USA Today--Hannah Serota-Campbell, associate director of admissions, helped answer questions at USA Today's College Admission/Financial Aid Hotline. In the three days that the hotline was active, more than 4,500 calls were answered by admissions professionals from around the country. Serota-Campbell was noted as advising one high school student to avoid graduating early unless all classes in her high school curriculum had been exhausted and to take as many rigorous classes as possible.
Sun Press (Euclid, Ohio)--Home schooling is increasingly becoming an attractive option to parents who are unhappy with public and private education. H. Dean Kelly, coordinator of students with disabilities and instructor in reading, said that he found home-schooled students at Oberlin to be "bright, well-motivated and charming: with 'phenomenal' skills and experiences." One downside of home-schooling--the students may have minor problems with test-taking and formal textbook reading. None of these problems, Kelly said, overshadowed his opinion of them as students.
Associated Press--In an article discussing the absence of African-American males in the world of opera, mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves, who attended Oberlin, said "There are many great voices among the black men, but they have a hard time even getting their foot in the door in America." Graves, who made her Metropolitan Opera debut as Carmen last year, said the reason for this is simple: "It's racism."
Salisbury Post (Salisbury, NC)--Associate Professor of African-American Studies Adrienne Lash Jones shares a hometown with Elizabeth Dole, but the two women never met. The women lived about two blocks apart, but were separated by a much larger color line. As Lash Jones shared her personal story with the inhabitants of her hometown at the Catawba College Women's Symposium there, she challenged people of different races and cultures to share their own stories so that the children of America's future can have an accurate view of history. "By taking time to listen and learn from one another we will find some basis to coalesce for wholesome changes," she said. "And we will respect each other when we disagree."
Chicago Tribune--An article on a new trend among American males--sharing the housework--cited a 1993 study conducted at Oberlin which found that while married men do 20 hours of housework a week, married women do 35.
Time--Julie Taymor, a class of '74 alum who studied folklore and mythology at Oberlin, has been chosen by Disney to turn the popular movie The Lion King into a Broadway show. Taymor was noted by Time magazine as a stage director who has designed "visually stunning and utterly original" theater pieces using masks, puppetry and mime.
Rocky Mountain News (Denver)--President Nancy Dye said the planned environmental studies building will get undergraduates thinking not about problems in the environment, but solutions. Oberlin, she said, gives students a liberal arts education to provide the skills needed to understand the environment, to live in harmony with nature instead of overpowering it. The new building will be a pedagogical, academic, living structure, drawing together students and faculty from all areas of the college to learn about and experience the building as a living machine.
Return to the ATS-April 1997 Table of Contents