I’ve been an Opinions Editor at The Oberlin Review since the fall of 2024. Curating this section has been quite the journey. Within a couple weeks of each other, we’ve published contentious political commentary supporting the Board of Trustees’ decision to reject Students for a Free Palestine’s divestment proposal (“Rejected Divestment Right Call,” The Oberlin Review, Sept. 6, 2024) and a reflection on how “Cryptozoology Provides Powerful Insight” (The Oberlin Review, Sept. 20, 2024), both of which were written by the same person (I’m still unsure of what cryptozoology is providing powerful insight into). I still haven’t fully figured out how to curate a quality section of content that engages all of the different parts of Oberlin’s multiplicitous community. I’m not sure I ever will. But my time as Opinions Editor is coming to a close as I move up the ranks as the Editor-in-Chief for the coming year. I’m not great at reflecting — I have the tendency to move with no end nor room to think of anything but the next upcoming deadline. At the time of writing this, I still haven’t even found time to call my mom in about a week and a half (I know this is unforgivable during Women’s History Month). But the year is coming to a close, and as I step out of the role, someone is going to have to fill the void left by the absence of my minimal and self-conscious stature. I want to provide my reflections not only for my own personal interest, but also to speak to any prospective readers considering being more involved with the production side of the Review and provide them with some personal exposure.
Earlier last week, a friend of mine gave me some advice on my work with the Opinions section. In essence, they told me that they like it when they can read opinions that are specific to our local community. Why publish commentary on national political developments when we already have so many newspapers like The New York Times?
It’s a valid question, and one that I’ve spent my year and a half at the Review wrestling to adequately address. During the week of my writing this article, I spent my free time inundating practically everyone that I know about how they should write an Opinions article.
“I don’t have any good opinions about anything,” is the typical response with some subtle variations. The question of what makes a “good” Opinions article confounds many of the people I know — and, I suspect, many of you reading this right now. It also does for me. But out of all three groups, I guess it’s on me to try and explain how to square this circle.
When I talk to people with relatively little experience writing opinion articles, I’ve noticed it’s common for them to think I am asking them to critically point out one thing about Oberlin College — either the administration or student body — they do not like and would like to respond to or call to be fixed. That assumption isn’t unwarranted. My first semester working as Opinions Editor was the last semester majorly defined by the contentious campus-wide debates galvanized by Oct. 7, 2023, Israel’s response, and the broader question of Palestinian sovereignty and Israel’s legitimacy as a nation-state. With that, the Review’s Opinion section became a bastion of thoughtful commentary and criticism responding to either side of this debate. Other articles not pertaining to this question also carried the sharp edge of political commentary about something the writer viewed as wrong and harmful to others. From Oberlin’s COVID-19 response to hotly contested debates over whether progressive voters should participate in the 2024 election in support of former Vice President Kamala Harris (I was passionately involved in this discourse), to write an Opinions piece was to respond to someone else’s controversial political take or some other aspect of Oberlin’s community in dire need of change.
This type of opinion plays an essential role in our larger discursive space — we do need to maintain lively debates about national and overtly sociopolitical questions. It is imperative for us to collectively process broad events that implicate millions of people nationwide and abroad, or we cannot adequately respond to the unique implications that national and global politics hold for Oberlin’s local environment. The Oberlin Review is the newspaper of record for the College and town — not the entire nation. That limitation is not a weakness, but an unquantifiable strength. The Review affords members a space to engage each other about the specific qualities of our unique community.
What do you have to say about the curricula provided to students in your capacity as a student studying a specific major? Can Oberlin students and residents take tangible steps to improve the sense of kinship that defines our town-gown relationship? As Juliet Loftis writes about in this issue (“Oberlin Students Crave the Rave: How We Can Improve Our Party Scene,” The Oberlin Review, March 13, 2026), what’s lacking in our party culture, and what can be done to improve it?
Commentary on issues like these have circulated the Review’s Opinions section from years prior to many students’ times at Oberlin. In Feb. 2023, Bulletin Editor Ava Miller published an Opinion article advocating for Oberlin College to invest part of their endowment funds toward creating a Scholars at Risk program — a safety network intended to protect scholars who face personal safety risks as a consequence of their research (“College Would Benefit from Welcoming Scholars at Risk,” The Oberlin Review, Feb. 10, 2023). Chemutai Ruto and Kambura Kinoti in November 2022 highlighted the dearth of subject focus on the African continent within Oberlin’s curricula (“Courses on Africa are Embarrassingly Limited in Oberlin’s Offerings,” The Oberlin Review, Nov. 11, 2022). As recently as last December, News Editor Yasu Shinozaki reported on how the current debacle about New Russia township and the prospective construction of a data megasite brought him lessons on building effective progressive populist political campaigns with the capacity to produce long-lasting change (“What a New Russia Township Trustee Meeting Taught Me About American Politics,” The Oberlin Review, Dec. 12, 2025). I admit this one’s more overtly political, but it still deserves mentioning; love you, Yasu.
The thread undergirding all of these articles is that they provide valuable reflections on both tangible, unique, and important aspects for our community. More importantly, the core driving motive behind these articles isn’t to dunk on other people’s takes, but to offer ideas for positive changes our community could make.
What makes a good Opinion article? The one enduring lesson I’ve taken away from being a Politics major is answering one question with another, so I raise to you: What aspects of our community animate you the most when you are in conversation with your peers? If the answer is a scathing critique of another opinion that someone has, that’s great — iron sharpens iron. If that isn’t your answer, you can still provide something uniquely valuable to our community.
