The Oberlin Review April 7, 2023

Football Continues to Undergo Major Program Changes

In the past few years, numerous teams within the Athletics department such as tennis, softball, and swimming and diving have undergone major program changes and introduced new head or assistant coaches. Recently, the football team hired a new head coach and defensive coordinator, John Pont and Ben Hammer, respectively.

Pont previously served as offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach from 2017–2020 at the University of Chicago and then spent the 2021–2022 season as an offensive analyst and football athletic performance assistant at Indiana University, Bloomington. Due to his work in athletic performance, Pont is certified in strength and conditioning and is allowed to help with the off-season workouts per NCAA regulations.

“This has afforded me great opportunity to show our team who I am and that I care about them more than just being football players,” Pont said. “Also, we have an open-door policy and our team has been great about stopping by and spending time getting to know each other.”

Hammer is a former Northwestern University defensive graduate assistant, a team that, like Pont’s old team, was in the Big 10 conference. He will be working with the Yeomen in the upcoming fall season.

“Coach Hammer is a tireless worker who has tremendous attention to detail,” Pont sai.d “He

Celia Perks Senior Staff Writer

is highly intelligent and is always searching for the most efficient and effective way to do whatever we are doing. He fully exemplifies our team values of love, care, respect, and faith every day.

Fourth-year captain Hulan Edward gave his input on what he believes the coaches will contribute.

“With a new staff comes a new energy to the program,” Edward wrote in an email to the Review.

“Coach Pont is very clearly committed to giving his all to this program. … His background lends directly to creating a culture of future success here at Oberlin and I’m excited to see what he does with the program. As for Coach Hammer, I haven’t really gotten to interact with him much. But from what I’ve heard, nobody brings more energy and enthusiasm to practice. I really think this new energy and direction has potential to drastically change Oberlin football for the better.”

First-year offensive lineman Jacob Bennett spoke on how he believes both Hammer and Pont will aid the team in the upcoming season.

“I believe that they will provide a new sense to the game that for the better we didn’t get from the previous year, I can feel the difference already with new coaching and it is a change for the better,” Bennett said. “They will provide us with a new way to play the game.”

During the 2022–2023 season,

the football team ended with a 0–10 losing record, but the implementation of a new coaching staff has given the team high hopes to not repeat this past outcome.

“Last season we were plagued by attrition by injury and by players leaving in the offseason,” Edward wrote. “I think that finding ways to retain players and keep them healthy, especially given the fact that we do have a smaller roster, should be one of the top priorities for next season. Everything else can be built from there. I think that the team goals are pretty simple: be better than last year.”

Coach Pont also has specific aims for the upcoming season, including constructing firm and positive beliefs within the program.

“Our goals are to build a tightly-knit team who believes in each other and our program, to connect with and positively impact our College and community, to prepare physically and mentally to give our all on and off the field; and to be the best people we can be,” Pont said. “If we work daily toward those goals, the wins will take care of themselves — and we all want to win.”

While the previous season did not go as planned, the Yeomen remain hopeful for the upcoming fall season. Bennett says the team goal is to win some games this year. Through hard work and dedication from the coaches and players, they will be ready to put their best foot forward.

John Elrod Sports Editor

Throughout history, people have cared about sports more than anything else, and there are many examples that prove this. The most famous thing from ancient Rome? The Colosseum, a sports stadium. The current Pope isn’t even the most famous person from his own country because we have soccer legend Lionel Messi, who is also from Argentina. And who’s the most famous person from the cultural Mecca of Akron, Ohio? That’s right, a basketball player.

Sports are the main interest and priority of most humans, and no population is more enthusiastic than the Oberlin community. Thus, the Sports section of the Review has decided to take over the rest of the paper. We intend to keep the names of each section while incorporating athletics information into News, Arts, Opinions, and the Conservatory and will follow a clear and logical outline to make this happen.

is an overwhelming amount of groundbreaking sports news — even just in the town of Oberlin — and we need to cover it all. It just isn’t fair that local kids aren’t getting coverage of their backyard wiffle ball games. By expanding the Sports section to the front page of the Review, we can make sure everyone is represented. If a second-year Anthropology major pulls off a five-game win streak in FIFA online seasons in their dorm room, the people will know about it.

The new Arts section is also relatively straightforward because sport is art. Athletic competitions are choreographed performances of people moving their bodies in expressive ways while wearing costumes. They audition to make the team, practice their skills, and have dress rehearsals — known as scrimmages to some. Coverage of the Arts section would parallel critiques of dance performances while focusing on something everyone, especially the Oberlin student body, actually cares about. Visual analysis of uniforms will also be central to the mission of

The plan for the revamped News section is straightforward: Sports section overflow. There See Sports, Page 3

Photo courtesy of Jennifer Manna

Associate Professor of Anthropology Amy Margaris has stewarded the ethnographic collection since 2017

The hiring of two new football staff reflects broad program changes across Oberlin. Photo by Erin Koo, Photo Editor

Aidan Loh & Abbie Patchen

Co-Chairs of the Student Athlete Advisory Committee

James Foster Production Editor

Aidan Loh and Abbie Patchen are this yearʼs co-chairs for the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee. Patchen, a third-year Law and Society major and player on the womenʼs lacrosse team, has been co-chair since the spring of 2023, and Loh, a third-year Psychology major and player on the menʼs lacrosse team, has been co-chair since the fall of 2022. Together, they have helped plan events for the Oberlin Athletics community, and look forward to celebrating Division III Week. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What led you to becoming cochair of SAAC? What do you bring to the role that helps the committee as a whole?

Aidan Loh: I ran for co-chair last spring because I saw all of the great work that SAAC does among the Oberlin community, as well as to become the voice for the Athletics student body and help facilitate communication between the department and athletes. As the co-chair, I am responsible for organizing and planning SAAC-sponsored events and community service efforts, as well as setting meeting agendas and leading officer meetings and full SAAC meetings. However, I am also extremely grateful for the work that my co-chair Abbie Patchen does, as well as the rest of the officers, as it is truly a combined team effort to make all of these events happen.

Abbie Patchen: I got involved my second year, just going to more meetings because I wanted to be more involved in the Athletics community. I ran for Public Relations and Communications chair at the end of my sophomore spring and I took on that role along with Maya Blevins, whoʼs a third year on the womenʼs soccer and lacrosse teams. We did that throughout the fall. Zoe Kuzbari, OC ’22, who was the womenʼs cochair, graduated early in December, and we kind of all agreed as an officers group that I would be

the one to run for her position. I did that at the end of the fall and started being co-chair this spring, which has been super fun. It is a lot of work, but itʼs been really great to get to know more people in the athletics community and work with people to make all of the events happen.

What has your experience in SAAC taught you and prepared you for in your Oberlin career and beyond?

AL: SAAC has helped me gain valuable organizational and communicative skills as well as event planning. There is a lot of collaboration involved in making these events happen, from listening to our SAAC reps to see what events theyʼd like to see throughout the year to communicating with the Athletics administration for help in making all of these events and efforts come to fruition. Iʼve learned so much from being a part of SAAC since my first year, and I am excited to see how these skills translate to my life after Oberlin.

AP: Itʼs taught me a lot about collaboration and how much work really goes into all of these things. It really means a lot when people show up to our events because we all really work hard — not just the co-chairs, but every single officer and the reps getting the word out to their teams has been really great. I think itʼs taught me a lot about the value of our student-athlete community and how important it is to create those kinds of relationships.

Are you going to remain in a leadership role next year? If so, what are you hoping SAAC will achieve next year?

AL: One of our biggest goals this year was to continue all of the amazing community service efforts and contribute to the many great organizations we are involved with. Another goal we set was to provide more opportunities for engagement between student-athletes on campus, as we are so busy with our own respective sports that we do not have many opportunities to actually get to know each other outside of

athletics. I am really excited about next week, as we are celebrating D3 Week, which is an opportunity for all individuals associated with Division III to observe and celebrate the impact of Athletics and of student-athletes on campus and in the surrounding community. We have a lot of amazing events planned to celebrate Oberlin athletesʼ hard work, including a field day on the last day.

AP: Saturday, April 15, the menʼs and womenʼs lacrosse teams have a One Love game, which is our hype game, and weʼll also be fundraising. Third-years Caroline Lee, Audrey Koren, and I, as well as other SAAC officers and reps, have worked on doing workshops last year and this year. Weʼre really passionate about One Love and super excited for that event. And then, the Sunday to end DIII Week, we have a field day with a dodgeball tournament, so thatʼs super exciting. Then April 30 we have Play Like a Girl, which is one of my favorite events. We bring girls aged five through twelve from the local community, and all of the womenʼs sports teams will teach them their sport. Itʼs a super fun day to get girls involved in sports.

Are you going to remain in a leadership role next year? If so, what are you hoping SAAC will achieve next year?

AL: I plan on remaining the cochair of SAAC for the next year and am committed to continuing our community service efforts as

well as looking to boost our efforts to give back to the Oberlin community for all of their support and kindness to all students on campus when school is in session.

AP: Everyone has to run again, so my plan is to run again for cochair. I think together, we want to keep up how much we give back to the community. We won an award this past year for contributing a lot to a variety of organizations. I think thatʼs a really important goal for all of us, as well as streamlining our volunteer efforts to get more athletes involved outside of the Oberlin campus.

Oberlin Rock Wall Supports Thriving Club

Chris Stoneman Senior Staff Writer

ExCo courses and club activities have been hallmarks of Oberlin, standing as prototypical examples of the College’s selection of unique educational and extracurricular opportunities. Obies have the liberty to do, learn, and teach others about practically anything we put our minds to, and nowhere is that freedom more apparent than within the rock-climbing community.

Tucked discreetly into a corner of Philips gym, Oberlin’s climbing wall is high quality with a 25-foot-tall pillar and 360-squarefoot bouldering cave to match.

“I came from a competitive climbing background, so it was really important to me that Oberlin has a climbing wall on campus — it’s also pretty special since we’re such a small school,” College fourth-year Aidan Cowie said. “During my four years here, we’ve been able to grow the wall and the climbing communi-

ty, and it’s been really exciting to see how much progress has been made.”

College fourth-year Cecilia Owen, who currently serves as vice president of the Oberlin College Rock Wall and helped revitalize the club during the pandemic, emphasized the impact the club had made on her time at the College.

“The climbing community here has been such a big part of my life and experience at Oberlin, and some of my best friends here I met while climbing,” Owen said. “It’s been such a pleasure watching the community grow so much in the past couple of years. Just the fact that we have a climbing wall and a space to practice what we love is super special, but seeing how welcoming and open it is and how many people we’ve introduced to the sport has been one of the highlights of my time here.”

The Rock Wall’s infrastructure and welcoming community have led the organization to impressive accomplishments.

“We had a climbing competition this past weekend, and it was a total success,” Owen said. “We had 28 brand-new climbs,

and dozens of people showed up to compete. I’m so glad to know that when I graduate, the wall and climbing club will continue on.”

Cowie emphasized the necessity of inclusivity for the club and the importance of publicity and outreach to get students involved.

“We’re dedicated to making the wall as safe and inclusive as possible, offering climbs for all levels — from complete beginner to lifelong climbers,” Cowie said. “A lot of people still don’t know that Oberlin even has a climbing wall, so we’ve worked really hard to bring new people into our space. Everything at the wall is completely free, and we provide gear and instruction to anyone who needs it. The climbing club has been a quintessential part of my time at Oberlin and I’m so excited to see this space that has been my home for the last four years becoming home to a new group of Obie climbers.”

With its strong foundation as a student organization, and open access to its wall and gear, the Oberlin College Rock Wall has managed to establish a solid, long lasting legacy on campus.

RApril 7, 2023

Volume 152, Number 19 (ISSN 297–256)

Editors-in-Chief

Kushagra Kar

Emma Benardete

Managing Editor

Nikki Keating

News Editors

Alexa Stevens

Cal Ransom

Opinions Editors

Emily Vaughan

Hanna Alwine

Arts & Culture Editors

Dlisah Lapidus

Yasu Shinozaki

Poetry Editor

Gillian Ferguson

Sports Editors

John Elrod

Kayla Kim

Conservatory Editor

Delaney Fox

Photo Editors

Abe Frato

Erin Koo

This Week Editor

Eloise Rich

Senior Staff Writers

Ava Miller

Chris Stoneman

Celia Perks

Lyric Anderson

Maeve Woltring

Web Manager

Nada Aggadi

Production Manager

Isaac Imas

Production Editors

Addie Breen

E.J. LaFave

Gideon Reed

Lia Fawley

Jasper Swartz

Serena Atkinson

James Foster

Trevor Smith

Layout Editors

Erin Koo

Grace Gao

Katie Rasmussen

Molly Chapin

Illustrator

Molly Chapin

Distributors

Leah Potoff

Nondini Nagarwalla

Neva Taylor

Will Young

Published by the students of Oberlin College every Friday during the fall and spring semesters, except holidays and examination periods. For advertising rates, please contact edsinchief@oberlinreview.org.

Second-class postage paid at Oberlin, Ohio. Entered as second-class matter at the Oberlin, Ohio post office April 2, 1911.

Office of Publication: Burton Basement, Oberlin, Ohio 44074. Phone: (440) 775-8123

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To submit a correction, email managingeditor@oberlinreview. org

Aidan Loh is on the men’s lacrossse team.

Abbie Patchen plays against Baldwin Wallace University.

The Oberlin Rock Wall offers fun and recreation.

Photo courtesy of Amanda Phillips

Photo by Erin Koo, Photo Editor

Photo by Erin Koo, Photo Editor

Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese Drama Taken Out Of Proportion

Kayla Kim Sports Editor

If you’re just learning the names Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese after last weekend, you’re not alone. The 2023 March Madness women’s final game received national attention — 12.6 million viewers at its peak, to be exact — not because of any player’s individual performance, but primarily after a move LSU forward Reese made: the “you can’t see me” gesture. This gesture, a wave in front of the face popularized by wrestler John Cena, was one that Iowa guard Clark previously pulled during her game against Louisville in the Elite Eight. While both players are known for trash talk and insults on the court, Reese’s move sparked immediate controversy, with the word “CLASSLESS” trending on Twitter. Her use of the gesture only attracted more criticism after First Lady Jill Biden proposed inviting both LSU and Iowa to the White House, breaking the tradition of only inviting the winning team.

