To the Editors:

Your editorial regarding the accountability of the College’s principle allocation body of the Student Activity Fee Fund, the Student Finance Committee (SFC) failed to discuss any of the power dynamics that occur within the committee. As the former Student Senate representative to SFC (making my official title Co-Chair of SFC), I experienced how the decisions of the Senate-appointed seven-student committee were influenced heavily by an administration-appointed student position, the Student Treasurer.

As legislated by the 1993 SFC charter, the Student Treasurer has the responsibility to manage allocations made from the Student Activity Fund. The Student Treasurer does not have the legislated responsibility or power to make policy or allocation decisions; however, as legislated, the Student Treasurer may be consulted by SFC to determine the feasibility of a policy or organization’s allocation. As legislated in the 1993 charter, the Co-Chairs (one senate representative and one inner-elected) of SFC would set all meeting agenda items regarding allocations and policy discussions. Also the committee’s members would attend every meeting and discuss those policies and allocations.

Neither of these desired outcomes have occurred regularly over the life of the committee. When I was appointed to be the Student Senate representative on SFC, there hadn’t been one for at least four months prior and the two representatives before me never realized their actual role of Chair. You can imagine the committee’s and the Student Treasurer’s (who have been basically running SFC meetings for at least the past three years) response when I showed up and told them I was the legislated Co-Chair of the committee.

Also, members frequently miss meetings. The students who take the unpaid, three hour a week minimum volunteer position often get more than they bargain for. These students are usually very busy and there is little incentive for them to sit through allocation and policy decisions of 150-plus organizations of which they know about probably 30.

Of course there have been many committed students who arduously attend every meeting and I commend their efforts. Yet these problems of no real leadership and overcommitted students have been constant for at least my three years of knowledge about the committee. These problems have led to more power in the hands of the Student Treasurer. I’d like to stress that this power has not been taken with malice, but out of necessity. The Student Treasurers have simply been trying to get money allocated to groups who are clamoring for funds from an otherwise disorganized SFC.

I commend the current and past Student Treasurer’s attempts to make-up for the shortcomings of the committee, but in the doing so an individual appointed by administrators, not through the student governance system, has a major hand in allocating the Student Activity Fee Fund. This fund is meant to be independent of influence by administrators, faculty and trustees; its sole purpose is broadly to provide funding for anything that will benefit the student body.

I am not suggesting that SFC has been allocating in ways that do not benefit the student body. Yes, the Student Treasurer’s position does now hold some illegitimate power, but that does not mean the power has been used unjustly. However, I believe it to be against the spirit and intention of Oberlin’s student governance system to have the even the smallest amount of student funds controlled by an individual who is not held responsible to the student body but to administrators.

It might seem that the best solution would be to clean house. Fire the Student Treasurer, and get a whole new SFC. This would solve nothing. The students in the roles discussed have changed. The committee and Student Treasurer have both changed entirely in my experiences with SFC and the problems have remained the same. The root of the power-dynamic problems in SFC is the not the personalities of the individuals involved but the institutional make-up of the committee.

I see several solutions, but there are probably many more. SFC members and/or the Student Treasurer could be directly elected by the student body. This would put accountability in every position; the Treasurer would be accountable to students, and all members would be compelled to attend all meetings.

I personally, though, am in favor of a more drastic change to SFC. Having seven students make the allocation decisions for all the student organizations (the current legislated process) on campus is a taxing endeavor if the desired allocations are just and non-arbitrary. The SFC should be divided into groups that allocate to specific types of organizations; a group for the arts, a group for club sports, a group for political groups and so on.

With this system, the students on the allocation groups would actually understand the needs of all the organizations they are allocating to, and thus would have a passionate interest in providing funds for these organizations. The Student Treasurer would have a similar role as is legislated now; managing outflows from the Student Activity Fee Fund.

The tricky issue of how much base funding each group of organizations (arts, sports, political…) gets could be decided by the Student Senate. Of course the Student Senate is not a perfect institution either, but at least all its members are directly elected by and thus accountable to the student body.

The content of this letter in no way represents the opinions of the Oberlin College Student Senate or any of its other members.

