Professor of Biology Keith Tarvin published a study last Wednesday which has been covered by major news outlets such as CNN, The New York Times, and NPR. The study, titled “Eavesdropping grey squirrels infer safety from bird chatter,” finds that squirrels use the tone of bird chatter to determine whether an environment is safe. Previous studies had only observed squirrels response to alarmed bird calls. Tarvin earned his B.A. from Hendrix College, an M.S. from the University of Arkansas, a Ph...

Susan Orlean is an award-winning, bestselling author and journalist. Orlean has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1992 and has contributed to publications including The Boston Globe, Rolling Stone, Vogue, and Esquire, among others. In October 2018, she published The Library Book, which tells the story of the 1986 Los Angeles Public Library Fire that destroyed 400,000 books and damaged 700,000 more. She interweaves this story with the history of the American public library system, as we...

Zahida Sherman stepped into her new role as director of Oberlin’s Multicultural Resource Center on Monday, Feb. 18. Most recently, Sherman was an assistant director of Black Student Success at the University of the Pacific. She has also worked as an associate development coordinator for Diversity and Inclusion at Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton LLP in Los Angeles, and as an assistant director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Kenyon College. Sherman earned her BA in anthropology fro...

Gar Alperovitz came to Oberlin as one of the speakers in The State of American Democracy: A National Conversation, a three-day, non-partisan discussion about the state of democracy in the U.S. The conference examines how the U.S. ended up in its current polarized state, and how we can bolster the resilience, fairness, and stability of our democratic institutions. Alperovitz is a historian, political economist, activist, writer, and former government official. He was the Lionel R. Bauman Professor of...