As an Iowa fan over the past three years, I have seen Clark and UConn’s Paige Bueckers’ showdown in the Sweet Sixteen, their upset by Creighton in the second round, and now an incredible and historic run to the finals in 2023. It was obviously disappointing when Iowa lost in the finals, but even speaking as a fan, the attempts to defend the team that came from both Iowa fans and people who had just learned about women’s basketball — as suggested by errant spellings like “Angela Reese” and “Caitlyn Clarke” — have gotten out of hand. Although Jill Biden backtracked on her statement through her press secretary, the idea of inviting Iowa

to the White House is insulting to both teams. It implies that LSU needs to share its spotlight and cannot have the glory of its victory to itself, and that Iowa should be coddled and treated differently simply because, like the other 66 teams in the tournament, the results were not what it had hoped for.

Additionally, Clark is well known in the world of women’s basketball for her trash talk, [despite the justifications about the length and energy of Reese’s taunting in order to defend Clark’s “class.”] Last year in a game against Ohio State, she mimicked Michael Jordan’s shrug — an iconic expression of nonchalance after scoring a series of improbable 3-pointers — and in this year’s tournament, she’s made moves such as telling Hailey Van Lith, a Louisville player and former USA Basketball teammate, to shut up, and waving her hand in a shooing motion directed at South Carolina guard Raven Johnson in the Final Four. There was a section on ESPN where she was called “The Queen of Clapbacks.” And, of course, there was Clark’s own “you can’t see me” gesture. With her history of trash talk, Clark is aware of when to give it and when to take it. Both players have spoken about such exchanges as an important and integral part of the game, and Clark defended Reese in an interview after receiving the Wooden Award.

“I’m just one that competes, and she competed,” Clark said. “I think everybody knew there was gonna be a little trash talk in the entire tournament. It’s not just me and Angel.”

But before the interview, and even afterward, it was bizarre seeing people bend over backward trying to uplift one and vilify the other

— people rushed to Clark’s defense when she never needed protection in the first place. If there’s anyone who needs the extra support, it’s Reese and the LSU team, who have been subjected to unfair, racist attacks on their physical appearance, intelligence, and character.

The so-called drama was exacerbated partially by preexisting racialization. For instance, one tweet compared the mostly white Iowa team listening to the High School Musical 2 soundtrack with the predominantly Black LSU team rapping to Boosie — omitting the context that Iowa was warming up while LSU celebrated a win. To be clear, conversations should absolutely take place about the policing of Black women’s emotions in the media, the double standard to which Clark’s versus Reese’s trash talk was held, the racist harassment Reese has been receiving since high school, and the appropriation of Black English and culture. But pitting teams against each other sim-

ply because of race was unnecessary, unhelpful, and ultimately,only added fuel to the fire.

As Van Lith stated after an altercation with Texas guard Sonya Morris in the handshake line after the second round, drama about trash talk in any women’s game would have never been started if it were in the men’s tournament.

“I mean, that happens in the NBA game[s] every single day,” Van Lith said in a press conference. “Just because it was women’s basketball, they’re going to drag it out and it’s a whole deal.”

What should be remembered from this tournament is the historic runs of both teams, as well as many others. There were several exciting upsets that took out all the No. 1 seeds, such as Mississippi and Miami’s wins over Stanford and Indiana, respectively. Clark, and many Iowa-born players, chose Iowa over other prestigious schools in hopes of rebuilding the program, and as a result of their dedication,

they made it to the Final Four for the first time since 1993. LSU won its first March Madness in either the men’s or women’s tournaments, thanks to Jasmine Carson and LastTear Poa’s unexpected 3-pointers that cemented the lead in the second quarter. And Angel Reese went from a freshman at Maryland out with a foot injury to a March Madness champion, as well as a role model for Black girls and women in sports through her authenticity and confidence.

“I’m too hood, I’m too ghetto,” Reese said in a press conference after the championship. “Y’all told me that all year. But when other people do it, y’all don’t say nothing. So this is for the girls that look like me.”

In the end, trash-talking is important to women’s sports, but it should not be the only reason why women’s basketball is making headlines. There is so much more to celebrate than those ten seconds.

Women’s Lacrosse Defeats Baldwin Wallace Sports Section To Run Oberlin Review

Kayla Kim Sports Editor

This Wednesday, women’s lacrosse played against Baldwin Wallace University in its last game before conference play, battling through inclement weather to secure a 15–5 victory.

Oberlin shined on offense and defense, forcing 11 turnovers in addition to goals. First-year Megan Hiller set the pace early in both halves, scoring the first goal within the first five minutes and winning the stick-off in the second half. Third-years Audrey Koren, Emily Shimabukuro, and Abbie Patchen, as well as second-years Katie McMorris and Lauren Mills, also scored. Patchen earned a career high of six points and scored in her seventh consecutive game.

The Yeowomen held Baldwin Wallace to no goals in the first quarter, and while they gained an early lead, both teams went on a scoring drought in the second quarter. Oberlin didn’t find

the net, and Baldwin Wallace scored its first goal. Hiller explained that this setback only further motivated the team to win.

“Not having scored any goals in the second quarter made us even more hungry to score in the third quarter,” Hiller wrote in an email to the Review. “We figured out what was and wasn’t working and used what we learned to capitalize in the second half. After talking and planning during our halftime break, we went into the second half of the game ready to execute our plays and strategically place our shots.”

Although women’s lacrosse did not play a game for 12 days after its spring break, during which it traveled to Florida to play against other teams, Koren said that the team used that break to its advantage and created a competition week.

“We were broken up into two teams, and everything during the week was a competition,” Koren wrote in an email to the Review

“It really fostered a competitive and fun environment. Competition week gave us time to reset and prepare for the second half of the season, while maintaining an intense environment. Everyone was excited to have a game again and I could really feel that energy on the field.”

Another challenge was the threat of severe weather that had been creeping through the Midwest — the game was moved up two hours to avoid potential storms, and even then, there was light rain during the game.

“It was very sporadic, and in the moments of torrential rain, the game became very back and forth,” Koren said. “Both teams had difficulty holding onto the ball because it was hard to see and everything was slippery. Once the rain would stop for a while, we did a good job regaining control and maintaining possession.”

Lacrosse is now looking to face DePauw University in a home game tomorrow.

the new Arts section. No matter the outcome of the games, teams can earn respect for wearing sleek, color-coordinated uniforms. Opinions is also an area that will seamlessly transition into allsports content. Much of sports media today is already about who can have the hottest take — think Stephen A. Smith and his ESPN show First Take. We’ll have no problem filling the pages with ridiculous statements about a variety of sports topics that use a poor amount of research and an abundance of raw emotion. We know that there’s already a little bit of a culture war between athletes and non-athletes, but one of our agendas will be to incite culture wars between sports teams. Something like an ugly beef between the field hockey team and the ultimate frisbee team will bring lots of traffic to our website and popularize our paper. Another vital move for our new Opinions section is the introduction of gambling advice columns. What brings people closer to the beautiful world of sports than convincing them to put their rent money on obscure college basketball games?

The new look for the Conservatory section requires a bit more creativity because it focuses on an actual institution within the school, but it will still be essential to our new sports-centric paper. Alongside the explosion of Youtube, Instagram, TikTok, and other video platforms in recent years, many new combinations of sports and music have arisen. During the 2022 World Cup, I couldn’t tell you how many Lionel Messi highlights I saw with four different pop songs remixed to it. We kindly ask the Conservatory to convert into a school where they solely teach students how to incorporate music into sports highlight videos, because it will help us keep the connection to the old Conservatory section as best as possible. Once we have our skilled student musicians recording music solely to be played over videos like “Best March Madness Buzzer Beaters of All Time,” the Review will then be able to provide indepth analyses of such pieces. Be on the lookout for the new and improved The Oberlin Review that focuses on the most important topic in the world, and happy belated April Fool’s Day!

Continued from page 1

Angel Reese and Caitlin Clark competed in the March Madness women’s championship game.

Audrey Koren looks to make a shot. Lauren Mills competes for the ball.

Photo courtesy of Maddie Meyer

Illustration by Molly Chapin

Photos by Erin Koo, Photo Editor

Local Churches Provide Professional Opportunities for Conservatory Students

Jazz Forum Has Become too Performance Focused

Lyric Anderson Senior Staff Writer

Every Friday at noon, the Cat in the Cream comes alive for Jazz Forum. Conservatory and College students quickly fill up the tables, squeeze onto couches, or perch atop the makeshift bench lining the back wall. Often, even more students are left leaning against the bartop, all in eager anticipation of live music.

But what is Jazz Forum — or, more importantly, what is it supposed to be — and why is it so popular to Conservatory and College students alike? In my three semesters at Oberlin, I’ve noticed Jazz Forum becoming increasingly synonymous with a jazz concert, which is another performance opportunity for small jazz ensembles. Concerts usually take place in the evenings on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays. But by definition, a forum is far different from a concert.

disagree with the critique. From a non-musician’s perspective, I imagine this dialogue is also quite interesting to witness, and I think there should generally be more of it.

Delaney Fox Conservatory Editor

On Sunday mornings, most Conservatory Vocal Performance majors aren’t found sleeping in, but rather in church pews, singing for a congregation. In fact, a real professional network has emerged around local churches and their willingness to pay Oberlin students for their musical talent. This week, many students committed even more time to their church jobs in preparation for Holy Week services and Easter.

The church choirs within this network vary in commitment, distance from campus, and size, allowing students to pick which church works best for them. Some students, like double-degree second-year Ava Paul and the four other paid members of her church, travel as far as Cleveland for their gig.

“My church pays more than other churches in the area, and that comes with a lot more of a time commitment,” Paul said.

“On Thursday nights, I leave campus at 6:30 p.m., and we drive 50 minutes into Cleveland. We rehearse for two hours, and then we drive back to campus. On Sunday morning, we leave campus at 8:00 a.m., drive to church, rehearse for an hour, and then have church service from 10–11:30 a.m. Then we drive back. It’s about four hours of rehearsal per week and four hours of driving per week.”

This week, Paul’s church scheduled additional rehearsals on Tuesday night and Saturday morning to accommodate the more than tripled amount of repertoire programmed for its Maundy Thursday service and extended Easter Sunday service.

“Easter and all of Holy Week is, I would say, the biggest week in the church scene, at least for my church,” Paul said.

Other students simply walk across campus to get to their church or rehearse in a Bibbins Hall classroom. Conservatory fourth-year Jared Cohen is the music director at Birmingham Methodist Church, located about 15 minutes outside of Oberlin. As a music director, his responsibilities include curating the music for each service and organizing rehearsals.

“We meet Wednesday nights in Bibbins to rehearse for an hour, and then we have the service on Sunday,” Cohen said. “The time commitment is really only like three hours a week. It’s not that bad.”

Conservatory fourth-year Nathan Romero directs the choir at First United Methodist Church of Oberlin, right next to Robertson Hall. For Romero’s choir, students dedicate their Sunday mornings to both a rehearsal and service, eliminating the weekday commitment. Romero’s choir also consists of community members who volunteer their time to make music for the congregation.

Regardless of the varied experiences, the value of a church gig is undisputed among Voice majors. For Romero, who will study Conducting next year at the Conservatory of Music at the University of Redlands, his church job and the experience from leading a choir at a professional level was invaluable to his graduate school application process.

“I think being a director at a church did help with my resume, since most undergraduate students specifically don’t graduate

saying they’ve been the music director at a church,” Romero said.

Paul, over the course of four semesters at her church choir, has seen an improvement in her skills as a musician, ultimately benefiting her coursework.

“My sight reading has gotten a lot better while working at a church where we are going through quite a bit of music every week,” Paul said. “I’ve definitely noticed a difference in my Oberlin College Choir experience.”

Cohen also commented on the importance of the church job in a singer’s career after Oberlin.

“I never had any experience with church because I’m Jewish, so it was weird adjusting when I first got to Oberlin and heard people talk about how it’s so standard for singers to have church jobs,” Cohen said. “But now, I think it is very important for singers to get the experience they can working at churches, because there’s no church that doesn’t need singers every Sunday. I think that it’s such an easy and convenient way to pick up money and experience as a singer.”

But maybe what speaks most to the popularity of the church gig is the fact that a majority of Voice students dedicate their time to singing in these choirs.

“There’s a ton of churches around, and I would say that most Voice majors have church jobs,” Cohen said. “It can be very difficult if you’re missing a service to find a sub for that reason, because everyone already has a job. They’re already working Sunday morning. It’s very standard practice to have a church job, and I don’t think that that’s just the culture here. I think that that’s everywhere.”

“Jazz Forum provides invaluable opportunities to perform in front of an enthusiastic audience, discuss your work and receive feedback, [and] polish your stage presence,” Division of Jazz Studies Director and Professor of Jazz Trombone Jay Ashby said in the YouTube video “Oberlin Conservatory: About Jazz Forum.”

What I find currently lacking in Jazz Forum is an emphasis on dialogue. Forum should be a time where groups bring in their less polished material — pieces they’re struggling to refine. If you have any original compositions, bring them in to get input from others. Maybe you’re having trouble narrowing down the story or arc of your composition, or you’re not quite sure if the bridge should have a swing or even eighth note rhythm. Fortunately, your audience is full of talented, opinionated jazz musicians.

I think every audience member, Jazz major or not, has something they like and dislike about any given performance. However, I’ve noticed a hesitancy to voice those opinions when the time comes. Perhaps there’s a fear of coming off as too nitpicky, but that’s precisely why the space exists. If the band members can’t handle the finer critiques, maybe it’s time the musicians ask themselves: Am I going into this performance with the mindset of being receptive to feedback? The goal should be to approach Forum like a masterclass, except you’re playing for your friends and peers instead of a world-class musician — although, really, we’re all already professional musicians.

