 in a manner that even the heaviest of metal shows could not match. She fulfilled her self-proclaimed “deep-seated drive” to engage audiences in “uncomfortable, confrontational ways” with a painfully loud, performance arttinged set.

Fans, critics and musicians alike tend to throw around words like “unusual” and “intense” when discussing power electronics, death industrial and related styles of underground noise music. Oftentimes, artists in these genres do little to differentiate themselves from similar acts, failing to live up to such adjectives.

But Pharmakon crafted a legitimately unusual and intense set by incorporating both unnerving performative elements and cathartic musical content.

Performance art aspects aside, Pharmakon’s music played an important role in her transformation of the ’Sco into a bleak, almost ritualistic space. Pharmakon employed innovative methods of sound production; rather than relying on guitars or drums, she utilized everything from sampling machines to a piece of scrap metal.

But her usage of unorthodox instrumentation did not hold her back in any sense. The sounds she generated, which included screeching

feedback, primal rhythmic motives and atonal walls of sound, shook the ’Sco at least as well as a band working with a standard rock lineup could hope to. Her vocals, which were mostly ethereal, reverb-drenched chants or demonic shrieking, complemented the music expertly, and though her lyrics were often indecipherable, they were effective. The lyrics I could make out dealt with issues like hopelessness and anxiety — which Pharmakon has written about extensively since a near-death experience in 2013 — through surreal and sometimes disturbing imagery. The aural onslaught lasted for close to an hour, as Pharmakon, even after leaving the stage to interact directly with attendees, never allowed the noise to dissipate entirely.

When Pharmakon did leave the stage, she connected with audience members in a subversive fashion. She circled around the ’Sco on all fours and clawed at attendees’ legs; she positioned herself inches from me and screamed directly into my face, as she did with many others in the crowd; she even wrapped her microphone cord around a baffled audience member. In general, Pharmakon displayed her interest in breaking down the boundaries that separated her from the audience in a way that seemed more akin to a performance art piece than a traditional concert. Through her actions, she made statements on gender relations in the context of noise music, a genre which her Facebook page describes as “almost exclusively dominated by male performers.”

Her actions, directed at the primarily male

crowd, confirmed this; she made it her central objective to own the space, establishing herself as a force to be reckoned with. From the way she stared threateningly into attendees’ eyes for extended periods of time to her authoritative body language, Pharmakon did everything she could to interrogate power dynamics, specifically those related to gender, throughout her set. She was successful in this pursuit: I found myself thinking about audience-performer relationships and noise scene politics in a new

way as the show came to a close. I later discussed the performance with other attendees, many of whom identify as non-male, and they agreed that the concert challenged gender roles, the nature of performance and other societal conceptions.

Pharmakon delivered a thought-provoking set. Her music certainly does not appeal to everyone, but for those interested in harsh and exploratory music, attending a Pharmakon show is an essential experience.

Pharmakon howls at an enchanted audience. She bridged the gap between music and performance art at the ’Sco on Feb. 27.

Evan Davies

On the Record with Steve Coleman, Saxophonist and Spontaneous Composer May 8, 2015 Steve Coleman is a saxophonist, composer and bandleader from Chicago’s South Side. Coleman’s complex style, which emphasizes polyrhythmic meter and unorthodox tonalities, falls outside the realm of categorization. The Review spoke to Coleman on the phone just before his May 5 show at the ’Sco about everything from playing in Cecil Taylor’s big band to parallels between music and language.

How did you develop your personal sound? Who are your early musical influences?

My early musical influences are things I heard on the radio at the time. Later on, as I got into improvising, I got into people like Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins — the kind of people that a lot of people listen to. I also listened to a lot of local players in my area, particularly one named Bucky Green. Those are my earliest influences.

You’ve traveled to Ghana, Cuba, India and other countries. How have those trips affected your musical outlook?

As a musician, traveling anywhere just broadens your outlook. That’s what I would say: It [changed] my point of view and how I look at the musical world.

It broadened my whole palette.

I was in Africa mainly to study the relationship between music and language. Communication — that’s the main reason I went.

I wanted to check out how [they] use music as a language. I’m not so much into music as entertainment but more as a means to communicate.

Can you tell me about your band, Five Elements?

The lineup is constantly changing — the “Five” doesn’t refer to the number of people in the group. [For the Oberlin gig], the lineup consists of people who I’ve been working with for a long time.

I’ve been working with the drummer and the bass player since the

Steve Coleman, a renowned saxophonist and improvisational composer, who played at the ’Sco with his band on May 5.

Effie Kline-Salaman

mid-’90s. The trumpet player’s been working with me since 2000 and the guitar player since 2007 or so. They’re not new members or anything like that. But [the lineup has] changed over time; a lot of it can be based on the ability of the musicians. Different musicians join paths for different reasons — sometimes you can’t hold a musician because you can’t pay them enough. [Laughs.]

There are polyrhythms and other complex elements in a lot of your music, so I’d imagine playing with people you’ve worked with for a long time must be helpful.

Yeah, that’s very important: which musicians you work with.

Everybody thinks it’s important, but it’s especially important with [Five Elements] because not just anybody can just jump in and play. It takes a lot of preparation, even though there’s a lot of spontaneous composition.

Can you tell me about this term spontaneous composition? You prefer this term to jazz in terms of categorization. Why is that?

A lot of people don’t like the term jazz, not just me. It doesn’t say anything, you know? Spontaneous composition, to me, says what the music is. When saying “jazz,” you could be talking about anything. People think so-called jazz consists of different things depending on who they are.

Somebody might think it’s Kenny G, somebody else might think it’s Louis Armstrong. It’s a term that musicians have never really liked.

Duke Ellington and [other musicians] never really liked the term because it doesn’t really mean anything.

Do you feel like the term spontaneous composition says more?

Well, yeah, because that’s what we’re doing. We’re composing spontaneously. So at least it’s descriptive. The term jazz is not even descriptive. People use it as a marketing term.

You’re a very prolific musician. Do any of your records stand out to you as particularly successful or unsuccessful?

Do you have favorites or least favorites?

Usually my favorite is whatever I did last. I’m always thinking about what I’m trying to do next.

Favorite is a hard word, though.

I’m more focused on my most recent work; I’m not focused on what happened 10 years ago or 20 years ago. There are projects that I think turned out okay, like The Sonic Language of Myth, but I’m not thinking about that; that was years ago.

Your most recent record was Synovial Joints. Can you talk about the half-waking vision you had that eventually led to the recording of this album?

This was a dream that I had in Jan. 2013 in Bahia, Brazil. The first part of the vision involved me working with percussionists from Bahia and Matanzas, Cuba.

The second part involved combining these sounds with instruments from Eurasia, particularly Western Europe — instruments more commonly found in an orchestra.

The idea was to compose using long rhythmic sentences, where I would create these long rhythmic phrases in counterpoint to other long phrases [in order] to create polyphonic and polyrhythmic

texture compositions. I believe that the basic melodic-rhythmic language of this tradition that I am a part of is unique. The basis of the rhythmic conception existed on the African continent but not in this exact form that we are utilizing today. The underlying principles of the harmonic ideas existed on the Eurasian continent. The melodic elements, although somewhat based on 12-tone equal temperament, are quite a departure from what had occurred in Eurasia or Africa in terms of contour, movement and vibe.

Together this all creates a very different use of color. The melodic and rhythmic language together create a totally different music. And the melodic and rhythmic language together imply very different harmonic textures — a kind of organic harmony that grows out of the melodic and rhythmic material. In this approach, the form of the rhythms and melodies dictate the harmony, not the other way around.

How did playing in big bands in New York influence you?

What was it like playing in Cecil Taylor’s big band?

Playing in big bands taught me discipline. Also, much of the music that I compose for large ensembles is influenced by my work in large ensembles. Playing gigs with Cecil Taylor’s large ensemble was a transformative experience for me. Just to get to work with Cecil was transformative. Mr. Taylor demonstrated to me how to express musical ideas using an oral tradition outside of writing things down on paper.

Interview by Danny Evans, Arts editor

Arts

The Oberlin Review, May 22, 2015

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music

TED Fellow Questions Sound Perception at AMAM Sam Rueckert Staff Writer Feb. 6, 2015 Multimedia artist Christine Sun Kim often shies away from communicating with the media. Signing to her interpreter, Denise Kahler, Kim explained the reasoning behind this.

According to Kim, journalists often box her in as simply a “deaf artist.”

Rather than being seen solely in this way, Kim should be seen as an artist who has come to work with sound in a unique, unconventional manner.

Hours before her performance and talk in the Allen Memorial Art Building on Feb. 2, Kim explained how she came to experiment with sound. “Sound was a sort of taboo subject” among her deaf friends, but she began to realize that “sound is everywhere” and that “there [are] a lot of social norms and power associated with sound.” A self-described “failed painter,” Kim, who said she previously felt “confined to a piece of paper,” discovered that using sound might be “a good vehicle to communicate her ideas and a good medium to reach a larger audience, as opposed to just the deaf community.”

Kim’s earlier work bridged the gap between sight and sound by using speakers to cause objects, such as strings and powdered chalk, to move.

She said that she “got bored quickly” and has moved on to making art she characterizes as notably different from her early work.

Enthusiastically gesturing toward Kahler, she shared a realization that led to this sea change.

“I’ve got this huge world out there of sound and music and spoken language and linguistic authority,” she said. Her current work on “unlearning sound etiquette,” she explained,

is a paradigm shift for her. “Structure and things are based off the hearing world. So we use things that already exist, that hearing people have created, and we use them to fit what I need them for,” she said. This paradigm shift she mentioned could be felt in her talk later that night.

From outside the room where Kim was to give the talk, a mass of students waited to be let in. Inside, ambient sounds could be heard. These sounds were indistinct but hinted at what was to come. When, at last, all of the attendees squeezed in, the room became quiet. She began to type to the audience with an iPad. The room remained silent for the whole introduction, except for the occasional laugh at Kim’s wit. She explained the collection of four sound files that she was to present, Fingertap Quartet, which employs her voice and another male voice.

The first sound file, she typed to the audience, was meant to be “a sound you like and think is good.” The following piece was the converse. The third sound file was meant to be “a sound you like but suspect might not be good.” The crowd chuckled at that and even more at the final caption, which was the converse of the third title. Before hitting play, Kim typed out a last couple of things, including that she insisted on using subwoofers for her and other deaf audience members and not to tell her if her sounds were distorted.

The sound files, whose textures Kim had produced with her voice and manipulated electronically, seemed to produce reactions in the audience that a non-deaf person might produce; however, the means of production were unique. “Like, Good” was a call-and-response of different “e” syllables between her and her sonic

partner, Jamie Stewart of California post-punk band Xiu Xiu. The audience, which seemed not to know what to expect, was clearly interested and listened intently. Kim’s recorded voice went through a series of “ee”s and “eh”s that gradually became more affected as the sound progressed. “No Like, No Good” began with chromatic note shifts that created a more dissonant feel. Grating, tearing, desperate and droning, this sound file opposed the first file’s title and content. Kim produced all of these textures with her voice and manipulated them electronically. “Like, No Good” included heavy breathing, slow-motion sounds and bomb dropping noises, creating a sexually charged sound. “No Like, Good” was consistent with its title. It elicited bodily reactions from audience members, with several concertgoers breathing along to the recording by the end of the piece.

Kim didn’t follow typical musical conventions, but the result was musical. Her music had a definite pulse, accentuated by her subwoofers. Audience members could be seen swaying along.

Kim’s pieces were expressive in a visceral sense. After showing her music, she presented other sound projects and visual art, which was just as unique as her music. She used four lines in her portrayals of musical staves instead of five because it correlates with the sign language symbol for musical staff. She also questioned the line between silence and sound with her drawing “The P Tree,” which shows a continuously subdividing pianissimo. Her talk was well-received by the students, almost all of whom stayed for the whole event despite a lack of seats and an oppressively hot room.

Conservatory senior Sivan SilverSwartz was a key force in bringing Kim to Oberlin. The day following Kim’s talk and performance, SilverSwartz explained why the Modern Music Guild decided to bring Kim to campus. “We often book … musicians, composers and artists who kind of fall through the cracks in terms of what the other official organizations bring [to campus],” he said. Silver-Swartz mentioned that he saw the event as bringing together art communities.

“I thought it was kind of a nice opportunity to sort of bridge the gap between … the studio art world and the music world, which seem often to be very separated,” he said. “People don’t go to each other’s events, so it seemed like a cool opportunity to get both communities [together].”

In reaction to Kim’s performance, Silver-Swartz recalled a moment when she flashed the word “empowerment” on the screen. “I think her art really is a lot about empowerment,” said Silver-Swartz, carefully adding that, although she said that her work was not overtly political in nature, “For many people, [Kim’s art] has po-

litical implications.”

One student who seemed particularly intrigued by the talk and performance was double-degree firstyear Mohit Dubey. Dubey, a Classical Guitar major in the Conservatory, also plans on majoring in Physics in the College. Dubey’s love of music and science has led to his interest in computational neuroscience. He said he is working to “get a computer to hear like the human brain.” Dubey said that he found Kim to be particularly interesting in terms of how “she’s kind of reinterpreting … what to think of as music and sound.” Some of the questions she raised resonated deeply with Dubey. “What does a dynamic mean? Can you ever achieve a true silence?” he asked. Dubey briefly explained that through an experience called “Hebbian learning,” our neurons “become tuned” as we hear things.

He continued to explain that his study of Hebbian learning pertains to Kim’s work. “She doesn’t have that experience,” he said. “Her experience of sound is mostly a visual and sensory experience.”

Artist Christine Sun Kim explores conventions of sound at a live musical art exhibition during her visit to the Allen Memorial Art Building on Feb. 2. A TED fellow whose work has been featured at the MoMA, Kim galvanized Studio Art and music majors alike during her refreshing performance.

Christine Walden

Warren, Adron Collaborate Throughout Respective Sets Tindal, Kronstadt Strive to Preserve Group Dynamic Danny Evans Arts Editor April 3, 2015

Johanna Warren and Adron distinguished themselves from the rest of the singer-songwriter crowd while remaining firmly planted in folk tradition with their show at Tank Hall the night of March 31. The atmosphere the two musicians set embodied this contradiction. They managed to establish a relaxed yet otherworldly mood that felt both similar to other folk shows and also entirely distinctive. Tank’s homey furnishing and a small but supportive audience helped foster the intimate feeling of the show, while the musicians’ spooky storytelling and softly burning incense created eerier vibes. More than location, incense or ghost stories, however, it was the songwriters’ music that played the paramount role in producing this contradictory — and highly effective — atmosphere. Both Warren and Adron offered songs that could be grouped into the folk genre but simultaneously defied expectations.

Warren, who opened the show with a lengthy and gripping solo set, connected with her audience as soon as she took the stage. Setting her guitar to an open tuning — the first of a number of unorthodox tunings she utilized throughout the show — the Portland, OR, native engaged the crowd with a laugh-inducing tidbit. “Oberlin was the only college that rejected me, and it was my first choice,” she said with a chuckle. Warren exuded charisma, and showgoers participated in the fun as she continued to banter.

However, she made it abundantly clear that her set wouldn’t be all laughs when she launched into her first song.

The track’s nostalgia-inducing chord progressions and haunting vocal melodies contributed to a somber tone. Most of Warren’s music stayed in moody territory, but her brooding sound never became boring or hackneyed. Complex, evocative lyrics (“My malaise was molten metal / Twisting into golden petals / Kiss me softly like a sparrow”) that often dealt with subjects uncommon to rock and folk lyricism served as a constant point of interest, as did Warren’s riffy guitar style and penchant for ending songs on unresolved chords. Whenever it seemed that she had fallen into a folky, downtempo routine, Warren made sure to keep the crowd guessing with alternate time signature rhythms, moments of startling dynamic contrast and deployment of extended guitar techniques.

