Oberlin College

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Coordinates: 41.292929° N 82.218576° W

Monrovia motto = Learning and Labor
Established	September 2, 1833
Type:	liberal arts college
Endowment:	694,565,000 USD (2006)[1]
President:	Stephone Taylor
Students:	4 staff=985584
Location	Oberlin, Ohio, United States
Campus:	Rural
Mascot:	Yeomen (men's teams) & Yeowomen (women's teams)
Website:	http://www.oberlin.edu/

Oberlin College is a highly selective liberal arts college in Oberlin, Ohio, in the United States. It was founded in 1833 by progressive Christians, and is home to the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, making it the only top-ranked liberal arts college with a top-ranked conservatory. A study found that more 1999-2003 Oberlin College alumni receive doctorates than do alumni from any other liberal arts college in the country.^[2]

Oberlin College is a member of the Great Lakes Colleges Association and The Five Colleges of Ohio consortium, including Ohio Wesleyan University, Denison University, Kenyon College, and The College of Wooster.

Oberlin College's motto is "Learning and Labor." Its school colors are officially crimson and gold.

The newspaper of record is The Oberlin Review. There is also an "alternative" student-run newspaper called "The Grape."

[edit] History

The Oberlin campus in 1909

Both the college and the town of Oberlin were founded in 1833 by a pair of Presbyterian ministers, John Shipherd and Philo P. Stewart. The ministers named their project after Jean-Frédéric Oberlin, an Alsatian minister whom they both admired. Oberlin attained prominence because of the influence of its second president, the evangelist Charles Finney, after whom one of the College's chapels, also a prominent performance space, is named. Its first president was Asa Mahan (1800-1889), who served as president from 1835-1850.

The college was built on 500 acres (2 km²) of land specifically donated by the previous owner, who lived in Connecticut. Shipherd and Stewart's vision was for both a religious community and school. For a more detailed history of the founding of the town and the college, see Oberlin, Ohio.

Oberlin has long been associated with progressive causes. Its founders bragged that "Oberlin is peculiar in that which is good." Oberlin was the first college in the United States to regularly admit African-American students (1835). It is also the oldest continuously operating coeducational institution, since having admitted four women in 1837. These four women, who were the first to enter as full students, were Mary Kellogg (Fairchild), Mary Caroline Rudd, Mary Hosford, and Elizabeth Prall. All but Kellogg graduated. The college was listed as a National Historic Landmark on December 21, 1965 for its significance in admitting African-Americans and women.^[3]

One historian called Oberlin, "the town that started the Civil War" due to its reputation as a hotbed of abolitionism.^[4] Oberlin was a key stop along the Underground Railroad, station number 99. In 1858, both students and faculty were involved in the controversial Oberlin-Wellington Rescue of a fugitive slave, which received national press coverage. This heritage was commemorated on campus by the 1977 installation of sculptor Cameron Armstrong's "Underground Railroad Monument," a railroad track rising from the ground toward the sky.^[5]

[edit] Pre 1950

Prior to 1950, most of Oberlin's students lived in large houses around town, some owned by the College, and others owned by individual landlords. Starting with the G.I. Bill and continuing with the Baby Boom, Oberlin's student body swelled during the years after World War II. The College's president, William Stevenson, decided to house this influx in large dormitories on campus. In Oberlin's own version of urban renewal, many wooden houses were torn down to make way for Dascomb Hall and its fraternal twin, Barrows Hall, both completed in 1956. Dascomb replaced the former residence of Dr. James Dascomb and Marianne Parker Dascomb, the first principal of the Oberlin Female Department. Dascomb Hall was specifically named after Mrs. Dascomb.^[6]

[edit] Introduction of co-ed dormitories

In 1970, Oberlin made the cover of Life Magazine as one of the first colleges in the country to have co-ed dormitories. Historian Geoffrey Blodgett, a professor and graduate of Oberlin, pointed out that campus architecture was the means by which the student anger of the 1960s came to Oberlin^{[citation needed]}.

