Oberlin Community Should Build Familiarity with One Oberlin Report

Elle Giannandrea Opinions Editor

The spring of 2018 marked the second semester of my freshman year of high school. At the time, I was 14 years old, and I was starting to hear discussion among my peers regarding their exhaustive, and often dauntingly complex, plans for college. They set goals, applied for summer programs, volunteered for hours on the weekends, and began to enter into the harsh realities of competition within standardized testing and the financial burdens of a college tuition.

At the same time, Oberlin College began its own project of what it considered to be self-improvement: a yearlong strategic review of its financial future and survival strategy in the face of massive budget deficits. This is known as the Academic and Administrative Program Review, which culminated in a final report known as the One Oberlin report.

The lengthy One Oberlin report details what elements of the College’s expenses and modes of operation were, in 2018, considered pertinent threats to Oberlin’s economic well-being, as well as multiple proposed strategies to increase the College’s appeal and competence within the marketplace of higher learning. The report focuses largely on the unsustainability of Oberlin’s financial model prior to 2018. It cites concerning figures regarding fiscal reliance on Oberlin’s endowment, revealing that, “Annual extraordinary draws on the endowment have occurred for more than two decades, in some years pushing the annual draw as high as 8 percent of the endowment’s value.”

To a member of the Oberlin community, many of the strategies outlined in the report should be patently familiar. The scope of One Oberlin includes jurisdiction over expenses such as faculty pay, housing and dining, and what AAPR refers to in a section heading as “Improved Usage of Space and Facilities.”

Over the past two years, the massive uptick in enrollment to the College of Arts and Sciences appears to correlate with the report’s observation that “Arts & Sciences students bring in, on average, $10,000 more in tuition revenue per year than Conservatory students.”

As a student, reading this report was somewhat jarring. As I moved from one page to the next, I couldn’t help but feel that I was looking at my experience at Oberlin through a viewfinder while focusing the lens. The vague suspicions I had in my first year that the Oberlin I was attending was somewhat altered from the Oberlin I had expected — regardless of what disarray was caused by the COVID-19 pandemic — were validated.

For me, and for many members of my now second-largest-in-record class, it was difficult to understand why the community we had joined felt so little like what we had expected as applicants. I frequently heard comments such as, “I feel like I’ve gone back to high school again,” or “I really don’t know anyone in my classes.” I know that when I considered what aspects of Oberlin I considered central in my decision to apply, I made specific note of what I saw as an opportunity to be a part of a closeknit community— one bolstered by a low student-to-faculty ratio and small class sizes.

One of the main cultural attributes of any liberal arts college is exclusivity without elitism. Part of that exclusivity comes from the fact that not everyone wants to go to a school like Oberlin. In the absence of other traditional markers of higher education, such as Greek life, athletic prominence, party culture, or proximity to home for the student body — the majority of whom are not from Ohio — Oberlin relies on the existing culture of its campus and of its student body to maintain its reputation.

Therefore, it is worrying to me that the broad outline of the One Oberlin report commands a fundamental shift away from this. The report does note “a few key areas the committee considered carefully but will not recommend changing at this time” which “go to the heart of Oberlin’s mission and values,” including the preservation of student financial aid, “the liberal arts college, the Conservatory of Music, the art museum, … a comprehensive residential experience,” “the breadth and depth of Oberlin’s current educational offerings,” and “maintaining the capacity of [Oberlin] faculty to be scholar-teachers.” However, none of these take into account the importance of the student body itself, regardless of what opportunities they are afforded by “a more robust set of Winter Term options” or “the presence of a Business concentration.”

The One Oberlin report seeks to remedy a problem that I can offer no possible solution to — the financial concerns Oberlin is currently facing. I can’t pretend to believe that maintaining the image of a small liberal arts college and ensuring an institution’s survival can always be compatible. Oberlin is, for better or for worse, an entity beholden to financial constraints. My concern is that the damage done by meeting our financial obligations as outlined in the One Oberlin report is not being fully considered by those in charge.

To give a concrete piece of advice: I would recommend that anyone unfamiliar with the One Oberlin report build that familiarity. I can’t in good conscience recommend that you pore over all 42 pages, but I do urge you to, at the very least, skim it for relevant information. While its language is understandably coated in a corporate veneer, it is an interesting document and, by the look of these past two years, is well on its way to taking full effect.

COMIC The Longest Week

Holly Yelton, Illustrator

Discrepencies in Quality Between First-Year Dorms Need to be Addressed

Sahil Novetzke Columnist

It’s no secret that there is a large discrepancy in the quality of different first-year dorms at Oberlin. While some have air conditioning, several lounges, and pool tables, others have hot, sticky rooms, broken toilets, and clogged shower drains.

