Drag Ball Dialogues

It seems every year around Drag Ball time there are debates about something or other. This year the theme of those debates seems to be who has a place at Drag Ball.
This year there are only 100 tickets set aside for people not affiliated with Oberlin College. This limitation comes after a long debate process between the Administration and the Drag Ball committee. The Administration hoped to decrease security risks by allowing fewer “voyeurs, gawkers and people that simply believe that it is a whopping good party” (Dean of Students Peter Goldsmith, see article page 3) into the event. While it is a good idea to restrict access to those who don’t respect the intentions of the event, limiting access through the strict control of tickets also restricts “a really vibrant non-college participation that has come and has been welcomed and have been vital members of evening” (Assistant Director of the Student Union Chris Baymiller, see article page 3). Unfortunately, this approach is too practical and in the end doesn’t restrict access on a basis of respect, but rather on punctuality. If all the gawkers buy tickets before the drag queens, nothing has been accomplished to promote a better event.
Concurrently, posters sponsored by the LGBTU have addressed the issue of who should be at Drag Ball in a different way, by addressing the original aims of the event (i.e. to promote awareness of drag and transgender issues). However, these posters can exert no control over who actually attends the event, no matter how good of a point they make. It doesn’t seem quite right that people in skimpy clothing should outnumber people in drag at a Drag Ball, but that has been the case in the past couple of years, and will probably be the case again on Saturday.
Ultimately there is no way to please everybody on this issue, which is not entirely a bad thing because you can learn more about yourself from being uncomfortable than from being comfortable with an issue. Drag Ball will continue year after year, and with it will come debates and dialogue about gender and stereotypes.

Housing Hassles

The College’s lottery system has determined off campus status for more than a decade, but as enrollment has been high over the past few years, there has been little trouble for juniors to get out of the dorms. ResLife has always warned that off campus status was not automatically granted, however, until this year there has been little controversy.
“This past year because of a whole series of factors we had more empty beds than was fiscally responsible and an unusual large number of juniors who chose off-campus and an unusual number of students who elected to go on leave after signing rooms. This is the first year in over two decades when beds were left empty,” Dean of Students Peter Goldsmith said (see article page 1).
Community is the big word on campus, and is part of the heart of the housing debates at hand. If community is so important, then why do students want to live off-campus? There are currently more than 900 Oberlin students who live off-campus, and most of them are effectively cut off from the Oberlin community in major ways; certainly they don’t interact with or provide models of behavior for underclassmen in the same way they would if they remained campus residents.
The appeal of a space of one’s own outside of the campus, particulary in a small place like Oberlin, is clear. However, our actions as students in this particular arena have deep and lasting effects in the Oberlin community. Student sprawl into the Oberlin community increases the number of high-turnover rental properties — half of the housing stock in Oberlin is now renter-occupied — and it’s much more profitable to stuff four students into a single-family house at $300 a month than one family at $600 a month. Additionally, students demand less of their housing stock in terms of quality, and so many landlords put little in the way of maintenance into their student-rented properties, further driving down property values in student-occupied neighborhoods. For Oberlin residents, students are lousy neighbors in more ways than just the rusty bikes and beer cans on the lawns.
Putting more students back into the dorms is better for the Oberlin community as a whole in the long run. However, for students to accept this, the College must consider broadening the kinds of on-campus options to include more independent settings. Opening up a refurbished Firelands and other alternative residencies is a great start. Just as needed is implementation of further measures to assure that rising juniors who are denied off-campus housing requests get the best possible options for living arrangements.

April 5
April 12

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