Warren continued to tell amusing stories and jokes between gloomy songs without sounding forced or unnatural. At one point, she delved into a quirky tale of her and Adron’s long-standing friendship, shedding light on the important roles the two have played in each other’s lives since their early years. When Adron joined Warren for several collaborative songs, their friendship could be heard in the music. Their voices blended together expressively; it seemed as though collaboration was second nature for the pair.

Adron’s contributions to Warren’s songs, which included everything from mournful countermelodies to bird-calls, showed that she too was a force to be reckoned

with among singer-songwriters; her solo set confirmed this. Adron’s performance had a number of elements in common with Warren but stood out nonetheless. Like her collaborator, Adron had a cozy and informal stage presence; in a move that separated her from Warren, Adron retained an informal sensibility in her lyrics, which contained colloquial phrases and the occasional curse word in place of lofty vocabulary and intricate rhyme schemes. Adron, who hails from Atlanta, GA, emphasized her guitar ability throughout her set as Warren did, but her particular playing style was hers and hers alone. Containing elements of Brazilian guitar, traditional folk fingerpicking and even pop-country influences, Adron’s technical yet eloquent playing sounded unlike Warren’s, or anyone else’s. Though it was ethereal in a manner similar to Warren’s, Adron’s singing displayed an enormous vocal range that differentiated her from Warren. In general, Adron placed herself in the same world as Warren but nevertheless managed to leave a lasting impression.

Warren and Adron’s performances succeeded in separating the two from an arguably overcrowded genre without appearing artlessly experimental or disrespectful of folk tradition. The two musicians represented a model of what the modern singer-songwriter can be, displaying unique command over their instruments and an admirable disinterest in writing conventional songs.

Unlike many of their peers, Warren and Adron appeared unafraid of moving beyond the boundaries of traditional folk music.

Continued from page 25 were,” she said.

“OSlam is definitely going through growing pains because … last year … we played [our meetings and programming] by ear,” Claypole-White said. He added that, because of increased interest, OSlam “structure[d] its organization a bit more formally” this year.

“I am a really big believer that learning how to hear a poem and give good, smart, kind, constructive feedback makes you a better poet and better person,” Kronstadt said, which may explain why OSlam has decided to make the team more selective. “You can’t give good, compassionate feedback to really personal poetry in a room full of strangers,” she said.

Tindal’s hope for OSlam is not to “just have a presence on [Oberlin’s] campus but a purpose on campus of starting dialogue. I think poetry is a really great avenue and venue to do that.”

“Getting to work with other artists — that is the dream,” Kronstadt said. “When I work with the people I’ve worked with since last year, … when things are going well, we’re in the same headspace but still bringing different thoughts to that — but we’re thinking about the work so intensely that we’re inside of it and able to make it better, because it is the house that we live in.”

Arts

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The Oberlin Review, May 22, 2015

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McCrae Debuts Vulnerable Poetry Collection Vida Weisblum Arts Editor Sept. 12, 2014 In a charming office of the iconic Yellow House on Tuesday morning, Shane McCrae, Oberlin’s newest assistant professor of Creative Writing, asked if it would be all right if he ate string cheese during his interview. An unconventional breakfast, perhaps, but one expects nothing less from an addition to one of the distinctive departments on campus. His public introduction was no less engrossing: McCrae read selections from his most recent compilation of beautifully violent poetry, Forgiveness Forgiveness, in Hallock Auditorium on Sept.

10. The reading featured provocative poems pertaining to McCrae’s childhood with content centering around his experience of growing up in a household with two racist grandparents who had suppressed the fact that McCrae’s no-longerpresent father had been Black.

When asked where he is from, McCrae gives an in-depth history of the many places he considers himself to “be from.” Despite having been born in Portland, OR, McCrae’s years spent roaming the U.S. define much of his complex per-

sona and have contributed to the unique brand of poetry that he now brings to Oberlin. Spending most of his childhood in Texas, he attended a wide array of educational institutions, including, but not limited to, Chemeketa Community College, Linfield University, the University of Iowa and Harvard Law School. The poet had an initially inauspicious educational experience, which is perhaps why, despite his apparent intellectual impressiveness and haunting poetry, he remains so humble.

“I failed every class from the sixth grade up,” McCrae says unabashedly. Yet he remembers the exact date when he first fell in love with poetry: On Oct. 25, 1990, during an after-school special that featured Sylvia Plath’s famous poem “Lady Lazarus,” McCrae, a self-described “gothy teenager,” fell in love with the classic line, “Dying / Is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well.” From that moment, McCrae started writing.

He was inspired exclusively by the work of Plath, Linda Paston and Celestine Frost when he first began his career. He says that there is a musical aspect to his poetry and revealed an anxiety about falling away from his usual musical focus

and becoming more text-driven instead.

However, despite his fears about his stylistic shift, McCrae’s latest poems, which he describes as “upsetting,” are satisfyingly powerful, combining musical and rhythmic precision and raising relevant social questions about race.

Forgiveness Forgiveness features two sections, each titled “The Visible Boy,” and the book is described

by McCrae as an “Emmett Till sort of thing.” “The Visible Boy” tells the story of a character named Little Brown Koko, whom McCrae remembers from a racist children’s book that stood among photo albums on his grandfather’s bookshelf. In an excerpt offered by McCrae during the Sept. 10 reading, Little Brown Koko runs away from his abusive mother. McCrae comments with the piercingly resonant line: “It’s easy to find God when something is being taken from you.

Little Brown Koko finds God everywhere.” When asked if he considers writing poetry to be equivalent to meditation, he responds with a decisive “no.” McCrae describes his poetry as “pretty businesslike.” His writing process gets mean; due to the vulnerability required for his poetry, which is confessional in

Assistant Professor of Creative Writing Shane McCrae is the department’s newest addition. McCrae gave a reading of poems from his latest collection, Forgiveness Forgiveness, to a rapturous audience of students on Sept. 10 in Hallock Auditorium.

Courtesy of Shane McCrae

nature, he has struggled less with achieving a place of vulnerability than with his lack of a personal life.

McCrae initially wanted to work for an MFA program but decided to teach undergraduates because his own undergraduate experience was more significant than his graduate experience. “Graduate-level [teaching] is much more about facilitating,” he says. McCrae applied to Oberlin on a whim and was astonished when he became a semi-

finalist for the teaching position, which required a Skype interview.

He was again surprised when he was invited to Oberlin as a finalist; when he was offered the position he was “even more shocked.”

Struck by the level of student engagement, McCrae enjoys being surrounded by an abundance of writers on a campus so rich with history. Does he enjoy working at Oberlin? “I love it,” he said. “It’s not a very complicated answer.”

New Late-Night Talk Show Pokes Fun at Oberlin Life Daniel Cramer and Zoe Kushlefsky Feb. 20, 2015 The ’Sco stage might have been mistaken for the Cat in the Cream the night of Feb. 16, when a couch and armchairs created the space for Oberlin’s first late-night comedy talk show, Good Talk with Luke Taylor. Good Talk’s group of organizers made sure its first installment was more than just a comedy show, presenting their diverse debut to a full house of spectators. The show has been a continuing success since then; its season finale took place on May 19.

“The turnout tonight was so much more overwhelming than I could have possibly imagined,” said co-host and College senior Maya Sharma after the inaugural show.

Show writer and College senior Will Banfield said, “I was ecstatic with the number of people who showed up.” In the minutes before Taylor and Sharma took the stage, the room buzzed with excited energy. “This was a bigger crowd than we had expected. … I had no idea that people knew about it,” Banfield said. “This was just another Facebook event that people [were] getting, and then all of a sudden people were like, ‘I can’t wait!’”

As soon as College junior and Good Talk writer and technical director Reed McCoy clicked the clapperboard, the house band, Elijah and the Conservative Boys — composed of Conservatory sophomores Elijah Fox-Peck and Michael Ode and Conservatory junior Jake Abramson — began to play.

Sharma and Taylor entered the stage to wild applause, and the audience remained both responsive and warm throughout the show, despite some technical slip-ups. Taylor’s microphone fell off of his shirt a few times, but he managed to turn this repeated problem into a running joke with the audience.

Perhaps because of these minor difficulties, Taylor maintained an intimate and comfortable relationship with the audience. In return, the audience was sensitive to the fact that first performances are prone to such errors.

In traditional late-night style, the show opened with a monologue in which Taylor talked about his recent time studying abroad in Russia. As Taylor commented on notable aspects of the trip, Sharma pointed out biting similarities between his description of Russia and her observations of Oberlin, including the frigid weather and the fact that nobody smiles as they walk by each other.

Following the monologue, writer and College senior Sophie Zucker entered with illustrated posterboards, which she used to inform Taylor of what he had missed during his semester abroad. Sharma added quips of her own during each posterboard’s presentation. Complaints of The Feve’s changed happy hour policy resonated with older audience members, while speculations about the new stained glass store in town being a front for a drug cartel exemplified the Oberlin-centric tone of the show.

Double-degree sophomore Santino Stropoli, the first guest of the evening, played a ukulele solo. After his performance, Taylor sat down with him for an interview.

Setting jokes aside and adopting a more genuine tone, Taylor asked Stropoli questions that informed the audience about his music and talent. This segment demonstrated the educational importance of the show.

“We’re trying to really showcase the Oberlin community,” said Taylor. “Doing the interviews, … that’s the reason I did this.”

The show returned to humor and showcased the rest of the cast with a pre-recorded skit called “Oberlin Stunts” that was projected onto the back wall. From a shot of Zucker falling face first into a massive pile of snow, to writer and College junior Charlie Kaplowitz gallantly shouting on the silent fourth floor of Mudd library, to producer and College senior Taylor Greenthal satirically informing passersby that Beyoncé is not a feminist, this segment picked up the momentum of the show.

The next segment involved a DIY prize wheel, over which Taylor expressed immense pride. College junior Robb Pears was

chosen as the first candidate to spin the wheel because he helped construct it. The wheel included such prizes as “your name on a piece of paper,” “Luke calls your parents” and a horn blare. Pears won advice from Sharma, who dished out intentionally vague wisdom about studiousness. Next to spin the wheel was College senior Paul Miller Gamble, who won $15 in DeCafé goods, including several cans of tuna and a can of Chef Boyardee.

College senior Bronwen Schumacher of the Oberlin Apparel Collective then sat down for an interview with Taylor and Sharma. They discussed the origins of the clothing line and where Schumacher gets her fashion ideas. Several of Schumacher’s designs were projected on the back wall, ranging from a T-shirt with a design of all of the windows on Oberlin’s campus to a Mason jar that said, “Oberlin, 1833.” After the sneak peek at the Oberlin Apparel Collective designs, Taylor announced that he had some designs of his own to propose and projected

some funny, stereotypically “Oberlin” T-shirt designs. These included Greenthal posing as a “first day of school freshman” wearing Uggs and an Oberlin hoodie on the front of a shirt and a “last day of school senior” with a new hairstyle and alternative clothing on the back.

The show concluded with Elijah and the Conservative Boys playing an original tune while the show’s crew struck the stage. Taylor said he was hopeful about the show’s future. “I would love for it not to [end when I graduate], but I have no idea. We’re planning on doing like seven or eight shows before the semester ends. If people are interested, I think this is an amazing thing,” he said. If the first season is any indication, Good Talk will have a long future at Oberlin. When it comes down to it, the show works because of the people involved. Greenthal said, “Nothing like it existed before, and it was exciting to create something from scratch and work with people that I really like and respect.”

Double-Degree sophomore Santino Stropoli responds to questions after performing a ukulele solo. Santino guest-starred on the first episode of Good Talk with Luke Taylor, a comedic talk show that focuses on Oberlin affairs.

Eli Steiker-Ginzberg

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The Oberlin Review, May 22, 2015

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The Epicurean: ‘Steakhouse of Lies’ Dashes Hopes Matt Segall Columnist Feb. 17, 2015 I should have known better than to go to an “upscale” restaurant located in Crocker Park, a so-called “lifestyle center” and the go-to retail platform closest to Oberlin since the indoor mall was declared dead in 2008.

It was a Friday morning. I was plugging away at an art history assignment due in a matter of hours. Still, I managed to procrastinate on Facebook, where I discovered that Cleveland Restaurant Week was going to end the following night! Right away, I began researching my options. My assignment cried out, “Finish me,” but I neglected it in pursuit of crispy calamari, strip steak and chocolate soufflé.

In an ideal world, I would have been able to dedicate all night to the outing, but I had responsibilities back on campus at 9:30 p.m., so I limited our options to the west-side suburbs, which, unlike downtown, are not renowned for their dining selections. By then, I’d heard back from my dining companions, so we began to rank our preferences. The first choice

was booked all the way until 9 p.m. Maybe I should have given up at this point. After all, this whole plan was hatched as a desperate ploy for procrastination. But I went ahead and booked a table at our back-up: Hyde Park Prime Steakhouse.

Whoever designed the menu was a bit overambitious. As noted in previous columns, I am not a fan of large menus at upscale restaurants. Hyde Park is a first-degree offender on this charge. Lobster mashed potatoes, garlic whipped potatoes, potatoes Gruyère gratin, baked potato, fries; creamed spinach, spinach with mushrooms, garlic spinach. Can’t they just choose one of each and do it well? Even if the execution wouldn’t change with more limited offerings, it would have given me a bit more confidence. However, the dishes sounded tasty enough.

Service was strange. Our main server came by three times within the first 10 minutes of our meal to get our orders and encourage us to buy drinks. But after that, we never saw him again. In hospitality, there is a delicate balance between being attentive but not overbearing.

Our server hit both extremes — overbearing early on, then mysteriously nonexistent for

the rest of the evening. Subsequently, 10 other staff members served us during the evening, bringing our food and filling our glasses. This inefficiency is likely due to poor management.

One of too many managers came by to inform my companion that the kitchen had run out of the salmon that he had ordered. He awkwardly crouched next to our table and was overly apologetic. When asked where the mahi-mahi was coming from, he replied, “It’s a Hawaiian fish,” not so cleverly avoiding our obvious inquiry: From where was the product sourced?

Great food could have saved Hyde Park, but the food was not great. It was bad. Not “I paid $50; this should be good” bad. It was “I would rather be eating at The Feve” bad. The wedge salad included an entire head of brown-edged iceberg lettuce, chopped in half and covered in watery blue cheese. They could’ve offered a less gargantuan salad with better greens or maybe even offered a non-salad starter on the Restaurant Week menu, but that probably would have been too much to ask.

My “twin filets” were the scraps from the beef tenderloin, cleverly pressed together and wrapped in bacon to look like one steak. The meat was raw in the center, undercooked de-

spite my medium-rare request. The cut lacked significant beef flavor. I’m not even convinced it was USDA Choice grade, which is the lowest any high-end steakhouse should be serving. The bacon was thin and stringy, creating a tangled mess on my plate. My companion’s chicken Milanese still makes me chuckle. The breading was shiny with grease, a result of improper frying technique. The white wine lemon-caper sauce tasted like a melted popsicle.

Everything lacked balance and finesse. We were hopeful that they wouldn’t screw up the most classic dessert: chocolate cake. False. It was so dense the fork barely moved through it.

It was more like a mass of poorly-made fudge than a cake. They even had the nerve to top it with an unripe raspberry. We called it a “neutron star cake” because it was so dense and because we’re nerds.

