At Oberlin, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and other liberal epicenters of American academe, student activism has made something of a come back this year.
Over what one called a long “winter of discontent,” protests erupted in almost every campus corner — amid escalating racial tensions and growing dissatisfaction with the way administrations handled social justice matters.
The crumbling of these liberal arts college is the subject of this week’s New Yorker piece “The Big Uneasy. What’s Roiling the Liberal Arts Campus?”
Writer Nathan Heller spent some time “at the center of the current storm,” talking to professors, students and activists at Oberlin College about a year campus unease that left many bewildered by the new politics of social progress.
Here are the most puzzling anecdotes.
1.Rage Against the Banh-Mi
These days, it’s pretty damn hard to eat anything but a Ruben without being told you’re appropriating another culture. This year, Oberlin students took the culture war to the dining hall by requesting that the college stop serving ‘inauthentic’ sushi, General Tso chicken, and Banh Mi sandwiches as this effectively made a mockery of Asian cuisines and cultures.
“When you’re cooking a country’s dish for other people, including ones who have never tried the original dish before, you’re also representing the meaning of the dish as well as its culture,” one student named Tomoyo Joshi told The Oberlin Review.
“So if people not from that heritage take food, modify it and serve it as ‘authentic,’ it is appropriative.”
2. The Trigger Warnings Playbook
One student — who had vocally advocated putting warnings on the cover of “Antigone” because of the potential triggering effects of the heroine’s suicide — told a surprised Heller that, after all these efforts, he’d decided to drop out of his course because of what he describes as a “persistent, low grade dehumanization from everyone.”
Explaining his Antigone campaign in the college paper, he likened trigger warnings to ingredients lists on food, arguing that “People should have the right to know and consent to what they’re putting into their minds, just as they have the right to know and consent to what they’re putting into their bodies.”
3. Caged Speech:
In an inexplicable and rather worrying urge to repent for the historic burden of whiteness, a sophomore published an essay in the Oberlin Review urging white students like her to speak less in class.
“I understand that I am not just an individual concerned only with comfort but also a part of a society that I believe will benefit from my silence.”
4. Non-Negotiable Demands:
Some of the students Heller interviewed felt unsupported because their demands were not realized. These demands, submitted to the school president Marvin Krislov in a letter, included among other things a request for an $8.20-an-hour wage for activists and the firing of 9 Oberlin employees deemed insufficiently supportive of black students.
“You include Black and other student of color in the institution and mark them with the words ‘equity, inclusion and diversity when in fact this institutions functions on the premises of imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, ableism and a cissexist heteropatriarchy’ read the letter delivered to the school board.
Other student activists not only asked that all grades below a ‘C,’ be abolished, they also demanded that faculty members be proactive in offering them alternatives to taking a written, in-class midterm exam if they had missed classes. Below if the testimony of Megan Bautista, a student who identifies as Afro-Latinx:
“A lot of us worked alongside community members in Cleveland who were protesting. But we needed to organize on campus as well—it wasn’t sustainable to keep driving forty minutes away. A lot of us started suffering academically.”
In 1970, Oberlin had modified its grading standards to accommodate activism around the Vietnam War and the Kent State shootings, and Bautista had hoped for something similar. More than thirteen hundred students signed a petition calling for the college to eliminate any grade lower than a C for the semester, but to no avail. “Students felt really unsupported in their endeavors to engage with the world outside Oberlin,” she told me.
The president, Marvin Krislov, replied in a public editorial that even though demands “resonated” with him and many members of the community, he would not comply with non-negotiable demands:
“I will not respond directly to any document that explicitly rejects the notion of collaborative engagement. Many of its demands contravene principles of shared governance, and it contains personal attacks on a number of faculty and staff members who are dedicated and valued members of this community.”
5. Hands Up. Don’t Touch:
When a Wesleyan student published a piece in the school paper The Argus questioning the integrity of the Black Lives Matter movements, over 170 people signed a petition to defund the paper.
Similarly, when politics and law major Aaron Pressman took issue with the approximate wording of Oberlin’s sexual-harassment policy, he was purely and simply silenced by his peers:
“A student came up to me several days later and started screaming at me, saying I’m not allowed to have this opinion because I’m a cisgender white male,” he recalled.
“I’ve had people respond to me, ‘You could never understand — you’re culture has never been oppressed.'”