On Wednesday, Robert S. Danforth Professor of Politics Eve Sandberg taught her last class before her retirement after 35 years at the College. As she left, a number of students, faculty, and staff surprised her in the entranceway of King Building to commemorate her career at the College and the impact that she has had on their experiences at Oberlin.

“It was touching to see the number of people from all swaths of Oberlin — both the College and the community — who turned out to give Professor Sandberg the proper sendoff,” College third-year Eli Ramer wrote in a message to the Review. “I am so glad to have been able to take part in that very special moment.”

Sandberg joined Oberlin in 1990, leaving a tenure-track position at Columbia University in New York. She came from an immigrant family and wasn’t encouraged to go to college at all. After being urged by her friends and a friend’s parents, she attended Boston University before teaching at an experimental high school in Philadelphia. While there, she earned her master’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania and then got a job at a preparatory school in Connecticut. It was in Connecticut that she discovered her love of teaching. Realizing that she wanted to teach at a higher level than high school students, she applied and was accepted into a Ph.D. program in Political Science at Yale University with a full-ride scholarship. 

Throughout these years, Sandberg worked with electoral campaigns, survey companies, and electoral consulting firms. She was also involved in activism and advocacy, especially in the anti-apartheid movement, which sparked her research focus in African politics. 

At Yale, she was much older than other entering students and entered a department with no female professors. As a result, she was appointed to various committees to ensure female representation. It was there, Sandberg said, that she saw that professors did more than just teach; they could work with governments, corporations, and other bodies doing consulting work.

“So it modeled for me … the fact that academia does not just have to be about teaching and being in the classroom,” she said.

This, according to Sandberg, would become a hallmark of her pedagogy and the work she would continue to do through her career. 

Sandberg left Yale in 1990 and joined the faculty of Columbia University but, despite loving the department, could not afford the cost of living in New York City and “hated” New York. She decided to look elsewhere and ended up interviewing at Oberlin College.

“One of the reasons I came to Oberlin was I knew they had very bright undergraduate students,” she said. “I knew already, from having chatted with some of them, that they were doing the same work as some of our master students at Columbia. You could see the commonality.”

Sandberg said that one of her most memorable moments at Oberlin came in this first year at the College. 

“I had [my first] office hours, but I didn’t think anybody was going to come,” she said. “But there’s a knock on the door and a young woman comes in and she says, ‘I came up to tell you that I’m really glad I’m taking this course. I realize I have a great worldview, but I don’t actually know any facts.’ This is a quintessential first-year Oberlin student; some of them know more facts than others, but they do come in with these worldviews, and they both learn facts and they expand their worldview while they’re here. And I thought it is important that this person be exposed to a number of worldviews and also learn how the world actually works, not just critique everything, not just say there’s a reason that these problems haven’t been solved.”

In her time at Oberlin, Sandberg has won the College’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 1999, the Outstanding Teacher Community-Based Learning Practitioner Award in 2005, and the Community-Based Learning Engaged Program of the Year Award in 2012.

Beyond her work teaching, Sandberg engaged in several projects as a faculty member. In her first year in Oberlin, she worked with the new government of Namibia, which had just won its independence from South Africa, to help with negotiations between Namibia’s central bank and the International Monetary Fund. At the time, she was also working with Tanzania and its central bank, which was also involved in negotiations with the IMF. She also worked as a consultant for the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development.

At Oberlin, Sandberg helped coordinate the Cole Scholars Program and founded the Oberlin Research Group. The Oberlin Research Group is a group of students who perform research for an outside client — in recent years, the State Department. Originating from a request from the Ohio State Legislature’s Congressional Black Caucus, who wanted students to help with policy research, the program, which is listed as POLT 411, has taken on different clients. For the past several years, it has worked in the State Department’s Diplomacy Lab Program to do research with departmental bureaus.

The Cole Scholars program came from a donation from Richard and Dodie Cole to establish a course of study in electoral politics. The idea behind Cole Scholars is to place students in positions with electoral campaigns and in the rooms where decisions are made. Students take courses on electoral politics in the fall and spring semesters and gain work experience during the summer in campaigns. Due to her work on multiple campaigns through the years, the Politics Department asked Sandberg to coordinate the program to get it off the ground. 

Outside of the classroom, she became deeply involved in the Oberlin community, serving on various committees and as chair of the Politics Department. She also served two terms as a member of the Oberlin City Council.

In honor of her retirement, the Oberlin Politics Department created an online bulletin board for her current and former students to express their gratitude. Over 100 people wrote on the board.

“Professor Sandberg has been a wonderful advisor,” College third-year Elizabeth Brame wrote in a message to the Review. “She’s been so helpful and has such a wide breadth of knowledge, so I’m very grateful to have been able to learn from her.”

Ramer echoed Brame’s sentiment. 

“I’m very glad that I crossed paths with Professor Sandberg while here,” Ramer wrote. “The Politics department, and the institution as a whole, are losing an absolute titan as she begins her much-deserved retirement. The students, faculty, community members, and stray cats of Oberlin can rest assured that she will still be around next year to provide fascinating stories, invaluable knowledge, support, and friendship.”