Back-and-forth conversation between the audience and performers is something I would really love to see more of during the feedback portion of Forum. Many of the audience’s comments aren’t clear-cut suggestions and would benefit from further elaboration. If you, the performer, truly want feedback, don’t just sit there and take it. Engage with it. Offer a justified rebuttal if you

Unfortunately, this time for discussion has been getting reduced by increasingly long set times. Forums tend to be more well-attended than concerts, despite the fact that students are usually busier at 12:15 p.m. on a Friday than at 7:30 p.m. on a Sunday. Audience engagement and energy can greatly affect the performers’ stage presence, and when the crowd is thin, it can be difficult to put on a good show. Consequently, I think that jazz ensembles squeeze as much music as possible into their forum sets to compensate for the lower turnout at concerts. 40-minute, four-song sets have become the new standard, despite there only being time for one 30-minute set per ensemble. What’s left is only a couple of minutes for feedback, which feels more like an obligation than an opportunity.

Additionally, the Cat in the Cream is a deceptively large venue; it claims to have capacity for 325 people. If 40 people show up to a jazz concert, which isn’t necessarily a small number, it can still feel quite empty — especially since we have a tendency to fill up the back of the room first. I myself have fallen into the trap of focusing my practice time on songs I’ll be playing at Forum because I know more people will hear it. For the concert, I’ll just wing it. When everyone in the group has this mentality, the concert may be more lackluster, furthering the cycle of low audience attendance.

This brings me to a potential solution for the concerts’ waning popularity: utilize the other amazing performance spaces in the Conservatory. If we want more people to come to jazz concerts, perhaps they could be held in a space other than the Cat in the Cream, which is so heavily associated with Jazz Forum. Having these concerts in the David H. Stull Recital Hall or the Birenbaum Innovation and Performance Space, for instance, could help others realize that they are true showcases of talent not to be missed. Some ensembles have photoshoots and make posters for their concerts to be pinned up around campus or posted on an Instagram story. I think this is a fantastic idea, and I would encourage other groups to do the same. Any sort of self-promotion will emphasize the idea that concerts and Jazz Forum serve different and uniquely important purposes.

I don’t believe that Forum is living up to what it could be. I think shortening the Forum set times to allow for more discussion and putting more energy and intention behind concerts could help form a clearer distinction between Forums and concerts, further uplifting them both.

Students rehearse with community members in a local church choir.

Photo by Abe Frato, Photo Editor

ARTS & CULTURE

Dandelion Romp Returns for a Weekend of Contra Fun

Ava Cantalon Staff Writer

For the first time since 2019, students gathered by the hundreds in Hales Gymnasium for the Dandelion Romp, an event put on by the Oberlin Contra Dance Club consisting of live music, dancing, and socializing with both old friends and new acquaintances. Contra dance is a form of American folk dance in which couples dance in line with others, often to fiddle music. The Dandelion Romp was canceled for the past few years due to COVID-19, and the reestablishment of the Romp created quite a stir on campus.

According to College secondyear and Contra Dance Club member Bizzy Seay, organizing the event after a several-year absence was both exhilarating and challenging.

“Because it hasn’t happened in so long, there are very few people that are here that have actually experienced it, so it wasn’t something that had a group of people that were super excited about it and ready to make it happen,” Seay said.

Despite this difficulty, the Dandelion Romp was planned and executed successfully, providing a weekend of fun for students, faculty and community members who came from outside the College specifically for the event.

The reestablishment of the Romp brought those familiar with contra dance and complete newcomers together. One of these newcomers was College first-year Natalie Scott, who attended both the evening dance on Saturday and the midday dance on Sunday.

“Everyone was so social and positive, it was great,” Scott said.

“[I even] promised a friend I’d seek out contra dances in my hometown over the summer so I can take them.”

The weekend’s event succeeded in engaging new people with the traditional dance style and the community it brings together, both at Oberlin and around the country.

College first-year Jakaranda Jacklin, who had attended other contra dance events over the past year, was drawn to the

Romp due to past events organized by the club.

“I already came in with an idea of what contra dance was like, and that expectation was fulfilled and surpassed in the best way,” Jacklin said.

These positive reviews are just a sample of the experiences people had over the weekend, and many students, faculty, and community members from near and far are sure to have more good times at future iterations of the Dandelion Romp.

Amazon Prime’s Swarm Unsettling, Memorable

Maeve Woltring Senior Staff Writer

When I first caught wind of the Amazon Prime TV series Swarm, my brain bounced to an implicit word association game — Swarm, anarchy, hierarchy, queen bee, post-apocalyptic societal disarray. In a climate marked by justified paranoia and a media culture frontlined by plausible dystopia like The Last of Us, I was sure Swarm’s title assumed a kind of ecological allusion to the planet’s encroaching demise and society’s digitalized disconnect and hyper-coagulation. I was both partially right and overwhelmingly wrong. Co-directed by Atlanta’s Donald Glover and Janine Nabers, Swarm supplies a psychologically fraught and genre-vexing serial killer series, a disorienting dance between satirical comedy and truly nauseating horror.

I began watching the show with a drive to untangle the mystified impressions I had gleaned from my peers: the show is in many ways about Beyoncé’s fanbase, but also not at all. The show is hard to watch, but impossible not to watch all at once. In the end, I understood the kind of stupefaction Swarm produces wholeheartedly. It’s the kind of show with a drive to trip you up, to dupe you, to challenge your preconceptions, and to dislodge your automatic assumptions.

Swarm opens with an unsettling disclaimer: “This is not a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is intentional.” We open to a close-up shot of the show’s protagonist, Dre, a young Black woman whose obsession with fictional pop singer Ni’jah quickly betrays an acute psychological codependency. Dre lives alone with Melissa, a woman she considers her ‘“sister” and whom she regards with a kind of desperate reverence comparable

only to that which she feels towards Ni’jah. At one point early on in the first episode, Melissa wraps her arms around Dre, and Dre begins to kiss a scar on Melissa’s wrist with dolorous fervor, as if the scar were still an open wound. “You’re weird as f**k,” Melissa says to Dre, “but I love your passion.” This evaluation acts like a kind of prophecy for Dre’s increasingly unsettling character arc, her acts of unprecedented violence often ushered by visual or auditory foreshadowing, such as the itch-inducing sound of bees buzzing in dissonant unison. Though Dre is decidedly taciturn, visual cues and auditory flourishes become signifiers of her unraveling psyche. In other words, if you hear bees buzzing, you know death is likely on the horizon.

A mere 25 minutes into the show’s first episode, Melissa, devastated by the news that her toxic boyfriend has cheated on her, commits suicide. Dre, lonely and reserved, leaves home to set off on a blood-soaked odyssey to reconcile her totalizing grief. First, she bludgeons Melissa’s adulterous boyfriend to death. At this initial murder, the audience sees Dre choking on sobs, crawling to the fridge and shoving a mixture of blood and pumpkin pie into her mouth with an indescribable urgency. Dre then embarks on an unpredictable quest to kill people who have publicly dissed Ni’jah on Twitter, with her expressions of remorse gradually diminishing and her serial murder habits slowly calcifying. For example, she always eats a snack after murder.

Food and death become part and parcel with each other, a sinister admixture representative of Dre’s psychological drive to fill the hole left by Melissa’s death.

And then there’s the show’s pointedly flagrant allusions to pop culture. Ni’jah is Beyoncé. Ni’jah’s fanbase, and the titular ‘swarm,’

refers directly to the BeyHive, Beyoncé’s fanbase. Although the show undertakes a bold strategy in the directness of these iconographic stand-ins, such word play and pop cultural critique doesn’t seem to be the main point. Sure, Ni’jah is Beyoncé, but she’s also Melissa; Dre’s fragile reality relies on the warping of people’s identities, and it proves ultimately useless to force significance onto structured categories. Cultural significance takes on a much more pointed meaning in regards to Dre’s interactions with the white gaze. In an episode containing Billie Eilish’s acting debut, Dre encounters a cultish posse of pseudo-spiritual white women, the leader of which is played by Eilish. “I feel so connected to you,” the women insist over and over, even though Dre has barely uttered a word. During this episode in particular, reality and surreality conjoin in a haunting middle reminiscent both of Midsommar and media in the Afro-Surrealist genre, such as Get Out and Atlanta. Although so much of the show takes on a decided slant to reality, these scenes reflect the lived absurdity of the white gaze.

Since its release on Amazon Prime on March 17, the show has garnered many different channels of media attention. As tends to be the unfortunate case, articles fixating on a graphic sex scene in the show’s first episode abound. An article from Collider declares, “Thanks to ‘Swarm,’ we have a new Slasher icon.” A Vulture piece addresses the novelty of a Black woman portrayed through cinema’s age-old madwoman trope, ultimately claiming the show fails to fissure typified representations of “femininity, disability, and power.” The New York Times similarly claims that the show, though textured by Glover’s distinctive aesthetics, ultimately fails to flesh

out Dre’s character beyond the titillating. It seems, however, that there is one thing everyone can agree on: Dominique Fishback provides a gorgeous and haunting performance as Dre, and the show, shot fully on film save for a single mockumentary episode,

is aesthetically striking. Ultimately, I found Swarm to be not only a singular and memorable viewing experience, but worthwhile especially due to the huge range of discussions it may start among viewers.

The Amazon Prime series Swarm, starring Dominique Fishback as a serial killer, released March 17.

Photo courtesy of IMDB

Photos by Erin Koo, Photo Editor

“Water Poem in Four Seasons”

Noah Kawaguchi, OC ’22

I.

Twenty-minute drive

And I’m at a sandy beach

But the strange water

Coldly laps at my ankles And asks me how I got here

II.

Trip to Lake Erie

My little ocean that could Pollution, dead fish

Everything is frozen now

I’m the only one melting III.

No ocean in sight

Seven-hour drive, due east Straight toward the coastline I see when the sun comes up That the map was upside down

IV.

The ocean outside Wells up in the fuzzy air

Could I fill the lake

With two decades of water Bottled somewhere far from here?

Noah Kawaguchi graduated in 2022 with a Jazz Studies major and an East Asian Studies minor. “Water Poem in Four Seasons,” written in 2022, is inspired by Kawaguchi’s experiences growing up Asian American here in Lorain County. Beginning with the Japanese tanka form of 31 syllables spread across five lines following a 5/7/5/7/7 pattern, he repeats it four times, once for each season.

Calypso Subverts Classic Mythology with Emotional Immersion

Yasu Shinozaki Arts & Culture Editor

“No man is an island,” states the oft-quoted John Donne poem. But in Calypso, a play written and directed by College fourth-year Jordan Muschler, the entire world of titular nymph, played by College third year Graciela Fernandez, is relegated to the island of Ogygia, where she has lived for centuries with only the occasional visits of the god Hermes, played by College first year Finley Taylor, to keep her company. This changes on a stormy night, when a man named Odysseus washes ashore. Unlike The Odyssey, Calypso focuses on the nymph’s perspective rather than that of Odysseus, played by Ned Bannon. “The original myth was interesting to me because Calypso’s circumstances were so fascinating, and yet she is not given much of her own agency,” Muschler told the Review. “I thought expanding on why she was alone on the island while fleshing out her character could make for a good play, especially since it gave me a chance to tackle loneliness and love in a unique way, with a character I felt a lot of empathy for.”

Calypso gives us an intimate and intense look into her world. The bulk of the play consists of her long conversations with the play’s other two characters, Hermes and Odysseus, that bring out her struggles with loneliness and her desire to connect with others. Additionally, the production includes several live performances of music in which Calypso plays guitar and sings, her lyrics and melancholy voice conveying joy and hurt that dialogue cannot express.

The Kander Theater provides an intimate venue that allows the stellar three-person cast to convey emotional subtlety and intensity and draw us deep into the inner lives of the characters. While the plot is relatively sim-

ple, Calypso’s relationships with Hermes and Odysseus are full of complexity. Hermes comes across superficially as a smug, arrogant god, but events in the play reveal emotional vulnerability. This character’s hidden depth shows the strength of the dialogue and its ability to demonstrate intricate character traits. Odysseus is more nuanced and conflicted than he is depicted in The Odyssey. In Calypso, his internal strife is more often shown than stated, demonstrating the strength of the writing and acting.

Muschler’s directing skills are evident in the way he builds mood and atmosphere. The set is simple; a circle of sand, illuminated by marbled light like the reflection of the water that changes to reflect the weather, with a stone arch surrounded in greenery as a backdrop. The dreamy lighting transports us to the idyllic yet miniscule paradise where Calypso is trapped, while sparse musical accompaniment and occasional sounds of waves and rain bring out the silence of her lonely domain. The pacing of the production gives a sense of altered time, reflective of Calypso’s curse of immortality. The scenes are long and move slowly, though they do not drag. Years pass im-

perceptibly yet believably during the play’s 95 minutes. Rather than including breaks in the narrative, time slips by as the characters are talking, dancing, and singing. The timelessness is also expressed in the section of the rock backdrop covered with chalk dashes that Calypso adds for every day she has remained in Ogygia. The dashes continue to accumulate throughout the play until Calypso wipes them away in a fit of frustration. Muschler’s ability to compress and extend time so artfully speaks to his control of the medium.

Those familiar with The Odyssey will not expect a happy ending to Calypso. However, the production ends on a hopeful rather than despairing note. Calypso’s troubles do not go away, but her spirit of perseverance is not damaged. At one point, Calypso sings a song telling the story of a Greek myth but leaves out the last verse which tells of the hero’s tragic end. Perhaps Muschler’s innovative change to the Greek myth is his omission of a triumphant or tragic ending. Like many stories, Calypso’s meaning is not found in victory or tragic death, but in human persistence amidst the onslaught of time, trials, and tribulations.

Calypso, written and directed by College fourth-year Jordan Muschler, plays at the Kander Theater April 6, 7, 8, and 9. Photos by Erin Koo, Photo Editor

Charlotte Pavlic

Diane Ramos has been the City of Oberlinʼs communications manager since 2021. Recently, she worked with Firelands Association for the Visual Arts and Oberlin High School students to make the Black History Month portrait contest possible. In addition to her work for the City, Ramos is a practicing artist who was the FAVA artist-in-residence in 2019. Her work incorporates a variety of media, including photography, painting, and crochet.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You grew up in Lorain, and now you’re working here in Oberlin. Do you think the communities that you’ve lived and worked in have influenced your work in government and art?