Students reacted vocally against the new dorms of the 1950s (Dascomb, East, North and South), calling them expedient "slabs" of "sleeping and feeding space,"^[7] and this protest soon took on other controversies, including the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. Dascomb went from being the impetus for protest to the vehicle of social change in 1967 when it was transformed into a coed dorm during winter term of 1969. Hebrew House, as it was known, was set up as winter term project to operate similar to an Israeli kibbutz. In January 1969, with the approval of Dean of Students George Langeler, Dascomb became the first co-ed college dormitory in the United States. The experiment was a success, and now all but one of Oberlin College's dormitories are coed. The Baldwin Cottage dorm is open only to women and transgendered people.

[edit] Sports teams

The school's varsity sports teams are the Yeomen and Yeowomen. They participate in the NCAA's Division III and the North Coast Athletic Conference. Oberlin's football team was the first team coached by legendary coach John Heisman, who led the team to a 7–0 record in 1892. Oberlin is the last college in Ohio to beat Ohio State (winning 7-6 in 1921). Though in modern times the football team was more famous for losing streaks of 40 games (1992–1996) and 44 games (1997–2001), the Yeomen have enjoyed limited success in recent years. The college also hosts several club sports teams, including the Oberlin Ultimate team. Oberlin Ultimate was founded in 1976 and is well-known in Midwestern ultimate circles for hosting the Oberlin Mellow Invitational Tournament (Omit).

[edit] Student Cooperative Association

The Oberlin Student Cooperative Association, or OSCA, is a non-profit corporation that houses 175 students and feeds 630 students in multiple sites. Its budget is nearly $2 million, making it the third-largest of its kind in North America, and by far the largest relative to the size of the institution whose students it serves.

OSCA is entirely student-run, with all participating students working as cooks, buyers, administrators, organizers, and every participant is required to do at least one hour per week of cleaning, making sure that no one is valued above others. Most decisions within OSCA are made by Consensus. Oberlin bans all fraternities and sororities (although for generations the presence of underground African-American fraternal organizations has been rumored), making the co-ops the largest organized social system at the college.

[edit] Academics

Of Oberlin's 2,800 or so students, roughly 2,200 are enrolled in the College of Arts & Sciences, a little over 400 in the Conservatory of Music, and the remaining 150 or so in both College and Conservatory under the five-year Double Degree program.^[8]

[edit] College of Arts & Sciences

Peters Hall, home of the Department of Languages.

The College of Arts & Sciences offers over 45 majors, minors and concentrations. Based on students graduating with a given major, its most popular majors over the last ten years have been (in order) English, Biology, History, Politics and Environmental Studies. Sciences are considered strong for a smaller liberal arts college, especially Chemistry and Neuroscience.

[edit] Allen Memorial Art Museum and Mudd Library

The Allen Memorial Art Museum is one of the top handful of college or university art collections in the nation, and the Art History major is understandably strong. The Oberlin College Library is one of the finest undergraduate libraries in the country, with over 2 million volumes, 3,500 print subscriptions, 5 separate facilities (Main Library, Art Library, Conservatory of Music Library, Science Library and Carnegie Storage), a very rich Special Collections department and 62 library staff members (full and part-time individuals). The library received the Association of College and Research Libraries Award for Excellence in 2002 and Director of Libraries Ray English was named the ACRL 2006 "Academic/Research Librarian of the Year". U.S. News and World Report listed Oberlin as #20 in its list of Liberal Arts colleges for 2008.^[9]

[edit] OhioLINK consortium

Oberlin students and faculty benefit tremendously by Oberlin's membership in the OhioLINK consortium, through which access is gained to 12,000+ commercially licensed online journals, 130 databases, 18,000+ ebooks and rapidly growing digital media collections. The OhioLINK Central Catalog represents the library holdings of 87 libraries in the state, including the State Library of Ohio, plus the Center for Research Libraries. The collection is nearing 10 million unique records representing 27.5 million holdings in the system, and undergraduates account for the larger percentage of OhioLINK online borrowing - the process by which any enrolled student can readily request the loan of books and other items from any other library in the system.

