Mack
Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Oberlin College
Sounds a Clarion Call for its Smelling Salts
Oberlin
College in Ohio dates to the early 19th century. Oberlin claims to be the first college to
admit women and black men, though Middlebury College in Vermont says that honor
belongs to them. Certainly men and women
from Oberlin helped save people from bondage during the slavery time, and some
1,000 Oberlin men, black and white, served during the Civil War, enabling their
classmate Mary Jane Patterson to
become the first African-American woman to earn a BA, in 1862. At the turn of the 20th century
missionaries from Oberlin, then a Presbyterian school, felt a call to witness
in China, and many died there from persecution.
Oberlin has truly been a
light unto the nations.
Sadly,
Oberlin has recently suffered a series of racist graffiti incidents, vandalism,
and physical assaults. Apparently no one
did anything about the enormities except feel bad.
More
recently, someone said that someone said that he or she had seen a Ku Klux
Klansman, bedsheet in full sail, walking across campus around two in the
morning. However, there is no source or
me-phone footage. Local police report
that other witnesses report that saw a pedestrian wearing a blanket, so someone
needs to verify the whereabouts of Charlie Brown’s friend Linus.
Oberlin’s
president, Marvin Krislov, stood to his tackle like a true Oberlin man – he canceled
classes, saying "…let us
be very clear, we stand united. We will not give into hate."
However,
in canceling classes, Dr. Krislov, hereinafter referred to as Aunt Pittypat, did
indeed give in to hate. A few bipedal
pimples with spray paint bullied him and an entire college into abandoning
their vocations as scholars. Instead of
standing up for the freedom to learn, to live, to work, Oberlin spent a day
feeling sorry for its collective self.
That’s
not exactly the spirit of the Oberlin men who helped hold the union line in the
cause of freedom.
With
classes canceled out of fear last week, the men and women of Oberlin finally
did something – they made signs, they staged a sit-in, and they organized
tolerance sessions.
Oh,
yeah, a sit-in – that’ll stop evil in its clawed tracks. Hey, and signs. Wow.
One
student told a rally that “I’m feeling comfortable and supported.” The content and the use of the passive voice
says everything we need to know about a young adult who, given the rare
opportunity to study civilization, explore ideas, develop concepts, write,
dance, paint, compose music, and perhaps, like her Obie predecessors, help free
oppressed peoples, could only bleat out in weakness: “I’m feeling comfortable
and supported.”
Reports
of reports report (finding anything solidly sourced about the problems at
Oberlin is at present impossible) that two Oberlin students were allegedly /
maybe / sort of arrested / detained as persons of interest / expelled from
school, but if so, no one is saying why.
When
Aunt Pittypat addressed the newsies at a press conference, his students
reportedly yelled vulgarities at him, so maybe a culture of spoken obscenity
already obtains at Oberlin, and only written obscenity is offensive to the
young scholars.
In
addition to sponsoring teach-ins, Oberlin has called in the Federal Bureau of
Investigation to, well, investigate crudities scrawled on walls. And if that’s not a worthy use of the FBI,
then what is, eh?
The
reader can follow the Oberlin community as they twitter and tweet at
https://twitter.com/oberlin. Somehow one gets the idea that Oberlin
College at present is the sort of place where people seriously read Samuel
Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
Oberlin
was once a moral and cultural light, a college of heroic young people who not
only called for injustices to be righted, but hazarded their lives in doing so
themselves. Just now about all they seem
to be capable of calling for is their smelling salts.
-30-
No comments:
Post a Comment