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College Appoints Matthew Lahey as Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary
The College announced the hiring of Matthew Lahey as Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary in January. Courtesy of Matthew Lahey Kushagra Kar Editor-in-Chief The College announced the appointment of the new Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary Matthew D. Lahey on Jan. 11. At Oberlin, Lahey will be responsible for a number of Oberlin’s legal needs, in addition to overseeing the restructuring of the Board of Trustees bylaws and supporting the implementation of One Oberlin. Lahey’s appointment has sparked controversy among alumni who are concerned about a LinkedIn profile that included “union avoidance” among his skills. Following the creation of the Office of the Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary in 2008, the general counsel was placed in charge of organizing board meeting agendas, arranging briefing packets, and keeping the board informed of goings-on around campus along with the President, among other functions. Already, Lahey is organizing the board meeting scheduled for March 4, in addition to his work on the ongoing revision of the board bylaws. “The Board of Trustees said to the faculty early on that they were gonna be looking at their bylaws over the course of the next year,” President Carmen Twillie Ambar said. “They’re having discussions with the
General Faculty Council about that. So the secretary to the Board of Trustees is the person who kind of makes those meetings happen, sits with the General Faculty Council and others to think about what those potential changes may be.” As a member of the College’s senior administration, Lahey will also play a role in the future of One Oberlin, providing legal advice to deans and other administrators directly responsible for executing the plan. Lahey joins Oberlin’s leadership team after eight years at the University of Notre Dame, where he served both as associate general counsel and, for the last three years, as concurrent professor of law. While he specialized in labor law, his career highlights include work in diversity, equity, and inclusion and serving on faculty. “[Matt] had a real breadth of experience around all the types of issues that I think come before the general counsel’s office, particularly around employment law, around diversity and inclusion issues, around policies and processes that institutions have to think through,” President Ambar said. “I was really impressed with some of the work that he had done around diversity and his work to try to build more diverse applicant pools.” Now into his fourth week at Oberlin, Lahey has identified the Presidential Initiative on Racial Equity and Diversity as the project he is most excited to support. During his time at Notre Dame, Lahey worked to design and implement more inclusive hiring practices and has already set his agenda for similar work at Oberlin. “At Notre Dame I was a faculty member in the law school where I taught employment discrimination law in addition to labor law,” he said. “Understanding the history of our civil rights laws has been important to me. And I was able to bring some of the passion that I’ve got for that area of law to the work that I did at my former institution, specifically related to the importance of greater representation of people of color among faculty. And for my former institution that was the case as well. So trying to create a process that was legally compliant, but really drove that important goal forward. Notre Dame was able to track the results and see the improvement over time in relation to faculty
hiring and staff hiring, which was really gratifying to go from concept to implementation to start to see results.” Lahey’s appointment has, however, raised concerns among alumni groups after finding Lahey’s LinkedIn page which includes “union avoidance” as a skill. Although Lahey wasn’t a part of the original decision making, some alumni believe this represents a growing anti-union trend in Oberlin following the outsourcing of the United Auto Workers union employees in the spring of 2020. Peter Miller, OC ’84, is particularly concerned about the hire after the outsourcing of UAW workers in spring 2020. “Word got out that the school had appointed a new general counsel, and the general counsel was proudly anti-union and listed on his LinkedIn profile among his skills that he was skilled in union avoidance and union avoidance training,” Miller said. “The idea that President Ambar and [the] Board of Trustees would’ve chosen this person as the general counsel, the school’s lead lawyer, seems impossible to separate from the horrific recent history the school had with its labor relations.” In response to these concerns Lahey emphasized the breadth of his work with labor law, including working with labor organizations to achieve common goals. Lahey believes he should be evaluated on the entirety of his record rather than a list on LinkedIn. “I think what is important is the work that I’ve done, which is represented in my description,” he said. “In my labor work representing companies, I’m proud of the work that I did in the labor space. Negotiating collective bargaining agreements and working with labor organizations to achieve collective goals. … I think the characterization of union avoidance is not an accurate representation of the actual labor work that I’ve done in representing companies. The other thing that I’ll point out, is that when I was on the faculty at Notre Dame, I taught labor law. It was something that was incredibly important to me, because I took the responsibility of helping bring labor law to students and helping shape perspectives — I took that seriously. I was very proud that I presented labor law in a very open and unbiased, neutral way.”
