On Friday, Feb. 21, the 230 seats of Dye Lecture Hall filled with students, faculty, and other community members who came to hear President Carmen Twillie Ambar and Vice President and General Counsel Matt Lahey speak on President Donald Trump’s executive orders, other government actions, and what they may mean for the present and future of Oberlin College.
In the hour-long event, Ambar and Lahey addressed the Dear Colleague Letter and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies, College interactions with ICE, the threat a tax could pose to Oberlin’s endowment, transgender rights, and investigations around antisemitism, then answered questions from the audience. Ambar also called on Oberlin students to take action themselves.
“The reason why this was important to me, besides the kind of just community gathering and people understanding each other and connecting, is that you need to get educated about executive orders, the legislative process, legal strategies,” President Ambar said. “This is a time to use our academic prowess in the right way. … I think sometimes, students can ask, appropriately, ‘What is the institution going to do and what is President Ambar going to do?’ And I’m just asking students to ask a couple more questions. What are you going to do around these issues in a national framework that can help the institution?”
Ambar and Lahey grounded the discussion in Oberlin’s Mission Statement, and emphasized the importance of keeping Oberlin in compliance with the law in order not to draw unwanted attention, while being careful not to “overcomply.”
“The Law”
The theme of distinguishing what makes up the word of law as opposed to executive orders, statements of purpose, and other communications on the part of the federal government — such as the recent Dear Colleague Letter pertaining to DEI policies — was a prevalent theme at the forum. Ambar and Lahey both spoke on the need to make this distinction before taking action that could jeopardize student life at the College in exchange for perceived safety.
“I don’t think this is the moment to overcomply, to be going to our website and trying to imagine what these executive orders want to have happen, stripping things down and trying to reconfigure ourselves,” President Ambar said. “We must determine the best way to use our institutional voice, the institutional tools, and to respond to what I do think is fair to say is in opposition to the values that we have established and the values that have long been established at Oberlin.”
Dear Colleague Letter; Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
The President’s forum came soon after the release of a memo — titled a “Dear Colleague” Letter — released Feb. 14 that informed colleges that the Department of Education prohibits the use of race in any facets of campus life, interpreting DEI programs as falling under that prohibition.
In the forum, Ambar maintained that the broad principles covered under the DEI mantle remain essential to Oberlin’s mission, which was projected in full at the beginning of the forum.
The letter tried to expand on the Supreme Court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which ruled that race-conscious affirmative action is unconstitutional. It used the decision to justify ending any DEI program as constitutional. Lahey explained that in the institution’s view, SFFA v. Harvard is actually far narrower than the Dear Colleague Letter’s interpretation and does not include all DEI policy. Even the Dear Colleague Letter emphasized in a footnote that the letter did not create any new law, but rather acted simply as guidance to universities.
As such, Ambar and Lahey emphasized that while there is some risk, the letter does not alter laws that Oberlin has already been in compliance with.
Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature Claire Solomon, OC ’98, who attended the forum, said the letter had concerning implications for the role of the government in academic life.
“It’s one thing to avoid overtly partisan political speech in the classroom, which is something that I try to avoid anyway because it’s a distraction from what I do,” Solomon said. “But to say, as the Dear Colleague letter does, that systemic and structural racism isn’t real, is chilling, right? What are the implications of that?”
Immigration
On immigration, Lahey emphasized that the College must still comply with the preexisting protections outlined in FERPA, which safeguards student records except in the case of a criminal warrant, meaning colleges cannot disclose student immigration status, despite the end of the sensitive locations policy.
“If ICE is attempting to access our non-public areas of campus and they don’t have a warrant, we would tell them that they could not do so without the appropriate legal document,” Ambar said. “In the case of an administrative warrant, we would be saying to them that FERPA applies, and that law indicates that we cannot turn over student records. But I understand the fear that some in our campus community are feeling.”
Endowment
Since 2015, there has existed an endowment tax for institutions that have an endowment of over a billion dollars. While Oberlin did not fit that criteria in 2015, the College now has over a billion dollars in their endowment and thus has to pay tax on its endowment. While the tax rate currently sits at 1.4 percent, Vice President Vance has threatened an increase to as high as 35 percent. Texas Representative Troy Nehls has introduced a proposal in the House of Representatives to raise the rate to 21 percent. Additionally, the administration has threatened to change how the tax is calculated, with proposals to change the structure from the sheer value of the endowment to the endowment per student that an institution has.
