All Roads Lead to Oberlin is an interesting lesson in simple economics. The little ambitious happy-go-lucky shareholders check out their investments, and Oberlin does what any grand corporation should do. It sells itself to shareholders as a comfortable cushy place that will sustain that happy-go-luckiness and provide excellent economic returns on their investment. But what happens when some past shareholders and workers in the corporation show and tell new investors the unspoken ironies of what life is really like inside the corporation? Something like this occurred this week as anonymous students calling themselves Trembles Our Rage gave hundreds of prospective students written testament of their trials, tribulations and truths of being placed and displaced in Oberlin College.
Upon acceptance, 1997 students get a tape, t-shirt, book, Ben and Jerry's coupon ... a house, toilet paper, a car, and the crispiest crispy patties you can eat. Supposedly, admissions attempts to provide its accepted students with smidgens of the best that Oberlin has to offer. Trembles Our Rage, in presenting new Oberlin students with views from Oberlin-experienced students, is balancing the weighted masturbatory suga-coatings with shouts and whispers of "Don't be fooled." The publication attempts to make new Oberlin students more aware and better prepared for what the next four years will offer them.
If students feel icky about the way Oberlin sells itself to prospectives and the world, we should take it upon ourselves to see that students and the world get a broader, more accurate picture. It takes a deep love and thick hope for kids and the institution to make that possible. It's students showing and telling prospective students the other side of being an Oberlin student. If passionate enough, all of us could surely tell prospective students the unspoken Oberlin realities for which we were unprepared. In Follow the Morning Star, and that change the world book, we're showered with Oberlin students' historical against-the-grain triumphs. Those triumphs, like the students' production of Trembles Our Rage, are based in raw initiative and a passionate refusal to become buddies with contentment.
Many will point to the anonymity of publication as cowardice and further reasons to devalue the work of these students. Whether one agrees with the anonymity of the document or not, the fact that some don't feel safe enough to plaster their names on their powerful work, says mounds about the hybridity of Oberlin College; mounds that the corporation publicists and tour guides, as a rule, can't say. The college community owes Trembles Our Rage, itself and the class of 2001 a commitment to understanding, truth and change.
Copyright © 1997, The Oberlin Review.
Volume 125, Number 21, April 18, 1997
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