To the Editor:
Howdy, y'all. Name here is Noel Taylor, and I'm conservatory class of '73. Found your website and read some of the news, including the new student rag. Sure doesn't seem like much has changed since I left.
Take that young man thrown out of campus housing after barricading himself in his room. The articles written, and the statements given, sound a bit familiar. You see, I had a good friend, name witheld since I don't have his permission to give it, class of '75, who went through something quite similar. We all went down to the evening meal at South Hall one night and this guy, a cafeteria work-study employee himself, asked for a serving of something or other which a student server, for no reason apparent to the rest of us, refused to give him. He tried to talk the server into serving him, but to no avail. So he simply walked around behind the counter, tickled the server out of the way, and served himself. For that, this hapless violinist was charged and convicted of racist, sexist and violent acts and barred from the cafeteria. The only due process he got was exposure to unbelievable levels of cigarette smoke while the kangaroo faculty went through the motions of looking good for the school's civil rights image.
Or take this co-ed dorm room thing. Hey, I don't know about y'all, but back when I was there we had co-ed dorm rooms all over the place. No, they weren't assigned that way, but that made no difference. And yes, we actually had assigned co-ed dorms, floors and bathrooms. Somebody forgot to tell us that the movements of the 60's were supposed to end when the number on the calendar changed to a seven.
Well, I guess y'all probably still do other things like we did, too. Like when everyone got together and built a fake Vietnam village on the town square and then burned it for Moratorium Day back in 1972, with people throwing in their stereos and 10-speeds to show solidarity with the napalm victims in 'Nam. Of course, that year, Moratorium Day and Earth Day landed on the same square on the calendar, so while the TV crews from Cleveland had their cameras rolling and all that oily smoke from the fire blackened the sky, some grinning mustached piano major walked across the scene wearing placards proclaiming HAPPY EARTH DAY to the TV masses.
Yep, your latest electronic reports sure sound like SSDD to me, and that's not something having to do with special education. Y'all.
Copyright © 1996, The Oberlin Review.
Volume 124, Number 22; April 26, 1996
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