Hyde Park Prime Steakhouse is a microcosm of Crocker Park as a whole. The lifestyle it tries to propagate, much like the food in the restaurant, is tacky and contrived. The table dividers, which were conspicuously high, were probably that way in order to keep diners from commiserating on the poor experience, organizing and staging a riot.

Mudd Library’s Special Collections and Letterpress Thrive Thanks to Vermue Jeremy Reynolds Staff Writer April 3, 2015 Between a row of blue lockers and the wall of windows that separate the hall from the sun deck on the fourth floor roof of Mudd library, Ed Vermue, Mudd’s Preservation librarian and Special Collections librarian, reclined against the back of his seat as he began to explain exactly what his positions entail.

“There’s hardly a typical day,” he said. As we spoke, he fiddled with a pair of reading glasses in his hands, squinting against the glare of sun through the windows and speaking with a slow, clear cadence, almost as if giving a lecture.

Even though his daily routine may be rather irregular, Vermue’s work, like that of a college professors, can be divided into two time periods: when academic classes are in session — the fall and spring semesters, along with Winter Term — and breaks. “I wear two hats,” Vermue said.

During the latter intervals, Vermue works primarily with a small group of students to preserve survival of the books in Oberlin’s circulating collection. Together, they work to repair and prevent damage to the aging books on the lower floors of the library so that future generations can continue to benefit from the large collection.

Most of his interactions with students, however, come through his work with the College’s Special Collections, which feature a constantly developing assortment of historical artifacts relating to the evolution of print media.

The fourth floor of Mudd houses everything from a facsimile of a beautifully illuminated Book of Hours to original copies of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and other anti-slavery literature to 20th-century Star Trek fanfiction — and that barely scratches the surface.

“It’s not just a rare book collection but a special collection on any subject,” Vermue said. Each manuscript tells its own story, and Vermue acts as a liaison between each artifact and the

teachers and students who peruse them during their sessions with him.

In addition to handling the manuscripts directly, Vermue has approached the Special Collections with a more “hands-on” attitude. In an effort to help students understand exactly how some of the materials in the collection were made, Vermue has developed a working knowledge of the skills necessary to replicate some of the historical processes involved in print culture. He runs workshops regularly at the Letterpress Studio on the second floor of Mudd, helping students navigate historic printing methods amid row upon row of typeface and ink rollers.

When I asked where he had picked up these skills, he smiled and said that he travels throughout the year to different conferences that spotlight book arts. “I sure didn’t learn it in library school,” he said, explaining that most of his education had been focused on using the digital information systems that libraries generally employ. Now, Vermue uses that training to renegotiate the relationship between the library’s physical collection and digital text. He helps students understand how book culture developed and that many of the most meaningful clues to the historical, economic and social context of a given text are firmly wrapped up in the physical attributes of the manuscripts in the collection.

“I don’t see my function as being a warehouse — I see Special Collections as having a laboratory purpose,” he said. Under his care, Special Collections has increasingly focused on book arts from the days when everything was made by hand. This focus on the interpretation of physical artifacts makes his job more like that of a museum curator than of a librarian. Vermue looks for reader marks, binding flaws, patterns of wear or even indications of censorship to tell the story of the vast range of books under his care.

I asked if there were any particularly popular areas in the collection; there aren’t. Or rather, according to Vermue, there are, but interest in the various niches on the fourth floor of Mudd tends to shift with students’

Special Collections and Preservation Librarian Ed Vermue opens a 15th-century Northern-Italian antiphonal manuscript. Along with his curatorial roles in the library, Vermue operates the Oberlin Letterpress Studio, where he runs special Winter Term and ExCo programs focused on book arts.

Simeon Deutsch

curricula. At the moment, the medieval manuscripts are drawing a large amount of interest, but so is the collection of documents and artifacts from the 20th century. “Telegrams aren’t as sexy to look at as a medieval manuscript,” he said, explaining that the growing interest in these more recent artifacts is linked to their casual nature. Vermue’s face brightened as he began to talk about the Special Collection’s small but growing collection of artifacts of visual culture like primitive moving image devices, which the College’s Art History, Cinema Studies and Comparative Literature departments have all developed a particular interest in recently.

The librarian works directly with professors to continue to build and develop the collection. Collectionbuilding occasionally involves purchasing additional manuscripts or accepting donations, but according to Vermue, the majority of his time is spent searching through existing sections of the collection and reinterpreting their potential applications. “Collection-building is a little

bit of a sleight of hand,” he said, going on to explain how the same material could be relevant to a range of different courses.

The fourth floor of Mudd offers limited space, and as Vermue continues to study the archives he said that he regularly finds texts that don’t belong in Special Collections; often they shouldn’t have been there in the first place. When this happens, he simply relocates the material to the main floors, and the object enters circulation with the rest of the library’s books. Rather than a comprehensive assortment of any particular literary epoch or genre, Vermue said that he is satisfied to collect only a sample — enough to teach with — of each kind of work. After we had finished talking, I stopped by the librarian’s office to check scheduling for the rest of the week; literally every surface was covered with one sort of text or another, all clamoring for attention.

A couple of days after our conversation, I watched him work with Professor of English Laura Baudot’s class on 18th-century British print culture.

While the students looked blearyeyed and possibly coffee-deprived at 9:30 a.m., Vermue moved energetically around the table in the Special Collections classroom, preparing each of the books that the students would be working with.

After Professor Baudot explained that the lab would be focused on the para-textual aspects of the selection of volumes, Vermue laid down the ground rules of working with older volumes. He talked about the texts as if they were human beings. “Don’t force them to do something that they don’t want to do,” he said. “You wouldn’t force a human leg above the head if it didn’t want to go there.”

Baudot chimed in from time to time to point out the relationship of the physical context to specific narrative attributes from the class, but she generally deferred to Vermue on any matters relating to para-textual elements. “You can always look this stuff up on the computer in the other room,” she said. And then, with a smile — “Or, you know, you can just ask Ed.”

Arts

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The Oberlin Review, May 22, 2015

performance

ODC Highlights Feminist Themes in “Only Way” Vida Weisblum Arts editor May 1, 2015 Thematically drawing on the suffragettes of the 1920s, Oberlin Dance Company’s “The Only Way” showcased contemporary dance, live music by members of the Oberlin Percussion Group and an original soundscape on May 1 and 2.

ODC is at its core a dance class. At the end of the semester, dancers perform a lengthy, complex piece in Hall Auditorium, much like a realworld contemporary dance company. ODC’s cast is typically hand-picked by the director based on dancing skill, ability to capture the director’s style, previous dance performance experience and special talents such as singing or playing instruments. Handman-Lopez noted that, given her cast’s strong adaptability and willingness to “plow through,” she wouldn’t have cast the show any differently given the chance. “Every single person is bringing something unique and interesting,” she said.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance Holly Handman-Lopez, the beloved member of Oberlin’s dance faculty who directed the show, has worked on multiple ODC shows, both as a director and collaborator. Handman-Lopez noted that she was excited to have added TIMARA elements and helped design the set. Lisa Yanofsky, OC ’13, served as assistant director.

When handed the responsibility of directing this year’s show, Handman-Lopez said that she originally “didn’t have a fire in [her] belly for a piece [she] wanted to make or a story [she] wanted to tell.” Eventually, inspiration for the show emerged out of the Percussion Ensemble’s wood block performance of a Fritz Hauser piece, which she said reminded her of the sounds of an antique telegraph machine, rain-

spattered window panes and galloping horses.

Handman-Lopez constructed the piece after discovering a New York writer’s story of the British suffragette Emily Davison, who threw herself before the King’s horse at the derby in 1913 and was tragically trampled to death.

Although companies in years past have typically presented one relatively short piece alongside unrelated performances, this year’s program was an impressively long 40-minute piece performed by the Company. Handman-Lopez talked about the complexity of the piece in comparison to earlier work. “This [was] the longest, largest piece I have ever made,” HandmanLopez said. “I went in knowing that it would be ambitious to create an evening-length piece.”

Last year during ODC, Handman-Lopez performed an intimate duet with Visiting Instructor in Dance Bobby Wesner, who also played an important role in leading the production. Her background in contemporary-style partnering played a major role in this year’s piece. Students were required to participate in an additional partnering class co-taught by Handman-Lopez and Wesner, in which they worked on weight-sharing and other partnering techniques. “Part of it is real skill-building and how to use the body and physics,” Handman-Lopez explained, adding that the dancers incorporated contact improvisation methods as part of their training.

She said that she has been excited to watch gravity and momentum come into play. In terms of partnering, Handman-Lopez said that the dancers combined contrasting techniques.

“I come from a more roly-poly place, and Bobby comes from a more balletic place,” Handman-Lopez said. “So we [had] a very broad range to work from.”

College senior and ODC performer Nick Schrier explained that the partnering is used

Jesse Wiener, OC ’14, and College first-year Frances Purcell perform a duet in Oberlin Dance Company’s “The Only Way.” The show, directed by Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance Holly Handman-Lopez, used partnering to communicate a narrative about suffragettes.

Mike Plotz

to convey feminist themes within the dance’s storyline, often communicating male power over women.

“A lot of [the partnering] is a lot more tumultuous,” Schrier said. “It involved a lot of male-female pairings with men really kind of roughing up the women. … It’s a lot of … women trying to achieve things and both men and women thwarting those efforts.”

After each partnering class, the Company would often take advantage of reserved dance lab space to develop new movement for the show. Schrier explained that the cast rehearsed in Warner Center from February to April for roughly three hours a day. Although HandmanLopez originally anticipated incorporating sections of choreography she had premade in

previous projects, the piece was made entirely of fresh choreography developed by the cast in addition to short dance phrases from Oberlin classes she has taught and that almost all of the show’s members have danced at one time or another.

Moving the piece from Warner to Hall Auditorium was relatively smooth yet time consuming, according to Schrier. “There [were] a lot of light cues, so it took about 20 hours during the weekend [of the show] to get through everything,” he said. For Handman-Lopez, the joy of putting the piece together was in the process rather than the product. “What interests me, what I’m good at,” she said, “is finding different ways for bodies to interact and the humanity of it.”

Contemporary Classical Ensemble ‘Adds Echoes’ to Finney Chapel Jeremy Reynolds Staff Writer March 6, 2015 One by one, the members of the Bang on a Can All-Stars added their voices to the sonic texture of Julia Wolfe’s “Believing,” their wordless humming contrasting sublimely with aggressively rhythmic instrumentals. Each voice was unique in timbre and register, but as the ensemble’s sound engineer Jamie McElhinney adjusted the balances between microphones, the AllStars’ voices blended together in an unearthly harmony that was both unsettling and profoundly beautiful. “Believing,” the second work in Feb. 28’s installment of the Artist Recital Series program, finished abruptly; the sudden silence in Finney Chapel was just as jarring

as the unusual construction of the music.

Formed in 1992, the Bang on a Can All-Stars deliberately blur the boundaries between different genres of music to stay on the cutting edge of musical innovation.

With elements of rock, jazz, experimental and world music, among other styles, the All-Stars are supporters of contemporary music; they regularly commission and perform new works composed specifically for their distinctive ensemble, which comprises of cellist Ashley Bathgate, bassist Robert Black, pianist Vicky Chow, percussionist David Cossin, electric guitarist Mark Stewart and clarinetist and saxophonist Ken Thomson.

The group opened with David Lang’s “Sunray.” The piece began with a delicate, gossamer texture

The Bang on a Can All-Stars treat their audience to a cohesive concoction of musical styles. The iconic collective returned to Finney Chapel on Feb. 28 for a lively performance.

Courtesy of Walter Novak

entirely in the treble register, as irregular rhythmic patterns flowed seamlessly into one another. There was no discernible melody. Instead, the All-Stars successively highlighted each member of the ensemble by incrementally adjusting their dynamics. At times, Chow’s piano playing seemed to ground the music, while at other times Stewart’s guitar could be heard most distinctly.

The stage was lit for the first part of the concert by warm red and gold spotlights. This contributed to the gentle fire of “Sunray.”

The piece gained energy and the All-Stars began to rapidly shift focus from instrument to instrument, conjuring a sound that maintained its balance while showcasing one performer at a time. As the musicians accelerated towards the finale, more and more of the ensemble played in unison, skillfully combining their energy into a single melodic pattern. As Cossin became more and more dynamic, his wild gestures both conveyed his enthusiasm for the music and kept the players in time before the piece ended with a final snap.

Concerning her piece, “Ridgeway,” acclaimed composer Kate Moore wrote, “The piece is a tribute to the journey going back to the point of one’s origin in life.

Life is about searching for identity and place.” The music evoked this search through extremely complex and irregular rhythmic patterns; it seemed to search for a comfortable meter, which it never quite found.

With expressions of fierce concentration, the All-Stars gamely fought through these difficult patterns, but in the end the piece lacked the laser-like precision of the other works on the program.

After Moore’s more aggressive composition, the spotlights changed to a cool blue, providing a visual indication of the more relaxed nature of the next several pieces. Michael Gordon’s “For Madeline” featured a light ostinato based on a major third in the piano line; Chow wove her repetitive figure with the rest of the All-Stars’ sound masterfully, always present, but never overshadowing more prominent melodic lines. Bathgate and Black played with a similar delicacy, their parallel glissandi on cello and bass introducing an instability to the work that contrasted with Thomson’s simple melody. Rather than crescendoing to a final burst like the works on the first half of the program, “For Madeline” faded out slowly, leaving only Thomson sustaining a soft note on the clarinet until even his sound died away.

Stewart acted as the spokesperson for the group throughout, introducing each work and commenting on the group’s goal as a contemporary ensemble. He said that Bang on a Can had played once before in Finney in the 1990s and that the group was excited to play at Oberlin again. “We’re happy to be here and add some echoes to this lovely hall,” he said.

“Horses of Instruction” by Steve Martland was certainly memo-

rable. Cossin set up an exuberant, mambo-esque beat in the drums before the ensemble introduced the principal melodic motifs. Thomson, who switched to saxophone for this work, bandied a cheerful tune back and forth with the rest of the ensemble, his excitement manifesting as he hopped up and down around the stage. If Martland’s music was a little too long or the final segment dragged out a touch too far, Stewart and Bathgate’s enthusiasm certainly made up for the music’s repetitiveness, their expressions flickering between serene happiness and amusement as they watched Thomson’s jubilant hopping.

After the spotlights switched back to a warmer tone, Bang on a Can revealed that they had saved the best for last. Though similar to “Sunray” in its delicate rhythmic patterns, Philip Glass’ “Closing” featured more straightforward figures, their cyclic nature allowing attendees to relax. With plaintive but gentle solos on both the guitar and piano, the All-Stars performed “Closing” with flawless technique and just the right amount of phrasing to keep the repetitious piece interesting without ruining its minimalistic aura. After finishing the work, the All-Stars waited with bowed heads as the audience took in the beauty of Glass’ writing for a moment before erupting into enthusiastic applause. Bang on a Can’s performance struck a balance between the cutting-edge and the familiar in a way that few, if any, other contemporary ensembles achieve.

The Oberlin Review, May 22, 2015

Arts

Page 31

performance

On the Record with Caroline Jackson-Smith Feb. 6, 2015 Over Winter Term, Caroline Jackson-Smith, professor of Africana Studies and Theater, directed Dessa Rose, a musical about slavery in the antebellum South. The plot follows a long line of politically and socially conscious plays that Jackson-Smith has put on at and outside of Oberlin.

The Review spoke with her about what audience members could expect from the production before it took place on February 5, 6, 7 and 8.

Why did you choose to put on Dessa Rose? Is there a particular reason why this year felt like the “right” year for it?