Yeah, definitely in one way or another. We kind of all just build off our experiences. I feel like it’s getting better now, but when I was growing up, art really wasnʼt something that was readily accessible or encouraged. I remember, when I was in high school, actually being discouraged from taking art classes. Now, in this position, I have the opportunity to go a different direction and guide things more — like with the last project we did with the Black History Month banners. Projects that engage local students and the young people by giving them access to art and opportunities are only beneficial for a community. So Iʼm glad that I could bring that side of things to the City of Oberlin, because there are things that I didnʼt have growing up that I wish I had.

Diane Ramos

Communication Manager for the City of Oberlin

Why do you think art is so important to a community?

I think that art is important because it can be so many things to so many different people. For me, I talk about the conceptual side of things and working through these ideas or problems that affect my life. But also, it could be something like, “This is beautiful and it brings me joy.” It can mean so much to so many different people, and I donʼt know of anything else that does that. I think that the ability to create art is beneficial for everyone. I think to be able to bring those opportunities to the community is golden. You have an opportunity to hone skills, or look at things in a different way, or use it as therapy, like I do. It’s a way of getting out what you canʼt get out otherwise, and I think doing that through creative means is very unique.

What kind of role do you think art does or should play in the Oberlin community?

Everything. Art is everything, right? If I wasn’t an art major, I couldn’t do the majority of the things that I’m doing in my job. Itʼs that ability to not only create, but also think in a creative manner to come up with new solutions to problems.

Working in a small government, it’s different every day. New problems arise, and you have to have the ability to think critically and think creatively to better the lives that you serve. I think thatʼs something that I learned as an art major. I want to bring that to any community I serve, wherever I land.

What do you see as major obstacles to the accessibility of arts in Oberlin?

Just generally speaking, the perception of art as not being valuable is a problem everywhere. But I think in Oberlin, maybe itʼs more of not knowing how to take advantage of it. We have so much here. And outside of Oberlin, people think of Oberlin as this great arts community, but itʼs not so much shining here as I feel it should be. We have an amazing museum here. We have Oberlin College. We have these galleries downtown and all of these incredible resources. They’re just not as promoted as they should be. They’re not as accessible as they should be. I think thatʼs been an obstacle, and you need someone or some organization to champion those types of efforts. Iʼm trying — Iʼm doing the best I can. I think that thereʼs more work to be done, but I think having that recognition that there is so much here — thereʼs so much potential for our community to shine as an arts hub, and Iʼm working to do that.

You mentioned you worked on the Black History Month portrait contest. Will we be seeing more projects like that bringing art to the community?

We’re hoping to! One of the things that we’re building on this year and hoping to do is the Black History project. I think everybody involved in it was like, “Yes, we need to do this every year,” so thatʼs going to continue.

One of the other things that we are putting together now is we are partnering with Firelands Association for the Visual Arts to grant funding for mural projects in the downtown business district. Thatʼs one of the things that weʼve heard, that

CROSSWORD

thereʼs interest in these visual arts elements downtown. Moneyʼs always an issue, so thatʼs the resource we are able to provide. Since we’re the government, we donʼt necessarily want to be in the business of selecting art downtown, so we’re fortunate to have an organization like FAVA right in our community that has those resources and can put together selection panels and work with artists and art in mind. It’s a pilot program this year, so we will have that evaluation at the end of the year, and hopefully we can keep that going and see that expand.

I’ll give you one other thing that we’re working on this year, though I donʼt have a lot of details yet because we’re still in

ACROSS

1. “Pay It No Mind” Johnson

5. The Goddess of Pop

7. She says a little prayer for you!

8. Militant Indigenous civil rights group, founded in 1968

9. Sketch show that premiered in 1975, for short

12. Texting service, for short

15. Eric of the Monty Python group, or another word for lazy

16. Famously shaggy

18. Like “The Star Spangled Banner” or “We Will Rock You”

19. She rings like a bell through the night

21. East Coast gas station chain, founded in 1964

22. The magic number

25. Agnetha, Björn, Benny, and Anni

27. Pistachio pudding salad, or Nixon scandal

29. “Queen of Funk” surname

30. LeVar Burton television debut

32. Genre that rose to popularity in the ’70s

33. Either/___

34. Garfunkel’s frenemy

35. Band that combined opera with rock, a controversial move at the time

the idea-building process. We are looking to establish a yearly Art in the Park event, like an Art Fair. We’re still building what the event is going to look like — we definitely want it to be very arts-driven, but also very Oberlin, so we want to work with all the galleries downtown. We want to work with Oberlin College and the Art department there and the Conservatory. We want to bring in the high school art students as well. We want it to be this very Oberlin community, arts-driven, annual event to happen downtown later this year. I think thatʼs one of those attempts to really let all the wonderful arts resources and organizations here shine.

DOWN

1. Cookbook from an Ithaca-based cooperative restaurant

2. Chlamydia, e.g.

3. First major airline to employ a female pilot in 1973, abbr.

4. Addams’ cousin

5. Bickle’s vehicles of choice

6. Landmark abortion rights case __ v. Wade

8. World heavyweight boxing champion

10. What 5-across did four days after her divorce

11. Minnesotan who appeared as a guest on an episode of New Girl

13. R&B music style named for Detroit-based record company

14. “River Collective Statement” published in 1977

17. ʼ70s slang for a certain green herb:

20. Shorts named for their temperature

23. Detest

24. Helter Skelter “family”

25. Home of DEVO

26. Filled bun:

28. “____ calling!”

31. Wrongdoing, to the religious

Answers to last week’s crossword

Diane Ramos is the communications manager for the City of Oberlin and a practicing artist.

Photo courtesy of Diane Ramos

Clara Mead, Lily Hessekiel

College Ethnographic Collection Demands Increased Awareness, Reckoning with Our Colonial History

Dlisah Lapidus Arts & Culture Editor

For over 50 years, King Building’s storage rooms have been home to the remnants of Oberlin’s old college museum. The Oberlin College Ethnographic Collection consists of approximately 1,600 objects including moccasins, bows, cradleboards, and pouches.

In 1859, Professor of Geology and Natural History George Nelson Allen founded Oberlin’s “cabinet of curiosities,” a collection of biological, geological, and anthropological materials. By the 1880s, Albert A. Wright, Allen’s nephew and the administrator of the collection, expanded the College’s “cabinet” into the substantial natural history collection later called the Oberlin College Museum. Wright obtained specimens not only from donors, Oberlin missionaries, and teachers, but also from commercial firms and exchanges with other institutions.

Over time, the geological and biological artifacts were adopted by their respective departments, leaving the ethnological and zoological materials as all that remained of Oberlin’s natural history museum. Because the Anthropology department was not established until the mid-1940s, these materials were moved between a number of buildings, including the College libraries and even the Conservatory. In 1927, the Wright Zoology Laboratory began housing the unsupervised anthropological collection.

In 1957, however, the College began preparations to demolish the Laboratory to make way for Bibbins Hall. At this point, the ethnological artifacts were divided between the newly-formed Anthropology department and the Allen Memorial Art Museum, although the criteria for division are undocumented.

Last fall, Associate Professor of Anthropology Amy Margaris and AMAM Curator of Academic Programs Hannah Wirta Kinney organized an exhibition titled “Divergent Paths,” displaying two pairs of moccasins that met different fates after the 1957 division of the collection. One pair, accessioned by the AMAM, was properly conserved, while the other was left in the neglected Anthropological collection. Even after the establishment of the Anthropology department and the construction of King Building, where the ethnographic collection was moved in the mid-1960s, the materials remained uncared for and largely forgotten. Aside from the occasional student exhibit, these artifacts held no significant role in the academic curriculum and were crammed into storage closets in King where they remained until 2002, when Professor Emerita of Anthropology Linda Grimm and her Museum Anthropology students worked to catalog the materials in the Oberlin College Ethnographic Collection project.

Grimm’s work in the 2000s organized, recorded, and digitized the collection. Due to a lack of space and resources, the team was left to repackage it into filing cabinets, draped in plastic beside chalkboards and fluorescent light bulbs, in King’s makeshift storage facilities.

In 2017, Margaris took on her predecessor’s role as steward of this collection and was finally able to move the objects to a climate-controlled room in Mudd Center. In her research and publications, Margaris has coined the term “dangling collections” to describe ethnological collections like the one in the possession of Oberlin College.

“Dangling collections are collections of cultural or scientific materials that were once part of campus museums, and then the museums went away, and the collections were left behind,” Margaris said. “These are collections that don’t have any formal stewardship, any formal curatorial oversight, but still maintain intellectual and educational value if we just get them out of the closets and cupboards.”

The ethnographic collection comprises objects originating from over three regions, including artifacts from the Native Arctic, which were given to Oberlin by the Smithsonian Institute, and artifacts acquired by Oberlin missionaries from the nation of Kiribati in Micronesia. The collection also contains objects assumed to have originated from Indigenous communities of the Great Plains, though the precise origins of these objects are unclear, as none of them show up in the accession book that Allen and later Wright diligently maintained.

“It’s very mysterious because everything else is well documented in this accession book,” Margaris said. “So perhaps the Plains materials came in differently through some different channels. We just literally have no idea.”

Although the specific origins of these objects are unknown, “collecting” practices of the time have been recorded and are assumed by College fourth-year Elf Zimmerman to have been upheld by whoever originally obtained these materials.

“The late 19th and early 20th centuries were periods of really active genocide against the Native American peoples in the United States,” Zimmerman said. “The general thought at the time was that these communities were going to become extinct, so anthropologists would go into Native American communities, buy up everything that they could, and put it in museums.”

Zimmerman participated in research on Plains Native American beaded items in the Allen Memorial Art Museum. Last year, they identified a number of objects as Cheyenne and found that they were obtained between 1880 and 1900. They worked in depth with Hunter Old Elk, a curator at the Plains Indian Museum who visited Oberlin last semester and consulted in identifying some of these objects.

Dangling collections are not unique to Oberlin. Because such collections are common practice, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act is an act that mandates and outlines repatriation of certain items to federally-recognized tribes.

“Any institution, college, or university that’s been around since the 19th century I guarantee has stuff hiding away,” Margaris said. “NAGPRA offers a legal pathway for

certain kinds of items. So, in a way, those materials are sort of easy to work with. The hard part is the items that don’t fall under NAGPRA.”

Under NAGPRA, federally-funded institutions and museums are required to inventory the Native American funerary objects and human remains in their possession and make efforts to facilitate dialogue with Indigenous consultants and Native American tribes to reach agreements regarding repatriation.

Through NAGPRA, Oberlin has repatriated the human remains of a probable female, age estimated 18–35, to the Onondaga Nation in upstate New York. All human remains and funerary objects have been stored and handled entirely separate from the rest of the ethnographic collection throughout its history.

“I learned a lot from that experience, from bringing some resolution to that and having her return to her ancestral home,” Margaris said.

Oberlin is currently in the process of another NAGPRA case to repatriate other human remains to a tribe in Spink County, SD.

“[This case has] been going on for a number of years because of COVID-19,” Margaris said. “Yesterday, I called them because we’re ready to make the repatriation,

Amy Margaris works to move specimens from the ethnographic collection to Mudd Center.

Photo courtesy of Oberlin Archaeology Society

Amy Margaris has taken on stewardship of the collection since 2017.

A.A. Wright Photo courtesy of Oberlin College Archives

George Nelson Allen

Photo courtesy of Oberlin College Archives

Layout by Eloise Rich This Week Editor

but they’ve been having terrible snowstorms, so everything got held up. The reality is there is one woman working for the tribe, doing all of this repatriation work on top of other work related to cultural heritage, and there’s me. And we’re just talking, working together, and working through it all. On paper, it’s been years, but we’ve had constant communication. We recognize that it’s a process, and that it will come to fruition. It takes time and is really about building relations between people.”

Communication is the most important step in the process of repatriating Indigenous artifacts and working through this colonial history. Aside from the artifacts flagged by NAGPRA for immediate repatriation, the larger ethical responsibility falls on institutions to allow Indigenous people to study, learn, and reteach their history and stolen cultural knowledge through the objects in these ethnological collections.

“I think that Indigenous communities need to have more agency within museum spaces over items that should be theirs,” Zimmermann said. “Bringing in more Indigenous consultants, really starting those conversations, [and] building relationships is the most important thing. Oberlin and the Allen like to pride themselves on being innovative. This is one way that they could really do that and show other institutions that this is a concrete next step that everyone should be taking.”

Other efforts are also necessary for creating a clear guideline for streamlining repatriation. Margaris is working toward the development of a collections committee consisting of representatives from the College, the Conservatory, the AMAM, and the College’s legal team.

“The great thing about this committee is that all of us who have concerns about stewarding other people’s stuff can sit together and think through the legal, ethical, and the practical ramifications to come up with best practices,” Margaris said. “I’ve seen work being done at Wesleyan University and other campuses to try and revive collections. It’s all being done in a sort of piecemeal way. I absolutely think that Oberlin can be a leader in doing this at a broader institutional scale, maybe through programming that

will bring in folks from other institutions that are wrestling with some of the same problems.”

This is not just a story of one small liberal arts institution’s ethnological collection, but a microcosm of the larger colonial context that Oberlin College students, alumni, faculty, and readers of the Review play a role in. Grappling with our imperialist history is necessary for recognizing the institutional and ethical responsibility to acknowledge our past and present ties to colonial practices. It is also imperative to raise awareness about Indigenous students, community members, and connections who the institution must support in all attempts for cultural revitalization.

Photo courtesy of Jennifer Manna

Iñupiaq women examine a wooden spear thrower from the Arctic ethnography collection.

Photo courtesy of Chie Sakakibara

A collection of bows primarily from Southern Africa is transported out of King Building. Photos courtesy of Oberlin College Ethnographic Collection

Above: Two moccasins from the ethnographic collection are on display.

Photos courtesy of Oberlin College Ethnographic Collection

A doll, called a nuguaq or irniaruaq, was recovered as a part of the Arctic collection.

