How is the national economy playing out with the College’s financial situation?

My inclination would be to say not very well. Over the last fiscal year the endowment has risen and the endowment is somewhat larger than it was a year ago, although by no means back to where it was three years ago. It has not made much gain.

Some people on both the staff and student body have been saying lately that Oberlin is starting to resemble a corporation in the way it is run. How would you respond to that?

Oberlin bears little resemblance to a corporate structure or corporate modus operandi. What people are responding to is that the College has got to steward its resources in ways that are very careful and must also be thinking very clearly about its priorities and where resources go. There is a strain of thought in Oberlin’s history that somehow Oberlin is a kind of utopia community and that it has social values that everybody shares and are different from values outside the community. One thing that is incontrovertibly true is that we cannot ignore economic realities. We’re very much dependent on forces outside this community. People say we’re running the place like a business. We have to. That doesn’t mean that our mission is like a corporation to that end. To carry that mission out we do have to think about what’s our resource base and how can we make responsible decisions.

How would you characterize Oberlin’s values?

We value individuality, free expression, pluralism, internationalism and cosmopolitanism. We are also a serious intellectual and artistic community. Oberlin thinks that art and music are central to human experience. We want to treat people humanely and inculcate our students with the values they need to become leaders.

What do you think about the Presidential election?

I hope that John Kerry will win! I’ve seen more interest from students in this election than I have seen in many, many years. The first election I voted in was 1968. That was a very exciting election and in the elections since then you can see American political culture changing. There’s been a move to the right in the United States in many ways. That’s simply a shift. The other thing I would say: the American electorate is much more polarized than any time since the 1920s. Many of the conflicts that have emerged recently are similar to the 1920s as well. Urban vs. rural, fundamentalist vs. secular, a time of great prosperity ending in economic hardship. Our time is very similar to that.

Did your trip to Iran last year shape the way you view the news from there?

It’s clear that there has been a great attempt to demonize Iran by a certain segment of this administration. Now that the nuclear issue is taking up more space that’s become more clear. It is interesting to me. There is more focus on Iran. There is more hostility in the rhetoric. To me it seems like such a basic mistake for countries not to talk to each other for 25 years. We don’t really understand or know what’s going on. I’m amazed at the affrontery of those who write that the U.S. as its next project should overthrow the government of Iran. If these people went to Iran they would realize that the last thing people want is to have the U.S. change the government of Iran.

How did you spend your summer?

Three weeks on Istanbul and got together with several of our students and met a number of people with Oberlin connections of some sort or another. I liked it every bit as much as I thought it would.

Any good Oberlin stories from Istanbul?

We met a political scientist named Ilter Turan who graduated from Oberlin and actually interviewed Bush last year before his visit to Turkey. Apparently Bush found out that he had gone to Oberlin and commented, “I’ve heard that that’s an excellent school.”

Interview by Josh Keating and Douglass Dowty