Well, that’s kind of ironic, because we actually picked [Dessa Rose] several years ago. The way we have to pick shows in the Theater department, we have to look over a few-year time period. … Also, because this was a musical, we wanted to make sure that we did it at a time when there would be good musical talent who wanted to be in the musical. But, why I picked it: I saw the original 10 years ago, and before that,

the novel had been one of my favorite novels. I had met Sherley Anne Williams in the ’80s before she wrote the novel, and she’s always been a favorite writer of mine. [Dessa Rose] was very significant to me because it was really a new way of telling a story about slavery … because it focused on young women who had created a rebellion [and] because it also looked at the partnership between a young Black woman and a young white woman.

Also, in the novel, there’s so much about love — sexy love, as a matter of fact! [Laughs.] The way that slavery has been stereotyped has often involved making African Americans look like victims and … [created] misunderstandings about how much rebellion activity took place. All of those things made me love the novel. So, when I saw the adaptation 10 years ago at Lincoln Center, I was really surprised that someone would’ve chosen it. And the music is beautiful. The adapters, Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty, are pretty famous musical theater writers; they wrote Once on This Island [and] Ragtime. I was really moved by the way they handled [Dessa Rose]. The music

Professor of Africana Studies and Theater Caroline Jackson-Smith directed a production of Dessa Rose, which came to fruition in Hall Auditorium.

Courtesy of John Seyfried

has always stayed with me, the story has always stayed with me, and I’m just so excited that we finally got to do it. It’s one of those projects that’s been on my mind for a long time.

With Dessa Rose being a musical based on a novel, did you find that the two sources came together to influence you, or was one more influential than the other? How did that affect your process?

Well, for one thing, I did insist that all the actors read the novel. It’s a rare opportunity to have a piece for stage that has other source material that gives you more information. … I would say that both the novel and the theater adaptation were hugely impactful for me. What’s interesting is that, in the adaptation, there are some critical changes that were made to … cut [the story] down to size. [In the adaptation], there’s more of an emphasis on the partnership between the two women; that’s a little bit more weighty in the stage adaptation than in the novel.

The other thing that’s really interesting is that Stephen Flaherty, who composed the music, did a lot of research into traditional Black music.

I appreciated that they were thoughtful in the adaptation to things that were important to me, like retaining the sense of what Africa meant to people, retaining the spirit of the unique AfricanAmerican culture that was created. The intention was [to create] traditional musical theater in a traditional format. So it’s a really interesting hybrid form. I think that [the adapters] succeeded in many ways for people that were outside that tradition. I think that they impacted me in different ways.

When I saw it at Lincoln, the lead, who played Dessa Rose, was a woman named LaChanze, who also won a Tony Award for The Color Purple, and she’s just a powerhouse performer. I just cry when I see this. I’ve joked, “I can’t cry through rehearsal all the time.” [Laughs.]

I guess this is the right musical for you to be putting on, then!

Going back to your first question, I guess I believe there’s a certain kind of universal “right-

ness,” a divine order, and I think that the students involved in this [and I] … kept asking ourselves all through the process, “What does this mean that we’re doing this now in this political climate?” In one of the pieces Lily White, who’s the dramaturg, wrote, she incorporated the term “Black lives matter” because when you see the story of slavery you understand the roots of all of the kinds of inequality and violence that continue to happen — the forms of racist stratifications. I’ve been really wanting people to see it. I think it really will frame the experience for people who don’t know this history in a very specific way.

I also think that this is a story of hope. It’s a story of allyship, which is a big question on campus. … It’s very difficult, but [it] produces changes if people hang in there with it — such an important subject right now: forms of rebellion.

What are the challenges associated with putting a play together during Winter Term? Are there any advantages?

It’s a total luxury. People aren’t divided in their attentions. What I was able to do was to establish a professional theater schedule. A professional theater schedule is 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day for six days a week, and that’s what we did.

It’s a real treat around here to focus on one thing for that long. And I must say that the ensemble who performed became so close.

The performers commented on several things.

One: It is a mixed-race ensemble; that’s the other reason I liked it for this environment — to give a lot of different actors opportunities.

One of the actors actually said at some point that they were never taught this material in high school and that their real education was beginning by doing this. They kept commenting on the fact that, since other people weren’t here, they felt freer to build their ensemble. So yeah, it’s actually a treat to do it [over Winter Term]. Usually you’re doing evenings, and everyone’s tired, and they have conflicts.

Interview by Danny Evans, Arts editor

My Miles Marries Jazz Standards, African-American Dance Liam McLean Staff Writer Oct. 10, 2014 Though he says he is no longer religious, trumpet player Kevin Louis, OC ’99, could not help but liken the Dance Diaspora concert My Miles: My Lullaby in Retrospect to the experience of going to church. The New Orleans native, who has produced more than 10 recordings since 1997 and embarked on multiple international tours, performed alongside other alumni and student musicians and the Dance Diaspora troupe in Warner Main on Oct. 11.

The show featured the music of jazz legend Miles Davis alongside vernacular African-American jazz dance. Both the auditory and physical mediums of the performance reflected the personal experiences of Sharpley and the performers themselves, often interweaving to create one unified storyline.

Professor Adenike Sharpley, artist-in-residence in the Africana Studies department and Dance Diaspora’s director, established the troupe in 1992 shortly after she began teaching at the College. The troupe’s mission statement expresses its goal to “maintain traditional West African dance forms and other African Diasporic forms by acknowledging the spirituality, philosophy and diversity of African culture and its global presence.” Exploring a diasporic heritage is fundamental to the troupe; both Louis and Sharpley said personal experiences are at the heart of this broader exploration.

“I always go back to [church] because

that’s what I was raised in,” Louis said.

“When you go to church, people go there looking for what they need. It’s a very personal thing.” His intention when performing My Miles, he said, was not to communicate any single message but to transmit an energy in which each spectator could find individual meaning.

For Sharpley, the entire production had personal significance; her family was especially passionate about jazz while she was growing up. The Cleveland native said in a press release that she only recently realized the effect that her early exposure to jazz had on her life. She told the story of how she found herself at work one day absent-mindedly humming a tune; former Afrikan Heritage House Director and Sharpley’s thencolleague Ralph Jones informed her that, unbeknownst to her, the song was “Flamenco Sketches” from Davis’ album Kind of Blue.

“When I was small, [jazz] was my lullaby music,” Sharpley said, pointing to a picture of her and her father while she reclined behind the counter of Ade’s Place, the local store she manages. “I know the tunes not by the names; I know them by the music. That’s why it’s personal for me.”

Sharpley said she decided to produce My Miles to communicate the importance of jazz within her family and the African-American community. She dedicated the show to her father, who she said was an enthusiastic jazz fan with a record collection that was the envy of Cleveland’s east side.

Sophie Umazi Mvurya, a College junior majoring in Law and Society, Politics and

Economics, has been a member of Dance Diaspora since her first year at Oberlin and performed in the show. She said the opportunity to interpret Sharpley’s musical memoirs through dance was the most exciting element of the production.

“We’re there to express that story from her perspective,” Mvurya said. She said this task requires connecting with Sharpley’s story on a personal level without losing the director’s original narrative intent. Mvurya went on to say that her relationship with her mother has been an emotional access point to her mentor’s memoirs as she strives to express them through dance.

Sharpley said that the dances she chose are not those typically associated with theatrical jazz choreography. “When I say jazz dance, I’m talking about the music that Black people do when they’re alone in their little juke-joints, in their little bars, and they’re dancing together,” Sharpley said.

She learned this style of dance from Margaret Christian, OC ’74, with whom Sharpley studied. According to Sharpley, vernacular dances, which are specific to particular Black communities, were central to the style.

Sharpley said that these dances often feature motifs that are repeated across the African diaspora and that can ultimately be traced to African continental heritage.

To Louis, this marriage of colloquial dance styles with jazz music was refreshing.

“I’m from New Orleans. That’s where the music is the dance music all the time,” he said.

“There was a period where jazz left the dance floor and became the sit-down-and-look-

at-it kind of music.” He was especially enthusiastic that Sharpley had choreographed certain musical selections, particularly “Concierto de Aranjuez” from Sketches of Spain, “My Funny Valentine” and “Half Nelson,” which he does not consider traditional dance songs.

In selecting music with Louis for the concert, Sharpley said that she looked for tunes that she personally connected to African diasporic genres, including funk, hip-hop and rap. She sought to balance solemn pieces, such as “My Funny Valentine,” with more lighthearted tunes. The latter are especially important to her because she believes her students can connect with them more easily.

This certainly proved true for the audience, who sat enraptured through the entirety of the performance, including each choreographed costume change.

“Trying to get emotion from young people is sometimes hard,” she said. In light of this issue, the troupe danced to more upbeat pieces, such as Davis’ “Right Off ” from his Jack Johnson album and selections from On the Corner, while Sharpley herself performed the final solo to “My Funny Valentine.” Che Gonzalez, OC ’96, provided the vocals for this jazz standard.

For Mvurya, one central element of the performance was the importance of forging and maintaining close relationships, like the familial connections that inspired the production.

“As human beings, we’re not meant to live alone. We’re meant to live together and form close relationships together.”

FRIDAY, MAY 22 Framework x LITTLE FEST 16 1/2 South Main Street (above Subway) 10–10:35 RQST 10:45–11:20 Siobhan Furnary 11:30–12:05 Larry Legget 12:15–12:50 Eppard 1–1:35 Special Guest, TBA 1:45–2:20 Elcy KILL ELI REVIVAL STAGE 17 1/2 West College Street (above Agave) 9:10–9:30 Mama Ska 9:40–10 Dark Image 10:10–10:30 Half 10:40–11:20 B B C America x Diocese 11:30–12:10 Timothy 12:20–1 Monaliarth

f

festivals throughout the year

little est IDOL HOUR

folk fest

filled a sunny Tappan Square with folk music from students and visiting groups on the first Saturday of May. Highlights of the Friday evening performances in the Cat in the Cream included cellist-cum-kazooist Rushad Eggleston and folk singer and children’s songwriter Kimya Dawson.

Little Fest Organizers

EXISTENTIAL ANIMALS

Movie +16 yr old

HUNTER ZEPEDA’s LASER SURGERY EVENT MEMORIAL STAGE 32 1/2 South Main Street (above Ottica) 9–9:20 Love Brunch 9:30–9:50 Slaves to the Pavement 10–10:30 L.A. Girls 10:40–11:10 Maladama 11:20–12 Machine Soul 12:10–12:50 woof

EXISTENTIAL ANIMALS ABSCISSOR

SPECIAL LATE NITER:

1–1:45

The Blood Pact

SATURDAY, MAY 23

9–9:20 9:30–9:50 10–10:20 10:30–11:10 11:20–12:00 12:10–12:50

SPECIAL LATE NITER:

1:00–1:45

Skeleton Zoo

MAGIC: THE GATHERING COLLECTIBLE TRADING CARD GAME STAGE 32 1/2 South Main Street (above Ottica) 9:10–9:30 Robin Chakra 9:40–10 Poppy Patica 10:10–10:30 Headmaster 10:40–11:20 Droop 11:30–12:10 D8ING 12:20–1 Swings

Jake Rivas: It’s not just a College thing. It’s not just a Con thing. It’s really music for music.

This weekend, Little Fest will enter its second year as Oberlin’s independent music and arts festival. Tickets to nighttime stages were sold in advance.

However, the more family-friendly daytime stage located at 87 East Lorain Street is open to all.

Photos courtesy of Tim Branscum

Oberlin jazz dance festival

attracted Oberlin swing and blues dancers with a weekend of dances and swing lessons with professional instructors. The Royal Roses, a jazz group from New Orleans, joined the Conservatory quintet Sultans of Swing to accompany the dances.

BLOOD PACT DRAMA SECTION

SPECIAL LATE NITER:

1:10–1:55

Jake Rivas: Last year’s Little Fest was way more spur-of-the-moment. I pretty much just announced it in Mudd and went to the five people I thought were the pioneers, or most influential people, and got them to sign on and after that it was kind of like a cascade. … By the end, it was like 40 people. And this year, we kind of had the reputation already. … So it kind of went the same way, where the first couple bands were the hardest — even though those were pretty easy — and after that, we actually turned people down. I think we had almost 60 submissions by the end.

We’re really just trying to do a good thing here.

We’re trying to make it like if you’re graduating and you like music and you have friends that are in a band, or the music scene has said anything to you — like for me, when I was a student, I used to really like to go to shows because they would make me less bummed. It’s really hard to be bummed if you’re at a jazz show and they’re playing hip-hop covers. It’s just fun.

Mark Moritz-Rabson: We really also wanted to make sure that College, Conservatory and community were all represented, because it tends to be pretty insular and sectioned off — that is, the music scene at Oberlin. It can be like people with specific, small circles tend to congregate and work within only those circles. But we have a lot of jazz-related kids and some classical and then a lot of the College bands, and also a couple bands with community members.

MEET THE PARENTS STAGE SWAMPHAUS 87 East Lorain Street 1:30–2 The Sunshine Scouts 2–2:20 Jess Banks 2:30–2:50 Sammy Mellman 3–3:20 Hayden Arp 3:30–4 Sedna’s not alone.

4:05–4:25 Primitive Streak 4:30–4:50 Boy Gemini 5–5:30 Bobby Weinbecker 5:40–6 Lucy Dacus TNDR LV3RS STAGE 148 North Main Street COFAXX Ron Slots Ummm whyouarei RYV Plexus

entered its 16th year as Oberlin’s weekend-long contra festival, drawing seasoned contra dancers from across the country. This year’s Romp featured bands Turnip the Beat and the innovative Great Bear Trio, joined by guest callers.

Mark Moritz-Rabson, College senior Jake Rivas, OC’14

SPECIAL LATE NITER:

1:10–1:55

dandelion romp

Sea Pups

INTRAMURAL SOFTBALL STAGE 17 1/2 West College Street (above Agave) 9–9:20 Sally Boy 9:30–9:50 Sidebitch 10–10:20 Beer Shits 10:30–11:10 Drama Section 11:20–12 Idol Hour 12:10–12:50 Növice

9–9:30 9:40–10:20 10:30–11 11:10–11:35 11:45–12:10 12:20–12:50

tr00 kvlt dj0ntson STAGE 118 B East Lorain Street Blacker Face Belial Abscissor Other Masquerades Existential Animals Space Funeral

Photos courtesy of Trish Finn Photos courtesy of Zoë Madonna

Photos courtesy Mark Moritz-Rabson

This Week Editor: Hazel Galloway

FRIDAY, MAY 22 Framework x LITTLE FEST 16 1/2 South Main Street (above Subway) 10–10:35 RQST 10:45–11:20 Siobhan Furnary 11:30–12:05 Larry Legget 12:15–12:50 Eppard 1–1:35 Special Guest, TBA 1:45–2:20 Elcy KILL ELI REVIVAL STAGE 17 1/2 West College Street (above Agave) 9:10–9:30 Mama Ska 9:40–10 Dark Image 10:10–10:30 Half 10:40–11:20 B B C America x Diocese 11:30–12:10 Timothy 12:20–1 Monaliarth

f

festivals throughout the year

little est IDOL HOUR

folk fest

filled a sunny Tappan Square with folk music from students and visiting groups on the first Saturday of May. Highlights of the Friday evening performances in the Cat in the Cream included cellist-cum-kazooist Rushad Eggleston and folk singer and children’s songwriter Kimya Dawson.

