Oberlin College Ghetto Dorms

I toured Oberlin College today with a friend and his son, a high school senior looking for a place to study science. For someone who has spent most of his time on the campuses of research universities, I was struck by how the students talked about their professors as accessible, dedicated to their learning, and “the best thing about Oberlin.” At MIT and Harvard, for example, professors are generally rather remote figures from the perspective of an undergraduate. With some help from Mindy the Crippler we met with a wide range of students and all spoke positively about their experience at Oberlin.

I was also struck when the student guide told us about a dormitory with an African heritage theme and specializing in serving “soul food” (link). She also mentioned a “Third World House” where “people of color” and “of low socioeconomic status” could live (link). It seemed odd that a college administration could set up places like this. Suppose that the school put out a Web page saying that “70 percent of our students are white and from wealthy families. Despite their stacks of cashmere sweaters, they wouldn’t feel comfortable living with anyone who was poor or black. So we’d appreciate it if students with darker skin or without a closet full of designer outfits would please move into Third World House or Soul Food Dorm.” If it wouldn’t be okay to do that, why is it okay to have the houses at all? Does having the best and most inclusive intentions make it okay to do something that might otherwise appear racist and classist?

[Separately, we learned about a house for women and transgender students (link) and talked to a young woman who’d applied to live there. She explained that it was open to anyone who had female chromosomes and identified as “female” and also anyone who was transgender. The only students to whom the living group was closed were males who identified as “male.”]

12 thoughts on “Oberlin College Ghetto Dorms

  1. I think if your second and third paragraphs are true (and I’m certain they are) civilization as we know it is rapidly approaching the apocalypse.

  2. It’s one thing to provide a variety of opportunities for various communities and economic levels, but a different thing to make them forced upon folks. It’s clear from your writing that you think it’s the latter, but is it really?

    (That being said, the name and quoted references to “Third World House” sound pretty abhorric.)

  3. What a convenient trip. You could scratch off Oberlin after that experience and spend your search time on better schools, or at least ones that didn’t view ghettoizing their student body as a positive aspect of the college experience.

  4. Jeffrey: “… but a different thing to make them forced upon folks. It’s clear from your writing that you think it’s the latter, but is it really?” I guess I am not a very good writer! I certainly did not mean to imply that Oberlin forces students to live in particular dorms. Now that you bring up the subject, I suppose by saying “Lord-Saunders is a designated safe space for residents and students of the African Diaspora” they are implying that the other dorms might be unsafe.

  5. Phil,

    Any mention of the security of the campus in light of the Lena Dunham rape allegations?

    The University of Virginia was recently victimized by a lengthy Rolling Stone story that described UVA’s frat houses as headquarters for serial rapers. Unfortunately for Rolling Stone, their story seems to be falling apart.

    I wonder if Oberlin is feeling any fallout from Dunham’s claim?

  6. >It’s one thing to provide a variety of opportunities for various communities and economic levels, but a different thing to make them forced upon folks.

    Except that’s false – not all communities and economic levels get their own “safe spaces”, only those in certain favored groups. So if I wanted to set up “Aryan House” for rich white male heterosexual Christians only, would that be OK with the Oberlin administration also?

    There is no doubt that the US had (an ever receding) history of discrimination but the current system doesn’t involve eliminating discrimination anymore, it involves creating NEW discriminatory schemes except with a different set of winners this time. I fail to see how that is better for our society than the old system.

    Small liberal arts colleges like Oberlin do indeed get you a lot more contact with faculty than a place like MIT, but there is a flip side (beside the ridiculous over the top politically correct leftism that tends to prevail at LACs) – certain kinds of science require major investments in hardware – research nuclear reactors, TOKAMAK fusion reactors, supercomputers, robotics labs, etc., etc. A place like Oberlin is going to have a fine dance dept. but they are going to be short on particle accelerators and such. If you want to be an English major, Oberlin is fine but science requires a lot of expensive toys.