[edit] Experimental College

The college's unique "Experimental College" or ExCo program, a student-run department, allows any student or interested person to teach their own class for a limited amount of college credit. ExCo classes by definition focus on material not covered by existing departments or faculty. Many courses supplement conventional disciplines, from languages and areas of cinema or literature, to musical ensembles, martial arts and forms of dancing. Other ExCos cover non-traditional topics too numerous to mention, in the past ranging from Aquariums^[10] to Wilderness Skills.^[11] Due to the nature of ExCo, while some staple courses are continued for years, the overall number and selection of classes offered varies dramatically from semester to semester.^[12]

[edit] Winter Term

Another aspect of Oberlin's academics is the Winter Term during the month of January. This term was created to allow students to do something outside the regular course offerings of the college. Students may work alone or in groups, either on or off campus, and may design their own project or pick from a list of projects and internships set up by the college each year. Projects range from serious academic research with co-authorship in scientific journals, to humanitarian projects, to learning how to bartend. A full-credit project is suggested to involve five to six hours per weekday.^[13]

[edit] Culture

[edit] Political activism

Students passing through the Memorial Arch in front of Peters Hall. The arch is dedicated to the memory of missionaries from Oberlin who were killed in the Boxer Rebellion.

Oberlin students have a reputation for being radically liberal and/or progressive. Oberlin has a thriving LGBT community, and most students are well informed about the intricacies of gender politics. The college was ranked as the eleventh most politically active by the Princeton Review, in 2005. The college also received an A among so-called "hipster ivy leagues" in Robert Lanham's homage to the eponymous subjects of his 2003 Hipster Handbook, second only to Evergreen State which received an A+.

Student unrest following what was widely perceived as the heavy-handed arrests of protesters on the lawn of then-President S. Frederick Starr's home on April 13, 1990, and his ongoing struggles with the faculty, were major factors in his eventual departure from Oberlin. Recent activism among the student body has resulted in a campus-wide ban on sales of Coca-Cola products^[14] and a vote of no confidence in the college's president at the time, Nancy S. Dye, in May 2005.^[15] This vote, as well as similar actions by the faculty, likely played a role in her resignation in September of 2006.

A sampling of the school's past commencement speakers reflects its reputation for embracing diversity, ranging from Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Jesse L. Jackson to figures as varied as Pete Seeger and Robert Frost; even Adlai Stevenson appeared, a month prior to his death.

[edit] Music

Conservatory of Music at Oberlin College

The world renowned Oberlin Conservatory of Music is located on the Oberlin College campus. As a result, Oberlin has always cultivated a lively community of talented musicians and artists. College students benefit from over 500 performances yearly by conservatory students, whose performances rival that of touring professionals. Only the finest musicians are selected to attend this extremely competitive conservatory. Studying alongside such gifted individuals adds to the diversity of the school, as they do not quite fit the mold of the typical liberal arts student. During the semester there are concerts and recitals through the conservatory almost daily; it is not uncommon to be able to choose among three or more concerts on a weekend day. Most of these concerts are free of charge.

In addition, Oberlin has a myriad of musical opportunities available for amateur musicians and students in the college. The Oberlin Gilbert and Sullivan Players (OGASP) perform one Gilbert and Sullivan operetta each semester. The entirely student-run Oberlin College Marching band (OCMB), founded in 1998, performs at football games throughout the year. There are a number of a cappella groups, including the Obertones (all-male), Nothing But Treble (all-female), and the Offbeats (co-ed). In addition, students in the college can form chamber groups and receive coaching through the conservatory. Student composers also provide a demand for musicians to perform their work.

The college radio station WOBC, and the party circuit (including the popular on-campus venue, The 'Sco) contribute to the success and popularity of their homegrown talent. Some notable alums have graduated to lucrative careers on the indie music scene, including members of the bands Come, Deerhoof, Songs: Ohia, The Sea and Cake, Tortoise, Trans Am, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Due in part to both this and the school's proximity to Cleveland, the college attracts touring artists with a frequency nearly unparalleled among institutions of its size.

Oberlin College is also home to Oberlin Steel, one of the premier college steel drum bands in the United States.

