A faculty-elected committee is now in place and has begun meeting to find a replacement for Mary Ella Feinleib, who resigned as dean last month after seven months on the job.
The committee consists of seven senior faculty members and will elect its own chair. At its first meeting Wednesday, a chair was not elected and no decisions about either the nature of the search or the timeline were made.
President Nancy Dye said that while no students are on the search committee, she's going to work with the committee to find ways to involve students in the search. In last year's search, members of the Student Senate complained because there were no students with voting power on the committee, though there were to Student Senate liaisons to the committee.
This year, a group of student departmental representatives has already asked for a voice in the search for the college's top academic administrator.
Traditionally, the dean of the college, whose job responsibilities include overseeing the college faculty, is chosen from within Oberlin's faculty. Feinleib, who had previously been a dean at Tufts University, was an exception to that tradition.
The committee has not yet decided whether the search for the next dean will be local or national in scope.
This dean search is the third in five years. In 1993, a search had begun to replace Alfred MacKay as dean before President Frederick Starr announced his resignation. When Starr resigned, MacKay agreed to serve as dean through the first year of the new presidency. Candidates for dean in the 1993 search were all Oberlin faculty members.
The members of the new search committee include Professor of Chemistry Martin Ackermann, Professor of History Marcia Colish, Associate Professor of Romance Languages Nelson de Jesus, Associate Professor of African-American Studies Adrienne Lash Jones, Professor of English Katherine Linehan, Professor of Chemistry Albert Matlin and Professor of Economics James Zinser.
The Review was one of six newspapers in country to be awarded the Gold Crown at the association's convention March 25.
Anneke Tryzelaar OC'95 was editor-in-chief. Rachel Claff OC'95 and Leah Mitch OC'95 were managing editors.
"I feel very flattered and I'm not surprised that we won. I think we put out an excellent paper last year," Tryzelaar said. "This demonstrates the sort of talent we had at Oberlin and especially at the Review."
Four hundred five college newspapers entered last year's competition. All the other papers that won the Gold Crown are dailies. Those papers were the Indiana Daily Student at Indiana University, The Kansas State Collegian at Kansas State University, The Auburn Plainsmen at Auburn University, The Eastern Progress at Eastern Kentucky Universiy and The Oklahoma Daily at the University of Oklahoma.
The Review won the Silver Crowd, the second highest level of achievement in Columbia's annual contest for its issues in both the spring of 1993 and 1994.
The course evaluation book will be published and available to students. It will provide students with information about which courses are worth taking and which are not according to students who are surveyed.
The proposal to write a course evaluation book was brought before the Student Senate and passed earlier this year by Senators senior Carl Sachs, Persky and senior Matt Cole.
After the proposal was passed, the committee was created to work out the details of the booklet and plan for its compilation and publication.
Organizers plan for the booklet to be composed by compiling questionnaires which students have filled out. The questionnaires will be distributed at the end of the semester, along with the current course evaluation forms they normally receive.
Students will answer about 10 questions evaluating the course, course content and "to a smaller extent the faculty," Persky said.
"Other colleges have this kind of thing and I decided it was worth doing something about," Sachs said.
The project will "definitely happen," according to Persky. Some unresolved issues include funding and publishing.
A target date for publication could be next semester.
Copyright © 1996, The Oberlin Review.
Volume 124, Number 20; April 12, 1996
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