Associate Dean of Residential Student Life and Services Deborah McNish, was forced to resign - by administrators, not students. The administration neglected to include students in the decision to dismiss McNish, making students' involvement in hiring professors or administrators absolutely worthless. McNish's forced resignation shines light on the fact that student power in the administration is at the mercy of the administration itself - amounting to little or no power at all for the student body.
Oberlin administrators pride themselves on the notion that students are involved in all levels of administration. We have students in charge of dorm halls. We have students on the judiciary board. We have students running a government that oversees student organizations as well as decisions made by administrators and faculty members. We have student assistants to the dean, associate dean and president of the college. We have students on search committees that hire professors, deans, associate deans, etc. We have students working on all levels, but any power they are given is limited, very limited.
Students asked to serve on search committees share a power like administrators in the process of hiring a faculty member or an administrator to the College. These students are trusted to make powerful and influential decisions that affect the student body, faculty members and the administration. But when it comes to trusting students with the decision to fire or force a resignation out of an administrator or a professor, administrators choose to trust themselves with that decision. So why don't students question why they are trusted in the process of hiring administrators or professors when they are not trusted in the process of getting rid of them?
Whether students agree with the administration's decision to force a resignation out of McNish, it doesn't matter because they weren't asked to help make that decision in the first place. If administrators choose to include students in the hiring process of the next associate dean of residential student life and services or any other administrator or professor, they should seriously consider and contemplate sharing that same trust and power in a different context - their potential dismissal from the College.
Oberlin College spent the summer dishing out lots of money. It gave the Co-op bookstore a $40,000 loan which enabled them to buy textbooks and donated $225,000 to Oberlin Fire Department. A donation of $225,000 sounds absurd, especially considering the fact that it only covers a third of the cost of a new fire truck. But the reality is that most of the alarms the Fire Department responds to are those of Oberlin College. Also, the College has tax-exempt status and doesn't support the Fire Departments as do many other Oberlin businesses and taxpayers.
The Co-op situation is a whole lot trickier. While much of the Co-op's trouble is laced within its inability to sustain growth as it proposed to do in 1993, another problem is student theft and the accompanying complete neglect of cooperative principles.
Oberlin students, quick to find victim status around every corner, have made it clear that the Co-ops prices are too expensive. Cooperative bookstores can't thrive while losing $80,000 to theft. And now, the problem is cyclical. Shoplifting leads to increased prices, which leads to students feeling justified in their theft, which leads to more theft, which leads to unpaid bills, which leads to the college bailing out the Co-op with a $40,000 loan.
The Co-op represents tradition and people working together in a noncompetitive environment. It's one of those last vestiges of idealistic grassroots bookstores in the era of big business vs. local cooperative ethics. Despite these assumptions, the Co-op might be on its last legs due to bad economic decisions and because Oberlin students aren't ready to be part of a Co-op bookstore. How many of us are part of the cooperative mechanism that runs the bookstore? How many know how a cooperative bookstore works? How many care?
We complain about high prices. We complain about being watched too closely. So maybe security cameras are the route to go. But if the Co-op invested in security cameras, how could it legitimize its cooperative stance? A donation of $40,000 exemplifies the Colleges' commitment to the Co-op tradition. If students can't make a smidgen of a similar commitment, it's time to say good-bye to the Co-op.
Copyright © 1997, The Oberlin Review.
Volume 126, Number 1, September 5, 1997
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