Future planning a student affair

Through Strategic Future Planning, President Dye says she's interested in how "we can create a community that celebrates differences, but manages to have commonality." President Dye, you can't. Any administrative attempt to create community or cultural diversity will only reinforce a beautiful shelled figurine of a community whose insides are rotted hollow. There'll be no essence. The creation of a community that celebrates difference and commonality must be initiated by those comprising the community - the students. Neither an administrative-lead strategic plan, an insightful speech by Cornel West, or classroom lectures, some of which our professors should pay us to listen to, can lay the needed prophetic framework for loving, honest, challenging human relationships on campus. This is not to say that structural strategic planning is not a positive progressive step into the future. Had a structural strategic plan been in place 10 or even 20 years ago, the college would possibly not have had such an enormous deficit last year that left many beautiful folk jobless. But the key word is "structural."

Dye says the strategic planning process will be a "grassroots effort," comprised of trustees, faculty, students and staff. One must question whether a grassroots effort can be initiated by the administration. Similar grassroots efforts were made last year in the way of administrative initiated coalition building. But, how interested was the administration in filling the hollowed figurine of Oberlin with a student communal essence when "coalition building" entailed only the figurehead leaders of various organizations across campus? This was evident again after the Cornel West speech when only 40 student leaders, faculty and administration were invited to dine with the distinguished professor. Where's the essence? The administration is not the fulcrum of this campus or this editorial. We must be self-reflective in remedying our moral content. How aloof are we in allowing the Arch, Nancy Dye, Kwame Ture, Matt Holford, Cornel West or the Review to dictate our critical discourses?

While it's quite possible that strategic future planning, campus convocations and administrative attempts at ameliorating communal and structural inadequacies will be successful, student accountability is paramount. We have the responsibility to fill this hollowed figurine called Oberlin with the want of understanding, love, the gall to viciously challenge, to ask why, to break each other, to build again, to create and sustain individual and communal consciousness with integrity. We also have the responsibility to be proactive in our discourses and attempts at learning and laboring within and without Oberlin College. Neither Cornel West, Nancy Dye or strategic future planning have the time or ability to do it for us.