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To the Oberlin College Community:

Last week, the British government released a 700-page analysis showing that unconstrained climate change could cost up to 20 percent of the world’s gross domestic product and that it would be cheaper by far to prevent runaway climate change than to try to adapt to it, which beyond some point would be futile. The science is clear: climate change is the first planetary emergency since Homo sapiens emerged and is central to the larger challenge of sustainability.

As recently as the year 2000, Oberlin was widely recognized for being in the forefront of the growing sustainability movement on U.S. college campuses. Oberlin, for example, was the only college or university mentioned in Time magazine’s “Planet of the Year” issue (Aug. 26, 2002), but we are conspicuously absent from recent stories in The New York Times and the Oct. 20 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education devoted to campus sustainability. Different indicators point to the same conclusion: while other institutions have substaintially increased their commitments to environmental stewardship, the energy, initiative and reputation for leadership that Oberlin once enjoyed has dissipated.

This is not to say that Oberlin has done nothing. To the contrary, many Oberlin students, faculty, college committees and alumni have shown real leadership. But it is clear that we are doing less than many other institutions and doing it with less imagination, alacrity, institutional coordination and comprehensive planning. This is particularly unfortunate not because it will impact our status in higher education — which it will — but because climate change and sustainability are the largest issues of our time.

As we begin the search for a new president and prepare to launch another capital campaign, this is a good time to ask what can be done. The answers are straightforward:

1) Make a commitment to sustainability a requirement for the new president along with executive ability and leadership skills; 2) Include sustainability as an essential part of the new capital campaign; 3) Set the goal of becoming the first “Platinum” rated campus along guidelines being developed by the U.S. Green Building Council; 4) Join the movement to become a climate neutral campus. The “2020 Report” (Jan. 2002) was the first report to outline comprehensive policy options for achieving climate neutrality. Inspired in part by that document, dozens of institutions, including major research universities, are preparing to announce specific commitments to carbon neutrality as a goal in the next few months through the auspices of the American Association of Sustainability in Higher Education. Similarly, the U.S. Green Building Council and the American Institute of Architects have adopted climate neutrality as a target by the year 2030 5) Make implementation of the Environmental Policy adopted by the Trustees in 2004 a top priority 6) Vigorously join operational changes with curriculum and research so that we equip our students with the analytical skills and broad liberal arts perspectives necessary to meet the challenges and opportunities in the years ahead with creativity, imagination and commitment.

In hindsight, all six recommendations will soon appear to be merely obvious steps given what is known about planetary trends. There is no good reason why Oberlin should sound an uncertain trumpet on threats posed by climate change and other environmental challenges. To the contrary, leadership on big issues is our tradition, let’s return to it.

–David W. Orr

Paul Sears Professor of Environmental Studies

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To the Oberlin College

Student Community:
 

If someone gave you $10,000 to help make the world a more peaceful place, what would you do?  This is not an idle question. In honor of her 100th birthday, accomplished internationalist and philanthropist Kathryn Wasserman Davis is sponsoring the “100 Projects for Peace” initiative: 100 student projects will receive $10,000 and the chance to make an impact all over the world.

Students at Oberlin are eligible for this one-time opportunity because Oberlin College is one of 76 colleges and universities recognized nationally as a Davis United World College (UWC) Program School.  Individual students or groups of students on the 76 UWC campuses are invited to design their own grassroots project for peace to be implemented anywhere in the world during the summer of 2007.  Intentionally, no definition of a “project for peace” is offered so as not to limit the realm of possible projects. 

You are challenged to formulate and test your own ideas to define what a “project for peace” might be. The overall program is designed to be worldwide in scope and impact, but projects may be undertaken anywhere.

Students interested in applying for these funds should contact Susan Morse (susan.morse@oberlin.edu) in the Sponsored Programs Office for information about how to apply.  The application deadline is Jan. 12, 2007. At Oberlin, we will nominate one primary proposal and up to two alternate proposals.

This is a great opportunity for Oberlin students to do what they do best: use their creativity and critical thinking skills to solve real world problems.  We look forward to reading your proposals.

