^^They have discovered the limits of liberal permissiveness.
Is Oberlin test optional? or did these students test in China?
Looks like the safe space demand has been made at other schools.
Not only is this super ridiculous, it’s also very poorly written. Frankly I think college students should be rather embarrassed to have turned this out. Their first goal says this:
an increase in Black and students of color represented in the institution from the Americas, including the Caribbean and Africa"
which is grammatically incorrect AND makes no sense. I think they mean something like “an increase in Black students, and other students of color, from the Americas (including the Caribbean) and Africa.”
Also, some of the things they demand sound expensive and impractical (a program to bring former prison inmates to be undergraduates at Oberlin? When prison inmates are demonstrably of lower academic achievement and on average would struggle in college altogether, much less at an elite college like Oberlin?), or are straight-up illegal (you can’t create black-only spaces or resources on campus that other students can’t use. That’s called segregation. And, quite frankly, given that there are only about 150 black students at Oberlin, why do they need four separate spaces?). Renaming the buildings is pretty bad, too - the Kohl building seems to be named after the couple who gave the seed gift to build that building; Hall Auditorium is named after the mother of a wealthy benefactor of the college who very likely gifted a lot of money to Oberlin.
I’m especially amused by the DEMANDS to immediate tenure some faculty - after checking, it appears that they are using the wrong titles for some of those faculty, and at least two of the ones they demand immediate tenure for are actually temporary visiting professors in their departments. Which skips two entire steps (the actual selection of these people as full-time tenure-track faculty and then their 6-year tenure process and review).
The thing is, they actually have some issues that could make sense as suggestions - like increasing the diversity of faculty overall (which is something that Oberlin is explicitly trying to do already), increasing the representation of black students in the student body, address unconscious bias, and potentially increasing the representation of different Western perspectives other than a European/Anglo-American one into the curriculum. If they dropped the demand structure and worked with faculty and administration in a less confrontational way they could actually get some of that accomplished. But mixed in with the completely unrealistic demands, the hostile language, the threats, and the poor writing…nobody can take them seriously, not even the president of one of the most liberal LACs in the country. Sigh.
That’s one of the least contentious things about this. Capitalizing black and white is an accepted grammatical practice in the English language, and is used in a lot of written forms of media (including scientific journal articles and scholarly books). I’m personally not a huge fan but it’s not incorrect and not a sign of stupidity.
No, cobrat. Your analogy is completely wrong.
A lawyer who is issuing a letter with a “demand” is typically doing so because he’s accusing a person of breaking either a law or a contractual agreement that already exists. The threat is – if you don’t comply, I will then use the court system to ensure that the law is followed, or that the contract we already agreed to / signed is followed.
These students who are issuing “demands” are just saying - this is what I want, and I’m going to hold my breath and pout until I get what I want.
Anyone know if the Oberlin cafeteria is still micro-aggressively mis-appropriating Asian culture by serving inauthentic General Tso’s chicken? Which dish, apparently, was first served in the 1970s in NYC.
And which was then was subsequently mis-appropriated into the orange chicken served at a Panda Express at the mall food court located near you.
College is a great time for kids to do stupid things. These activities are as harmless as they are brainless. Party on.
@juillet Any form of communication which gets the point across is “acceptable” I suppose, but the capitalization of “black” and “white” are not an accepted grammatical practice. It is poor grammar and a sign of ignorance. I have seen the words capitalized, or sometimes “black” capitalized while “white” remains lowercase in various formats, but it is still wrong. People use “ain’t” all the time, but it ain’t proper.
Those who have a yearning need for capitalized racial identifiers should use Caucasian or Negro, although I find both terms to be a bit contrived in modern usage. However, both are preferable to the use of capitalization when using the words “black” or “white.”
Grammatical rules do change over time. From around 1650 to 1800 the capitalization of important nouns was considered correct. In modern usage it is not. I just think that as a society we should hold the line on this issue. We have rules of grammar and they should be enforced and followed.
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Don’t be surprised. Few years ago Berkeley wrote a front-page about a man, who spent long time in prison (some serious crime), applied to Berkeley, was accepted (SAT score was not mentioned, he finished HS in prison). He was celebrated for bringing diversity and real life-experience to campus. Berkeley newspaper devoted several pages to celebrate this story. They asked his opinion about political issues, etc. Was a big news splash.
I know some kids who believe that jail experience is a good topic for college admission essay, because they have “real-life experience”. Seriously.
As misguided and cringe-inducing as this action is, I do wonder whether they are responding to some actual inhospitability toward black students at Oberlin. No doubt faculty of color are as woefully underrepresented there as in academia in general.
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I do wonder whether they are responding to some actual inhospitability toward black students at Oberlin.
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Oberlin isn’t in the south so it couldn’t possibly be guilty of being inhospitable towards black students.
