March 18, 2022
OPINIONS Established 1874
OSCA Greatly Misunderstood by NonOSCA Students Emily Vaughan
When I first decided to sign up for a co-op, I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into. I knew that I would be responsible for cooking some of my meals and cleaning up after said cooking, but I knew nothing about the bureaucratic and legislative aspects of being in a co-op. It wasn’t until I joined Pyle Inn co-op at the beginning of this school year that I learned what I was getting myself into. With our hand signs during discussions, terms for pieces of equipment, and general culture, from the outside the Oberlin Student Cooperative Association definitively looks like a cult. There’s an air of mystery surrounding OSCA and how it functions. What is a Hobart? What about a DLEC or KitchCo? Why are we always talking about llamas? But beyond these questions about specific co-op rituals and terms, students who aren’t OSCA members lack a surface-level understanding of how the organization works. Just last week, the Review published an article (“Old Barrows, Brown Bag Co-ops to Remain Closed” The Oberlin Review, March 11, 2022) that called the nowclosed Fairchild co-op a housing and dining co-op, but it is widely known by students in OSCA that Fairchild, also known as Fairkid, was a dining-only co-op until it was closed in March 2020. In fall 2020, it was reopened as College-operated dining. Prior to the 2021–2022 school year, the building operated as a traditional residence hall, but it now serves as a first-year dorm. Another co-op that has not been in operation since the shutdown in March 2020 is the Brown Bag co-op. Brown Bag allowed students living off campus or in Village Housing to pick
up groceries and prepare food in their own kitchens. The College does not offer a similar alternative dining option, which greatly limits the abilities of students living in Village or off-campus housing to become independent and cook for themselves. Oberlin requires all students to be on a meal plan. Even the smallest and least expensive meal plan is more expensive than OSCA, not to mention the fact that the cost per meal swipe is significantly higher for smaller plans. Unfortunately, OSCA is no longer as affordable an option as it could be. There is currently a policy in place that removes the amount students can save by joining OSCA from their financial aid packages, though OSCA is taking steps to counteract this problem. On a more lighthearted note, I would like to offer some answers to common questions and misconceptions about OSCA. Firstly, we eat more than rice and beans. Today, we had cheesy pasta bake and tofu! We also have granola, bread, and lots of other tasty baked goods. The Hobart is what we call our lovely industrial dishwasher, nicknamed after the manufacturing company. Not too exciting. A DLEC is a Dining Loose-Ends Coordinator. Each co-op elects two at the beginning of the semester. To quote one of Pyle’s DLECs, College third-year Sammy Siegel, “The job of a DLEC is mostly to lead discussions and elections and to do anything else that needs to be done around the co-op.” And as for the llamas? Well, the llama is a hand symbol made in OSCA to propose an idea during discussion that will be voted on. It originated as a joke between friends in Harkness, and eventually spread to the other co-ops as a standard discussion procedure.
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Volume 151, Number 15
General Faculty Motion Recommends Solutions to Increase Faculty Pay Editors’ Note: The following motion was presented in Wednesday’s general faculty meeting by Professor of Mathematics Jeff Witmer as part of a broader conversation around faculty compensation. The motion was presented following the Board of Trustees’ rejection of a Dec. 15 faculty motion and passed with 86 percent voting in favor, four percent opposed, and 10 percent abstaining. Jeff Witmer Rationale: The future of Oberlin depends on having a strong and engaged faculty to deliver an educational program that attracts students to the College. All employees matter, and extracurricular activities will always be an important part of the life of a student, but we rise or fall based on the quality of the educational experience that we offer. Oberlin cannot expect to provide academic and musical excellence if we cannot attract and retain outstanding faculty, or if the faculty we have are demoralized. Oberlin has many needs and there are countless ways we could spend money, but investing in the educational experience through the faculty should be front and center. In its recent letter, the Board stated that spending on instruction and research, as a share of the budget, has remained “almost the same” since 2010, but the percentage
has actually dropped from 48.3 percent to 46.6 percent over the decade, with the difference between those two percentages representing close to $3 million in annual spending that is not, today, supporting instruction (e.g., through faculty compensation). This graph shows the most recent 11 years for which data are publicly available. In 2013, the Board of Trustees made a commitment to improving faculty compensation, stating, “Oberlin College should set a goal of achieving salary parity (meaning the median of the salary range) with the Sweet Sixteen Schools in each continuing rank (Professor, Associate Professor, and Assistant Professor),” and “Oberlin College should establish a strategic indicator to monitor annual progress toward this goal.” Having an annual evaluation of where we stood relative to that goal indicated a serious commitment to investing in the quality of the faculty, but that commitment seems to have been abandoned. For many years (2001–2015), Oberlin used a payout rate from its endowment averaging over 5.5 percent. The Board of Trustees determined that having such a high payout rate, well above the average used by peer institutions, was not sustainable and has set the FY22 payout rate at 4.4 percent, a figure that is to be reduced by 0.1 percent per year until it reaches 4.0 percent . However, reducing the payout rate to 4.4 percent , heading lower, has resulted in such severe budgetary constraints that faculty compensation has fallen well behind inflation, to say nothing of comparison to peer institutions. It is true that the AAPR One Oberlin report — where one repeatedly reads of the academic and artistic excellence that must be provided by the faculty — recognized the need for budgetary reductions and some savings in benefit costs across employee groups, but the GF approval of that report was not intended to signal acceptance of a health care plan that, unique among our peer set, has no options. The College had already reduced retirement contributions and to follow this by the move to a CDHP-only plan will only make recruitment and retention of faculty more difficult in the years ahead. Any spending today is implicitly taking money from the future of the College, but saving money for the future must be balanced against the needs of building a strong College today. The cost to faculty morale and to the ability to hire and retain quality faculty must be considered. We believe that the College has the capacity to invest in its future via the faculty. For example, increasing the payout rate by 0.3 percent would provide roughly $3 million per year (which, coincidently, is roughly the amount that has been removed from instruction and research support in recent budgets). We know that the College’s resources are limited and that the demographic situation is going to get worse in the coming years, with the number of 18-year-olds declining. We think it is better to enter those years as a top-tier, if somewhat poorer, school than as a lower-tier, but relatively wealthier, school.
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