    Quantity also has its own quality – if you are interested in one particular niche in science (and modern science tends to be about niches) at a place like MIT you are going to find several faculty members interested plus a number of grad students plus a bunch of undergrads who share your interest. At a LAC you might be the only one.

    You cannot compare the energy levels between MIT and Oberlin, and not just in the classes. My daughter took me to see the shop that they have next to the MIT Museum for the various student run clubs and activities – robotics and race cars and appropriate technology, etc, etc, etc. Each one by itself was an amazing place where people were doing real hands on, cutting edge work, and there was a whole building full of them. Even if you never got to see a professor at MIT, these clubs alone and the ability they give you to learn from your fellow students would be worth the price of admission and I don’t think you could find anything like these (certainly not on that scale) at Oberlin.

    But, college selection is all about matching the student’s personality and interest to the school. My daughter is thriving at MIT (though she has signed herself up for so much exciting stuff (not just classes) that she literally doesn’t have time to sleep) but for someone else the place might be overwhelming.

  7. These self-segregated houses have been around for a long time . They already had one at Penn when I was there in the ’70s (the DuBois House). They make a certain amount of sense if you understand how affirmative action works. Most minority students have significantly lower high school grades and SAT scores than average at their colleges so they often come in to a place like Penn or Oberlin in over their heads. Their classmates have often gone to private schools or wealthy suburban schools where they are used to writing essays and doing college level work while they have come from less demanding schools and are shocked to see what is expected of them at a competitive school. If you throw this group into the general population without special support many (even most) are going to flunk out. So the segregated houses (and the “Studies” departments with their lenient grading) lets the minorities live and get help from others who are in the same boat that they are in.

    Of course the real solution is to get rid of affirmative action so that minorities can attend colleges that are better matched to their abilities. See Sander’s work on this : http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/the-painful-truth-about-affirmative-action/263122/

  8. Phil: designating safer spaces for marginalized students isn’t implying anything; it’s recognizing reality. White women, people of color (especially Black people), members of the queer community, and other marginalized people have to constantly interact with a world that is unsafe for them in a variety of ways. GamerGate and the deaths of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Eric Garner are recent and high-profile examples of this, but there are thousands of other examples.

    Everyone deserves to have a space where they aren’t constantly under attack, where they can simply exist without having to constantly explain or defend themselves. That is what safer spaces aim to provide. I wonder: did you have the opportunity to talk with any of the residents of these spaces, and if so did you ask them what kind of difference the space made for them?

  9. Ryan: As noted in the original posting, we talked to a woman who had applied to live in a “safe space” but she hadn’t been accepted. A woman with darker-than-average-for-Oberlin skin stopped to pet Mindy and then, noting that my friend’s child was half-Chinese/half-Caucasian, reassured him that “there are a lot of special programs for students of color in the sciences.” We didn’t ask where she lived. Our tour did not include the interior of any dorms with themes.

    [Separately, while it is certainly upsetting that the police have killed a variety of citizens in a variety of places, I’m not aware of the Oberlin police having done so.]

  10. And now that you mention it, we did also talk to two students who said that they felt that they were unable to speak their minds at Oberlin because other students and faculty were intolerant of their point of view. One was a believing Protestant Christian and one was a practicing Catholic.

  11. >Everyone deserves to have a space where they aren’t constantly under attack

    This is laughable. As if at a super-liberal hippie college like Oberlin, there are hooded KKK Nazis going around attacking minorities EVER, let alone CONSTANTLY. Nothing could be further from the truth.

    > other students and faculty were intolerant of their point of view.

    Phil, you are being silly. You know that only certain points of view deserve tolerance. Do you really think that the Constitution requires us to tolerate the insane ranting of cisgendered Jesus freaks who want to force rape victims to carry fetuses to term? The Oberlin campus is supposed to be a “safe space” – this means that we should be protected from such hate speech which might trigger rape survivors.

  12. I see that Oberlin has a “substance free” dorm. Hmmm capacity 40 students, total student body about 2700. Sounds about right 🙂

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