To the Editors:

We are writing this letter to express our concern about a faculty member: Davida Gavioli. She is currently serving as the Italian professor, and has spent several spring Semesters teaching the methods course for Comparative literature. We understand that, due to visa problems, she must spend the next two years back in Italy. We also understand that there is not anything that Oberlin can do to keep this from happening. What we would like to do with this letter is to make it clear that current and former students feel that her contributions to the Italian and Comparative Literature departments are crucial and that we would like to see her rehired in two years.

Oberlin will always have a need and a demand for Italian. To prepare for future opera careers, students of voice must have a workable knowledge of German, French and Italian. In addition to this interest from the Conservatory, the college consistently has a group of people interested in learning Italian, and proceeding with it to levels beyond the Beginning Italian offered. With the necessity of this department clear, we would like to make a suggestion about what to do for the next two years.

In the German department and the two other Romance languages an instructor from the country is hired on a temporary basis to teach beginning classes or to lead discussion groups. It is our belief that a similar person could be found to serve Ms. Gavioli's function in her absence. This could be done at a much less significant cost than hiring a full-time Ph.D professor. By hiring someone from Italy on a temporary basis, the needs of both the student and the college could be met.

The current CompLit program boasts about twenty majors. Those students need to have a methods course.To deprive them of this opportunity is clearly to put them a severe disadvantage. Our suggestion for the problem of a methods course in Ms. Gavioli's abscence is to hire an ABD from Cleveland to cover two semesters worth of methods. This would he much easier and cheaper than a full-time Complit professor.

The students in this department deserve a Ph.D professor. Without someone to teach the crucial methods course, or to serve as an advisor with extensive knowledge in the field, the department is incomplete. It is our sincere hope that the needs of the students within the Comparative Literature department will not he overlooked. For the past four or five years, we have had that. That Ms. Gavioli also functions as an Italian professor is an unusual but fortunate combination.

Ms. Gavioli clearly provides two services in addition to her time spent as Director at the Language Lab, and we would like to emphasis the good fortune of both the College and the students at having found such a powerful resource. We would like to thank you for giving Ms. Gavioli the time she has already spent at Oberlin. With this letter we hope to make it clear that we, the students, want to see Ms. Gavioli rehired at the end of her two year stay back in Italy.

Most importantly, we feel that Ms. Gavioli's willingness to support and advise her students goes far beyond the basic requirements of being a professor. She has consistently shown her commitment to students especially those in the CompLit department who have very few resources to turn to. We understand that other people can he found to teach the methods course and Italian but we would like to make it clearly known that we find Ms. Gavioli to possess qualifications that extend past the boundaries of CompLit and Italian.

It would be hard to find someone else who could bridge these two fields as readily as Ms. Gavioli. We also feel that to deprive the already small CompLit major of a Crucial resource would he unfair to the students already within the program.

-Ingrid Peterson, College junior

-Jenny Morse, College senior

Mardi Gras in Oberlin? A perfect WT

To the Editors:

Regarding Amy Widestrom's article in the Oct. 30 issue, I was happy to see that Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys played a gig in Oberlin. I wish I could have been there. Was anyone cajun dancing? Mamou is only 24 miles from Oberlin-Louisiana, that is. Oberlin, LA was founded in the late 1890s by farmers, pioneers, missionaries, students or people of some sort from Oberlin, OH. They even tried to found a college on the rice-growing prairie. The ruins are on the outskirts of town.

I went to Oberlin for Mardi Gras ten years ago. I heard farmers speaking French on the post office steps. I stayed at Madame Richard's (ree-SHAR's) bed-and-breakfast with a portrait of Napoleon in the upstairs hall. Louisiana was waiting for him, you know. He went to Elba instead, or was it St. Helena?

Mardi Gras in Oberlin is a horseback affair for whites and a pedestrian and a pedestrian and car affair for blacks. The idea is to get drunk; dress in medieval costumes; play darkly modal music on accordion, fiddle, and triangle; scrounge groceries from farmers, town merchants, and neighbors; fix gumbo; and have a dance at night. Sadly, it's a completely segregated business, whether by tradition or preference (whose preference?), if no longer by law.

I went to both dances. The black zydeco was better by far- a locomotive rhythm that rocked the small dance hall outside of town, somewhere on the road to Mamou. The deputy sheriff (Mrs. Richard's brother-in-law and I were the only whites present. I tried to sit inconspicuously in the corner, but some ladies asked me to dance. When I left, the deputy made sure I got to my car OK. I didn't feel in any danger, only disappointed that such is life in Southern Louisiana.

Attention musicology anthropology, history, African-American studies, French, and sociology majors Winter Term project, anyone?

-Eric B. Nye OC'70 German major