Ambar and Lahey described the proposals as possibly punitive against institutions of higher education. Oberlin’s administration is currently modeling what such a rate would do for Oberlin’s financial health.
Transgender Rights
President Ambar referenced SB 104, the Ohio “Bathroom Bill,” to emphasize the difficulty in minimizing harm to students without bringing unwanted attention — including legal consequence — to the school through what she described as the institutional voice.
She used the example of the “Bathroom Bill” as a reference for College response to hostile government action more broadly.
“This Bathroom Bill has been one of those challenging moments for me personally,” said Ambar. “People have said to me, ‘President Ambar, why wouldn’t the institution sue, they should’ve sued, where’s the institution’s voice about this?’ and we’re having to really think strategically about when the institutional voice can make a difference, and when the institutional voice could potentially cause harm. … I didn’t want to create a moment where provocateurs would come on our campus and make a problem for students.”
President Ambar also noted the Ohio Supreme Court has become more conservative at large with a 6–1 conservative supermajority, which would make legal action on the part of the College on the Bathroom Bill issue — and potentially other topics that may arise — more difficult.
Investigations around antisemitism & affirmative action
Matt Lahey pointed to investigations announced by the Department of Education and the Office of Civil Rights against five institutions — Northwestern University, Columbia University, University of California Berkeley, Portland State University, and Minnesota State University.
Lahey expressed concern over the punitive nature of these investigations, and how the colleges were being chosen. He stressed again the importance of focusing on community and making sure the college remains in compliance with the law, while adding that he will be monitoring how the investigations evolve.
Reactions from Attendees
Some attendees expressed gratitude for the forum.
“I wanted clarity,” College third-year Alira Allen said. “I was excited when I saw it in the Campus Digest. And I was like, ‘Okay, I need to go.’ I feel like I did get clarity on some things, not all things, but it’s nice to know that they cared enough to actually have a forum about it.”
John Elder, OC ’53, and a resident at Kendal at Oberlin, attended the forum and echoed these sentiments.
“It was both helpful and necessary [to have] this kind of gathering,” Elder said. “I think that it’s obviously challenging to present the facts of the matter when the facts are so unclear. So they probably did as good a job as could be done explaining the present situation, recognizing that the present situation is not fair to those in the administration themselves, much less to those impacted by it.”
College second-year Wren Long expressed some frustration over the communication from administration.
“I was a little upset with how they seemed to talk around things,” Long said. “I was also especially surprised to hear that professors are feeling not communicated with as well. I wasn’t expecting that. It was good to hear that things are going on behind the scenes. You assume, but it’s hard to know that when you’re not hearing about it.”
Communication Going Forward
Both after the talk and in follow up interviews with the Review, students and faculty expressed concerns about lack of and hopes for more clear, timely, and specific communication from those in the College administration tasked with interpreting and implementing what does become law.
“It’s important for the school to tell people or keep an update system of just letting you know, right, that this executive order may impact us, that we’re doing this thing, right, that we’ll update you as it’s going,” College second-year Tessa Furlow, who attended the talk, said. “It’s hard trying to piece it together from like, 10 different newspapers, and social media, none of which exactly are telling you about your institution.”
President Ambar said she thought the community forums may become a regular occurrence and stressed that students and faculty are always welcome to contact her office and other branches of the administration with questions they would like formally answered. However, there was no guarantee of a specific stream of communications, in part due to the difficulty of restricting written communication to exclusively the College audience. The Feb. 21 forum was recorded, but the recording will not be made available to the public.
President Ambar stressed the importance of student organizing beyond campus.
“Students don’t have to convince me that diversity, equity, and inclusion are important,” President Ambar said. “I think I’ve lived my whole career believing that. Students don’t have to convince me that transgender rights are important. I’m persuaded. The challenge is how to persuade others who can have an impact on making the change that we hope to make happen.”
After the forum, Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Biology John Petersen, OC ’88, restated his hopes for Oberlin as a whole.
“I got up in the morning [after the election] and felt like the focus that I do in my work on building local community has never ever been more important, because there’s nothing good that’s going to happen at the national level right now,” Petersen said. “But at the end of the day, building a stronger community within Oberlin, between Oberlin and the town regionally, those relationships are what are gonna build resilience and also potentially build the collaborative potential to move forward when opportunities become available.”