Photo courtesy of Oberlin College Ethnographic Collection

OPINIONS

Students Should Participate in Improving Campus Mental Health Services

Josie Rosman

Last semester, I had many conversations with my friends about times they were failed by the mental health support services here at Oberlin. I knew friends who had been unable to make appointments in the first place, who had received insufficient support, or who had been turned away in times of crisis. I got so upset about this that I wrote a letter to Vice President and Dean of Students Karen Goff. I was surprised when she wrote me back to set up a meeting with herself, Executive Director of Student Health and Wellbeing Andrew Oni, and Counseling and Psychological Services Director John Harshbarger. I was struck by their level of concern and engagement with the issues I had brought up and the clarity of their vision. I went away from the conversation feeling hopeful and was further encouraged when I saw that they were hosting a Student Mental Health Open Forum.

The forum provided a rare but important opportunity for direct dialogue between students and staff; both parties, I believe, came away with new knowledge. Students learned about mental health resources that they had never heard about, including Early Alert, a texting-based wellness bot, and Protocall, the crisis support telephone line (reachable at 855-256-7160); staff learned that students were largely unaware of these resources. Students also brought up new ideas, most notably incorporating awareness of the mental health resources into new student orientation, perhaps through the Peer Advising Leaders program. Students also had the opportunity to bring up environmental concerns that negatively impact student mental health.

Perhaps most importantly, students learned valuable information about what to do in a crisis situation. One student spoke up about being turned away at a crisis moment, like many of my friends. This student had to leave school for the rest of the semester because she could not get the support she needed. The panelists recommended some specific lan-

guage that they advised students to use to get the help they need:

“I need immediate help,” “I need to speak to someone today,” “I am in a crisis,” “I am feeling unsafe,” and, “I need a crisis appointment.” While I personally think it’s a little silly that there are magic words we need to say to unlock mental health support, it is clear that we do, so it is important that we know what those words are.

A final important topic of conversation was that communication between administrators and students at this school is really hard, and that is a problem. Not everyone reads the Campus Digest, the Review, or the Student Senate emails; not everyone reads all the posters, follows all the Instagram accounts, or comes to these open forums. This is something that I think students and administration alike should work on. If we want Oberlin to be an engaged and active community, students need to be informed about and involved with the things happening around us.

Beyond these more practical elements, I came away from the forum thinking more about the nature of mental health support at Oberlin. The fact is that mental health issues are a huge problem here, like they are everywhere, and we the students need the people taking care of us to do a better job. It feels important to note that the administration — specifically Dean Goff — cares deeply about our mental health, and is actively working to make our support structures stronger. There are a lot of systems in place that simply don’t work, and so many of the adults who have control over our lives are overwhelmed with the work they’re being asked to do, or else see students as numbers instead of people. Both issues need to be addressed, but we should also acknowledge and celebrate when the opposite is true — when people really care and are really trying.

We have to acknowledge that the administration can’t know when things are wrong or if systems are failing us if we don’t tell them. It would be great if the resources we have worked perfectly for us already, but we’re clearly See College, page 12

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EDITORIAL

Dependence on Visiting Professors Contributes to Unstable Academic Environment

For several budgetary and administrative reasons, institutions of higher education are rapidly shifting toward higher percentages of visiting assistant professors as opposed to tenure-track positions. According to College Factual, 11 percent of Oberlin’s total instructional personnel is part-time but not faculty, or non-tenure track faculty, otherwise grouped together as adjunct faculty. Thankfully, Oberlin has a significantly lower percentage of adjunct faculty compared to the average across higher education, but that may change in future years. Given the financial exigencies outlined in the One Oberlin report and ongoing concerns with faculty pay, it might only be a matter of time before the College considers remaking its faculty composition — if it isn’t doing so already.

There are three factors that deserve higher consideration when hiring faculty members: students benefit from an abundance of long-term faculty; faculty benefit from the freedom to conduct research and the ability to build their careers; and both of these factors benefit the institution by attracting young, competitive academics who are looking for long-term positions.

Oberlin’s low student-to-instructor ratio naturally allows professors to give more attention to their students, both in and out of the classroom. This is a large selling point for the College as a

whole. Some students decide to come to Oberlin because of the benefits reaped from close relationships between students and faculty members. During the semester, this means more detailed feedback on papers, more personalized advice during office hours, and accommodations that are better tailored to individual needs. Often, students take multiple courses with the same professors, which translates into a long-term rapport. Students often ask their recurring professors to be their academic advisors or write letters of recommendation. In addition to building a relationship, students benefit intellectually from the opportunity to immerse themselves over several semesters in their professors’ specialized fields. This can translate into doing credited research with professors, which is invaluable in securing offers from graduate schools, or individual research in the form of capstones or honors projects.

An additional concern with adjunct faculty is the short-lived nature of their course offerings due to their limited time at the institution. If a student were to become especially interested in a field of study that a visiting faculty member specialized in, the sudden departure of the professor teaching that course could derail the student’s long-term plans and negatively impact their academic career.

First-years have also expressed specific concerns with being assigned faculty advisors who are visiting professors. It is difficult for faculty to advise students on unique institutional requirements and provide them with targeted advice regarding courses and faculty they have little experience with. Incoming classes are increasingly disillusioned with the quality of Oberlin’s faculty. It has become more difficult to ask upperclassmen for advice because the professors they know may not be at Oberlin anymore. This year’s course selection has brought this issue into particularly clear focus, with desires to take specific courses stunted by, “Oh, actually, I think they were a visiting professor.” For faculty, the opportunity to stay at one institution for more than two years gives them a secure place to work on their research and fine-tune their courses. Getting published in journals and writing books is what enables faculty in the humanities to develop an edge. Meanwhile, professors in the sciences need resources, students, and time to work on lab experiments and data collection — all of which demand a steady base of operations. The ability to invest time and energy in research will no doubt incentivize up-and-coming academics to accept positions at Oberlin, which is a longterm investment in the success of the institution.

Editorials are the responsibility of the Review Editorial Board — the Editors-in-Chief, Managing Editor, and Opinions Editors — and do not necessarily reflect the views of the staff of the Review

Oberlin College Should Follow Proposed Standards For Alumni Salary Disclosure

Selena Frantz Columnist

As the 2023 college admissions cycle continues, many high school seniors are making a stressful yet exciting choice: where to spend the next four years of their lives. In an attempt to increase yield, colleges are courting their possible first-year classes with an overwhelming intensity. Oberlin College is no stranger to this, as demonstrated by the lengths gone to make its All Roads Lead to Oberlin program a resounding success. Still, even with all the attention the College pays to incoming students, Oberlin somehow manages to overlook one of the most important factors in a future collegianʼs decision: money.

It’s no secret that many college students end up deciding to pursue higher education based on the possible financial and career advantages of a degree. We go to university to expand our earning potential or bolster job security. It is therefore incredibly important that the institution a student attends can provide this. After all, what is the point of spending up to $61,106 a year on tuition alone at Oberlin if the financial

strain might outweigh the possible benefits?

Recently, the Ohio House of Representatives introduced a bill that would require all Ohio state colleges to “provide financial cost and aid disclosure forms” to newly admitted students. This also includes sharing “the qualifying student’s expected monthly education loan payment upon graduation” as well as “the income range between the twenty-fifth and seventy-fifth percentiles for each of the following:

(a) The state institution’s most recent cohort of graduates;

(b) The state institution’s cohort of graduates who graduated five years prior to the qualifying student’s admission to the institution.”

In an interview that I conducted with Representative Adam Mathews from Ohio State District 56, who is one of the primary sponsors of the aforementioned House Bill 27, he discussed how important this bill is for students.

“The general feeling is, if you get accepted by a good college and you show up for class, you do your work, you’ll be fine,” Mathews said. “But that is never defined for you — what fine

looks like. How are you going to be able to make rent, get your life or family set up, be able to get your first down payment for a mortgage? Is that even a reality? We want students, especially when they’re making what’s probably either the first- or second-largest financial decision of their life, to have that in front of them.”

While this bill may not directly apply to Oberlin, as it is a private institution and not a state college, there is no reason why the school should not start adopting these practices on its own. According to one 2014 New York Times study, Oberlin is ranked 63rd out of 64 for median student income when compared to other “elite” schools. Oberlin graduates made an average of $38,900 at age 34 at a time when the national average was $48,257.83. When looking at this data, to be as fair as possible, I must note the lack of defined age range in the second study and the fact that these statistics are almost ten years old. Still, I think any possible inflation of data would be offset by the fact that the second study looked at all workers, not just those with See Students, page 12

Continued Gun Violence Affects Generations of Americans

Emily Vaughan Hanna Alwine Opinions Editors

On March 30, thousands of Tennessee students walked out of school and marched to the State Capitol building in response to a mass shooting at the Covenant School, which tragically claimed the lives of six people: three elementary school children and three adults. This walkout was the latest in a string of many over the past few years that have occurred in response to school shootings. There have been over 100 mass shootings in the United States in 2023. It’s a staggering number, almost impossible to conceptualize and even harder when the loss of human life is considered. Yet this statistic has not graced the front pages of any newspapers, and this figure alone does not have the same impact on Americans that it may have had even ten years ago. Americans, and more specifically American legislators, have become accustomed to statistics of this kind.

The coverage of this walkout brought us back to our own involvement in school walkouts in response to mass shootings, having both participated in the national walkouts organized by March for Our Lives in March

2018. Five years have passed since this event. We think of our siblings, now close to the ages that we were when March for Our Lives was founded in response to a school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL. How will they respond to these tragedies? Does the violence shock them as it shocked us at their age or has this type of gun violence become so commonplace that the anger has been lost, leaving only hopelessness? We are devastated by this thought. How can so little have changed since we marched? How can we still be in virtually the same place that we were before?

Why do we let children continue to die from the same preventable cause?

This is not to discount the meaningful legislation that has resulted from these protests and the power of the collective action of student organizers that has propelled us forward. It is thanks to these efforts that we owe several pieces of effective legislation:

In 2022, common sense gun legislation received a major victory with the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which, among other things, enhanced background checks, supported state red flag laws, and invested in mental health services and access. But

for every step forward, it seems as if the movement is set two steps back. Recently, the Florida state legislature approved legislation that would allow permitless open carry.

In writing this we would like to point to the undeniable fact that generation after generation of Americans continue to feel the impact of the gun violence epidemic plaguing this country. Every student in the United States has been touched by the impact of gun violence and, unless change happens, will continue to be. Most domestic students at Oberlin likely remember armed intruder drills happening at some point in their pre-college education.

We remember these drills being first implemented around 2012, following a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. We continued to experience these drills throughout the remainder of our education, with yearly drills being implemented in our school districts following the Parkland shooting. Between and following these two shootings, there have been hundreds, if not thousands, more. We just don’t remember all of the names and places; there are simply too many. A quick Google search for “gun violence” or

“mass shooting” will yield a myriad of results published in the past 24 hours, each seemingly about a different shooting within the past couple weeks. In just a short time, the news circuit will move on, publicizing and reporting on the next shooting and the next. This leaves little time to process the news, to truly understand it. More importantly, it gives those affected little time to grieve and truly make sense of their losses. How does a parent process the loss of their child at school, a place where children are supposed to be safe? How do these children process the loss of their classmates? How does anyone process the loss of their friends or family members to senseless violence? How do communities move past these tragedies and recover, despite the holes of missing people in the patchwork that makes the communities what they are? There simply aren’t words to describe the pain and trauma that a mass shooting brings to a community. Following a mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in October 2018 — four and a half years ago — remnants of the tragedy are still visible in the signs saying “no place for hate” around the neighborhood and the chain link fence that surrounds the synagogue, covered with ban-

ners displaying art made by children from the Pittsburgh and Orlando areas: two cities touched by the horrific reality of mass shootings in America.

The threat is ever present. Gun violence — in the form of mass shootings in particular — has become frighteningly normalized in the United States. This is not a fresh take; it is a disturbingly old one. That in and of itself should be horrifying. How do we keep repeating the same conversation? At what point does this epidemic end? When do we say, once and for all, that enough is enough? How many more kids need to die for something to happen? How many more people will die as a result of our politicians’ inaction?

The prevalence of mass shootings in America has made it difficult to be shocked when these horrific events happen. A mass shooting is four deaths. Why should that be considered a small number? It horrifies us to think of our sisters growing up in this same reality, that soon they, their friends, and their peers will be exposed to the same traumas and stresses, if they have not already been. This cannot go another ten years. This cannot go another five. We, the people, are tired. What else can we do to make our voices heard?

Inconsistency in Dining Services Causes Harm to Students

Nikki Keating Managing Editor

Editor’s note: This article contains descriptions of disordered eating behaviors. My day goes like this: I wake up and go to class before going through the numerous activities, jobs, and social events I’ve committed to and love. I end up not being able to wait in the Rathskeller line, but I promise myself to stop by Stevenson Dining Hall after class. Between those points, I have to spend a meal swipe on a bottle of cranberry juice because I’ve run out of Flex Points. To conserve the number of meal swipes I have, I skip lunch, saying that I want to get juice later in the day and hope to get a slice of salmon from Lord-Saunders Dining Hall. I run into a friend who explains that she’s been sick all day and blames the Umami she ate last night, describing the gray meat she cut into and the nausea she’s felt for hours. Suddenly, stopping for dinner gets taken off the list of things to do. Another promise is made that I will eat eventually, but the when and where get buried under a textbook I am reading. It is only when I lie down and reach to turn off my lamp that I finally realize that all I’ve had to eat was a packet of saltine crackers and cranberry juice. It’s not that I don’t want to eat. When I go home from Oberlin, I find myself eating and thinking about food consistently and happily. I was never a big eater in my family and have been struggling with weight loss all my life, but I have never felt such a lack of control as when I am eating at Oberlin — a lack of control regarding what I can put into my body and the knowledge that the food on my plate could make me sick. Even the food I see boiling in a pot or cooking on the grill at the Rathskeller is tainted by the thought of “what if it’s expired?” — because it has been before — or “what if it’s not cooked all the way?” It’s hard to try and see every meal differently when it’s the same methods that are used to make it over

and over again. This fear slowly spread and took over my mind, and at one point, I could not eat at Stevie for a month. Whenever my friends beg me to eat, I grimace because it means I have to force something down my throat or risk my health. Or worse, I feel the shame of concerned looks I get when my clothes look looser on my frame. It feels like I’ve lost control of how I eat and, in turn, how my body functions and looks. In the winter, I went to Egypt and ate some of the best food of my life. Not only did I feel good, but I was also proud of eating every meal and even returning for seconds. I gained 20 pounds. By the end of February, I had lost it all. Again, it is not that I don’t want to eat. I remember the story the Review published detailing health code violations. I remember the rotten fruit that I pulled

out of the DeCafé refrigerator. All of a sudden, I’m not that hungry. The days go on, and my appetite grows smaller because the quality of campus food makes it hard for me to eat.

