Outraged Alumni

To the Editors:

As an Oberlin College alum, I was outraged to hear that Oberlin has laid off 11 employees. Oberlin recruits students largely from middle class families claiming to prepare them to go out into the world to help the poor and the oppressed. Yet apparently Oberlin College has no problem pushing its own employees into poverty.
If you are trying to save $430,000 by cutting these positions, why did you recently accept a raise of your own salary to $363,000 a year? Why did you accept the $1,000,000 bonus that the Board of Trustees recently awarded you? What on Earth would the President of Oberlin College need all that money for, especially when many of your expenses, such as your house and your car, are already paid for by the College? Oberlin is exhibiting some of the very same traits as giant corporations who reward their executives with handsome bonuses while they layoff workers.
Layoffs not only add enormous stress to families dependent on those paychecks, but they also will result in cutbacks in student services and increased demands on the remaining workers to work harder to compensate for less staff.
Clearly your excessive salary and bonus would be enough money to afford to re-hire the 11 workers. If college administrators continue to claim that the layoffs are unavoidable because of the budget deficit, then you should not be afraid to put the college’s budget on display for everyone to see on the college’s website and on clear display somewhere on campus. The only reason you would hide the information is if you are misallocating resources towards your own benefits and salaries instead of sharing the resources equally with the entire community, such as the laid off workers.
I urge you to immediately re-hire the workers whose families will otherwise be seriously devastated by the loss of income that they depend upon to feed their children.

–Ramy Khalil
OC ’98