The Oberlin Review
<< Front page News February 25, 2005

Faculty prepares for planning vote
Public relations and “verticality” questioned

College and Conservatory professors raised questions about Oberlin’s strategic planning process at a general faculty meeting on Wednesday. The faculty is set to vote on the proposal next week.

The 10 page document is currently undergoing some last minute revision before next Wednesday’s vote.  Some of the more controversial aspects of the plan include an emphasis on increased verticality in the curriculum and the image of Oberlin in the outside world.

The verticality portion of the plan is aimed at improving Oberlin’s retention rate and providing more opportunities for student research.

“We’re looking for a sense of intentionality,” said history professor and Planning Committee member Steve Volk. “We need to provide students with more opportunities and make them more aware of their own intentions.”

Other faculty members worried that the emphasis on verticality was not advisable for all sectors of the College and worried that the initiative was a means of discouraging students from pursuing multiple fields of study.

Planning committee members were quick to respond to these concerns. “If we wanted to discourage double-majors we would have said that we were discouraging double majors,” said Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Jeff Whitmer.

Politics Professor Marc Blecher felt that the plan should place more of an emphasis on what makes Oberlin students distinctive from students at other liberal arts colleges.

“Our students focus on the ideas themselves rather than arraying them in the way that idea specialists would,” he said.

Other professors felt that the school had not done an adequate job of selling itself as a distinctive entity in the educational market.

“I know that all of us have done some pretty amazing things and projects over the year and might feel that these things are not always adequately reflected in the information that gets out there,” Professor of Religion Paula Richman said.“We could do a better job at letting students know the ways we are unique as a College.”

Other professors agreed. “A lot of evidence suggests that students don’t see us the way that we see ourselves,” said Volk.

The other major issue of the discussion was whether the plan was specific enough to have a real impact on College decision-making.

“Somewhere in this document there is space for details of what is meant by these general principles,” said African American studies professor James Milette.

“[The plan] avoids suggesting tough choices,” said history professor Gary Kornblith. “I don’t see this document as adequately specific.”

Some felt that the plan’s innocuous nature made it very difficult to assess.

“If I vote against it, I feel as if I’m voting against mom and apple pie,” said one professor. “There’s nothing in it to disagree with.”

Members of the planning committee, however, were quick to point out that the real work was to be done in the implementation of the plan.

“To whom should we look for this inspiration and drive? We need to look to ourselves,” said African American Studies Department Chair Booker Peek. “This question is going to be resolved with the faculty.”

“Nobody has yet sat down and said where should we implement this,” said College President Nancy Dye in an interview on Wednesday.  “There are many, many stakeholders in this plan and you want to create a document that makes everybody feel they can be a part of it.”

Volk agreed. “As someone who studies text for a living I have less and less of a belief in text and more and more of a belief in action,” he said. “Our task it to implement something that will be exciting. The doors are there.  Whether we walk through them is up to us.”
 
 

   


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