New Staff Cuts Concern MRC, Students, Campus by Tobias Smith and Ariella Cohen In an effort to curb its multi-million dollar budget deficit, the College recently announced plans to do away with the employee category of “intern.” This action will eliminate 25 positions, including four of the Multicultural Resource Center’s five coordinators. While this staff cut will affect various departments ranging from theater to athletics, the severe reduction in the MRC staff is particularly devastating. While the College has stated plans to create two new full-time MRC staff positions, many students remain skeptical. “It is really important for the rest of the student population to understand that the MRC has been a bulwark for these communities since its establishment. It’s one of the only places that students can go for suppport, camraderie and programming on this campus. [The administration] squeezes the same people over and over,” senior and MRC assistant Christine Harley said. Since the cut was made public, students have expressed concerns that the new MRC positions may not be community specific. Unlike the current community coordinator positions, specified as Asian Pacific, Latino, African and LGBT, the new positions may not require that the hirees be members of the constituencies that they represent. “What they are trying to get rid of is the community-specific coordination, which is identity-blind multiculturalism,” senior Nicolas Stahelin said. The same day that the cuts were announced, students began mobilizing to protect the MRC. On Thursday night, more than 100 concerned students, coming from a variety of organizations and perspectives, gathered to discuss ways to address the dangers that the MRC, and, in turn, the communities the center serves, face. “We are just concerned students,” senior Liane Lau said of the organizers of the meeting, before giving up the floor to a variety of student speakers. “I really don’t see how the MRC can run without interns. We know for sure that [Associate Dean and MRC Director] Rachel Beverly will be here but there’s no way that she can handle the workload of five people. The administration has insinuated that they will bring someone else in but even if there are three new people there is no way that they will be able to handle the load of five people who are already struggling as it is,” Harley stated. The MRC facilitates the bulk of culturally-specific programming on campus, putting together film and lecture series, such as the Indigenous Women’s Series, and serves as a home-base for student organizing. The center also coordinates a long-running Oberlin program wherein interested students are paired with local families of their same cultural background, providing a local community network, support and a place for a good, hot dinner. “The student resources I have utilized have been almost solely done by the MRC. None of these could have happened without the intern staff,” senior Grace Han said. At Thursday night’s meeting student organizers pointed out that cuts in MRC faculty will place additional responsibilities on other multicultural representatives, which is likely to put an undue burden on faculty of color. “I don’t think it’s the responsibility of faculty of color, I think often it’s their burden. That’s why the College has the Dean of Students office, so they can target the needs of the student body. I think that the burden falls on new faculty, because we have such a high turnover of faculty of color. On top of their academic workload they have all this informal advising. Not to say they aren’t a wonderful resource, but that is unfair that they should have to fill these additional roles,” Senior and member of the Comparative American Studies Committee Grace Han said. “I think people may not think it is a big deal because we still may get CAS and we have the African American Studies department. Peter Goldsmith has said that faculty of color are going to have to pick up the slack but they [faculty of color] teach classes and are already mentoring these students. This is not their job. Why aren’t white professors asked to do the same thing?” Harley said. This quandary has already been realized by some faculty members. “The pace of teaching, the pressure to publish in a liberal arts setting can work to preclude possibilities of faculty working with student activists,” Professor of Sociology Antoinette Charfauros-McDaniel said. Other students tried to put the cuts into a larger historical perspective, noting that during a similar hiring freeze in 1998, Dean of Students positions, which had been organized to reflect identity-specific representation, were changed to the current system, under which each graduating class has a non identity-specific Dean. Many of Oberlin’s peer institutions, including Brown and Bard, boast permenantly staffed community resource centers. A question-and-answer period at the meeting yielded questions ranging from need-blind admissions, to custodial understaffing, to benefits for faculty dependents. After this brief period of questions, discussion moved to possible student courses of action. In addition to questions about the ramifications of the cuts, many are upset about the unilateral decisionmaking process which brought the College to the decision. Associate Dean and MRC Director Rachel Beverly, the only member of the MRC staff who will remain after the cuts, was not consulted on the cut to her staff. “I was not a part of the discussions regarding the elimination of the intern positions,” Beverly said. Some are simply perplexed about this perceived lack of public discourse leading up to the cuts, which come on the heels of faculty meetings from which students were barred. “There has been a lack of dialogue between administration and students, and once again there is a disparity in the facts,” senior Jorge Sanchez said.

April 12 April 19

site designed and maintained by jon macdonald and ben alschuler :::