“Out of the six sinks on my floor, only three of them currently work,” College first-year Margot Jones, a resident of Barrows Hall, explained. She went on to describe other faulty facilities, including clogged shower drains and scarce washing machines. Another Barrows resident, College first-year Anjali Blacker, summarized the residence hall in a single word: “Dingy.”

Conversely, College first-year Sylvie Cove, a resident of Kahn Hall, described her dorm as “beautiful and modern.” While Cove enjoys the luxury dorm life Kahn provides her, she admires Barrows and other second-rate dorms for their well-established communities.

“I often go to other dorms for social events, and other people come here for AC,” Cove said.

The lack of AC in dorms like Barrows has contributed heavily to the fostering of a strong community. On particularly hot days, residents like myself convene in the cool lobby or on North Quad to escape the heat of our stuffy rooms. This forced socialization means that friendships have developed quickly among first-years living in Barrows.

“We bonded over the heat and the poor ventilation,” College first-year Luke Dodson explained.

Most other dorms on campus have similarly varying levels of quality. For example, Dascomb Hall has some recently installed amenities, including an air conditioning system and ceiling fans, but some residents still wish that there were more washing machines.

This year’s first-year class is the largest in Oberlin history. This has created an evident housing crisis on campus. Rooms meant to house two people sometimes house three, former lounges are now makeshift living spaces, and some students arrived on campus not knowing where they would be staying.

In all fairness, the pandemic and the mass deferral of student admissions in the past few years likely contributed to this crisis, but it is the responsibility of the school to provide safe, comfortable, and clean housing for all students. After all, many of us are paying tens of thousands of dollars to attend Oberlin. While it is upsetting for there to be such major differences in facilities and living situations, more upsetting is the fact that all students living in traditional housing pay the same rate. This means that students living in small, hot rooms with no real amenities besides the bare necessities still pay the large housing fee that students living with pool tables, music practice rooms, functional vending machines, and robust kitchens are paying.

There has been talk of constructing a new first-year residence hall within the next few years, which could easily be a solution to the housing crisis, particularly if a high rate of enrollment continues to be an issue in the following years.

There are many amenities featured in current dorms that should be incorporated into the new dorm. The Dascomb ceiling fans are more sustainable than AC and can create a cool breeze in the room rather than simply making the room cold. The wide, open lobby in Barrows has made for many a late-night meet-and-greet with residents from other halls. Each hall has its perks, and the new building should draw inspiration from all of them.

Ultimately, what really matters in a dorm? I’ve been living in Barrows for two weeks now, and I think of my dorm, however grimy and humid, as my home. It’s where my stuff is, and it’s where my friends are. However irritating it may be to wake up covered in layers of sweat or to be unable to shower because of massive balls of hair in the drains, I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.

It’s about the community, and it’s about the people. And your college experience is only going to be as good as you make it. So, to all my fellow Barrows residents and anyone else who may be struggling with their dorms: they may have AC, but we have character.

Interdisciplinary Study Essential to Liberal Arts Education, Should Be Encouraged

Desmond Hearne Morrey

At Oberlin and across higher education in general, those studying STEM and those studying humanities rarely branch out toward their disciplinary other. By extension, the practice of glorifying hyper-specialization within institutions is encouraged by capitalism. It’s not uncommon to hear, “I can’t stand STEM classes,” “Keep me away from those humanities majors,” or the rather sad “I think it’s interesting, but I refuse to do math.” In my Creative Writing major, I meet very few fellow students with an interest in math or physics, and conversely, I’ve met a fair number of STEM majors who, despite their commitment to consumption of the arts, have some aversion to taking art classes themselves. We tend to stay on our own side of this particular disciplinary chasm. However, it’s important for arts and humanities majors to take some STEM classes and for STEM majors to take arts and humanities classes. In service of this, STEM classes should work to be more accommodating of people coming in from outside STEM fields, and arts and humanities classes should work to be similarly accommodating.

When I first arrived at Oberlin, I was finishing Everything and More, a book by David Foster Wallace about the history of the mathematical concept of infinity. That book inspired me to take a course in the Mathematics department called Discrete Mathematics, which is, to date, one of the most interesting courses I’ve taken at Oberlin. I did worse in Discrete than I did in any other class that semester — a trend that continued when I took Calculus II later on (making it difficult to justify taking further math classes when faced with my GPA). However, something interesting happened while I was taking calculus: the math I was learning started to seep into my poetry. Calculus deals with integrals, derivatives, and repeated sums, which involve ways of making something smooth, continuous, and unified out of infinitely smaller, jagged pieces. I found deep aesthetic motivation here, and I started thinking about other things as made up of infinite parts coming together into smooth wholes.

