After over a year of campaigning for greater transparency from the Board of Trustees, Oberlin’s chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists of America has received a commitment from the College to publish notes on the contents of each Board of Trustees meeting. On March 2, representatives from YDSA met with General Counsel Josh Nolan and Chief of Staff David Hertz, who accepted the organization’s proposal that the General Counsel Office write a summary of each meeting to be released on the College’s website shortly afterward. The first meeting summary was published this week, detailing the conversations and events of the Board’s last meeting held March 5–6.

“Conversations with students about increasing transparency around Board of Trustees activity led to this change,” Hertz said. “Students affiliated with the Democratic Socialists Club, working with Thom Julian, senior associate dean of students, raised thoughtful suggestions in discussions with General Counsel Josh Nolan and me. Based on that input, we decided to move forward with sharing summaries of Board actions, excluding executive sessions, following each meeting.”

YDSA’s campaign for greater transparency from the Board of Trustees began in February 2025. Last spring, the newly chartered organization released a petition calling for the Board to release a pre-meeting agenda and detailed minutes reports taken by a third party to students, faculty, and staff. The petition received over 900 signatures. This fall, members of YDSA met with administration members on several occasions to discuss the possibility of more information being provided to students and faculty about Board meetings. 

Speaking to the Review last October, President Carmen Twillie Ambar expressed interest in the conversations but said that Oberlin would be unable to provide complete transparency.

“I think as the YDSA gets its work going and has these conversations, we will be able to talk about more opportunities for there to be Board engagement and connection,” President Ambar said. “Does that look like what a public institution does, where people get a chance to go and observe the Board and weigh in on their perspective? I don’t think that’s what it’s going to look like at Oberlin. But I do think there are ways to have deeper and richer conversations with each other, ensuring we’re having good communication about what the Board is thinking and what actions they’re taking.”

College second-year Ava Firestone-Morrill, who is on the YDSA Steering Committee and has led the transparency campaign, said that in these earlier meetings, administrators had concerns about releasing information to the general public given that the College currently has no way to securely share documents internally.

“[Former General Counsel Matt Leahy and Hertz]’s main concerns were privacy and security, especially given how institutions are now [becoming] political targets,” Firestone-Morrill said. “I wasn’t sure how much that actually would affect us being a small liberal arts school in Ohio … but I understood those concerns.

Oberlin will have an internal file sharing system once the College transitions from Banner to Workday, which is projected to occur in summer 2027. Given that time frame, Firestone-Morrill said YDSA shifted its focus to what the College would be willing to do immediately.

“[In our proposal], instead of calling it meeting minutes, it’s actually called meeting notes because that is more comfortable and it’s more summary-like,” she said.

This March, YDSA gave a presentation to Hertz and Nolan explaining their proposal for the College to release a 300–400 word report on the work of the whole Board and each committee to be emailed to all students, faculty, and administrators, and published on the Oberlin website. They asked that each report include “the purpose of the meeting and action items,” motions considered and approved, and other “decisions relevant to Oberlin College and the broader Oberlin community.”

The presentation referenced the practices of other private colleges and universities with regard to Board transparency. Numerous other small liberal colleges provide students and faculty with reports on Board meetings, the presentation noted. University of Pennsylvania has open meetings in which recording is allowed. YDSA’s proposal is most similar to practices at Brown University and Dartmouth College, both of which release “a summary of current life and concerns on campus” and “300–500 word reports detailing each committee’s work.”

Firestone-Morrill said the proposal was almost wholly accepted by Nolan and Hertz, with little pushback or discussion. College first-year Hugo Love-Geiger said that Hertz and Nolan raised concerns about students misreading the meeting notes. 

“They thought that since the students didn’t know exactly what the Board of Trustees does that they would take the information that was in the meeting reports out of context, which is why we talked about how we wanted to do informational sessions,” Love-Geiger said.

This Friday at 12:30 p.m., Nolan hosted a “Conversations with Counsel” event in Moffett Auditorium where he spoke to students about “the duties and responsibilities of the Board of Trustees.”

The first meeting summary, published this week, is over 800 words long and includes sections covering the activities of the Board’s committees. It also includes the adoption of the suggestions of the Ad Hoc Board Planning Committee, which was already covered by the Review (“Board of Trustees Approves Bylaw Changes,” The Oberlin Review, March 13, 2026), the approval of faculty tenure and nominations, and the approval of Nolan as General Counsel.

Firestone-Morrill stressed that the campaign for transparency is not over. In particular, YDSA’s presentation mentioned further steps the College could take to improve transparency surrounding the Board, including a proxy form through which students could ask questions and raise concerns to the Board, releasing an agenda before meetings so students can give informed feedback, and the implementation of the internal-file sharing system. The presentation also requested a “published statement of continued commitment to transparency” and an agreement between YDSA and the College ensuring conversations over transparency continue.

Firestone-Morrill said that greater transparency could serve to empower students and faculty in campus decision-making. She mentioned the Finney Compact — an almost two-hundred-year old agreement between Charles Grandison Finney and the Oberlin Collegiate Institute that set the precedent for faculty governance.

“A lot of it goes to the Finney Compact, because we are supposed to be a faculty-run school,” she said. “This isn’t really the case anymore. There’s a lot of threats to equity salaries. There’s barely been a raise in their payment the past few years. … So I think we are continuing to think about the groups who are affected by the board’s decisions, with tuition increases, and just increasing accessibility and communication and dialogue.”

Love-Geiger said that better communication from the Board could prevent hostility from students and faculty.

“People think that the Board of Trustees doesn’t care about their opinions, that they’re doing things that are antagonistic to the school, because if they’re not sharing them then maybe they’re not doing good things in these meetings,” he said. “It just creates a lot of tense feelings and hostility between administration and students when there’s not communication.” 

Hertz also commended the policy as beneficial to the institution as a whole.

“We appreciate the engagement from students that helped bring this about and see it as a positive step in ongoing communication with the campus community,” Hertz said.