Last Saturday, ConPALs facilitated a new update to the Racial and Social Justice in Music training for incoming first-year Conservatory students. Conservatory fifth-year Meera Bhatia and Conservatory fourth-year Gabi Allemana, both ConPAL coordinators, redesigned the training to highlight prevention and create a more agency-focused discussion of social justice issues. They coined this approach, shared by the title of their training, “The Smallest Step.”
The ConPAL program began in 2018 as a companion to the College’s Peer Advising Leaders program for incoming first-years. In 2020, Associate Dean for Academic Support and Conservatory Liaison to the Office of Institutional Equity, formerly known as the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Duty Title IX coordinator, and Visiting Assistant Professor of Musicology Chris Jenkins instituted the Racial and Social Justice training as an online module to familiarize students with terms and ideas such as gender pronouns and the Black Lives Matter movement that are commonly used or understood at Oberlin.
“In 2020, when everything went online because of [COVID-19], and the Black Lives Matter protests really erupted that summer, it became evident to me that we needed to do something to reflect what was happening socially,” Jenkins said. “And so we introduced the module… so that students have more of a social and political introduction to the kinds of values that their peers tend to hold.”
The redesign was instigated by a recent resurgence of attention surrounding accusations of sexual misconduct against two New York Philharmonic players in 2010. In an April article published by the New York magazine site Vulture, former New York Philharmonic player Cara Kizer detailed her encounter with Matthew Muckey and Liang Wang publicly for the first time, 14 years later. The article prompted the suspension of Muckey and Wang, and their subsequent filing of two independent lawsuits against the Philharmonic and their labor union for wrongful suspension.
“The article about the New York Philharmonic situation dropped… and it was a really tough read,” Bhatia said. “And I read it — I didn’t know what I was getting myself into — and then I went to orchestra. I had an orchestra concert that night. After the concert, I was like, ‘We need to do something.’”
Allemana, a cofounder of the Crimson Collective, had already been active in creating pre-orientation training related to microaggressions and discrimination against gender minorities for incoming jazz performance majors, which launched in the fall of 2022.
“[Allemana], through their work with the Crimson Collective, started facilitating a discussion for the first-year jazz students that was really along the lines of trying to establish some norms for social behavior around gender and how gender minorities felt in the [Jazz] department,” Jenkins said. “And I think that was really effective. So we had a discussion about the possibility of introducing some of that into ConPAL, especially because these issues of power and abuse are present everywhere in music performance — classical, jazz. And I would say that their most obvious form is sexual harassment, sexual assault, because it’s spoken about, it’s talked about, it’s written about, so it’s visible. But that really reflects a toxic dynamic that exists or has the potential to exist in so much of music training, music performance. And so we wanted to do something to at least open up a conversation where we could begin to address why that is and to help students feel more comfortable talking about it and opposing it.”
Bhatia, independent from the Crimson Collective, brought her concerns about gendered power dynamics within the Conservatory environment to Jenkins.
“So we had a discussion, and the question was, ‘What can we do?’” Jenkins said. “And one really obvious thing to do was to introduce this kind of programming into ConPAL because incoming students have a lot of power to shape the culture that we’re going to have for classical music, discussing how they could think of themselves as active participants in shaping that culture.”
The structure and form of the training — allowing each cohort to interact with different real-life scenarios — remained the same. But the scenarios newly reflected the interaction of gender, race, and other identities.
“We took three of the four scenarios that we had used last year, but all of those were like ‘You were the bystander in the situation,’” Bhatia said. “So we kind of changed it so that we had to think about everyone’s perspective. I think the update is both about awareness and prevention because, I think a lot of times, the solutions that are talked about are these big changes that would have to happen institutionally. It’s stuff that we don’t have control over. So we were just like, ‘What is literally the smallest thing that we can do in any situation to just create a better culture and prevent this stuff from happening in the first place.’ This terrible thing happens, but what can we do to create a culture where it just never happens?”