In finding inspiration from the sciences, I seek to emulate authors as well. In his collection of short stories, Stories of Your Life and Others, Ted Chiang

The Research Center, located in Mudd Center, provides students with resources to support their interdisciplinary studies. Photo by Erin Koo, Photo Editor

writes about a fictional proof that one equals two (without sneakily dividing by zero). He uses this proof as a device to destabilize the characters andto explore what happens when a fundamental fact of life is turned on its head. Peter Watts’ science fiction novel Blindsight includes a bibliography at the end, with extensive notes on the world in which the book takes place. Watts uses Blindsight to ask questions about whether or not our conscious awareness of the world is evolutionarily advantageous or even desirable through rigorously exploring all the ways the brain can be fiddled with.

Not everyone is writing about airplanes or dividing by zero, but we are writing in the context of our world, which is rigorously theorized by scientists and mathematicians. While some background is needed to understand everything properly, STEM can sometimes offer writers just the right metaphor or word. Scientists and mathematicians have some hilarious words—quark is one of my favorites.

On the other side of things, STEM majors generally don’t engage with non-scientific writing. As a result, scientific papers tend to be dense, difficult to understand, and clunkily written, making them inaccessible to the general public. Political divisions surrounding climate change and vaccines are both scientific nonissues. The scientific writing on these subjects can be difficult to access and understand, meaning that those without the proper background are left to trust the media and politicians, who themselves may misunderstand the science or spread false information. Practice in writing in narrative and prose can help scientists make their work more accessible. It’s easier to convince a skeptic using a narrative than an appeal to authority or through confusing data. What if there were creative writing courses that focused on scientific nonfiction or popular science writing? What can a literary analysis of the way publishing brings power to certain ideas tell us about patterns of scientific publishing?

It’s not hard to understand why STEM majors don’t frequent poetry classes. They’re difficult to get into, and it takes some work and creativity to connect what they might teach you to your more familiar area of study. Conversely, STEM classes tend to be very technically oriented, with a focus on memorization of concepts that will be important later. Art and humanities majors may not want to spend their time learning concepts that will only be useful in other STEM classes.

Oberlin is a liberal arts school, which means it provides flexibility in what classes students can take outside of their major and when they can declare or change their majors. In general, this freedom aims to give students a broad, multifaceted education. However, in the professional sphere, fixation on one subject is becoming increasingly the norm. We hear stories about math prodigies or pianists who started practicing at younger and younger ages. One story that gets told often in creative writing circles is a writer describing themselves as a child who always loved writing and knew they wanted to be a writer when they grew up. The normative moral here is the successful professionalization of children. We are not writers, just as we are not scientists or athletes. Although these are all roles we play, we cannot and should not mistake ourselves for them. Especially during our short time at Oberlin, we should look to explore new and scary things, stretch ourselves, and grow, and our institution should support that.

Social Media Users Seek Better Experience with BeReal

Continued from Page 5 but that number is finite as opposed to other apps’ never-ending feeds.

Recently, the app has gained international attention. Released in 2020, BeReal rose in popularity in 2022, obtaining a cult-like following of 10 million daily users by August. Will BeReal change the way that we interact with others online for good? Or will the trend be over and done within the next few months? I would argue the latter. Although this movement to a less filtered, more spontaneous online presence is an improvement over the way social media has been used previously, it may not have a lasting effect. It’s hard to tell if these high-minded concepts fit the reality of BeReal usage. About two months ago, I downloaded the app. At first, I liked it. It was fun to be prompted to upload pictures at a random time every day, to see what my friends were up to, and to have a compilation of my past week in random stills. But as time wore on, I found myself waiting to take my BeReal until I was doing something I felt was worthy of posting. Though the idea behind the app is to take the picture immediately when you get the notification, I sometimes found myself unable to accomplish this task because I would be in class, at work, or in the shower, so I would wait, and the spontaneity would be ruined.

I have since abandoned BeReal, partly because the service in Oberlin makes it impossible for me to upload, but also because, in practice, BeReal didn’t feel that different from other social media. Rather than subverting a curated social media presence, BeReal adheres to a different type of image. As opposed to the perfect, poreless, sepia-toned, beach-pic aesthetic of the 2010s, BeReal is all about looking like you don’t care. The popular rise of “photodumps” on Instagram is another example of social media users attempting to curate their content to look like they’re not curating their content.

One of the most interesting aspects of BeReal’s sudden rise to popularity is its reliance on limits. The choice to download the app and adhere to these limits is optional, yet BeReal’s popularity has grown exponentially in recent times. Maybe this is because of the endless warnings about the dangers of social media or dissatisfaction in the way we interact with one another online, but there seems to be a push to move away from the heavily manufactured world promoted by other social media and toward spontaneity.

Despite my belief that BeReal is not the saving grace of social media it bills itself as, its widespread popularity has shed light on a large demographic of teenagers and young adults who want an alternative to traditional social media’s emphasis on curated perfection. While BeReal may not be the app to fill this void, the market is out there. It’s just waiting for someone to fill it.