It isn’t just an Oberlin thing. Many colleges don’t have appetizing food that students consistently want to eat. I also acknowledge the privilege of being able to have consistent food provided to me in the first place. As college students, we are privileged to have many options for food. I, if nothing else, feel grateful that I get to be in a space where I don’t have to ask myself if food will be on the table. This makes me feel worse when I can’t force myself to eat any of it. My parents, who spend thousands of dollars for me to go here, often beg me to eat — to put on just a little bit of weight and just try eating something from

the dining hall. No matter how much I criticize myself for looking thinner or how guilty I feel when I call my parents and tell them I’m going out to get food, it doesn’t change the facts. I can’t convince my body to feel anything but nausea when I remember cutting into chicken at Stevie and seeing pink. And even when I find myself hungry, it’s easy to spend a meal swipe on a latte and a muffin and convince myself that it’s filling because it’s packaged and safe. My brain can convince itself that taking a bite won’t make me sick.

I wish there was an easy way to fix the quality of Oberlin’s food. So much of the food we eat is shipped in from all over, and its quality is at the mercy of the season and the delivery time. But the food in crates waiting for transport is the same food students complain about sitting in the De-

Café fridges long after expiration. The AVI staff workers are tasked with serving the entire Oberlin community, and every day, I am grateful and thank them for their hard work. It’s the responsibility of AVI Foodsystems, not the job of the underpaid and under-appreciated staff workers, to ensure that the food provided is up to code and fit to be served. No solution will be easy. From the wide variation of what qualifies as a meal swipe to the fact that the Rat has three health code violations, different campus dining locations all have problems that require individual solutions. But I want a day when I can trust what is in front of me and eat it without fear of sickness or pain. And that starts by asking how food is made on campus and if we are doing everything to ensure our food is safe and healthy.

Azariah’s Cafe offers a limited variety of what qualifiies as a meal swipe.

Photo by Erin Koo, Photo Editor

What Would You Tell Prospective Students About Oberlin?

Emily Vaughan Hanna Alwine Opinions Editors

Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

Abhisri Nath, College fourthyear I feel that as a student, you can really find your niche in the Oberlin community and in college because you can develop that sort of relationship with the professionals here on campus — and with the professors, too. But having said that, I would also say that you should be wise and you should be cognizant of the fact that we are in Oberlin, which is a little away from the city life, hence networking and career trajectories can seem a little different in such a place.

Andreea Procopan, College

fourth-year

Because it’s in Ohio, it definitely is a bubble that can sometimes isolate students from real-life issues, which kind of makes you question how the students are here. That same bubble can sometimes make it boring here. There are a lot of events, but if you’re into more urban or city activities or knowing different people, that might be difficult to come by here, since the student body population is also quite small. But for the professors, it’s definitely worth it. That’s what I will say. Favorite, favorite aspect is professors.

Ruby Spencer, College firstyear

One thing I wish I’d known before coming here — this is so classic, but party-scene-wise, it’s

Students Benefit From Knowledge of Average Graduate Salaries

very limited if you don’t know things. Parties end at like 12:30 a.m. It’s not all-night ragers. It makes sense for the environment, but be warned. It’s not super social at night.

Katia Chapin, College firstyear

The main thing I would tell a prospective student is that everyone at Oberlin is very nerdy about one specific thing, and that’s already amazing. The added benefit is that they’re very excited to share with you, and they’re very excited to hear the thing that you’re nerdy about. That manifests itself in classes and the ExCo program, and everyone has a great time learning from each other.

Mia Cooper, College second-year

I would say take Italian with [Senior Lecturer of Italian] Ivana Di Siena. She’s the best ever.

Oona Shane, College

second-year

Obviously, I would say to come to Oberlin College Lanes. It’s the best place to be. Everyone who works there is awesome. Everyone who bowls is awesome.

Avi Moses, College first-year

I’d tell them that Oberlin is an average liberal arts college and a world-renowned conservatory. The two reasons to go here are co-ops and the culture that you get from being in a conservatory. And also, like, go here now, ’cause like, it’s getting worse. It’s still good, but like, I bet I wouldn’t recommend it in 10 years. So especially if you’re gonna be a double-degree, f***ing, go now.

College Mental Health Systems Continue to Fail Students

past that point now. Speaking up on your own behalf can feel particularly hard when you’re actively in the middle of a mental health crisis, but even when that’s the case, we need to speak up after the fact or speak up on a friend’s behalf about times we were turned away or received inadequate support. We deserve quality mental health care — but for better or for worse, we have to

participate

It’s

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college educations, who theoretically should be earning more than those without. Moreover, I highly doubt that a $10,000 difference in salary can be made up in a mere 10 years. Even if it could, I have no choice but to assume otherwise, due to the lack of new information from the College itself. This information should not have to be sought out by researchers in order to be made public. In fact, for the sake of students, it should not be difficult to find at all. While most of us would love to choose our happiness over money, this is just not realistic for everyone. Low-income students cannot afford to make the mistake of attending the wrong college. While Oberlin does provide a decent financial aid package, it does not cover everything for most students. Some students will have to take out loans, another financial aspect that House Bill 27 expects colleges to share. Additionally, if students could be making more money by

EDITORIAL COMIC Molly Chapin Staff Illustrator

right after high school, then why should they spend four years that could have been used to climb ranks and build a résumé? This is not to say that the experiences gained in college, whether they might be educational, cultural, or social, are a waste of time. However, who is to say that one cannot expand their worldview in a space outside of educational institutions?

In addition to a potentially lower-than-average salary, the lack of transparency itself also disproportionately affects first-generation and low-income students. Access to college admissions counseling, as well as inherited knowledge of the financial risks of college, are not luxuries that everyone has. When colleges are not open about the financial expectations students should have, they are making it more difficult for students to find the best school for them, decide if college is even the right choice, or reach the same success level as their

wealthier peers.

Making the transition to a higher degree of transparency is not a difficult task. According to Representative Mathews, “it doesn’t look like the coding expense would be really much more than a student’s normal textbook expenditure.” It only takes a few hours to make this information public knowledge — information that should have been so in the first place.

If Oberlin College really wants to demonstrate its professed “longstanding commitments to access, diversity, and inclusion,” then it must strive to do better. Oberlin is already the college with the fourth-lowest number of Pell Grant-receiving students, with only 8.4 percent of its students displaying exceptional financial need. In order to not further alienate low-income students, as well as all the students who have made or will make a commitment to this school, Oberlin College owes us all full financial transparency.

new Ohio House Bill requires post-graduate financial transparancy from colleges. Photo by Erin Koo, Photo Editor entering the workforce

Continued from page 10

Continued from page 10

in the process of guaranteeing it for ourselves and our peers. It’s easy to complain about the things that go wrong at Oberlin, but we also need to be a part of making this place better.

easy to feel hopeless about our ability to affect real change at this school, but there are people who genuinely care about us and want to do right by us. Let’s help them help us.

Ecolympics Returns to Campus With New Campaigns

Walter Thomas-Patterson

After a five-year hiatus, the Oberlin Ecolympics — an annual two-week community competition and event series aimed at reducing emissions and raising environmental awareness — will kick off on April 10 with a rock painting and pledge card signing event in Tappan Square. Spearheaded by the Office of Environmental Sustainability, the Ecolympics’ main fixture will be separate competitions among Oberlin College dorms, Oberlin Public Schools, and various public buildings around Oberlin, to see who can reduce the most water and electricity over the Ecolympics’ duration.

OES will also be hosting a series of other events as part of Ecolympics, including tours of local environmental infrastructure, workshops for making dryer balls and utensil holders, and an opportunity to compost food at Stevenson Dining Hall.

Along with these events, there will be a “Poop Campaign,” where on select days, students and community members are invited to use bathrooms in the Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies to help feed the Living Machine, a system that mimics wetlands to filter wastewater. Participants will tally the number of times they make a donation, and whoever donates the most will have the opportunity to be featured in Big Parade.

There is an additional community-wide goal of reducing electricity consumption by 10,000 kilowatt hours and water consumption by 10,000 gallons. Progress will be tracked in real time on the Oberlin Environmental Dashboard — a system that collects information about campuswide resource usage.

Heather Adelman, sustainability manager of OES, explained that the community-wide goal is a crucial addition to the Ecolympics to help foster a more inclusive atmosphere.

“Due to ongoing construction with some of the electricity and water meters in certain buildings, not all dorms will compete individually but instead will help work towards this broader community goal,” Adelman wrote in an email to the Review

According to double-degree second-year Sophie Griffith-Oh, who works as an intern in the OES, one of the significant challenges related to this event has been raising public awareness. She identified a general sense of resignation that many Oberlin students feel when it comes to environmental activism.

“Even once I was involved in this project, I felt a little bit skeptical,” Griffith-Oh said.

“There is this attitude of ‘I can’t make a difference, I’m just one person. It’s the companies that are at fault’”

Ecolympics was the brainchild of Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Biology John Petersen, OC ’88, whose background in systems ecology helped guide him in its development. He pioneered the Oberlin Environmental Dashboard, which allowed the competition to take place.

“Everyone needs a sense of self-efficacy — the understanding that their actions can actually have a measurable and significant impact on the world around them,” Petersen said.

“But dorms have many students living in them, all of whom are making decisions about water and electricity use. The challenge with the Ecolympics competition is that you have to have a critical mass of people in a dorm working and strategizing together to conserve these resources before you will actually be able to measure and see the reductions. That is why collective engagement [and] excitement of the whole dorm are so important to success. But this is really the way the world works too — unless we get our s**t together on a community level, individual action won’t be enough to solve problems like climate change.”

Petersen emphasized that he thinks that Oberlin’s slogan, “Think one person can change the world? So do we,” can be misleading when it comes to this competition.

“I love the sentiment of self-efficacy embodied in [the slogan]. But I also think it is off base. It has always been through working as a community for collective action that Obies and others have positively changed the world.”

Friday, April 7

8–10 p.m.: Spring Fling Swing Dance in Wilder Main Space

The Oberlin Swing and Blues Society, along with the Ruby Laks Quintet, invites participants to an evening of dancing and live jazz. All levels of experience and abilities welcome.

Saturday, April 8

3–4:30 p.m.: International Students in STEM Listening Session in Wilder Hall, room 208

Hosted by the Student Leadership Committee, this event comes as part of several identitybased listening sessions slated to occur over the next two weeks. SLC hopes to share what it learns from students during this event with faculty and staff in order to improve the culture of STEM at Oberlin. Attendance is not limited to STEM majors. Those with questions are invited to contact STEM Fellow Darian Gray at dgray@oberlin.edu.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Sunday, April 9

1–3 p.m.: Consent for Men workshop in King Building, room

101 Hosted by Preventing and Responding to Sexual Misconduct, this workshop aims to provide a space for maleidentifying people to discuss “positive masculinity” as it relates to consent, communication, sex, hookup culture, and relationships on campus.

Monday, April 10

7–9 p.m.: Consensual Kink and BDSM workshop in King Building, room 321

Hosted by PRSM, this workshop aims to educate participants on consent and safety in kink and BDSM at both the intellectual and personal levels through scenarios and group discussions.

Wednesday, April 12

6–8:30 p.m.: Oberlin Heritage Center Annual Meeting and

Community Awards Ceremony at the Hotel at Oberlin

After an optional social hour and dinner, Sara Fisher, Executive Director of the International Women’s Air and Space Museum will present “Sharing the Stories and Impact of Women in Air & Space.” OHC will then present awards to community members and organizations.

Thursday, April 13

5–6 p.m.: “Where is Consent in Art (Museums)?” walkthrough in the Allen Memorial Art Museum Curators of the consent exhibit Hannah Kinney and Sam Adams invite participants to a walkthrough of their experimental museum installation. The curators will lead an exploration of the ethics of presenting images of power and sexuality using Black, feminist, and queer frameworks. The exhibit is open until August 22.

Africatown Documented by Students, Faculty, Documentary Filmmakers

Nikki Keating Managing Editor

Descendant, a Netflix documentary that was released last year, was shown at the Apollo Theatre April 1. The documentary, directed by Margaret Brown, narrates the history of the last slave ship to the U.S., the Clotilda, which arrived in Africatown, AL, and how the captives’ legacy remains in the town today.

Oberlin College students and faculty have been traveling to Africatown since 2013, creating an oral history project of the Black community that remains there today.

Kern Jackson, co-writer and co-producer of the documentary, helped build a relationship with the Oberlin community, as he is familiar with and a part of the Africatown community.

“Essentially, I was really interested in reversing and learning about the migration that my mom traveled — she actually came to Ohio when she left Alabama,” Jackson said when talking about how he first approached the project. “I was interested in sort of looking at the things that are unspeakable and unspoken [SIC], as Toni Morrison would say, with regard to the space and culture here.”

In the documentary, the citizens of Africatown explore the history of the descendants of those who arrived on the Clotilda. The film explores the relationships descendants have with their ancestors who were on the last slave ship to the U.S. and how this heritage shaped the town’s culture and many of its citizen’s futures.

“It started as a way to look at the oral history of Africatown,” Jackson said. “Africatown is actually composed of like six neighborhoods. The descendants, in particular, hold homecomings for Mardi Gras. They have simultaneous festival events celebrating their resilience and resistance and the survival of their family’s experience, which I thought was kind of fascinating. There was this overlay that was happening that I wanted to look into.”

Descendant’s production team worked closely with Oberlin students and staff.