Little Fest Organizers

EXISTENTIAL ANIMALS

Movie +16 yr old

HUNTER ZEPEDA’s LASER SURGERY EVENT MEMORIAL STAGE 32 1/2 South Main Street (above Ottica) 9–9:20 Love Brunch 9:30–9:50 Slaves to the Pavement 10–10:30 L.A. Girls 10:40–11:10 Maladama 11:20–12 Machine Soul 12:10–12:50 woof

EXISTENTIAL ANIMALS ABSCISSOR

SPECIAL LATE NITER:

1–1:45

The Blood Pact

SATURDAY, MAY 23

9–9:20 9:30–9:50 10–10:20 10:30–11:10 11:20–12:00 12:10–12:50

SPECIAL LATE NITER:

1:00–1:45

Skeleton Zoo

MAGIC: THE GATHERING COLLECTIBLE TRADING CARD GAME STAGE 32 1/2 South Main Street (above Ottica) 9:10–9:30 Robin Chakra 9:40–10 Poppy Patica 10:10–10:30 Headmaster 10:40–11:20 Droop 11:30–12:10 D8ING 12:20–1 Swings

Jake Rivas: It’s not just a College thing. It’s not just a Con thing. It’s really music for music.

This weekend, Little Fest will enter its second year as Oberlin’s independent music and arts festival. Tickets to nighttime stages were sold in advance.

However, the more family-friendly daytime stage located at 87 East Lorain Street is open to all.

Photos courtesy of Tim Branscum

Oberlin jazz dance festival

attracted Oberlin swing and blues dancers with a weekend of dances and swing lessons with professional instructors. The Royal Roses, a jazz group from New Orleans, joined the Conservatory quintet Sultans of Swing to accompany the dances.

BLOOD PACT DRAMA SECTION

SPECIAL LATE NITER:

1:10–1:55

Jake Rivas: Last year’s Little Fest was way more spur-of-the-moment. I pretty much just announced it in Mudd and went to the five people I thought were the pioneers, or most influential people, and got them to sign on and after that it was kind of like a cascade. … By the end, it was like 40 people. And this year, we kind of had the reputation already. … So it kind of went the same way, where the first couple bands were the hardest — even though those were pretty easy — and after that, we actually turned people down. I think we had almost 60 submissions by the end.

We’re really just trying to do a good thing here.

We’re trying to make it like if you’re graduating and you like music and you have friends that are in a band, or the music scene has said anything to you — like for me, when I was a student, I used to really like to go to shows because they would make me less bummed. It’s really hard to be bummed if you’re at a jazz show and they’re playing hip-hop covers. It’s just fun.

Mark Moritz-Rabson: We really also wanted to make sure that College, Conservatory and community were all represented, because it tends to be pretty insular and sectioned off — that is, the music scene at Oberlin. It can be like people with specific, small circles tend to congregate and work within only those circles. But we have a lot of jazz-related kids and some classical and then a lot of the College bands, and also a couple bands with community members.

MEET THE PARENTS STAGE SWAMPHAUS 87 East Lorain Street 1:30–2 The Sunshine Scouts 2–2:20 Jess Banks 2:30–2:50 Sammy Mellman 3–3:20 Hayden Arp 3:30–4 Sedna’s not alone.

4:05–4:25 Primitive Streak 4:30–4:50 Boy Gemini 5–5:30 Bobby Weinbecker 5:40–6 Lucy Dacus TNDR LV3RS STAGE 148 North Main Street COFAXX Ron Slots Ummm whyouarei RYV Plexus

entered its 16th year as Oberlin’s weekend-long contra festival, drawing seasoned contra dancers from across the country. This year’s Romp featured bands Turnip the Beat and the innovative Great Bear Trio, joined by guest callers.

Mark Moritz-Rabson, College senior Jake Rivas, OC’14

SPECIAL LATE NITER:

1:10–1:55

dandelion romp

Sea Pups

INTRAMURAL SOFTBALL STAGE 17 1/2 West College Street (above Agave) 9–9:20 Sally Boy 9:30–9:50 Sidebitch 10–10:20 Beer Shits 10:30–11:10 Drama Section 11:20–12 Idol Hour 12:10–12:50 Növice

9–9:30 9:40–10:20 10:30–11 11:10–11:35 11:45–12:10 12:20–12:50

tr00 kvlt dj0ntson STAGE 118 B East Lorain Street Blacker Face Belial Abscissor Other Masquerades Existential Animals Space Funeral

Photos courtesy of Trish Finn Photos courtesy of Zoë Madonna

Photos courtesy Mark Moritz-Rabson

This Week Editor: Hazel Galloway

Sports

Page 34

The Oberlin Review, May 22,, 2015

features

TPAC Revises Transgender Inclusion Policy Tyler Sloan Sports Editor April 17, 2015 The Transgender Participatory Advisory Committee and the Multicultural Resource Center partnered to host a TPAC forum on Monday, April 13 in Wilder Hall to discuss the latest draft of the “Guidelines for Inclusion and Respectful Treatment of Intercollegiate Transgender StudentAthletes.” The policy adheres to NCAA guidelines but also provides additional resources in the hopes of improving accessibility and institutional support for transgender student-athletes.

The NCAA addressed transgender student-athlete participation for the first time in 2011 with the official release of its policies in the publication “NCAA Inclusion of Transgender Student-Athletes.” Following the NCAA’s release of its guidelines, the Club Sports Trans Policy created TPAC to oversee the policy’s content and application at Oberlin.

Since then, TPAC members and faculty have collaborated to address how the NCAA’s provisions affect transgender student-athletes and to evaluate how to administer stron-

ger support systems and advocacy within the NCAA’s strictly regulated guidelines. College sophomore Augie Blackman said they believe these policies can be discouraging for younger trans athletes.

“Trans athletes aren’t particularly encouraged to participate in sports in the first place,” said Blackman, who co-led TPAC’s forum with College senior Aran Shultz this week. “The reason I joined this committee was because I grew up playing soccer, and I’m wondering, ‘If I had a different experience growing up — a mixed-gender team or a team that had honored my gender — would I still be playing soccer now?’”

TPAC’s next step is to have the latest draft of its guidelines approved by the General Faculty. The group has made several major revisions since the General Faculty last approved the policy guidelines in April 2014, including updating the resource list, clarifying the appeals process, editing definitions of cisgender and transgender and rewording several paragraphs in response to student concern or to improve clarity. Director of Recreation and Club Sports Betsy Bruce said that she hopes these revisions will yield

more assistance to incoming transgender student-athletes who may not understand the NCAA’s policies.

“We really didn’t have a complex process for how a student was supposed to self-identify and get through the process,” said Bruce, who has worked closely with the Committee to continually improve the guidelines’ language. “We’ve really tried to clarify that.”

In a further attempt to make the NCAA’s language more accessible, Blackman and Schultz navigated the complex and often medicalized policies with those attending the forum. The duo highlighted language alterations in Oberlin’s guidelines for intercollegiate transgender studentathletes, which initially used much of the language from policies at Bates College and Grinnell College.

“What we’re doing right now is working on revisions for the second version of the policy,” said Schultz, who has been working with TPAC since last summer. “The first version was mostly lifted from other schools’ policies and was very basic. So this is the revamping of the policy, listening to more students and seeing what their opinion is on the policy and how

we can make it better.”

Intercollegiate athletics, unlike club and intramural sports teams, are governed by the NCAA. This, along with other factors, may help explain the higher level of participation of transgender student-athletes in club sports than at the varsity level at Oberlin. Vice President and Dean of Students Eric Est es said that in recent years he has seen the NCAA make progress but believes there is still a long road ahead.

“There is greater flexibility in the club sports realm than in varsity athletics,” said Estes, who has worked with TPAC by connecting the Committee with faculty members that have the potential to aid the committee. “I think the NCAA has shown some real progress over the last five years or so, which is hopeful. But progress has also been the result of courageous work by student-athletes themselves like Kye Allums, who spoke on campus last year. My hope would be that we can develop a policy that creates as much accessibility and support as possible.”

As recent progress has been made in improving the accessibility of athletics to transgender student-athletes,

IN THE LOCKER ROOM

Track and Field

Feb. 6, 2015

— how is the snow treating you?

MN: Man, that first week [of January] was brutal. I remember as soon as I walked outside the airport doors, I was like, “Oh, I don’t know if I can do this.” But I mean, you learn that you can’t really control it, so it is what it is, but I don’t like it.

AR: I’m from Eugene, OR, so it doesn’t snow, but it gets to be 24 degrees and clear. Or it’s 40 degrees and raining. So I’d rather have it be cold and snow everywhere. It’s pretty.

The Review sat down with women’s track and field rookies Ana Richardson and Monique Newton to discuss their early success, transitioning from West Coast to Ohio weather, preseason and more.

You are both first-years playing a varsity sport in college for the first time. Has this always been an aspiration of yours, or did you decide to join track after arriving at Oberlin?

Monique Newton: We were both recruited, so we were expecting to come to be on the track team. It’s weird meeting some people who weren’t recruited and just do it because they love it. I’ve always done track, so I can’t imagine not doing track.

Ana Richardson: I can’t imagine just having school — it’s crazy.

How does the commitment of Oberlin’s track and field team compare to your high school team?

MN: It’s a lot harder, a lot more time put in. Those first two weeks — I don’t know if they were trying to break us. I don’t know what they were trying to do, but I’ve never worked harder. I’ve never felt so tired in my life, but you get used to it, and you kind of get used to college in general.

AR: For me, my high school time commitment was the same, but that was only because I was the only thrower. Also, my coach was willing to put in time outside. So the time was the same, but the workouts were not the same. So I’ve definitely brought my athletic level up by a ton since I’ve been here.

Why were those first two weeks so

other student organizations have begun to organize safe spaces for trans people in Oberlin’s athletic facilities.

For example, Student Senate’s Student Health Working Group piloted a Women and Trans Hour at South gym on Saturday, April 4.

In an email sent to the student body, Student Senate said that the purpose of the event was to “help determine the level of interest in establishing a permanent safe space hour at South gym for Women and Trans folx.” College sophomore Dana Kurzer-Yashin said that the safe space was set aside for women and trans people because, in a very body-conscious place, these two groups might appreciate the ability to have a space where they don’t have to worry about one more level of body-awareness.

“The gym is a super body-conscious place, so we wanted to try this to create some kind of space for women and trans folx,” said Kurzer-Yashin, who hosted Women and Trans Hour at South gym. “I, as a cis woman, don’t think it’s my position to push for trans hours, but of course I support those efforts. If, going forward, trans folx want to have their own hours, we would definitely support that.”

Ana Richardson (left) and Monique Newton bad? What did you have to do?

AR: We hit the ground running.

MN: We just did so many different things at so many different practices. Just a bunch of running, and then you’re not done, and you have to do something else. Plus, the first two weeks we weren’t really in the best of shape. It was just bad.

AR: [Coach Hepp] gave us this packet to do over the summer, and I was like, “This is ridiculous; I’m not going to do this all.” Then I got here, and basically he expected you to be able to do the stuff. The first day, we did sprint suicides, and we were out of shape and had just done plyometrics before that. Then he would teach us to throw weight after we ran, but we made it through.

Did you decide to go to Oberlin because of track and field or was it a combination of athletics and academics?

AR: It was really Coach Hepp. We were both recruited D-I. We could have gone D-I if we wanted to, but Coach Hepp really stressed our

education and how important that was. So really, I don’t think I came to Oberlin for track. I was recruited and found out about Oberlin through track, so that was really cool, but I didn’t come here just to do track.

MN: Out of all the schools that were looking at me for track, academically, this was the best. And out of all the schools I got accepted to, academically, this was the best. So it was always like I was going to a really good school academically, and I get to do track.

You have both already been honored by the NCAC with Athlete of the Week recognition. Can you tell us what this success means to you so early in your collegiate career?

MN: It means I’m on a good track and starting off strong. Especially working as hard as we have, it means we are getting results, and it’s worth it. It’s nice because if I was throwing the same as I had been in high school, I would have been like, “What the heck? I’m working so much harder now,” so it’s nice to be

getting better.

AR: We both [set personal records] the first time we threw, which was really nice.

Do you have any specific goals for the rest of the season?

MN: Well, I made it to nationals, so hopefully I do well at nationals.

AR: And she has the school record by like four feet.

MN: That’s the goal. Just keep getting better. I really hope I PR again and that wasn’t the furthest I throw this year.

AR: Mine is the same. In weight throw, I’ve been getting better and better, but I was hoping to at least get second in conference. I think I’m ranked third right now, but I have to get to 15 meters, which is a couple more feet. I know I can do it. And hopefully, not this year, but next indoor season, I can make it to nationals in weight. I just want to do well in conference coming into the spring season.

You’re both from the West Coast

What have been your high and low points of the season so far?

MN: High point: First meet of the year, kicking it and doing great. Low point: A couple of weeks ago, I got hit with a weight and hurt my butt.

Deep, deep bruise. So I missed practice for a week and a half and didn’t get to go to any of the meets over Winter Term. Last week was the first week I started practicing again. I feel really good this week. I’ve never been injured and had to sit out for that long, so it’s weird.

AR: My low point was definitely the first week I was here. There was a point where I was like, “Do I really need to do track?” Of course I was being petty, but I was way out of shape and had anxiety about going to practice because I was so tired all of the time. I didn’t do well on my first biology test because I was just so tired and didn’t know how to study.

Right now, I’m in a transition period in weight, and I feel like I’m going to be able to do a lot better. So my high point is just progressing and feeling more comfortable, working harder and doing better. I’ve just become a better athlete overall, so it’s not a specific high point.

Interview by Tyler Sloan, Sports editor Photo by Grace Barlow

Sports

The Oberlin Review, May 22, 2015

Page 35

features

Cruz Leads Young Yeomen Receiving Corps Taylor Swift Nov. 7, 2014

With a roster of 22 first-years and a slew of season-ending injuries across all positions, the football team struggled to produce winning results last fall, finishing its season with a 2–8 overall record.

Sophomore wide receiver Justin Cruz’s performance, however, has never wavered.

Coming off of his first year with a total of 19 catches and 173 yards, the Pleasanton, CA, native made leaps and bounds in his second season. At the conclusion of his 2014 campaign, Cruz had recorded 64 catches and 828 receiving yards with a season high of 14 catches and 242 receiving yards in the Yeomen’s 37–9 victory over the Allegheny College Gators. Both statistics earned him a place in the record books, breaking Ricky Valenzuela’s, OC ‘02, previous school record of 239 yards while also tying the record for catches in a single game.

This stellar performance earned Cruz the titles of D3football.com’s Team of the Week and NCAC Offensive Player of the Week.

Cruz attributes the majority of his growth to the support of his teammates and coaches. Although he began his football career as a running back in high school, Cruz’s impressive speed made him an obvious choice to excel in the short, quick pass routes required of a wide receiver when he arrived at Oberlin.

“Coach [Adam Sopkovich], the wide receivers’ coach, has done a

really good job of developing me as a player and making me more of an actual wide receiver,” Cruz said. “The players around me have also done really well this season, which has given me a lot more opportunities.”

Cruz’s standout performance this season can be partly attributed to his strong relationship with junior captain and quarterback Lucas Poggiali. Poggiali sees Cruz’s performance as integral to his and the team’s success.

“[Cruz] is such a go-to guy on the field, and it makes my job a lot easier having good playmakers around me,” Poggiali said. “We have such a young group of receivers — seven of them — and he’s been such a leader out there as one of the oldest ones.”

Standing at 5 feet 9 inches, Cruz said that he has always used his size as motivation to get better and be able to compete with bigger opponents.

Head Coach Jay Anderson, however, views size as irrelevant given the

amount of talent and skill in Cruz’s performance.

“At this level and any level, it’s not about size; it’s about ability,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how big you are or how small you are; it’s ‘Can you play?,’ and he can play.”

