To the Editors:

We are writing to express our gratitude, respect and admiration for Shareef Elfiki, who wrote a letter in last week’s Review titled “Sexism in Oberlin Revisited.”

This commentary, as well as Jesse Carr’s letters over the past month, challenge the Review staff as well as contributing authors to work toward a higher standard and analyze these issues with a level of complexity, sophistication and integrity that has been largely absent with regard to campus discourse. Thank you, Shareef Elfiki and thank you, Jesse Carr.

What we have found most compelling and alarming about the responses by students and an administrator to Jesse Carr’s original letter was the anxious, reactionary rush to recover the name of an individual and simultaneously, the recovery of all institutions that have come to be associated with that name — the judicial processes of the College, the “Court of Law,” the overall campus culture and the actions of a policy administrator.

This is how unapologetic misogyny and the culture of the heroic masculine are circulated into the framework of “liberalism.” What is lost in the various movements of liberalism is a structural analysis of power, where the identity of “woman” and the status of “innocent” are categories to be thoughtfully interrogated.

This sort of liberal approach to sexual violence results in an impossible situation: the experiences of “women,” “survivors,” “victims” of such violences cannot be registered in these spaces of institutional judgment yet remain present, though unacknowledged by official narratives.

There is a radical disjuncture between what can be known and understood by these official narratives and what has been and continues to be known by those who are excluded from them. What is so critically important about Shareef Elfiki’s and Jesse Carr’s commentary is that they engage the understandings and categorizations that preclude the possibility of objective judgment. Perhaps an analysis of structural power and liberal rhetoric can be brought to current discussions of SAST organizational decisions.

As Shareef Elfiki noted at the conclusion of his letter, allegations of rape are never outside of other forms of violence and oppression. Thus activism concerned with sexual assault can indeed be complicit in reproducing violence, which leads us to wonder: Is a hotline necessarily a good thing? Is it inherently a neutral and accessible service? Does it matter who is running this hotline, how they are trained, how they define violence and assault?

We hope that productive discussions can continue on these issues in a setting that is more careful not to fall into anti-intellectualism, sexism, racism and liberal apology. Perhaps in these discussions, we should pay special attention to the moments at which we become aligned with institutional narratives and consider more seriously how each of us is complicit in maintaining the status quo.

–Rebecca DeCola
Original member of the
Presidential Task Force on
Sexual Education & Ethics
Former SAST member
College senior
–Alex Braunstein
College senior