The examples I’ve seen were mostly of cases where the lawyers who sent the “comply with my client’s demand or there will be serious consequences letters” knew or should have known beforehand by virtue of their professional training/experience that the demands were not actually supported by the law concerned or were actually themselves illegal under the laws on the books.
Those clients and lawyers were by your definition “terroristic” by issuing threat-backed demands against friends which had no genuine legal basis or worse…blatantly illegal because they were counting on them not knowing their legal rights under the law.
Something which was illustrated when we called their bluff by citing the specific tenant rights/relevant laws which proved they were blowing hot air and they dropped the matter.
The phenomenon I’m describing is unfortunately all too common with unscrupulous individual/corporate landlords or in other cases…larger corporations/wealthy individuals using their greater financial resources and lawyer(s) to intimidate smaller businesses and lower SES individuals who may not know their rights and/or don’t have the financial/time resources to fight them on a level legal playing field.
I have no idea if this is true, but Oberlin’s history is rooted in abolitionism. It was co-ed when it opened its doors and admitted its first black students a couple of years later. I can’t imagine a school today more accommodating of students of color, aside from an HBCU.
Maybe all Oberlin freshmen should be required to read one of these books:
“I can’t imagine a school today more accommodating of students of color, aside from an HBCU.”
I don’t know about that. It’s extremely liberal, and the history still matters, but non-HBCUs that aren’t in rural locations and that have larger communities of color (both in percentage and absolute terms) may well be more accommodating. I think Oberlin bends over backwards to do the best it can within its limitations, but its limitations are significant. There are plenty of sheltered white students at Oberlin who (at least at first) have no idea how to conceive of black people other than as an abstraction or a cause.
I guess I should have said “tries harder to be accommodating.” But maybe I’m wrong about that too. Although it’s not like sheltered white students don’t end up at urban schools too.
Actually, the part about it going Co-Ed wasn’t completely the case as women weren’t admitted to the same BA degree program as men until 1837:
https://new.oberlin.edu/about/history.dot
Another thing which the college rarely mentions is the motivation behind opening its full collegiate program to women and African-Americans wasn’t completely altruistic initially. Instead, it was more due to it struggling to attract enough paying students during its first decade of existence.
However, going to an urban college means they’re far less likely to be able to maintain themselves in a “college/town bubble” where the vast majority of the college/town population is mostly White*.
And while Oberlin does try to be accommodating towards URMs and other minority groups(i.e. LGBTQ), the local mostly White town residents didn’t always reflect that considering the numerous incidents ranging from White locals staring and acting hostile towards interracial dating couples; drivers driving by yelling racist, sexist, and homophobic epithets against us students, and one case where one of those drivers almost got out of his car to pick a fight with me after I responded to his racist epithet towards me by giving him a one-fingered NY salute in response before he found a cop car was coming up a few blocks away and he opted to high-tail it out of there.
- Oberlin was around 74% White when I was an undergrad there.
You may end up tossing a lot of highly intelligent students who grew up in educational systems abroad or within the US which mandated the capitalization of races in writing in K-12.
Oberlin is not rural. It is thirty five minutes from Cleveland. The town of Oberlin is (or was anyway) majority minority with a large African American presence.
I agree that there are plenty of sheltered white students at Oberlin. They come from California and the East Coast. The town itself is nothing like the college, which may be part of the problem.
California is minority-majority state. Lots of diversity here (although, not black/white diversity).
I think you’re on to something there. I heard a debate on my local NPR affiliate between a Penn student and a Swarthmore student a couple of months ago about accommodating students of color, and the Swarthmore student, who was African American, was upset that the college didn’t do more to counteract harassment she felt she’d received from some local in a pickup truck driving by who’d used a racial slur against her.
As bad as I felt for her, I did wonder out loud if she had ANY idea that the lovely little borough of Swarthmore, which is just a 30-minute train ride from Philly, is set amidst a very blue-collar, white working-class area, where there has always been, and continues to be, a fair amount of prejudice and racism, and where the vast majority of students don’t have a prayer of ever attending a school as posh and elite as Swarthmore.
Her complaints just seemed over the top and out of touch to me. Talk about a bubble.
Re: Oberlin city versus college demographics
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/39/3957834.html indicates that Oberlin (the city) in 2014 had a population of 8,251, which was 70.3% white (NH) and 14.8% black. Median household income of $51,013 was higher than the Ohio median of $48,308, but the poverty rate of 19.8% was also higher than the Ohio rate of 15.8%.
http://www.collegedata.com/cs/data/college/college_pg06_tmpl.jhtml?schoolId=1778 says that Oberlin College’s 2,961 undergraduates were 75.1% white and 5.6% black. About half receive need-based financial aid, which means that the other half must come from very wealthy families who can afford the $66,832 annual cost of attendance. Only about 11% of students receive Pell grants which are available to those from middle and lower income families (meaning 89% come from upper middle and higher income families.