–The Oberlin College

“100 Projects for Peace” Review Committee

Adrian Bautista

Beth Blissman

Eric Estes

Cindy Frantz

Susan Morse

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To the Editors:

After being interviewed briefly for the article last week on the midterm elections as the vice president of the Oberlin College Republicans, I was hopeful that my answers to the author’s questions would help dispel some misconceptions that seemed to be circulating the campus about the OCR’s absence as an organizing force in voter registration.

To my surprise and disappointment, in reading the article, I found that such misconceptions were not only left uncorrected, they seemed to be reinforced. The article, framing a quotation from me, stated, “in part due to the strength of liberal groups and numbers of Democratic voters on campus, the Republicans ‘haven’t been that strongly election oriented.’”

The implication, which echoed sentiments I had heard from fellow students leading up to the election, seemed to be that we hadn’t organized our own voter registration effort simply because we didn’t want to be registering students who would overwhelmingly vote Democrat.

This frustrated me greatly, as I had recalled being quite explicit about our actual reasons: that we are a group, not surprisingly, of relatively few students, and we felt that it would be more effective to encourage our members to volunteer individually with OPIRG or the OC Dems to register voters since those groups had already organized such great registration drives.

The original context of my quotation regarding the OCRs not being “strongly election oriented” was in a response to a question about what our plans would be once the election was over, in which I explained that they would not change greatly, since the primary focus of our group has been in our speaker series and, in general, promoting healthy debate about a wider range of issues here at Oberlin by presenting views that are seldom represented on this campus. I don’t want to overstate my disappointment.

After all, it was a small interview and an even smaller section in the printed article. To me it mostly represented a missed opportunity in an up-hill struggle we face against negative perceptions about the OCRs and conservatives students in general here at Oberlin.

We’re not here to discourage Democratic voters. We’re not here to offend or anger our liberal peers.

We are active to promote much needed diversity in the intellectual and political culture of this college. At the very least we are here so that members of the community can fully understand more conservative arguments before they can reject them.

The essence of intellectual strength is in challenging and re-challenging one’s own views, and we simply hope to inspire people to do so.

I hope that the mischaracterization of my quotations was simply a misunderstanding, and I look forward to continued interaction between the Review and the OCRs in the future.

–Elliot Strathmann

College senior

Vice President of the Oberlin College Republicans

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To the Editors:

ARGO (Architectural Research Group of Oberlin) is an organization on campus committed to creating a forum for the exchange of ideas pertaining to architecture.

In this pursuit, we are motivated to raise awareness of the recently proposed Jazz Studies Center and to make an inquiry as to its nature.

In the planning of the Jazz Studies Center we would like to hold the college and conservatory accountable to ARGO and the greater Oberlin community.

Accordingly, we would like the administration to explain the current state of the project.

In order to critically assess the building, ARGO requests more up to date information than the presentation made by architect Paul Westlake to the Board of Trustees last spring.

Considering the impact of the proposed Jazz Studies Center, several things are at stake. As a significant addition to the college, the building is capable of accomplishing various objectives.

These include: forming a visual relationship between the campus and town, reaffirming Oberlin’s high standards for design, satisfying all members of the community by incorporating their expectations into the design process and creating a new and dynamic identity for Oberlin’s jazz studies department. 

As it stands, the project fails to meet these objectives and places significant limitations on two levels.

First, the proposed site, located at the parking lot behind the Conservatory, introduces a greater set of concerns about the building’s access and presence.

Second, the designs presented so far raise more questions than answers about the building’s purpose, and does not specify or outline how these will be resolved.

Lastly, ARGO is cognizant of the shortcomings of recent projects that have deviated from Oberlin’s long heritage of distinguished architecture.

We feel that it is important to ensure that the addition of the Jazz Studies Center will serve as an iconic backdrop for Oberlin’s world-class music students that will be commemorated now and in years to come.

In the aim of addressing these issues, we would like to announce an open discussion of the project hosted by ARGO, to be held on Monday, Nov. 20, 2006 in Wilder 101.

–Architectural Research Group of Oberlin