“You’re misunderstanding the point I was trying to make. I don’t diminish the pain, or even genuine FEAR, she may have felt as the victim of a racial slur, and I agree she WAS a victim in this case. I was objecting to her criticism of THE COLLEGE for not doing more to protect her and other students of color against such attacks. What exactly can they do, aside from forbid their students from leaving campus or instructing them on the, er, eccentricities of the local population?”
Exactly. We all agree it’s horrendous for someone to drive by, roll down the window and shout something hateful, but what do you expect a college to do about it when it’s not on their property? And in the absence of a license plate, etc what do you expect the police to do about it? .
Black students face legitimate hurdles or issues when attending college. It’s extremely disconcerting that they’ve wasted their time (and platform) trying to further nonsense.
"A lot of of those demands were pretty dumb, but this one isn’t a bad idea. "
There were a number of not-bad ideas in the document. But I agree with the president that demands have to lead to discourse if you want to achieve anything. It’s even OK with me to call them “demands” – I just think it’s bananas to announce at the start that there will be no negotiation. That’s just ensuring that you won’t get progress.
On the whole, I hope Oberlin never changes. We have to remember that the radical abolitionists in the 1830s-50s were considered crazy, just off-the-reservation extreme. I mean, not just abolition but social equality? Giving a classical education to blacks and whites in the same classroom? That was Oregon-militia-Keystone-Cops comedy, even on the left. And now we see that they were the only ones getting it right. So who knows what kind of madness is going to look brilliant and advanced 150 years from now? Oberlin may well get there first.
I have a lot of sympathy with the idea of trying to enroll prisoners.
We know that the proportion of blacks imprisoned in the US is hugely out of whack with the general population, and we know that this is due to policies and factors that have nothing to do with fault on the part of the black population.
Addressing the things that cause this to happen is vitally important to our society going forward–including misguided drug laws, mandatory sentences, for-profit prisons, structural racism of all kinds, racism in law enforcement, and more-- but in the mean time, what about the people who have already been caught up in this? For colleges and universities to partner with other local educational institutions to help prisoners to escape this downward spiral would be tremendously constructive.
But to do anything effective, this would have to start with intensive educational programs inside prisons, starting with literacy and extending to grade 12, at least.
It’s not a matter of Oberlin just taking a couple of released prisoners.
This is an important detail, yea. They came on way too hot and sounding unreasonable, and I doubt talk was ever seriously an option the was this played out. They set it up so that the president could either refuse the whole thing because a lot of it was unreasonable or accept some rather unreasonable demands, with no middle ground.
On the subject of prisoners, it’s probably pretty relevant that I’m at a large state university with the resources and faculty to do this on a significant scale and provide support for these people during their studies. As for educational programs in prisons, when my Dad entered a California state prison in the early Oughts, there were four vocational programs and a GED program where they just gave you some books. When he was released eight years later, there was one vocational training program and the GED program. So it at least some prisons, educational resources are being taken away to save money.
Actually, the town of Oberlin is located within Lorain county. A county which was considered one of the 2 poorest counties in the entire state when I attended in the mid-late '90s.
I also still strongly disagree with the way you characterized the bad town-gown relations. The root causes/factors of the conflict are mainly due to the wide gap in fundamental social and political values and attitudes between the town residents and the vast majority of the college student body…especially when I attended.
Town residents were overwhelmingly White, blue collar, socially conservative, politically right leaning, etc. Many were also quite open about their racism, homophobia…and in the case of the town local males…feeling free to make drive-by sexist catcalls towards classmates on the town streets.
Some racist BS I’ve experienced ranged from being imperiously ordered by a town resident to stop speaking Mandarin Chinese to some Chinese international students to which I questioned him on his right to make such a demand to having racist epithets tossed at me…including one which when I responded in kind…almost resulted in the racist driver attempting to get out of his car to pick a fight with me.
College students while also majority White and tended to be majority upper/upper-middle class, were in contrast… socially and politically radically progressively left far in excess to even stereotypical radical campuses like UC Berkeley* or Santa Cruz, and much more accepting of racial minority and GBLTQ students. The level of radical left progressive left of the Oberlin student body when I attended was such that being a Green Party member was considered “too conservative/mainstream” by most undergrad classmates of my era and Bernie Sanders** would have barely been accepted as a political compatriot.
Incidentally, Oberlin’s student body did become more politically conservative and mainstream after I left as most of the Obie alums I’ve met after around 2002 tended to fall more into the Green/left-leaning Democratic party category. Some…including many who are themselves White and from upper/upper-middle class backgrounds also expressed concern our undergrad alma mater was becoming less racially and SES diverse compared to their undergrad years and earlier.
Knew of one student who transferred to Oberlin from UC Berkeley in the late '90s because paraphrasing his words "Berkeley has become too damned conservative and pre-professional.".
** Most of the Oberlin alum friends I knew from my class year and earlier tend to grudgingly accept Sanders, but feel he is far too timid and not radical enough in his political platform/stances.