Despite being an underclassman, Cruz has proven himself to be a leader for his teammates both on and off the field. As a Politics major, he has a dedication to balancing both academics and football that makes him an exemplary student-

Sophomore wide receiver Justin Cruz sprints down the field during a game against the College of Wooster Fighting Scots last fall. Cruz holds the Oberlin record for touchdowns in a single season, 11, and ended his 2014 campaign with 64 catches and 828 receiving yards. He was named to the NCAC Second Team for his accomplishments this year.

Courtesy of OC Athletics

Quidditch Hosts First-Ever Home Game Tyler Sloan Sports Editor April 24, 2015 Ten points for Oberlin! Quidditch was officially named a club sport this spring in a move reflecting the growing number of participants on campus. The roster now has upwards of 20 people, practices up to four times a week and participates in regional competitions. As a member of the national organization U.S. Quidditch, Oberlin’s chapter functions as an allgender-inclusive team.

The program’s initiation started off rocky. At times, there were not enough players to field a full team of seven, there was limited funding to attend events, and Oberlin’s team only held intra-team scrimmages because it was not ready to play other schools. Fast-forward a few years, and the quidditch team now has a full-fledged budget and travels to events as far away as West Virginia. College senior Ethan Schmitt has seen the team through this evolution, including when the club completely ceased to exist for two years.

“Quidditch at Oberlin was started by a group of upperclassmen when I was a freshman three years ago,” said Schmitt, who has been with the team since its inception in 2011. “They decided it would be really fun, and they thought, ‘Well, we’re nerds, so why don’t we have a quidditch team?’ It was really popular right off the bat. There was a bit of a bumpy road for about two years, but this year it has really come in force.”

For those who have ever read the Harry Potter series or seen the movies, imagining a real-life reenactment of the magical sport can be difficult, if not altogether impossible. But in reality, the game is fairly straightforward and involves all the same positions as it does at Hogwarts — including the golden snitch, played by a neutral person who tries to avoid both teams’ seekers, making it much easier to avoid acci-

dentally swallowing it in a heated game. College firstyear Rachel Dan said that quidditch can be strenuous and that all positions require a high level of fitness.

“People outside of quidditch see it as that silly nerd sport that people who can’t play sports do because they don’t know how to be athletic,” said Dan, who joined the quidditch team last semester after her friend suggested she attend practice. “But really, they’d be extremely surprised how physically demanding it can be and how much strategy is involved.

It’s like basketball and rugby had a baby, made it 10 times harder and added dodgeball.”

Despite the “dorky” reputation that quidditch has, many members of the team vouched for the aggressive nature of the contact sport. Although no one will be plummeting hundreds of feet toward the ground off their broomstick necessitating a Hermione Granger-style rescue, there is still plenty of room for injury — especially as athletes try to run with a broomstick between their legs. College sophomore Maya Martin dismissed the idea of quidditch being less demanding than other sports.

“It’s a full-contact sport,” Martin said. “People think we’re a bunch of nerds trying to play sports, but really, we practice at least three times a week for an hour and a half, and there’s lots of tackling.”

Overall, many members of the team expressed that playing quidditch has provided a sense of belonging and family, much like being a member of a house.

Martin explained that many people on the team often felt uncomfortable when participating in sports, but quidditch has provided a productive and safe outlet.

“There’s this feeling that everyone takes you seriously as an athlete and as a player,” Martin said. “As someone who hasn’t done a lot of sports previously, that’s been something that has been hard for me in the past. Whenever I do want to play sports, people are like, ‘You’re female presenting, or you’re not very athletic, so we’re not going to take you seriously,’ which isn’t true when you play quidditch.”

athlete. Leading by example, he has helped instill a similar drive in the younger players, such as first-year running back Khalil Rivers. “[Cruz] told me early on [that] sometimes you have to sacrifice fun if you want to have success on the field,” Rivers said. “He showed me what it takes to be successful in the classroom and how much I have to study in order to feel prepared. He might not be the most vocal leader, but his actions speak volumes.”

Coach Anderson agreed with Rivers and noted that Cruz’s strongest assets are his character and dedication.

“I think his biggest strength is that he cares,” Anderson said. “I watch him interact with everyone on our team and on campus, and he’s able to integrate football and walk across campus by being courteous to any and everyone he meets. He’s just a good person. As anyone else as young as he is, he has to continue to grow and get a better understanding of the game; he has to get stronger and he has to get faster, but he’s on the right path.”

Late in the season, Cruz set the single-season record for touchdowns by tallying 11. The record was previously held by Jay Greeley in 1974 with 10 touchdowns. For his efforts, Cruz was named to the AllNCAC Second Team.

Looking ahead, Cruz will look to continue his record-breaking career for the Yeomen this fall in the team’s home opener against The College at Brockport in September.

Yeowomen Drop Season Finale Against Kenyon Continued from page 36 of the team were essential leaders for the Yeowomen — with Weiss and Frost co-captaining the squad — and sophomore forward Taylor French said the trio would be sorely missed this fall.

“My class has been playing with them for the last two years, and we’ve gotten really close, which allowed us to respect them as leaders, teammates and friends,” French said. “That mutual respect allowed them to really lead us effectively. We always played for each other, and that went both ways. We wanted them to go out with a good season.”

Just two years ago, the Yeowomen won only a single game. For the seniors, this season was an ideal parting gift after coming so far.

Frost, reflecting on the team’s growth from her first to final year, said that the improvement was a result of increased intensity both on and off the field.

“I think the atmosphere at practice was a lot more intense than it’s been in my past three years. I think we all enjoyed being there and working hard for each other, which was really important,” she said. “[Head Coach Dan Palmer] did a really good job of working with what he had and pushing us to be better players. I think everybody improved this season.”

Palmer, who now has a 14–22 record at Oberlin after his second year, said that the program has made major strides and echoed Frost’s praise for the team. “[The team] worked incredibly hard and really bought into the things that we asked them to do,” Palmer said. “The returning players made huge strides from where they were last year, and we had some enthusiastic and talented freshmen that made big contributions as well. The team chemistry was also very good. So it was the right set of circumstances that came together well for us, despite the injuries.”

The Yeowomen will look to add more talented incoming players in pursuit of an NCAC title to their already young roster.

“We are very young and enthusiastic,” said Palmer. “The future is bright.”

Sports

Page 36

The Oberlin Review, May 22, 2015

fall sports

Arthur, Lehmann, Neal Earn All-American Accolades Tyler Sloan and Nate Levinson Sports Editors Dec. 5, 2014 The women’s cross country team, accompanied by Yeomen juniors Geno Arthur and Josh Urso, concluded its historic season at the 2014 NCAA Championship on Saturday, Nov. 22, placing seventh in the nation.

Seniors Emma Lehmann and Kyle Neal were trailblazers in the women’s race, finishing in times of 21 minutes, 55.9 seconds and 22:7.8 to take ninth and 14th places respectively. Unfavorable weather, however, tore up the winding

course and made the race all the more difficult for the runners.

“It’s just such a different race than any other just because of the size not just of the field but also the spectators — it’s just so many people,” said Neal. “On Saturday, it was super slippery, so the conditions were really bad. It was a lot of having to focus on not completely wiping out when you run around turns. It’s an odd course because it’s kind of like a maze.

Neal climbed the ranks to improve upon her 28th-place finish in 2013, coming in 14th place this season. Lehmann also made strides in their final competition for Oberlin, moving from 11th

Senior Emma Lehmann outkicks their opponents at a race earlier this season. Lehmann earned an All-American title for their ninth-place place finish in the 2014 NCAA Championships on Saturday, Nov. 22, helping lead cross country to seventh place overall.

Courtesy of Dale Preston

to 9th place in the 2014 competition. Neal and Lehmann’s fast finishes earned them All-American honors for the second year in a row.

Head Coach Ray Appenheimer applauded the senior duo for their tenacity during trying conditions.

“It’s the kind of race where everyone is fit,” Appenheimer said. “These are the best teams and the best runners in the nation, and it always comes down to who handles that moment the best. Having a group of women there who have been there four years in a row gave a tremendous advantage, and I think it showed up on that day.”

Senior classmates Sarah Jane Kerwin, Carey Lyons and Erica Morelli also made the trip to Mason, Ohio for the race. Coming in a little over 30 seconds behind Neal, Kerwin just missed the cut for All-American honors with a time of 22:41.9, earning her 46th place.

Recovering from a slip earlier in the course, Lyons was not far behind Kerwin, pushing through to finish in 86th place with a time of 23:8.7. Morelli rounded out the top five Yeowomen runners, coming in at 163rd place with a time of 23:40.5.

“Emma’s race was just tremendous,” Appenheimer said. “Sarah Jane was so close to AllAmerican. Carey, who fell during the race, which would destroy so many runners psychologically, got up and went on and passed about 100 people in the last mile or two of the race. I’m just so proud of all of them.”

Lehmann, a four-time veteran of the Division III NCAA championship race, said this competition bore similarities to those of years past.

“It was pretty similar to last year’s race,” they said. “I kind of just tried to stay with the front few girls. I don’t know why, but I always get stranded by myself in some place where there is no one anywhere around me, and that happened again this year. Overall, it went pretty well I think.”

Meanwhile, just hours before the Yeowomen hit the course, Geno Arthur and Josh Urso competed for the Yeomen. Arthur jumped more than 90 places when he finished at 19th place this year, compared to his finish in 2013 at the 111th spot.

Arthur’s time of 24:29.22 in the 8K race makes him one of only three male runners in school history to place in the top 20 at a NCAA national competition. He also earned All-American honors for his efforts. Urso, just 30 seconds behind Arthur with a time of 25:3.24, crossed the finish line in 64th place, significantly improving since his race at the 2013 NCAA Nationals competition, in which he placed 139th.

“It wasn’t a fluke that I made it last year,” Urso said. “I do deserve to be [at Nationals]. I performed really well there, and I can continue that.

I just have to keep that mindset going into next track season. If I place that well in cross country, I can do that well in track, as well.”

While Appenheimer, concluding his 11th year as cross country head coach, said he is incredibly proud of the group, he also said he already has his sights set on the upcoming track season and on continuing to build his program.

“The great thing about this job is there’s always a meet coming up,” he said. “We’ve got lots to look forward to with this group.”

Men’s Soccer Falls Behind Over Break, Goes 0–3 in NCAC Play Taylor Swift Oct. 31, 2014 The men’s soccer team came out on the losing end of a flurry of North Coast Athletic Conference games over fall break. With three straight losses, the team moved its conference record to 2–4–1, effectively eliminating any hope of advancing to the playoffs.

Oberlin saw tough competition in contests against the DePauw University Tigers, the Denison University Big Red and the nationally ranked Ohio Wesleyan University Battling Bishops, falling 2–1, 4–2 and 4–1, respectively.

Despite fall break setbacks, junior Louis Naiman found the time off to be productive for the Yeomen.

“It was nice to return to almost a preseason-like mentality,” Naiman said. “Our primary focus became playing and bonding and being on a break from school work.”

This focus steered the Yeomen into a hopeful first few minutes in their home game against the Denison University Big Red when sopho-

more Adam Chazin-Gray netted the first goal in under three minutes.

Junior Sam Bernhard sent the feed to Chazin-Gray, tallying his second assist for the season. However, the strong start would not be enough to hold off the Big Red, as it retaliated with two goals headed into halftime.

Just minutes into the latter half of the game, the Big Red built on its firsthalf momentum and netted its third goal. Play turned rough minutes later as a scuffle in the Yeomen six-yard box resulted in a head injury for senior goalkeeper Oidie Kuijpers. The injury allowed sophomore Connor English to step in for his first career game.

“I honestly didn’t expect him to come out of the game initially when we were playing against Denison,” English said. “I was in shock, but I just went out and played. It was pretty easy to adjust [with the defense] because Oidie and I would rotate and practice with everybody.”

The transition did not slow down the Yeomen as they continued to fight from behind, and Chazin-Gray

tallied his second goal of the game after junior Slade Gottlieb slotted a through-ball behind the Big Red’s defensive line. Unfortunately for the Yeomen, however, the Big Red answered Chazin-Gray’s play with its fourth and final goal. After missing the first few games of the season due to injury, Chazin-Gray’s presence on the field proved integral to the Yeomen’s attack.

“I think if we had Adam all year, we’d be looking at a couple different results,” Head Coach Blake New. said “He’s just a really dynamic player and moves really well off the ball, and I think he played well in both [the Denison and OWU] games.”

Chazin-Gray proved just how vital his presence was once again in a match against the Ohio Wesleyan Battling Bishops on Friday, Oct. 24. After the Battling Bishops netted an early goal against English, Chazin-Gray retaliated by scoring one of his own less than six minutes later.

However, Ohio Wesleyan proved relentless as it put yet another goal past Oberlin and topped off the game

with two more in the second half.

Still, the Yeomen’s defense remained strong with sophomore defender Galen Brennan curtailing a number of scoring opportunities for the Battling Bishops. New described Brennan as one of the team’s “most solid performers.” Naiman also commended English for his stellar performance in spite of the challenging conditions in the game.

“Oidie was playing fantastically before [the] collision, but Connor deserves all the credit in the world for stepping up and not only finishing the Denison game in Oidie’s spot but playing against OWU, which is a really tough game to play for your first start,” Naiman said. “Connor played with a lot of poise coming in, and it shows that all the hard work he put in for so much of the season has paid off.”

English also started in an away match against the Allegheny College Gators on Wednesday, Oct. 29. The Yeomen leapt to a 2–1 first-half lead in the match but had no answer for the Gators in the second half and gave up

three consecutive goals for a 4–2 loss.

Though the Yeomen were coined the underdogs of the conference in the 2013 season leading up to their unprecedented trip to the NCAA, they did not have the same element of surprise this year. New said that this shaped the team’s mentality headed into tougher games.

“I think we had trouble being the favorite, and even though we talked about it all the time, we struggled with that mentality at times,” New said.

“We haven’t gone into the last week of a season in probably four or five years without a chance to make it into the playoffs, so it’s a little foreign for us, but at the same time, I think the message is finish what you started and maybe spoil somebody else’s party.”

The Yeomen ended their season with an overall record of 5–10–2, marking significant statistical regression from their 2013 run. However, the Yeomen will return many of its key contributors in the fall for another go at the conference title.

Kenyon College Ladies Quash Conference Playoff Hopes for Women’s Soccer Harrison Wollman Staff Writer Nov. 7, 2014 The Yeowomen took on their ultimate conference foe, the Kenyon College Ladies, in their regular season finale at home on Saturday, Nov. 1, ultimately losing 2–0 and stomping out their playoff dreams. The Yeowomen concluded their season with an overall record of 10–8 and 3–5 in conference play, more than doubling the wins from the 2013 season.

In addition to beating Kenyon, the Yeowomen were banking on other NCAC results swinging their way; Denison University needed to defeat DePauw University and Allegheny College had to beat Wittenberg University. Both games played out in Oberlin’s favor, so the Yeowomen knew exactly what was on the line in their game.

Saturday’s contest also fell on Oberlin’s Senior Day, which senior forward Abby Weiss said added to the emotional atmosphere.

“Anytime you play Kenyon it’s an emotional day,” Weiss said.

“The fact that it was Senior Day and the last game of the season, along with the opportunity to make it to the NCAC playoffs, made it a really tough game but also really exciting. We were really pumped for this game, probably more pumped for this game than any other game this season.”

With winds exceeding 20 miles per hour at Fred Shults Field, the game was particularly susceptible to external conditions. The Yeowomen started with the wind at their backs but were unable to take advantage of the opportunity and score. The Ladies also faced difficulties going against the breeze, and the first half concluded in a 0–0 stalemate.

