Nathan Carpenter, Editor-in-Chief
November 8, 2019
Editor’s note: This column is part of a series that will focus on Oberlin’s history as a town and an institution. The series will be published regularly throughout the fall semester. Over the course of just a couple weeks in the spring of 1970, Oberlin students heralded the first Earth Day with a series of campus speakers and workshops, held an anti-war protest following a national address by President Richard Nixon, and mourned the traumatic deaths of four Kent State University students at the hands of the Ohio National Guard just an hour down the road. It...
David Mathisson, Columnist
November 8, 2019
The student community elected me to Student Senate so that I could push a three-point policy plan. You’ve probably heard about the first point: improving the variety, quality, and value of goods at DeCafé. While there’s plenty to be done, we’ve made substantial progress since the beginning of the semester. We’ve also been working hard at the second point, which is improving transparency in the Office of Residential Education. The third point is pushing a multifaceted policy package to fix course selection. With course selection for the spring semester coming...
Nathan Carpenter, Editor-in-Chief
October 11, 2019
Editor’s note: This column is part of a series that will focus on Oberlin’s history as a town and an institution. The series will be published regularly throughout the fall semester. In January 1886, just over two decades after it was built, Oberlin’s second Ladies’ Hall burned down. After the smoke of Oberlin’s first major fire cleared, the building’s cornerstone was opened, revealing a collection of documents placed inside when it was originally laid in 1861. It was common practice in early Oberlin to fill cornerstones with mementos of the time,...
Jackie Brant, Opinions Editor
October 11, 2019
The Supreme Court is in the process of hearing three different cases from New York, Georgia, and Michigan that will decide the future of LGBTQ+ rights in the workplace. Two of the three cases have been combined because both plaintiffs were fired immediately after coming out as gay in their workplace; the third case involves a transgender woman who was fired immediately after coming out to her superiors and informing them that she would be transitioning in the future. Despite the differences in the cases, all three claim that being fired on the basis of sexuality...
Ananya Gupta, Managing Editor
October 11, 2019
Scientists around the world are finally coming to the realization that the Jonas Brothers were right in 2006 when they sang, “I’ve been to the year 3000. Not much has changed but they lived underwater.” The consensus among several reputable international institutions — the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA, and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — is that sea-levels are rising at an alarming rate, and may eventually result in the partial submersion of continents as we know them today. Several coastal and island...
David Mathisson, Columnist
October 11, 2019
This semester, Senate has made transparency a priority in order to bring together our community and foster cooperation between students and the administration. Senate is working to release more information to students this year than at any time in the recent past, improving the student body’s access to policies that work for us all. I’m optimistic about Senate’s work this semester, and believe that Senate’s work will set an example on transparency for the administration to follow. With that in mind, the severity of Oberlin’s transparency crisis means it...