Students for Energy Justice Hosts Atlanta Forest Defenders Kush Bulmer News Editor Editors’ note: The protesters often confront law enforcement as a result of their activism, and are known within their communities by “camp names,” such as Trench Foot, Sumac, and Marinara. This story will refer to individuals by the camp names that they use in their daily life at the encampment. Four organizers from the Defend the Atlanta Forest encampment gathered in Wilder Hall on Tuesday to discuss their activism with interested Oberlin students. The Defend the Atlanta Forest campaign uses direct action tactics to oppose the construction of a police compound and soundstage in the largest contiguous forest in Atlanta. Oberlin’s Students for Energy Justice planned the event, compensated the organizers for their talk, and voiced support for their efforts. Following a meditative exercise that aimed to ground students in their bodies and within a global interconnected system, Raina, one of the guest speakers, read a statement from a Muscogee traditional chief. The statement referenced the displacement of the Muscogee Creek people from their traditional lands in what is now Atlanta and called for listeners to learn how to become better stewards of this stolen land. The four members of the group then explained how the construction project is a continuation of the country’s history of colonial and racial violence. The Atlanta Police Department is pursuing a plan to claim roughly 300 acres of forest — converting 85 acres into a tactical training facility while maintaining 265 acres for green space. The facility, known to the activists as “Cop City,” would draw police recruits from around the nation. Among its proposed features is a mock city street, where recruits could practice using riot gear. Additionally, Atlanta’s DeKalb County is attempting to sell another parcel of nearby forested
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public park to a major film and TV production company; Blackhall Studios would clear-cut forest to create the state’s largest soundstage. These proposed plans would be located directly adjacent to the grounds of the Old Atlanta Prison Farm. The site was the focus of a 1980s ACLU lawsuit, which alleged that the prison farm used inhumane punishment tactics against its prisoners, particularly Black and Brown people. Already, the police have repossessed the site of the ruined farm — which is being transformed by a burgeoning new growth forest, to construct a firing range. To the many residents of Atlanta — the “city in the forest” — the land repossession was unwelcome news. “There is a large grassroots movement in Atlanta,” said Trench Foot, one of the organizers. “There are a lot of people who are very upset about the Cop City and about the movie studio. And I think that the convergence of these forest defense tactics with urban mass organizing tactics is really special.” For Oberlin’s SEJ, supporting this campaign aligns with its central ideology; the radical environmental student group supports direct action tactics, especially those that resist the power of the fossil fuel industry. SEJ uses both its allocated funds and human expertise to support the actions in Atlanta — which include blockades, tree-sits, and other forms of direct action against the construction efforts. “These folks don’t make money,” said members of SEJ in a group statement. “The work they do is counter to anything that any business would pay for. … Being affiliated with the College and being connected to the College’s resources, I think, is both a big privilege and comes with a big onus and a big responsibility to give it away as much as possible. And I think this is an example — this talk is incredible. And Oberlin students wanna hear about this and in return, this will feed people or buy climbing gear or whatever else needs to happen.”
One of the speakers, Marinara, is a former member of SEJ. Marinara’s journey to Atlanta began with a similar radical encampment in West Virginia, the Appalachians Against Pipelines. Through SEJ, Marinara learned about and connected with organizers at the AAP movement. AAP similarly uses direct action tactics to resist the creation of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a natural gas pipeline that is currently under construction and planned to range from south Virginia to northern West Virginia. Members there have conducted one of the longest tree-sits in the country — 932 days — and have helped deter the construction of the environmentally devastating and climate-changing pipeline. “The sort of informal community of friends that we made fighting the pipeline ended up moving down to Atlanta to fight Cop City as the pipeline is not being built currently,” Marinara said. “And so I decided to go and join my friends doing stuff that mattered to me. It was through amazing networks of trust and affinity.” As they closed their presentation, Trench Foot called on listeners to find their frontline — where one can make the biggest impact and resist apathy and complacency in the midst of the worsening climate crisis. “Atlanta has been identified as one of the most stable cities in the so-called U.S. against the climate crisis, in large part due to its urban forest setup,” Trench Foot said. “It’s also a very likely destination for climate refugees, from the coasts and from increasing climate chaos. As the climate crisis grows worse, and with the rise of the far right, and just sort of the everyday disasters of capitalism, I think that the police are going to become more emboldened, that they’re going to become more repressive and they’re going to be used by people who are already wealthy and powerful in society to hoard what resources are left. This is bad and we should work to dismantle these systems as quickly as possible.”
