<p>Oberlin convenes the same way a family calls a special meeting at the dinner table. If there is an important issue or incident causing tension within the student body, teach-in is one of the ways the school (very rarely, but sometimes) pulls everyone together to air and share issues.</p>
<p>When I attended in the late 1960’s, I recall a schoolwide teach-in, following a series of student demonstrations on and off campus against military recruitment the career placement office, relative to the Vietnam War. The teach-in was interesting, although in the pedagogy of those years, more top-down with professors lecturing students. History and Economics professors spoke for and against the war. Government (Political Science) profs analyzed protest methods used thus far by students for the different degrees of legality and morality. I recall finding it informative and reassuring to witness a college functioning as a single community of concern. As a freshman, I heard from the most venerated faculty, and made decisions about future coursework with them. </p>
<p>In those years, with the country turning upside-down over that war, it felt confusing. WHen my friends tried to broach those topics in their homes on break, some experienced family argument, disinheritance, alienation of affection. By contrast, at Oberlin college, the administration was gathering all together, to discuss every issue, from every angle. </p>
<p>Issues of racism, antiSemitism and homophobia also resonate throughout this country. I can imagine how a spate of local expressions of hate-speech would similarly distress students. It did not surprise me to hear, in alumni correspondence, that the administration chose to call a “time-out” to address those issues openly through dialogue.</p>
<p>Honestly, Oberlin today feels more like a suburb of Cleveland than the unending cornfields of yesteryear. </p>
<p>As for graffiti, this is the college that boasts a large rock, sitting in the green center of campus and town, for the sole purpose of graffiti. It is painted over nightly by students wishing to express themselves. I imagine it began as a pebble, but all those layers of paint turned it into a boulder. Defacing posters with swastikas or racial epithets would be antithetical to Oberlin’s culture of free speech on campus. Even that is not a trivial breach of campus life.</p>