“The wind was really intense,” Weiss said. “It’s such a huge advantage to have the wind at your back, and it was really crucial that we got a few on the board that first half, but we were unsuccessful. If you watched the goal kicks or the punts against the wind, they really didn’t go anywhere.”

The second half provided Kenyon with the edge it needed, as

Ladies senior captain and NCAC leading goal scorer Becca Romaine capitalized on a give-and-go play at the top of the box in the 61st minute. However, the staggering blow for the Yeowomen came in the 77th minute when Romaine tucked away the gamewinning goal, her 14th of the 2014 season.

In the second half alone, the Ladies outshot the Yeowomen 9–2, outshooting Oberlin 12–4 overall. Senior goalkeeper Kate Frost put forth a strong effort in her last career game and managed to keep Oberlin in the game with six saves.

In addition to the significant improvement from past seasons, the Yeowomen had the longest winning streak in women’s soccer history this year, going nine straight games without losing.

Among these notable triumphs were victories over longtime rivals Wittenberg and Baldwin Wallace University.

Before the game, Weiss, Frost and classmate Samantha Mater were honored for Senior Day. The three graduating members See Yeowomen, page 35

Sports

The Oberlin Review, May 22, 2015

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Marquette Leads Yeowomen in Season Finale Nate Levinson Sports Editor Feb. 27, 2015 The women’s basketball team saw its record-breaking season come to an end on Tuesday, Feb. 24 when the Yeowomen fell to the visiting Ohio Wesleyan University Battling Bishops by a score of 75–58. A raucous crowd of 456 attended to witness the Yeowomen’s first home playoff game since 1990.

The Yeowomen hung tough with the Battling Bishops for over half the game, as junior Lindsey Bernhardt tied the game at 39 points with a three-pointer with 17 minutes, 53 seconds to go in the second half. It was all Bishops from there, however, as they capitalized on 13 secondhalf turnovers by the Yeowomen to earn a 17-point victory.

After the game, Head Coach Kerry Jenkins attributed the sluggish second half to the taxing effects of a long season of hard work.

“Their effort and their investment was extraordinary, and I think at the very end, they just kind of wore down,” Jenkins said.

“They still fought to the very end, but we were a team that had to work hard and play really well in order to be successful, and I think that the tank was on ‘E’ at the very end.”

The loss capped a 14–12 season in which the Yeowomen set a new school record of 10 conference wins. Star senior forward

Christina Marquette said the difference this year from past years was the level of commitment from the team.

“Everybody bought in from the beginning,” Marquette said.

“We all sacrificed a lot. Even once classes started, people were coming in throughout the day to get in individual workouts.”

Jenkins acknowledged that setting the record for conference wins was a solid achievement but that the team’s goals going forward don’t revolve around regular-season wins.

“We want to advance further within the conference tournament,” he said. “I don’t know that our express goals are ever going to be about how many wins we have. I think that we’d established a pattern of development that requires us to drop some games early to develop a bench and develop personnel.”

In her last ever college game, Marquette headlined yet again for the Yeowomen. Scoring 22 points and pulling down seven rebounds, she capped off a historic season with an average of 18.2 points and 8.4 rebounds per game. After seeing the Yeowomen finish well below .500 in each of her previous three seasons with the team, Marquette found the early exit from the playoffs an especially tough pill to swallow.

“None of us thought we were going to lose that game,” she said.

Though the Ohio Wesleyan game was the last time Marquette

stepped on the floor for the Yeowomen, her influence on the women’s basketball program and the entire athletics department will not soon be forgotten.

“She has really shown people what it means and what it looks like to be committed,” said Delta Lodge Director of Athletics Natalie Winkelfoos. “I think that’s created a model for other studentathletes. … She knows what it means to work hard. She is in the gym constantly, working on her fitness, working on her shot, but she also studies the game. She is quality, and she is a wonderful

young woman who is going to go far in this life.”

Going forward, Head Coach Kerry Jenkins knows Marquette’s stellar production won’t be easily replaced.

“There’s going to be a huge, cavernous hole on our team next year with Christina graduating, and that’s not going to be filled by one person,” he said.

Losing Marquette will certainly present a great set of challenges for the Yeowomen, but with Jenkins at the helm, Winkelfoos is confident about the future of the women’s basketball team.

Senior forward Christina Marquette dribbles past a defender in an NCAC playoff game against Wittenberg University on Sunday, Feb. 22. Marquette finishes her career holding the all-time scoring and rebound records for Oberlin women’s basketball as one of the most decorated players in the program’s history.

Courtesy of Erik Andrews

Brabson Leads Yeowomen to NCAC Success Harrison Wollman Staff Writer Feb. 20, 2015

The North Coast Athletic Conference four-day championship meet, which took place from Feb. 11 to 14, proved historic for the women’s swimming and diving team when it broke Oberlin records with a fourthplace finish and a final tally of 913 points.

The relay team of junior Samma Regan and sophomores Vera Hutchison, Nora Cooper and Maddie Prangley headlined the Yeowomen’s success in the 800-yard relay with a fourth-place finish of 7 minutes, 39.71 seconds.

The speedy race, which the squad finished 10 seconds faster than the previously held school record, also qualified them for the NCAA B meet.

“The 800 freestyle relay, which qualified us for nationals, really stood out a lot for me,” Regan said. “We all just got up and had a super fun time before and after the race.”

Much of the women’s swimming and diving team’s success has come from the leadership of Head Coach Andrew Brabson.

In only his second year at Oberlin, Brabson earned the NCAC Women’s Swim Coach of the Year title for the first time in Oberlin’s history. Regan accredited Brabson’s recognition to his attention to individual swimmers’ talents.

“Andy really understood the idea of work ethic and really tapped into that,” she said.

“He understood our strengths and played on that. He made us more competitive than we were in previous years.”

Regan, Cooper and Hutchison struck again, with junior Lauren Wong rounding out their 400-yard medley team, when

“I think what [ Jenkins] brings to his program is a true sense of consistency,” she said. “He’s a nononsense kind of guy, and I think that his players understand that and know when they come to practice that it’s time to go to work.”

Despite the sudden end to the season, the consistency that Jenkins mentioned was as evident as ever after the game. Jenkins told the team not to hang their heads and that there are great things ahead of them.

they crushed the previous school record of 4:01.22 by touching in at 3:56.08. Regan and Cooper also broke school records in the 200yard free, finishing within .24 seconds of one another at 1:53.86 and 1:53.62 respectively.

Reflecting on the Yeowomen’s recent success, Cooper shared that the team’s mental resilience has had a direct correlation with results in the water.

“Prior to the meet, the women’s team had a meeting in which we outlined our goals for [the] conference [meet]. I think that helped in terms of preparing us well,” Cooper said.

The accolades continued into the final day of competition for Regan and Hutchison, when both made the cut for the NCAA B competition in their respective races.

Hutchison took sixth place in the 200-yard butterfly while Regan beat out the competition for fifth in the 200-yard breaststroke.

On the men’s side, the Yeomen racked up 547 points to claim eighth place. All-American senior diver Chris McLauchlan clinched sixth place with a strong performance in the men’s three-meter event with 492.4 points.

McLauchlan followed up with a sixth-place finish in the final. Sophomore Jeremy Cooper managed to earn a spot in the Oberlin record books as well, swimming the ninthfastest 200-yard free with a time of 1:45.96.

Brabson echoed Cooper’s remarks regarding his team’s tough mentality and cohesive dynamics.

“Our team came out with a great mindset, and we were certainly able to feed off of the energy and excitement,” Brabson said.

Next season, the swimming and diving team returns the majority of its young roster, setting it up for NCAC success in the winter.

Senior co-captain Jack Redell swims the butterfly in a home meet against the John Carroll University Blue Streaks on Saturday, Jan. 17. The Yeomen finished in eighth place at the NCAC Swimming and Diving Championship meet, while the Yeowomen took fourth.

Courtesy of Kyle Youngblood

Yeomen’s Season Ends in Defeat Continued from page 38 Nate Cohen was the only Yeomen player to score in double figures with 10 points, but he finished 4-of-14 from the field in 31 minutes of play. Ollie also had a strong performance in the loss, finishing with seven points and a game-high 11 rebounds.

Prior to the Fighting Scots game, Oberlin honored seniors Miles Gueno, Austin Little, Jesse Neugarten and junior Ian Campbell, who graduated early this semester.

The Yeomen now turn their attention to the 2015-2016 season with all five starters returning — big men Ollie and Matthew Walker and guards Jack Poyle, Nate Cohen and Zach Meyers.

Expectations are high with so much veteran talent.

“The goal is to beat Wooster, to beat Ohio Wesleyan and to win the conference championship,” said Cavaco. “Matt and Randy can be a really good one-two punch with Jack and his ability to stretch the floor and Nate with his ability to get to the basket.”

Ollie backed Cavaco’s claims, expressing confidence that the best is yet to come.

“Now that the season is over, I definitely feel as though we fell short of our expectations to host a conference game like the women did, but it’s really cool to have the most overall and conference wins since the early ’90s,” Cavaco said. “Next year fans and followers should expect big things from myself, as well as the rest of the team, and I can promise that next season should be a historic season for the program.”

Sports

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The Oberlin Review, May 22, 2015

spring sports

Women’s Tennis Can’t Get By Northwestern Ohio Owen Mittenthal May 8, 2015 The women’s tennis team was unable to knock off National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics foe the University of Northwestern Ohio Racers, falling in a close 5–4 match on Saturday, Feb. 28. Despite claiming victories in the top singles and doubles spots, the Yeowomen were ultimately unable to clinch wins in the subsequent flights. Senior captain Grace Porter won in the No. 1 top singles flight 6–4, 6–1 and was joined by first-year Sarah Hughes to pull off the No. 1 doubles win 8–5.

Head Coach Constantine Ananiadis highlighted the positive aspects of the team’s performance, commenting on the Yeowomen’s advancement in handling adversity in matches.

“We are getting better at problem-solving and adjusting tactically to situations,” Ananiadis said in an email to the Review.

“We still have a ways to go, but we’re way ahead of where we were a month ago.”

First-year Jackie McDermott, who played both doubles and singles against the Racers, echoed Ananiadis’ sentiment regarding the importance of making speedy mental adjustments.

“I think we’ve had to step up our mental

and emotional game in order to make sure that we’re always focused and always strategizing in the moment,” she said. “I just really want to evolve my strategy.”

The Yeowomen came out on the losing side of doubles competition, heading into the latter half of the matches trailing 2–1. Junior Erin Johnson and sophomore Emma Brezel dropped an 8–4 decision to opponents Valeria Popko and Ana Lacerda in their doubles match. McDermott and sophomore Olivia Hay couldn’t contend with their competition either, falling 8–6.

“Playing No. 1 doubles as a freshman is really exciting,” Hughes said. “Grace and I played a pretty solid match. [Our opponents] were really aggressive players, so we took their pace and sort of used that against them.”

The score after the doubles competition ultimately proved to be the margin of defeat for the Yeowomen, as they split the singles matches 3–3. Porter took the No. 1 game home, and Johnson and junior Ariana Abayomi both won their singles matches. However, Northwestern Ohio picked up wins over Brezel, McDermott and junior Alex Kahn to solidify its victory. Reflecting on the tight competition, Porter also stressed the gravity of overcoming mishaps in tough matches.

“I think everybody was in a pretty difficult match,” Porter said. “I was in a really scrappy doubles match. Even if you’re not playing great, it’s really important in tennis to try to find a way to win.”

In the remainder of the season, the Yeowomen continued their strong performance into the NCAC playoffs, ultimately taking

fourth place. Next spring, the Yeowomen will feel the significant loss of Porter, but with a young and healthy squad, McDermott is looking forward to another season.

“As a team, we’re really supportive of each other and always really positive,” McDermott said. “I’m looking forward to us still having that positive energy.”

First-year Jackie McDermott lunges to hit the ball in a match against the Ashland University Eagles on Wednesday, Feb. 25. The Yeowomen finished in fourth place at the NCAC Championships in Gambier, Ohio on Sunday, April 26.

Effie Kline-Salamon

Baseball Makes History with NCAC Title Victory

Feature Photo: Ultimate Frisbee

Continued from page 40

April 27, 2015 College junior Jacob Gilbert lays out to snag a disc at the USA Ultimate Sanctioned Tournament Division III Easterns on March 21, 2015. Both the men’s team, the Flying Horsecows, and the women’s team, the Preying Manti, qualified for Regionals at their respective Sectionals competitions. Neither team placed high enough at Regionals to qualify for Nationals.

Text by Tyler Sloan, Sports editor Photo courtesy of David Freedman

winter sports

a key contributor to the Yeomen’s success, the NCAC honored Sklar with All-Tournament MVP. “It’s nice to have a guy like him on your pitch,” Schweighoffer said of Sklar’s pitching abilities. “He pitches a couple times a day, three times a weekend if need be. He just goes out there and competes.”

Following the NCAC tournament, the Yeomen traveled to Auburn, NY, for the first phase of the NCAA Regional Championships. While Oberlin certainly strove to compete with the top opponents in the region, most of the team was still riding the high from the conference title. However, the Yeomen did not use this as an excuse to slow down, as they proceeded to knock off top competition like SUNY Oswego, the College at Old Westbury and Keystone College in three straight games.

Holding the Yeomen back from advancing further in the tournament was an earlier loss against No. 1 SUNY Cortland, followed by another against Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute later in the week. Despite these

losses, the Yeomen were incredibly proud of their accomplishments in the conference and applauded Head Coach Adrian Abrahamowicz for his levelheadedness when entering the competition.

Hutson said that Abrahamowicz provides support for his team by keeping the Yeomen on track toward their goals. Preceding the trip to New York, Abrahamowicz was awarded Coach of the Year by the Athletics department at the fourth annual Obie Awards earlier this spring.

Overall, the Yeomen concluded their year with historic progress and appear to be set for success next spring when they return star pitchers Sklar and Kiley, who won Male Newcomer of the Year at the Obies.

For the graduating seniors, Schweighoffer said he could not have imagined exiting his collegiate career on a better note.

“I never expected us to go to Regionals in my time here,” Schweighoffer said. “Halfway through this year if you had told me we were going to win the conference championship, I would have said you’re crazy. It was pretty incredible and definitely a great ending.”

Ohio Wesleyan Battling Bishops Knock Men’s Basketball Out of Playoffs Bob Cornell Feb. 27, 2015 The men’s basketball team saw its season end in defeat when it fell 83–66 to the No. 1 team in the conference, the Ohio Wesleyan Battling Bishops, on Tuesday, Feb. 24 in Delaware, Ohio.

The Yeomen have previously faced adversity when playing against the Battling Bishops, falling 86–61 and 106–76 earlier in the season. The away game had the Yeomen struggling again, and though they played it close for much of the game, trailing the Bishops by three points late in the first half, the Bishops’ offensive surges kept the Yeomen at bay.

A 19–7 run in the final 7.5 minutes of the

first half pushed the Bishops to a commanding 54–39 lead that they refused to relinquish. After the game, junior center Randy Ollie praised the nationally ranked Bishops’ finesse in knocking down shots.

“Ohio Wesleyan is able to put up a lot of points because they are very [effective] at moving the ball to find open shooters and [are] really good at converting off of second chances and turnovers,” he said.

Despite the Bishops’ offensive momentum, the Yeomen played tough defense in the second half, holding them to just 29 points.

However, Oberlin was unable to spark its own offensive energy, scoring only 27 points and going just 7-of-27 from the field.

Head Coach Isaiah Cavaco said that he believes the Yeomen are more than capable

of hanging with the Battling Bishops but need to be more consistent throughout the game.

