Dr. Dorothy Washburn, OC ’67, donated $2,170,000 to hire a full-time lecturer in Arabic starting next fall. Washburn previously published a Letter to the Editors expressing her desire for Oberlin to have a strong Arabic program (“College Should Reinstate Arabic Professorship,” The Oberlin Review, Nov. 15, 2024). Washburn is an archaeologist and holds a position as a Consulting Scholar at the Penn Museum.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What led you to make this donation?

For me, Oberlin was life-transforming; it opened all sorts of doors. I came from a little suburban high school that was lily-white and very conservative. Oberlin was the best thing that ever happened to me. 

Arabic is the fifth most spoken language in the world. If we cannot communicate with other people, how is the world going to go forward? We need to have expertise, at least in some of the really widely spoken languages. So, let’s support that.

I’m not an Arabic speaker, although when I was in graduate school at Columbia, my advisor was Ralph Solecki, who dug the site of Shanidar Cave in Iraq, and he took all the students into the field with him. We went to Lebanon and dug this cave site, which had Neanderthal materials in it, and so I learned a little Arabic. But that wasn’t really the reason. 

The real reason was actually thanks to you people at The Oberlin Review. Occasionally, when I come over to use the library or visit campus, I pick up a copy of the Review. So I picked up a copy of the Review, and it talked about the problems with the Arabic language courses — it’s only one year of Arabic. 

So I thought, why isn’t there a second year of Arabic [at Oberlin]? I went over to the Middle East and North Africa Studies Program, did a little exploring and so forth, and it turns out that they just didn’t have the money. And so I said, okay, I’ll support an Arabic program. So you have one year of Arabic, first and second semesters, then we’ll have a second year of Arabic.

They suggested that what we need to do is hire a lecturer, to create a lectureship in Arabic. But what I want to do is endow it, because then it won’t go away. If in a given year, not too many students sign up for Arabic or whatever happens, then they can’t say, “Well, we don’t have enough students enrolled, so we’re gonna take it away.” By endowing it, it’s forever.

During a moment when universities are coming under attack, why do you think it’s important to invest in higher education, and in particular in the study of other cultures and languages?

I think anthropology is definitely unappreciated. And some of it could be the fault of the anthropologists, who, some people would say, “Oh, you look at these most arcane things.” But I think that if we’re one world, we just have to understand other people, and we just can’t sit back and say, “The United States, we’re the greatest place in the world, and you guys have to do what we want you to do.” In order to understand other people and other places, we have to put ourselves out and learn to talk and listen. 

You have to be able to communicate with people to exchange ideas, to create plans, to interact and live in this world. And if we can’t understand people in their own languages, we aren’t going to be able to communicate successfully, and we won’t be able to solve some of the world’s biggest problems.

When I came through Oberlin, 1963–67, we had to take a language, we had to take a science — there were more requirements. I wouldn’t have taken philosophy if someone hadn’t said you have to take philosophy. And I thank my lucky stars for all of that. It is so important not to just think, “Oh, I’m going to be a chemist and I’m not going to think about anything but chemistry.” You could do that, but you’ve missed all the other things that make our culture and our world what it is. That’s why it’s so great being here, because you don’t get lost in the weeds of the thousands of things you could take at any big university. 

If we don’t have an educated populace, people won’t understand each other. That’s why education is so important — so that people learn how to think about an issue, so that they have enough breadth of knowledge in different fields that they can think about it, and they can bring information in from the different fields to help them think about it and solve the problem. Education teaches us the kinds of things that we need to know to live in this society, because we’re a community. Human beings live in communities. And if you want to live in a community, there’s certain things you have to follow; you have to know how to communicate with people and understand them. If we can’t communicate with each other, then where are we?

Tell me about what you do! How did you get into archeology?

I’m an archeologist mostly, and I work mostly in the Southwest, but I focus on designs and on material culture, ceramics, textiles, tiles, which is everywhere, all over the world. And I use mathematics to analyze it. Symmetries. Not very many people do that, at least anthropologically, which has gotten me into many publication issues. 

So as a family, when I was growing up, we would go camping out west and we’d go to all the national parks. And I just remember going to Mesa Verde. They had this old fashioned exhibit in the corner and there’s a little sign that said, “what are these objects?” It just interested me. Some people sort of wander around. They don’t know what they’re going to do, but everybody, for one reason or another, finds something that just catches your interest. And I thought, wow, this is really interesting. So by the time I got to Oberlin, I was in my second year sitting in anthropology class, and there were two guys sitting in front of me, they were talking about going on this dig. I didn’t know them, but I tapped one, I said, “Can I come?” He said, “Sure,” and it turned out it was a Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology dig at a site called Hell Gap. It was an early man site, a 9,000 year old site where people were butchering bison. I applied, and that was in 1965. And I have never looked back.