"...A higher degree of legitimacy." That's what sophomore senator Sarah Stein Greenberg audaciously believes Senate has reached. If voter turnout of last week's election is any indication, Senator Greenberg is absolutely right. Last week's election of Kara Stevens, Amy Pandjiris, and Adriana Lopez-Young brings more than a changing face to Senate. It marks a real change in how Senate and Senate elections will function. A political precedent has been set for what should happen at Oberlin every year.

The success of last week's election can be traced back to one electric event the Review-sponsored debate. While we at the Review, in out coziest inked dreams, would love to believe the previous sentence, the claim is absolutely asinine. It's impossible to accurately point to a solitary reason why this election and voter participation was so different. Many realities played a part in what unfolded ...

1. 1)There were a record number of candidates running.
2. 2)Candidates like Kara Stevens and Sam Taylor employed new e-mail strategies that asked different communities for support.
3. 3)During the weeks leading up to the election, Senate did a wonderfully thorough job of publicizing the election.
4. 4)Throngs of Oberlin students, up until now, could not have cared less about Senate. Hence, student participation could be a derivative of the hard work and organization of last semester's group of Senators.
5. 5)The actual elections were held exclusively on email. Gone forever are the bothersome paper ballots.
6. 6) The debate helped flesh-out candidate's ideas. This helped create candidate's platforms and provided many voters with information and perspectives that would have otherwise gone unknown.

In the political realm, even a student political realm, greater voter participation means greater Senate expectations. Now that there are actual informed voting constituents to whom Senators are accountable, there must also be more pressure from students urging Senate to up the ante and represent.

Animal rights, a lesson in coalescing

Oberlin is a place with many "issues." Ask the woman brushing her teeth next to you tomorrow morning what she thinks about vivisection, and she'll probably spit the toothpaste out of her mouth and tell you.

Every year there is the perfunctory neuroscience faculty-vs.-OAR debate, usually during the one of the intro.- level labs, while nervous neuroscience students wait in the classroom. After that, three or four letters to the editor crop up, explaining why we can't live with - or without - animal testing. Last year, there was the guy wearing the white fruit-of-the-loom t-shirt proclaiming "I'm hunger striking to protest vivisection." Of course, we can't overlook the students that swung and hung off Mudd last semester.

So, a semesterly debate and a sit-in or two later, where are we? Is it time to take all these questions animal use and animal rights to some new, wider, more "all-campus mailing" type level?

That's what the neuroscientists - budding and professional - and members of OAR thought. These two groups worked together, coalesced, in Obie-speak, bringing three pairs of speakers to Oberlin College to debate the animal use issue on various grounds. Culminating in a panel discussion Tuesday night, this was a conference that was long in coming.

It's much easier to talk at each other than to legitimately try to increase our boundaries of understanding. Brave activists and scientists tried to begin scaffolding a bridge that might let them get close enough to actually speak to each other instead of shouting.

Other polarized groups on campus can and should benefit from this example of "intelligent discourse." This is what many of us expected when we signed on the dotted line to enroll here. As the conference this week confirms, real learning is possible when we transcend our bickering long enough to acknowledge that we need to talk and listen.