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By Josh Keating

As tensions continue to boil in the Middle East and the possibility of arriving at a peaceful resolution seems more and more remote, Oberlin’s administration is taking clear steps to improve the level of debate on campus.

These steps, directed through the President’s Office and the Office of the Ombudsperson, are designed both to facilitate greater dialogue and to bring new perspectives to campus.
In one move, a special group assembled by the President’s Office including faculty, administrators, students and Oberlin’s Jewish Chaplain Shimon Brand has been entrusted with “finding ways that we can work constuctively and postively to deal with this conflict.”

Their main initiative so far has been to bring speakers to campus such as Aaron Miller, Director of Seeds for Peace, who gave one of the convocation addresses, and the Arab-Israeli group Parents’ Circle that brought bereaved Israeli and Palestinian parents to speak to college students as advocates for peace.
The Office of the Ombudsperson is also planning on a series of conversations through the College Dialogue Center.

“We want to create a group where people will have space on a regular basis to engage in constructive dialogue,” Ombudsperson Yeworkwha Belachew said. “They need to learn be able to talk with each other with respect.”

A prototype for the discussion groups occurred earlier this year when Miller met with various student groups. A permanent discussion forum will have its first meeting next week. The specific groups involved have still not been finalized.

The heated student debate over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has only intensified since the beginning of the second intifada in 2001. It reached its height in the spring of last year when the campus was littered with posters and grafitti proclaiming “Zionism=Racism” and the commentary pages of The Oberlin Review were flooded with angry letters from both sides of the table.

“It was a very distressing level of debate last spring,” College President Nancy Dye said. “The stickers and other attacks reached really inapropriate levels.”

Dye was quick to deny allegations that the school does little to address anti-Jewish sentiment.

“I don’t know of any anti-Semitism that this institution tolerates,” she said.

At a recent open trustees meeting, one member of the Jewish student group Hillel disagreed, even going even so far as to contend a trend of “accepted anti-Semitism pervading the campus.”

Dye did, however, acknowledge that some of the student-to-student debate had begun to take on a racist tinge.

“Overall it was a very bad atmosphere,” she said.

In the past, visiting speakers have often been the source of friction on campus. Speakers like former Black Panther Kwame Ture and the late scholar Edward Said caused uproar in certain segments of the student population due to their anti-zionist views.

While this year’s speakers have been, for the most part, more diplomatic in their handling of the situation, Dye was adamant that the school would not stop inviting controversial speakers to Oberlin.

“We bring contentious views to campus all the time,” she said. “It’s important to hear views that may complicate one’s perspective on an issue. People tend to view this conflict as a manichean struggle of good against evil when it’s actually much more complicated than that.”

Belachew was quite critical of the forums used for conversation last year.

“It bothers me when I see students hiding behind The Oberlin Review,” she said. “Why is it so difficult to just talk one another?”

Dye stressed that the College does not seek to pacify the campus.

“The goal here is not to end disagreement,” Dye said. “Too many students feel too passionately about this subject for anyone to expect that.

“A campus with no disagreement would be much more distressing,” she added.