“In stretches, we can go point for point with them,” he said. “We have to be a little more disciplined. … Sometimes we get caught up in the pace, and that is when they make their 10–2 runs or 14–5 runs, and then you play them even for another six minutes.

It is just a matter of making sure we don’t have mental lapses.”

Ollie led the Yeomen with a strong performance, scoring 20 points, grabbing eight boards and recording two blocks. In their last game as Yeomen, seniors Austin Little and Miles Gueno scored 15 and 9 points, respectively, off the bench. Still, it was not enough for the team to overcome a stagnant

first half defensively.

Prior to their game against Ohio Wesleyan, the Yeomen’s regular season ended in defeat on Saturday, Feb. 21 at home, as the team fell to the College of Wooster Fighting Scots 58–45. The Fighting Scots are currently ranked 24th in the nation.

Plagued by poor shooting throughout, the Yeomen finished 18-of-56 from the floor and 3-of-21 from behind the arc. The shots were available, but the team failed to connect on a multitude of wide-open looks.

“They are probably the most athletic team in all five positions across the board,” Cavaco said. “I thought we had good shots; we just didn’t make them.”

See Yeomen’s, page 37

Sports

The Oberlin Review, May 22, 2015

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Yeowomen Fall Short in NCAC Championship Harrison Wollman Staff Writer May 8, 2015 The Denison University women’s lacrosse team offensively dominated the first half of the North Coast Athletic Conference championship against the Yeowomen on Saturday, May 2, scoring eight goals within 20 minutes and holding Oberlin to just three. The Big Red’s scoring momentum, paired with its solid defensive efforts, carried over into the second half, and the team tacked on six more goals to take home the conference title, winning 14–7.

For the Yeowomen, advancing to the conference championship was a major feat on its own. The last time Oberlin’s women’s lacrosse team advanced to the final

round of the tournament was in 2000, when the Yeowomen also fell to the Big Red. The historic tension was evident from the start of last weekend’s game, with both teams remaining scoreless for the opening seven minutes while locked in a defensive battle.

Breaking through the Yeowomen’s defensive line, Denison netted the first goal of the match in the 22nd minute to take a 1–0 lead. Just two minutes later, junior midfielder Grace Barlow responded with an unassisted goal to even the score. Barlow, who was named to the NCAC First Team on Tuesday, concludes her junior year with a career-high 53 goals, placing her fifth in the conference for goals. She said Denison’s previous playoff experience bolstered its potential to win

the title entering Saturday’s event.

“Denison is an extremely confident and experienced team,” Barlow said. “They have six conference championships in the past 12 years and know exactly what it takes to win under pressure.”

Later in the first half, following three straight goals from the Big Red, sophomore attacker Marissa Maxfield scooped up a rebound on a shot attempt from sophomore attacker Sara Phister and buried her attempt to halve the deficit.

Denison responded with a goal of its own just 36 seconds later, moving the score to 5–2. Barlow was able to bring Oberlin back within three as she netted her second goal of the game off an assist from first-year midfielder Natalie Rauchle.

Junior midfielder Grace Barlow sprints to catch the ball in a game against the Denison University Big Red on Saturday, May 2 in Granville, Ohio. The Yeowomen qualified for the NCAC Championship for the first time in 15 years but ultimately fell 14–7 in the final against the Big Red. Briana Santiago

Every time the Yeowomen seemed to gather momentum, the Big Red were quick to return with a goal of their own. This type of play dictated the contest, as Denison notched two more goals following Barlow’s score to send the Big Red into the half up 8–3.

The Yeowomen used halftime to make some defensive adjustments and were able to hold the Big Red scoreless for the first 20 minutes of the second half. The Yeowomen translated this defensive stand into offensive spirit, using goals from sophomore midfielder Morgan Daruwala and first-year Sydney Garvis to pull within three.

Denison finally broke its scoreless streak with just under 10 minutes remaining in the second half.

After Maxfield was able to find nylon on a free-post attempt for Oberlin, the Big Red pulled away, using a string of goals to put the game out of reach.

Senior captain Kate Hanick, who was named to the NCAC AllTournament Team, had nothing but praise for this year’s squad.

“This team has been the most driven, tenacious and cohesive of all the seasons I’ve been here,” she said. “It’s been amazing to see what strides were made in such a short amount of time.”

The NCAC honored Oberlin’s historic season with a flurry of recognitions. Second-year Head Coach Lynda McCandlish was recognized as the NCAC Coach of the Year after guiding her team to an 11–6 record, which included a first-round tournament upset against top-seeded Wittenberg University.

Sophomore goalkeeper Alexa L’Insalata headlined players’

awards, earning Defensive Player of the Year and First Team awards. She was joined by sophomore attacker Sara Phister and junior midfielder Suzanna Doak, each honored on the NCAC’s Second Team roster.

Daruwala was also recognized by the conference on the Honorable Mention list.

For seniors Bronwen Schumacher, Jodi Helsel and Hanick, the trip to the conference finals marked the conclusion of their collegiate lacrosse careers.

“Losing seniors is always hard, and this class is no exception.

They’re amazing leaders, both on and off the field,” Barlow said of the graduating class.

Hanick said that this season was the icing on the cake for what has been an amazing four-year experience.

“Being a part of OC women’s lacrosse has, by far, been the most rewarding experience of my college career,” Hanick said. “Playing for four years with amazing people that I get to call my best friends, all of them, is something not many people get to say.”

Looking ahead, with five conference award winners returning and a large incoming first-year class, the team doesn’t expect to see any drop-off in performance.

Doak said she believes this will be enough to send the Yeowomen to the conference championships again next year, when they hope to take home the title.

“I think we’re going to win conference next year because that’s always our goal,” Doak said. “We came so close this year, and with the big incoming class next season, I know we have what it takes.”

Men’s Tennis Finishes Fourth at Conference Tournament Jackie McDermott Staff Writer May 1, 2015 The men’s tennis team earned a fourth-place finish at the North Coast Athletic Conference tournament, which concluded on April 26, capping off a 12–11 season. Head Coach Eric Ishida was named NCAC Coach of the Year following the tournament, while sophomore Ian Paik and first-year Michael Drougas also earned NCAC accolades.

In the first match of the NCAC tournament on Friday, April 24, the fifth-seeded Yeomen earned an exciting 5–3 upset over the fourthseeded Wabash College Little Giants. After falling 5–4 to the Little Giants during the regular season, the team made a statement in doubles competition, coming out strong with victories in the second and third flights.

The second-flight pairing of Paik and Drougas kicked off an intense evening of competition with an 8–4 victory. Sophomores Abe Davis and Billy Lennon soon followed with an 8–4 win at the No. 3 doubles spot. The No. 1 doubles pairing of senior captain Soren Zeliger and junior Callan Louis, ranked 12th in the region, almost completed the sweep, but the impressive Wabash first flight team, ranked third in the region, got the best of Oberlin’s pair, winning 8–6.

Assistant Coach Kevin Papen said later that the strong showing in doubles paved the way for a successful day.

“Going up 2–1 after doubles definitively set the tone that we were there to win that day, and it helped show the guys that we [could] take [the match],” he said in an email to the Review.

“It helped so much because we knew that they were good at every singles position. Knowing you’re up after doubles is such a mental relief when you start your singles matches.”

In the February dual match between the two teams, the Yeomen were ahead 2–1 at the doubles break but faltered in singles and dropped four of the six matches. It was a different story at the NCAC championships, however, as they kept the early momentum going thanks to strong performances at the bottom of the line-up from Lennon and first-year Manickam Manickam.

Manickam earned a decisive 6–1, 6–3 fifthflight victory to put the team up 3–1. On the neighboring court, Lennon soon followed, winning a tight 6–4 first set before blanking his Wabash opponent 6–0 in the second.

As the Yeomen predicted, Wabash did not lie down, and the opposing team fought back to win the third and fourth singles slots over Louis and Davis. When No. 2 Drougas dropped the first set 3–6, it looked as if Wabash may have mounted a comeback. However, Drougas did not waiver and turned the match around, winning the next two sets 6–3, 6–3 to clinch the Yeomen’s bid to the semi-finals.

The win under pressure was nothing new for Drougas, and the mental strength and tactical prowess he showed throughout the year helped him win the NCAC Newcomer of the Year award. That marks the third year in a row that a Yeoman has been named Newcomer of the Year, with Paik and Louis earning the honor in the past two years. Drougas finished the year with a stellar 20–7 singles record and a 13–6 record in dual matches.

Papen said that Drougas has shown himself to be a player they can count on in the clutch.

“It is great as a coach knowing that you have someone that, when it gets tough or close, has more grit than his opponent,” he said. “In pretty much all of his close three-setters, I haven’t been my most nervous because I’ve known that as long as [the coaches] stayed in his ear to keep playing the right way, he was going to pull it out.”

Drougas posted yet another impressive performance in the conference semi-finals, teaming up with partner Paik to earn Oberlin’s lone point in the match against the top-seeded Kenyon College Lords, who came in ranking second in the region and ninth in the country. The Yeomen hung tight with the Lords — who went on to win the championship — in all three doubles matches but eventually fell 5–1.

The weekend concluded in Gambier, Ohio, as the Yeomen attempted to reverse a 6–3 loss during the regular season against the Denison University Big Red in the third-place match.

There would be no such vengeance, however, as Denison earned an impressive 5–0 win over the Yeomen.

Despite the back-to-back losses that ended the season, the team’s strong performance throughout the weekend — especially the close doubles matches with Kenyon, a Division III powerhouse — demonstrated how far the men’s program has come in the first three years of Ishida’s reign as head coach.

Just this year, Manickam has seen his game improve under Ishida’s guidance.

“I really learned how to stay relaxed and focus on the right things when on the court this

year. When you think about playing for your team rather than for yourself and just focus on getting your point for Oberlin, tennis just becomes a lot more fun,” he said. “I am definitely looking forward to [continuing to] work with Eric and improving for next year.”

Paik said he believes that Ishida’s coaching improved his confidence in his own game.

“Over the past two years, I’ve just become a more solid player mentally and physically,” he said. “I make the shots I used to miss and trust that I’ll be able to do it day in and day out.”

Paik certainly proved himself to be a solid player in his sophomore season, earning firstteam all-NCAC honors. He credited his success to his supportive teammates and coaches.

“Although it’s an individual award, it was definitely a team effort,” Paik said. “There’s absolutely no way that this season would’ve turned out the way it did for me without everyone on the team, along with Eric and Kevin.”

The men will look to build on the spring season’s successes next semester, when they will return with their entire roster other than Zeliger. This year’s team of mostly first-years and sophomores will look to translate increased experience into continued success.

“I think that going from one of the youngest teams in the region to a team that is predominantly upperclassmen will definitely help us,” Paik said. “Using that extra big match experience, we should be able to get past the hurdles that have plagued us in seasons past.

It’s starting to show this year by [our] handling the teams we were supposed to beat, winning matches we were not favored in and getting to the final four of Conferences.”

Sports year in review

Page 40

May 22, 2015

The Oberlin Review

The baseball team celebrates its historic NCAC Championship title in Chillicothe, Ohio after defeating The College of Wooster on Friday, May 8. The championship victory marks the first time in Oberlin College history that a men’s program has finished first in the conference.

Courtesy of Mike Mancini

Senior Squad Leads Yeomen to NCAC Title Tyler Sloan Sports Editor May 22, 2015

For the first time in Oberlin history, the baseball team claimed first place in the North Coast Athletic Conference Championship en route to an inaugural trip to the NCAA tournament. The underdog victory marked the first time an Oberlin men’s program has ever won the NCAC title.

The Yeomen, or self-proclaimed “Mules,” had a fairytale comeback in the second game of their doubleheader against the College of Wooster Fighting Scots to secure the title on Friday, May 8 in Chillicothe, Ohio. In the first game of the tense doubleheader, the Yeomen appeared to be headed for a familiar fate, falling 23–6 to the topseeded Fighting Scots. But in a fortunate turn of

events, Oberlin found its second wind and mustered a comeback with an 11–5 triumph in the latter contest.

Leading up to the final showdown, Oberlin battled past the Allegheny College Gators in a tight 7–6 win before breezing past the Fighting Scots 11–6 on Thursday, May 7. But after folding in the first game of Friday’s doubleheader, the second game against The College of Wooster was the deciding factor in which team would take home gold. Heading into the finale, however, senior Andrew Hutson said that the Yeomen were confident from playing well in the days leading up to the game.

“We knew we had two chances to beat them, and we felt pretty confident, especially with the pitchers we had,” Hutson said. “So we weren’t really worried about it, even though we had lost by

100 runs.”

With the title on the line, the combination of a talented senior squad partnered with firstyear pitching stars was the lethal solution to last year’s shortcomings, when the Yeomen were eliminated early from conference play by DePauw University in the NCAC Crossover Series. Senior Benjamin Whitener, who was recently named to the All-NCAC Second Team, led the way with one of the best games of his collegiate career, going four for five with four RBIs. Whitener’s classmates also had stellar performances with Ryan Bliss and Danny Baldocchi each adding two hits.

Bliss, along with senior infielder Jeff Schweighoffer and first-year pitcher Sean Kiley, were named to the NCAC All-Tournament Team following the Yeomen’s historic win. The accolades were of particular significance given Oberlin’s

absence from the playoffs last season. Whitener said that the title was a result of team chemistry coming to fruition at the perfect moment.

“Everybody has to be on the same page at the right time, and it just came together beautifully,” Whitener said. “I am going to cherish this season forever. There’s so much gratitude for the coaches and the other guys.”

With the senior class setting the bar for success, first-year pitcher Milo Sklar exceeded expectations as a relief pitcher throughout the NCAC tournament. Pitching 3.2 innings in relief during the final game, Sklar allowed three runs on three hits and three walks. Over the course of the tournament, he pitched for a total of 7.2 innings to strike out five and went 1–0 with the save. As See Baseball, page 38

OBERLIN ATHLETICS 2014–2015 BY THE NUMBERS Men’s Soccer: 15–10–2 overall, 2–6–1 NCAC Women’s Soccer: 10–8 overall, 3–5 NCAC Football: 2–8 overall, 2–7 NCAC Field Hockey: 3–13 overall, 2–12 NCAC

Men’s Cross Country: 11 of 37 with 298 points at NCAA Great Lakes Regional Competition

Men’s Swimming and Diving: 8 of 10 with 547 points at NCAC Championship

Women’s Cross Country: 7 of 32 with 237 points at NCAA Championships

Women’s Swimming and Diving: 4 of 9 with 913 points at NCAC Championship

Volleyball: 13–19 overall, 2–6 NCAC

Men’s Basketball: 10–16 overall, 6–12 NCAC

Baseball: 21–28 overall, 6–13 NCAC

Men’s Tennis: 12–11 overall, 2–1 NCAC

Softball: 6–28–2 overall, 3–12–1 NCAC

Women’s Tennis: 13–11 overall, 3–0 NCAC

Men’s Lacrosse: 7–8 overall, 4–4 NCAC

Men’s Track and Field: 4 of 9 with 66.5 points at NCAC Outdoor Championships

Women’s Lacrosse: 11–6 overall, 4–4 NCAC

Women’s Basketball: 14–12 overall, 10–6 NCAC

Bested by Big Red

Touchdown!

Sophomore wide receiver Justin Cruz sets single-season record for touchdowns in his 2014 season with the Yeomen.

See page 36

Cannonball!

Women’s swimming and diving sets new school records in the 2014-2015 season.

See page 39

Women’s lacrosse falls to Denison in the NCAC Championship game in its first appearance in 15 years.

See page 36

Women’s Track and Field: 2 of 8 with 113 points at NCAC Outdoor Championships

Spring Sports Winter Sports Fall Sports Features

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