The Oberlin Review
<< Front page Commentary April 15, 2005

Keep Oberlin weird

Readers may be surprised to see this editorial in Oberlin’s “official,” “more traditional,” “more conservative” newspaper, but after all, the Review editors are Obies too and every once in awhile there’s a fact that simply needs to be stated: Oberlin is a pretty weird place and we like it that way.

This is a school where 200-plus pound football players dress in ball gowns for a Saturday night out, where intrepid warriors on the fourth floor of Noah carry out elaborate quests in fantasy worlds of their own creation, where tie-dyed neo-hippies smoke pot and form drum circles on North Quad in the middle of the afternoon only fifty feet from where state-of-the-art physics and biology experiments are taking place and the hockey team adopts a six-foot papier-maché penis as its mascot.

Several recent developments, however, seem to indicate that Oberlin’s infamous iconoclasm may not be to the liking of everyone in the College administration. Oberlin’s two flagship parties, Drag Ball and Safer Sex Night, were substantially toned down this year with Tents of Consent, Sex Demonstrations and “educational pornography” sanitized or removed entirely.

In athletics, Oberlin’s club sports, such as Ultimate Frisbee and Women’s Rugby have seen their budgets slashed while the College pours staff and funding into recruitment and training for varsity sports.

Oberlin’s co-ops have been an integral part of the College community for over 50 years. They provide hundreds of students with a low-cost alternative to the restrictive and impersonal atmosphere of dorm life and College dining.

In recent years, however, OSCA has experienced an unprecedented level of animosity from the College, primarily in the form of unexplained rent hikes. As the Review reported last week, swipe cards given to prospective students did not work at several co-ops since last semester. The department of residential education claims this was due to an equipment malfunction rather than any animosity toward OSCA; but in the process of investigating the story, long-standing tensions between co-ops and the Department of Admissions came to light.

A senior admissions official at the College has written to the Review this week explaining that she “will demand that Harkness provide clean, safe, drug-and-alcohol-free accommodations to prospectives. If this means that Harkness must change what it is, then so be it.”

While the concern is legitimate, it is extremely naive to think that prospective students who stay in traditional dorms are any less likely to be offered drugs or alcohol than those students in co-ops. Does the College seriously believe that a prospective student who spends a Friday night in Barrows or South will never be passed a joint or a beer; or is this part of some larger effort to shape the image that Oberlin presents to the outside world?

Oberlin is a great academic institution in a country full of great academic institutions. If it really wants to be competitive with its similarly-sized but better-funded peers on the East Coast, it must do so by emphasizing what makes it unique rather than what makes it the same. Safer Sex Night, Drag Ball, club sports and Harkness are as central to Oberlin life as our world-class conservatory and high-tech science facilities.

In a country where conservatism and conformity dominate mainstream politics and the media, we need places like Oberlin to be a vanguard of weirdness, keeping a bit of rebellious dynamism in our culture.

Oberlin’s weirdness should be cultivated and celebrated, not merely tolerated with the hope that no one from the outside will notice.
 
 

   


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