[edit] Art

Oberlin is also notable for its unique art rental program. At the beginning of every semester students camp out in front of the north gate of the college's Allen Memorial Art Museum to get first pick of original etchings, lithographs and paintings by famous artists like Renoir, Warhol, Dalí, and Picasso. For five dollars per semester, students can hang these works on their dorm room walls. The program was started in the 1940s by Ellen Johnson, a professor of art at Oberlin, in order to "develop the aesthetic sensibilities of students and encourage ordered thinking and discrimination in other areas of their lives."^[16]

[edit] Events

Oberlin is also famous for Safer Sex Night and the Drag Ball, two annual school-sponsored parties that garner national attention.

[edit] Athletics

[edit] Football

Oberlin played its first football game in 1891, going 2 and 2 that season. In 1892, they were coached by John Heisman; Oberlin went 7 and 0, beating Ohio State twice by scores of 40-0 and 50-0 and the University of Michigan. They outscored opponents 262 to 30.

Oberlin was one of the founding members of the Ohio Athletic Conference in 1902, along with Case, Kenyon College, Ohio State, Ohio Wesleyan University and Western Reserve. The league commonly was known as the "Big Six." Ohio State joined the Big Ten in 1913. Ohio State's all-time highest margin of victory was a 128-0 thrashing of Oberlin in 1916. Oberlin is the last in-state school to defeat Ohio State. The Yeomen upset the Buckeyes 7-6 at Ohio Field in Columbus in 1921.

The Oberlin teams of 1994 to 2000 have been rated the fifth worst college football team of all time by ESPN.com's Page 2. In 1994, Oberlin lost all nine games of its season scoring only ten points and giving up 358 points. In 1995, the Yeomen were outscored 469 to 72. In August 1996, Sports Illustrated featured Oberlin in its annual College Football Preview as the worst team in Division III. After four winless seasons from 1993 to 1996, Oberlin opened its 1997 season with an 18-17 victory over Thiel College sparking post-game jubilation with fans rushing the field. The victory garnered national attention as ESPN featured it on SportsCenter. Oberlin would not win again for years. Swarthmore College and Oberlin scheduled a 1999 matchup, with both schools nursing long losing streaks, just so one of them could end their streak. Oberlin lost 6-42 and continued a 40-game losing streak, ending it with a 53-22 victory over Kenyon College at home in October 2001.^[17][18]

Since then the team has enjoyed modest success, staying competitive in most matches and going 5-5 (with better than .500 records in conference) in 2003, 2006, and 2007.

[edit] Ultimate

Oberlin has both a men's and a women's Ultimate team, known as the Flying Horsecows and the Preying Manti^[19] respectively. The Horsecows have made trips to College Nationals in 1992, 1995, 1997, and 1999. The Manti qualified for Nationals for the first time in 1997. Both teams maintain a tradition of emphasizing the spirit of Ultimate, and Oberlin has traditionally hosted the OMIT (Oberlin Mellow Invitational Tournament) in May, where teams who wish to unwind after an intense season gather and play Ultimate without scorekeeping or pressure, but with kegs.

[edit] Notable alumni

Main article: List of Oberlin College alumni

Oberlin alumni have had notable successes in a variety of fields. Oberlin has graduated several Nobel Laureates and other prominent academics and scientists, award-winning writers, prominent politicians in the United States, artists and entertainers as well as notable athletes. Oberlin's avant-garde reputation has also led it to produce many alumni whose success has been outside the mainstream, such as feminists and abolitionists, entrepreneurs, a lesbian cartoonist, an actor/clown who received a MacArthur Genius grant, and modern political commentators and activists spanning the political spectrum.

[edit] In popular culture

Oberlin was mentioned in the popular 2004 American movie, Eurotrip, as the school that the main character attends at the end of the film. It is a joke referencing the fact that the plot of the movie has the main character trying to find a girl in Berlin, Germany only to be united with her at the college in Ohio, which sounds like "Oh Berlin".

[edit] References

[edit] External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Oberlin College

• Oberlin College Website
• Oberlin College Library
• Oberlin College Archives
• Oberwiki, the Oberlin wiki
• Oberlin College Marching Band