“I was volunteering at an event called the Tar Sands Healing Walk, on unceded First Nations land in Alberta, Canada, near Fort McMurray. I was up there, I was

working the registration table and the elders from Africatown came to check in and I was really interested.” Director of Environmental Studies Program Jay Fiskio, who orchestrated the project to Africatown, said. “And so I asked them to tell me about their story, and that’s how I learned about Africatown.” When students travel to Africatown, Fiskio introduces them to the community and its residents. There, students conduct interviews with community members using the snowball technique, which entails gaining recommendations for people in the town, conducting interviews, and then identifying other potential subjects through them. The interviews aim to create a digital historical archive of the town detailing descendants’ experiences and narratives.

“I traveled [to Africatown] during my time as a student seven times on different academic breaks,” Nathan Carpenter, OC ’21, said. “Most of my work on those trips was alongside Professor Fiskio and other students. We focused on working with our partners and collaborators in Africatown to conduct oral history interviews for the digital archive, and that’s what we’ve been building in collaboration with our partners there.”

Africatown was formed after the enslaved people from the ship Clotilda, who were brought to the United States illegally, settled back into the outskirts of Mobile, a port city on Alabama’s Gulf Coast. Presently, Africatown struggles with its environment being heavily polluted due to industrial manufacturers and chemical refineries. One of the hopes of the project is to create a space and place for research in Africatown that improves the quality of life for its residents.

“We have been waiting to take the Africatown Digital Archive public. Originally, there was talk of releasing it January of 2020 but we wanted our community partners to take a look at it, and give us feedback,” Fiskio said. “They said, why don’t you wait and come back in June 2020 — and then the pandemic hits. So we have been waiting to be able to be there in person to take it public. And I’m hoping that we’ll be able to go down this summer for the opening of Heritage House on July 8.”

Students who communicate their interest in the project and

visiting Africatown are referred by Fiskio and invited down as either research assistants or interviewers who spend time in the community.

“One of the things that I think is really special about my experience working with Professor Fiskio and folks in Africatown is not only have I benefited from Fiskio’s mentorship, but I’ve also been really lucky to be mentored by the folks in Africatown,” Carpenter said. “They have always taken a real investment in the learning of the Oberlin students who have traveled to Africatown over the years.”

The screening brought together both the filmmakers and the Oberlin community. After the screening, a panel moderated by Associate Professor of Africana Studies Charles Peterson took place. This panel included two of the Clotilda’s descendants, along with Jackson and environmental justice activist Major Joe Womack. A Q&A was also conducted so students could have an opportunity to ask questions about the documentary, the overall history of Africatown, and the experiences of its descendants.

“It is this consistent return to Africatown that helps Oberlin students share their gifts,” Jackson said. “I think that’s just evidence of what students are doing at Oberlin. It speaks to Professor Jay Fiskio and other professors within the Africana Studies program that they have eager students — students who feel like they have some practices for their theoretical understandings and ways to apply them.”

Africatown’s Heritage House is set to open in July 2023 and was announced as part of an annual festival titled the “Spirit of Our Ancestors.” Fiskio hopes to then release some of the oral research conducted by students alongside the texts, documents, and artifacts that will be showcased within the Heritage House.

“One of the things that I think is special about my experience in Africatown is that I’ve been tremendously lucky to benefit from the mentorship of both Professor Fiskio as well as our partners in Africatown,” said Carpenter. “Our partners and collaborators have always made a real investment in the learning of the Oberlin students who have traveled there over the years.”

Past iterations of the Ecolympics have featured a variety of events.

Photo courtesy of Environmental Dashboard

Lucien Ferguson, OC ’13, was recently selected for the 2023–2025 Drinan Scholars Visiting Assistant Professorship at Boston College Law School. He will gain teaching experience as well as experience in civil rights law. Ferguson highlights African-American political thought and explores the intersections of civil rights and activism within the legal system.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Could you expand on the goal of the Drinan Scholars Visiting Assistant Professorship?

In legal academia, one of the main pathways to becoming a law professor is to do a legal fellowship or visiting assistant professorship. There’s a number of them throughout the country and they are extremely

Lucien Ferguson

Drinan Scholar at Boston College Law School

competitive. They offer you a chance to develop your research and teaching amongst a community of legal scholars who are invested in helping you secure a tenure track job. The Drinan Scholars Visiting Assistant Professorship is a two-year position at Boston College Law School. I will be teaching one course each semester to law students, and the course I’m teaching in the fall is called “Reimagining the Reconstruction Constitution.” It’s a course that I’m designing and very excited about. While at Boston College Law School, I will also turn some of my dissertation research into law review articles, which will be part of my future job market application.

So, over the course of the two years, I’m hopefully going to receive some helpful mentorship, I’m teaching, and I’m developing my scholarship. I will also add that the Drinan Scholars Visiting Assistant Professorship is for scholars who study law and race. I was really honored to get this one in particular because of the focus. The program is also unique because it accepts only one visiting assistant professor each year, which can result in more opportunities for individualized attention and support.

Your dissertation is titled “The Spirit of Caste: Recasting the History of Civil Rights.” Could you talk more on this and speak to how it relates to your professorship?

The project is looking at civil rights history from the perspective of caste, which, in the U.S. context, means a system of racialized and gendered impediments to social mobility. Many academics and people generally speaking don’t tend to think of the U.S. as a caste system. But, there’s a really important theme of caste in 19th century Black political thought. These are thinkers that critiqued the U.S. as a caste system. That is, they explicitly developed a critical understanding of the U.S. as a caste society and theorized the law as a means to abolish caste. A key part of what participants in the abolitionist, women’s rights, and civil rights movements were trying

to do is think about how law — but also a much wider range of strategies and tactics — can be used in the service of racial uplift through the abolition of caste. Some of the central thinkers I am studying include Frederick Douglass, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Anna Julia Cooper, Thurgood Marshall, and Ida B. Wells. It’s a really broad conversation and broad range of figures that are understanding the U.S. in terms of caste and thinking of the meaning of civil rights as protections against caste.

As the 2023–2025 Drinan Visiting Assistant Professor at BC Law, I’m going to be connecting this research to contemporary legal conversations by developing a series of law review articles that look at the 14th and 13th Amendments and also areas of property law from the perspective that these figures bring.

Did this interest with caste in the legal system stem from your education in Oberlin?

Oberlin was very important for interest in these topics for many reasons, and I didn’t even know about the really rich abolitionist and civil rights Oberlin history before getting to Oberlin. But my firstyear seminar was with Associate Professor of English Gillian Johns and she taught English and African American literature. She taught a class called “The Blues Detective” that brought together Black political thought and theory in a way I found really exciting, so I often think back on that class. While at Oberlin, I also fell in love with political theory, in part because I cultivated close relationships with Harlan Wilson and Sonia Kruks, who are now emeriti. I also think that just by being at Oberlin you become aware of important abolitionist and civil rights history, and I was really affected by the radical student culture and politics going on around campus during my time there.

As a white scholar researching civil rights and activism centered on Black voices, how do you navigate the narra-

tives of Black scholars respectfully?

This is a very important question for me and one I think about quite often. As a white scholar studying the work of Black intellectuals, there are inevitably limitations to my ability to understand their lived experiences. Thus, it is imperative for me to be as reflexive as possible and to constantly examine and acknowledge the assumptions I bring to my research. One way I do so is by staying as close as possible to the texts, the historical archive, and the work of prominent Black scholars so that I can preserve the voice and intentions of the figures I am studying as much as possible. Additionally, a crucial goal for me as a scholar is to help us overcome the misconception that Black voices have always been marginal in the development of our legal system. What I try to do in my work is show how the intellectual contributions of Black individuals and Black-led movements have shaped our legal traditions and how they can help us navigate major legal and political challenges today.

How does it feel to earn this professorship at such an early point of your career?

I am just overjoyed and so excited! It means so much to me that I can pursue this kind of career and life direction, which has been my dream and aspiration for a long time. I couldn’t have been happier to get this opportunity. My hope for my time at Boston College Law School is to establish my first step into legal academia as a scholar and as a teacher. I think the opportunity to bring some of my teaching experiences from the past to teaching law students at Boston College is one of the really exciting aspects of the program. The other very exciting aspect of it is that there are truly amazing professors at Boston College Law School, and so I really can’t wait to just have conversations with them that will be important for my work and future direction as a scholar. It feels like my next step after graduate school — a big turning point — and I’m really happy about it.

Kendal at Oberlin Designated Tree Campus Healthcare Institution

Yendi Kai Foo

The Arbor Day Foundation recently dubbed Kendal at Oberlin a 2022 Tree Campus Healthcare institution.

This award was presented in March of this year to only 35 healthcare institutions nationwide who made a considerable impact on wellness through tree planting, education, and community engagement.

In line with the City of Oberlin’s Climate Action Plan, this award is a testament to the community’s commitment to a better environment in Oberlin. The Tree Campus Healthcare program standards also include an advisory committee, a tree care plan, participation in community forestry projects, celebration events, education campaigns, and a financial commitment to investing in trees, education events, and community outreach.

The project was spearheaded by Kendal at Oberlin’s Horticulturist and Arboretum Curator Rachel Duncan, with much assistance from the community members on her committee.

“The John Bartram Arboretum [places] a high level of focus on education, community engagement, health and well-being, collaboration, and responsible investment and planning for the future,” Duncan said.

Duncan said that they arrived at this point organically and cited the City of Oberlin’s Climate Action Plan and its more than 20-year-long participation in the Tree City USA program as inspi-

ration for its arboretum and applying for the award. Kendal at Oberlin was also re-accredited with full compliance by the Commission on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities for the sixth time.

The Arboretum is just one part of the campus’ wider sustainability initiative. Kendal at Oberlin Chief Executive Officer Barbara Thomas, as well as Director of Sales and Marketing Terry Kovach, note that they are following

the City’s steps to a zero carbon community. Currently, they are focusing on ways to create a sustainable community with minimum pollution. In addition to new technological infrastructure, including solar

panels and electric stoves, they are looking to minimize their light pollution and become a dark sky community through their LED Lighting Retrofit project, aided by a $44,000 grant from the City of Oberlin.

Nikki Keating Managing Editor

Kendal at Oberlin was recently presented the 2022 Tree Campus Healthcare instution award.

Lucien Ferguson

Photo by Abe Frato, Photo Editor

Photo Courtesy of Boston College Law School Magazine

Karthik Ranganadhan

Editors’ note: This week’s world news series contains mentions of death and murder.

Indigenous Woman Found in Landfill in Winnipeg

The remains of a second Indigenous woman were found in a landfill on Monday in Winnipeg, Canada. The first woman found in the Brady landfill in May 2022 was identified as Rebecca Contois. Police believe that the deaths of the two women were unrelated.

Contois’ murder is believed to have been committed by alleged serial killer Jeremy Skibicki, who is now in custody. A feasibility study is now underway to determine if the Prairie Green landfill in Winnipeg can be searched for the remains of two other missing women, presumed to be murdered by the same

person who killed Contois. Police believe the recently killed woman was found only hours after being killed, while the other bodies are possibly buried under pounds of garbage.

Former U.S. President Trump Charged with 34 Felonies

Former U.S. President Donald Trump was charged with 34 felonies by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. The charges stem from accusations that Trump falsified business records regarding hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels. It is the first time that criminal charges have been brought against a U.S. president. He faces a maximum of four years of jail time for each count, for a total of 136 years if convicted on every count, and the sentences run consecutively. Legal experts, however, are unsure of how likely it is that Trump will face jail time.

Leader of Indian Opposition Appeals Defamation Conviction

Rahul Gandhi, who is the leader of the Indian opposition, has appealed his conviction on counts of criminal defamation.

Gandhi, who is a leader of the Indian National Congress, was sentenced to two years in prison for remarks he made in a speech in 2019, where he compared Prime Minister Narendra Modi to prominent fugitives and thieves Lalit Modi and Nirav Modi on the basis of a shared last name. The twoyear sentence is the minimum required to expel Gandhi from the Indian Parliament, which he was disqualified from on March 24. His appeal comes through a storm of criticism of the conviction and expulsion from opposition leaders and concerns about the country’s democracy.

Friday, March 31

Security Report

Custodial staff reported graffiti in a room on the third floor of Robertson Hall and on the tile ceilings.

Saturday, April 1

Officers and Oberlin Fire Department responded to a fire alarm in a kitchen of Fairchild House.

Officers and Oberlin Fire Department responded to a fire alarm at a Goldsmith Village Housing Unit.

Sunday, April 2

Student reported the theft of their men’s Giant bicycle from the southernmost bike rack of Zechiel House.

Monday, April 3

Officers and Oberlin Fire Department responded to a fire alarm at Price Hall.

Tuesday, April 4

Officers and Oberlin Fire Department responded to a kitchen fire at Wilder Hall.

Wednesday, April 5

Officers and Oberlin Fire Department responded to a fire alarm at Severance Hall.

OES Hosts Clothing Swaps, Workshops to Promote Sustainability

Ava Miller Senior Staff Writer

This weekend, the Office of Environmental Sustainability will begin holding clothing swaps. Today, members of the Oberlin community are able to bring their clean, unwanted clothing to Burton, Kahn, South, Langston, and Dascomb Halls. From Saturday, April 8, through Sunday, April 9, community members will be able to thrift clothes at these same locations.

Clothes can be donated and thrifted at tables in the firstfloor lounges of each dorm. Leftover clothing articles will be donated to the Free Store. Community members can also donate old fabric scraps to be reused for sewing projects, or old socks, underwear, and cloth face masks to be sent to a textile recycling center.

The clothing swap is part of the Clothing Care and Repair event series, which aims to reduce clothing consumption on campus in an effort to mitigate the harmful effects of the fashion industry. According to the United Nations, major clothing corporations produce 20 percent of global wastewater, and 85 percent of textiles end up in landfills or are incinerated. The industry also contributes to ocean plastic pollution as well as unsafe and unhealthy working conditions.

As an Environmental Studies major and OES Intern, College second-year Adrien Stratis has taken an interest in the environmental concerns brought about by the textile industry. Stratis wanted to show the community that there are ways to take action. He encouraged his friend, College second-year Amelia

Merithew, to utilize her clothing repair skills for the series.