I agree that there are some good ideas embedded in this document but as a whole it comes off as totally unreasonable. For instance, I’m not sure how the authors of the document expected the college to raise student aid, pay student organizers, pay to bus Oberlin public school kids, create a program to send ex-cons to Oberlin for free and a bridge program with the public high school(s), offer townspeople free courses, create “safe spaces”, upgrade buildings, institute a $15 minimum wage plus insurance for all employees (apparently even part-timers), and still maintain the current course offerings, faculty-student ratios and facilities. How did they think their demands would be funded?
…who are already being thoroughly milked to support current institutional priorities like financial aid and faculty salaries and who would in most cases not be inclined to financially support demands simply because they’ve been demanded.
Adding, @texaspg, I get that your post is tongue in cheek, but wonder if unfortunately that may in fact be what the students are thinking!
Unfortunately, I don’t ever see any student thinking about the costs when they make demands which require money. Why should this be any different from students who borrowed a quarter million to get an ivy league degree making the demand to forgive all student loans.
To which one might add that, while the college can try to discourage such behavior, if someone’s determined to bandy such terms about he/she can do so. Even in the presence of a license plate, the first amendment protects the right to be a jerk if you so choose, which leaves the police with their hands tied until laws are broken.
The college can do its utmost to prevent incidents of racism, but at the end of the day I wouldn’t hold the school accountable for what the townspeople say or do any more than I’d blame the townspeople for bad food in the cafeteria or a poorly maintained building on campus.
The first amendment does not give license for an individual to harass others in a threatening manner. Some towns also have ordinances against public displays of obscenity and even public profanity which can result in fines or sometimes even jail time:
Not saying I necessarily agree with all of these laws. Just that the first-amendment doesn’t necessarily give others carte blanche license to behave in a threatening manner towards others or sometimes even publicly utter profanity in public in some areas.
This is the first I’ve heard of such ordinances, I’ll admit.
The Supreme Court, in Snyder v. Phelps, upheld our constitutional right to brandish signs that read “God hates fags” or “God hates America” at a gay soldier’s funeral, so I think it unlikely that substituting a different epithet (perhaps a common variation of “Negro”) would render similar speech unconstitutional. Then again, there’s a reason I’m not a Supreme Court justice.
There’s a major difference between organized protesters who are widely unpopular and otherwise acting peacefully and someone yelling a racial epithet on a street in a threatening manner to someone minding his/her own business in an area where racist attitudes are strong within a critical mass of the populace…including some who may be in positions of power in the local government and LEO agencies*.
Mentioning this because several Philly area friends who grew up in or are familiar with the areas around Swat have mentioned this is a known serious issue in that and other areas around the Philly area. And from what I gathered from my 80's era Swat graduate client and friend, seems like not much has changed from when he was an undergrad in the area.
For the record, Snyder v Phelps reaffirmed the right of the Westboro Baptist Church to protest at the funeral of a heterosexual Catholic soldier because they followed the time, place, and manner restrictions currently in force in the state of Maryland which required them to stay a specific distance away from the service. (They chose the Phelps funeral because they know soldier funerals attract media and the location of that one fit into their agenda for the day.) The First Amendment necessarily protects unpopular, even offensive, speech, because that’s the speech that NEEDS protection. If we all agreed with Westboro, their point of view wouldn’t need protection. An unfortunate side effect of that is sometimes hateful speech gets protected, but the hope is that as humans we can rise to our better selves.
I think the activists are very young and struggling for a way to express the fear they feel in a world where social media is full of reports of what appears to be increasing racial bigotry and violence – but which, for the most part, they can’t fight because it’s far away and doesn’t really raise its head much in their daily lives. So a single guy shouting out a racial epithet becomes something that you don’t just shrug off as one jerk, but evidence of the tip of a fearful iceberg. And when you’re 19 and living in what is really a very sheltered and safe college world, what do you do to “do something”? I sympathize with the urge to make a stand. But how do you stand up against a dark mood in the country?
Maybe there are ways, and it’s not what they’re doing, which does seem like ridiculous over-reaction and tantrum throwing. But that’s part of what happens when you’re young. In years past, the immature way they’re expressing themselves (been there done that) wouldn’t have been Facebooked and re-tweeted ad infinitum; they’d have passed around their Xeroxed statements and grown up to be, well, Oberlin administrators doing their best to be inclusive in the real world. But there they are: 19, immature, worried, anxious, seeing a world full of increasing problems that you can’t tackle well from a college campus … so they come up with their “demands,” and in this case, the Oberlin president makes a response that’s just exactly right. The issues are real, or at least have a connection to genuine dilemmas and concerns; it’s the approach that’s off-base … and now bouncing around in the social media echo chamber / magnifying lens / intensification machine.
Yes @cobrat, Oberlin is in Lorain County. The county seat of which is Elyria. What is your point? And you must be way off the political map if you found the people of Oberlin to be conservative. The entire county has been reliably democratic for years and years.
And I doubt very seriously that the locals were “open” about their racism and homophobia, not only because I know the people of the area far better than you do, but because virtually no one in today’s world is open about their racism and homophobia. I mean really, do you expect people to believe that such behavior actually occurs in an environment where the students feel micro aggressed by the General Tsao’s chicken?
