I’ve wound up in a lot of conversations recently criticizing Oberlin’s lack of alignment between its current decisions and their impact on student life, and its professed left-wing values.

Criticisms of Oberlin’s failure to uphold its values can largely be explained by  financialization. The consolidation of dining spaces, the support of more vocational departments at the expense of humanities departments, the adoption of AI in a move that the College likely believes will be quite lucrative — these are all major concerns. But at the back of the conversation, there is always a question of context. How neoliberal and austere is Oberlin when compared to universities across the nation? How has Oberlin retained its values in the face of destructive federal pressures: mass funding cuts, McCarthyist trends, et cetera? 

These kinds of questions and their answers are important, but often their very existence either mystifies or removes Oberlin’s achievable, localized, and necessary obligations. Oberlin College should not be solely responsible for and understood in the context of national collegiate trends; it should above all be responsible for and understood in the context of its local jurisdiction. One of its primary arenas of responsibility is to the town of Oberlin.

The College is responsible for upholding its values to the town of Oberlin’s people. Sharing a physical location with a person or set of persons inherently creates a relationship that requires integrity and respect. Oberlin College has an outsized obligation in this relationship because it is the institution around which the town has been built and expanded. The College is even more responsible because it has very material power in the Oberlin and wider Lorain area. For one, it is a major landholder. College land is tax-exempt; a 2015 Review article reported that the College’s property was worth nearly $200 million (“Students Push for Agreement On College Taxes,” The Oberlin Review, Dec. 12, 2015). This land constitutes most of the 47 percent of tax-exempt land in Oberlin. The College is a large factor in the nearly-doubled property tax burden for those in the town that do pay taxes (“Oberlin Annexes Land From Pittsfield Township for Industrial Park,” The Oberlin Review, Nov. 22, 2024). According to that same 2015 Review article, if the College were not tax-exempt, it would likely contribute $4.4 million in taxes, which was nearly half of the City’s expected revenue in 2016 (about $9.3 million) (“Students Push for Agreement On College Taxes,” The Oberlin Review, Dec. 12, 2015). Despite this, Oberlin students, staff, faculty, and admin enjoy both the direct and indirect benefits of taxpayer money, largely without contribution. 

The 2024 article illuminates this point in the context of a Lorain County Board of Commissioners approved 142-acre annexation of Pittsfield Township land. This move was following in the footsteps of a tried and failed 2015 land annexation, which would have included Lorain County Joint Vocational School. LCJVS has long resisted annexation, in part because the Pittsfield Township income tax is far lower than the Oberlin income tax. LCJVS has over 1,200 students, about a third of whom are pursuing adult education. Asking LCJVS students to subsidize infrastructure and other community benefits that the far wealthier Oberlin College and its members gain from but do not contribute to is frankly ridiculous. 

The College is also a major employer in Lorain County, meaning many residents are reliant on the College for their income. The College’s 2021–22 financial report states that the College spent $70.7 million on employee salary and wages and $20.5 million on employee benefits, totalling $91.2 million. This is roughly 3.8 percent of Lorain County’s total wages for service-providing industries in the same year (which totaled roughly $2.4 billion). These numbers are especially significant because Lorain County is home to multiple major service industries, including three separate hospitals/medical centers, and because this was the financial year directly following the College’s 2020 mass firings.

The 2020 mass firings terminated 113 unionized Oberlin employees as the College pivoted to outsourcing dining and janitorial positions. This was in spite of mass student and staff protest. The protests were easy to ignore after students were sent home for the COVID-19 quarantine; ironically, COVID-19 was exactly the kind of national event made far more precarious by lack of job security. Brandon Denton, OC ’23 and others compiled a report about the layoffs, centering a series of 2022 interviews with former employees about their lives during and after their time at Oberlin College. 

In the report, the College was described across the board as an essential component of household income for its employees.

 “Oberlin College was always the prestige place for someone to work,” Michelle, a custodian laid off after seven years, said. (The Review could not verify the full names of the employees quoted, as last names were not disclosed in this report.) “If you got into Oberlin College, you had a really good job, you had a good future.” 

The 2020 mass firings are indicative of the school’s lack of respect for the reliance it has generated.

 Vince, also laid off after seven years, described his situation post-termination: 

“Financially I’m probably worse now than I’ve ever been in my life … the unemployment numbers are just skyrocketing,” he said. “And you’ve got bills, responsibilities … I volunteered to do so much overtime just because I love my job, I would do the overtime and then the money was there. Now, all of a sudden, overnight everything’s gone.”

Such disrespect, such lack of integrity degrades the Oberlin community. It harms family safety, security, and happiness. It destroys the material anchors that stabilize members of the Oberlin community; the results of lifelong, sometimes generational labor — such as home ownership and retirement funds — that guarantee future financial security. It removes a hard-won sense of place and rootedness for community members, putting them in flux. In turn, it reduces this sense of place and rootedness for the College and its members. 

Oberlin College has a transitory, temporal memory and sense of identity by nature: we have a four-or-five-year student turnover and a disproportionately high number of visiting professors, many of whom spend five years or fewer here. By uninvesting in our community, we uninvest in the body that most consistently holds our practical and moral legacy. The “We go to school in the middle of nowhere” rhetoric is in part a product of a lack of institutional memory; it only holds after we have disengaged from the body that has been here for long enough to preserve that memory.