“I was thinking about how Amelia is really good at sewing,” Stratis said. “We asked if she could just work on this one project. And then it turned out that, if she wanted to work on that, she had to be hired as an actual intern.”

At first, Merithew felt unsure about her abilities to teach others to mend their clothes.

“I felt like I wasn’t qualified,” Merithew said. “[Stratis] said, ‘No, people really don’t know this stuff. Like, you can come and teach them, and it will actually make a difference.’ [He] just kind of pushed me to do it, and … it turned out really great.”

Last Saturday, OES held a clothing repair workshop. Community members received assistance in repairing clothes that were torn or damaged.

“We had supplies like fabric needles, thread, glue,” Merithew said. “On a case-by-case individual basis, we helped them repair their clothes and hopefully taught them the skills so that next time, they can fix it themselves. So, they don’t have to stop wearing that pair of jeans just because there’s a big hole.”

Stratis notes that the Clothing Care and Repair event series has been well- attended so far.

“We weren’t totally sure how many people were actually going to show up,” he said. “It ended up being the ideal turnout. So that was really exciting. We’re all really happy about that.”

The OES interns hope to maintain their momentum this weekend. Recently, Stratis and Merithew have joined forces with College first-year Zoe Meister, who brings a passion for reducing textile waste.

Meister believes the event series is a valuable step toward achieving environmental sustainability goals on a local level.

“This project is very accessible,” Meister said. “This is an opportunity to make a change. Even if it’s small, it’s still important and it’s gonna be fun.”

Stratis feels that Oberlin’s values create a great environment for pursuing this project.

“It’s important to build community with people trying to address [these] issues,” he said.

“People at Oberlin are really passionate about clothing and tie their identity to their clothes, but then they feel really guilty buying new clothes. The clothing swap is encouraging people to celebrate changing up their fashion sense and sharing their clothes with other community members and giving themselves an opportunity to be creative.”

Kosher-for-Passover Meals Provided by Multiple Groups

Cal Ransom News Editor Isaac Imas Production Manager

Students who keep kosher for Passover observe a different set of rules than they would the rest of the year. Not all Jews practice the same Passover customs, but traditionally, one must refrain from eating grain products such as wheat, oats, barley and rye, all known as chametz. Observant Jews scour every part of their kitchens to eliminate any traces of grain and often replace their everyday dishes, cookware, and utensils with a Passover-only set, to ease the burden of cleaning. In establishments that serve kosher-for-Passover food, a supervisor, or mashgiach — often a rabbi — must be able to certify that standards of kashrut are being met. Rabbi Shlomo Elkan, co-director of Chabad at Oberlin, has served as Heritage’s mashgiach since fall of 2021 Heritage, Oberlin’s kosher-certified kitchen that operates under Rabbi Shlomo’s oversight, was closed for four of the eight days of Passover in 2022. This year, due to the timing of the holiday, it will be closed for six. In the two days leading up to Passover, about 100 meals and sides were prepared at Heritage and packaged for distribution at DeCafé for the days that Heritage will be closed. These meals can be purchased with a meal swipe, functioning like any other cold meal

at DeCafé.

“The food from DeCafé comes out of Heritage, so we really ensure that it’s to an incredibly high standard of kosher so that anybody would feel comfortable eating it,” Rabbi Shlomo said. However, these meals won’t be available to those without kosher-for-Passover dietary restrictions.

“We’re keeping that stuff in a cooler that is not available to the general public,” Director of Retail for AVI Foodsystems Sarirose Hyldahl said. “Last year I know we ran into some issues with people buying stuff that looked good or different, and then the people that [were] needing it [didn’t] have any options. We’re solving that problem by doing it that way. It’s worked really well for Ramadan so far, so I’m hopeful, and I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be good for Passover.”

To supplement the grab-andgo food available at DeCafé and meals available at Heritage, kosher-for-Passover snacks, including matzah and jello, are available in DeCafé for purchase with Flex Points, Obie Dollars, or credit card.

This year, Oberlin Hillel will be providing supplemental packages of kosher-for-Passover food. These packages include snack items and non-perishable staples sourced through Cleveland Hillel.

“Last year, Hillel actually had a space on campus, Wilder 217,” Miriam Cory, an Oberlin Hillel

student board member, said. “It was a pretty big meeting room, and I think maybe it was meant for all of the Jewish student orgs. So, we had a fridge in there and we could keep [KFP] snacks in there and it was really great, especially last year when Heritage Kosher Kitchen was still figuring out how they worked.”

This year, Hillel is located in Wilder 328, which functions as a storage and meeting room for Jewish student organizations.

Until 2020, the Kosher Halal Co-op was run out of Talcott Hall in the space that Heritage currently operates out of. This year, college fourth-year Elliot Diaz will be reviving the Kosher Halal Co-op informally out of his Village Housing Unit.

“I am not a rabbi, but I was Kosher Halal coordinator [my first year], so I learned all the rules of how to keep kosher and halal,” Diaz said.

In order to make the kitchen kosher, Diaz poured boiling water over the sink, cleaned the kitchen, and covered the cabinets and table with aluminum foil. The Kosher Halal Co-op retained its utensils when it closed, and Diaz will be using those utensils throughout the week. Though Diaz does not have an in-person mashgiach, he consults Rabba Amalia Haas via text whenever he is unsure of how to maintain the kosher status of his kitchen.

“Hillel Rabbi Megan [Doherty] was involved [in Kosher Halal Co-op previously], and as part of

the people who were trained by her, we would be able to ask her questions — we had her phone number, … and there are all these minutiae that we were able to clarify with a rabbi, which is really important because some of the stuff is just complicated,” Diaz said. “There are edge cases, like any legal system.”

Diaz will provide gluten-free kosher-for-Passover meals for 12

students and host an Iftar for 10 additional students who are celebrating Ramadan.

“Last year, I ate cold brisket and matzah [from the Hillel fridge] for many days, which is not good for a holiday that’s supposed to be communal,” Diaz said. “I have a Village [Housing Unit] as a senior, so I’m kind of in this unique position to host and coordinate it.”

Kosher Halal Co-op closed in 2020.

Photo Courtesy of Elliot Diaz

Cooper Community Resource Center Unveiled to Public

Cal Ransom News Editor Karthik Ranganadhan

On Thursday, March 30, the new Cooper Community Resource Center opened to the public for the first time since Oberlin Community Services acquired the building and surrounding property. The building, located at 500 E. Lorain St. in Oberlin, is approximately 27,000 square feet and located on a four-acre property. It will be outfitted with loading docks, a large warehouse, walk-in coolers, and a dedicated space for the Choice Food Pantry.

After weighing the costs of expanding its current building, constructing a new facility, or moving to other locations, OCS purchased the property on East Lorain Street from the National Association of College Stores for $1 million.

Funding for the initial purchase of the building was provided to OCS by Roger and Fran Cooper. Roger Cooper worked at Oberlin College as the treasurer from 1970–1984, while Fran Cooper worked for law and mortgage firms and as an administrative assistant at the College.

Fran Cooper, who volunteered at OCS, said that the couple had decided to donate the funds because they believe in the mission of the organization.

“I’m so excited that this new building is coming,” Fran Cooper said. “This building will be an uplifting building and a hub for organizations.”

Another anonymous donor gave $500,000 toward a community room on the first floor, which will be named after Ann Fuller, executive director of OCS from

1981–2006.

The current stage of the capital campaign aims to raise $400,000 from the public to renovate the property. Nearly 1,000 pledge cards were distributed in Oberlin Friday, March 31. Donors were also asked to collect spare change in medicine bottles and deliver them to OCS through the month of April.

“We want everyone to have the chance to help make the Cooper Community Resource Center a reality,” Connie Ponder, a member of the OCS board, said.

“Whether that means giving a dollar or ten dollars or a hundred dollars or a thousand, all your gifts are meaningful, and we welcome them because they’ve come from the heart. Oberlin is a heartful community.”

An anonymous couple has pledged to match capital campaign donations up to $100,000 in memory of Jacqui Willis, a volunteer and board member of OCS.

Willis lived in Oberlin for 40 years and was deeply involved in the City and the surrounding community. She worked as an administrator and media specialist at Lorain, Elyria, and Strongsville City Schools and served the community in organizations including Oberlin Recreation Committee, Athletic Boosters, Lorain County Alliance of Black School Educators, Jack and Jill, Inc., Oberlin Black Alliance for Progress, and OCS. At OCS, Willis organized the annual Juneteenth picnic, volunteered weekly at the choice food pantry, and collected backto-school supplies for Oberlin children each summer.

“Jacqui would say, if she were here, ‘There’s no gift too small,

as long as you’re helping people,’” Susan Egloff, a longtime sustaining donor of OCS, said.

OCS has contracted Williams Brothers Builders Inc. to begin renovating the first floor of the building in April. The first phase of renovations will create space for OCS’ food pantry and food warehouse, and renovations are expected to finish by August.

“Our hope is that we will be able to move in by fall,” Executive Director of OCS Margie Flood said.

OCS anticipates future renovations on the second floor of the building, to create office space for OCS partner organizations such as Providing Oberlin With Efficiency Responsibly.

“We are really excited about getting other area partners in the office space to make a community resource center,” Flood said. “Right now, legal aid comes to OCS once a month, but OCS doesn’t have the space to give them a full office. What we are talking about now is having an office [at 500 E. Lorain St.] so they can be onsite more often. That’s how it is with a lot of our community organizations — for example, POWER has an office at OCS, but [they] have to share it with several people, so now [they] will have their own office and our partnership can continue.”

Greg Jones, energy advocate at POWER, sees the collaboration

between nonprofits as key to their mutual success.

“It just was a natural fit for what we do in housing to match up with what Oberlin Community Services did with all the other services,” Jones said. “That’s why it’s important now, for all help services — if you are a help service to people, then you need to be in one spot so people can find you and get help.”

Flood also expressed OCS’ goal of making the building energy-efficient.

“Eventually we hope to finish with solar panels on the roof and really make this a model community resource center,” Flood said.

OES Signs Contract with Local Farm to Bring Sheep to Mow Solar Field

Emma Benardete Editor-in-Chief

The Office of Environmental Sustainability signed a contract last month with Old Slate Farm — a sheep and cut flower farm in Mount Vernon, OH — to bring sheep onto campus that will eat the grass around the College’s solar panels.

The contract will bring around 150–200 sheep to mow three times this year — tentatively once in May, once in July, and once in October — though Campus Energy and Resource Manager Joel Baetens noted that there may be a possibility for the sheep to remain long-term in future years.

The project is being led by Baetens with support from College second-year Kira Dobbins and College first-year Shea O’Day, student interns at OES.

“I have been working in an ‘intern’ capacity since September,” Dobbins wrote in an email to the Review. “I’ve been in contact with College staff from facilities as well as with the farmers and lawyers to get this contract signed in a way that works for everyone and leaves opportunities open for the future across the board.”

Both Baetens and Dobbins independently conceived of an idea to have solar panels and agriculture sharing the same plot of land — a

practice often called co-location, or agrivoltaics — on campus.

“I approached Joel separately before I knew the project had just started to be planned — I was thinking over the summer about what types of projects the College could implement on campus that would get students involved in more hands-on work,” Dobbins wrote. “I thought that having a farm or grazing under the panels would be a super cool dual land use system to exemplify how renewable energy can fit into our futures even in rural settings and how everything in the environment can have more than one purpose.”

Baetens noted that the arrangement will decrease both the financial cost and the emissions impact of maintaining the solar field. The College has historically spent between $15,000 and $30,000 per year to mow the solar field, whereas Baetens expects the sheep program to come with an annual price tag of around $6,600. While OES has yet to obtain exact numbers on carbon emissions, Baetens is confident that the plan will decrease the carbon impact of maintaining the fields.

“Less fuel is used to transport the sheep than to mow,” Baetens

in a truck than in a lawn mower [due] to emissions controls. We will develop [a] detailed verification analysis after we get a year of data.”

Katie Carothers, one of the owners of Old Slate Farm, outlined some of the other advantages of agrivoltaics over traditional mowing. She noted that sheep can access areas that may be difficult to mow with traditional mowers, that their manure helps to improve soil quality, and that they do not produce dust, which can cover the solar panels and reduce efficiency.

Beyond the benefits to the solar field, agrivoltaics also aids farmers. Carothers noted that these partnerships allow farmers to raise livestock that they would otherwise not have the land to graze.

“One of the biggest challenges for new and young farmers is land access, especially for those of us grazing livestock in Ohio,” Carothers wrote in an email to the Review. “Much of the land is planted in crops, not pasture.”

According to Carothers, solar fields are often planted with grass to control runoff, making them ideal grazing sites.

Oberlin’s solar field is smaller than some of the other planned agrivoltaics sites across the state that Old Slate Farm is hoping to

work with, which Carothers feels makes the College a good trial run.

“Oberlin reached out to us to see about utilizing our sheep on their solar project, and we saw this as a great opportunity to begin in the industry and learn on a smaller scale before the 1000+ acre sites are built around the state,” Carothers wrote.

Beyond the suitability of the small solar field, Carothers feels that the College provides an opportunity for students to become knowledgeable about sheep farming, especially amid what she sees as the potential for growing demand for sheep farmers.

“We are … excited about student interest and involvement, as we will need more shepherds in the future as the sheep industry grows alongside solar in Ohio,” Carothers wrote.

In order to increase student and community engagement, OES is planning tours of the field while the sheep are present.

“We will talk about the Sustainable Infrastructure Program which electrifies our district energy system,” Baetens wrote. “That ties directly to onsite renewable energy generation and how to effectively manage in a low carbon way.”

Dobbins would also like for the tours to explore how the presence of the sheep can improve biodiversity in the area.

Dobbins hopes that by providing tours, OES will be able to mitigate some of the concern that large solar fields will hurt the availability of grazing land, while Baetens hopes the tours will give the College an opportunity to showcase its commitment to carbon reduction.

The new Cooper Community Resource Center is located at 500 E. Lorain St.

Photo by Abe Frato, Photo Editor

Oberlin’s solar field will be introduced to a new Agricultural method.

Photo by Abe Frato, Photo Editor