The Oberlin Student Cooperative Association's (OSCA) contract with the College will be up for its traditional three-year renewal next summer.
Beginning Monday, a team of OSCA's executive board members and members of the College's Residential Life and Services department will meet throughout the school year in an attempt to facilitate speedy negotiations.
"I think the last contract was signed during finals weekend. We want to be more organized than that," Tracy Murry, area coordinator of all the co-ops, said.
"Right now we're just doing preliminary work, discussing issues we want to see addressed. We want to be done by the end of the Spring semester," Murry added.
A new personal port registration system was established this summer in an effort to give students easier access to ResNet, the campus-wide network.
"We've actually made port registration better by not having a human involved in the registration system. Students can now step up to the web page and register their own ports. In my perspective, this system has far more pluses than minuses," Director of Computing John Bucher said.
While only 600 people were connected to ResNet from personal ports during all of last year, more than that have already registered their ports in the past few weeks. Bucher expects 800 more students to follow suit over the next few days.
Though some students did lodge complaints about the period of delay between the time they registered their computers and the time they could connect to the network from their dorm rooms, Bucher attributed this to a lack of understanding of the system.
"Students must understand that as long as we need to find out who's assigned to what port, there will always be some delay necessarily involved. Not everyone can register during the first week of school; instead, it may take two to three weeks. Next year, we're hoping to make it even easier-hopefully, we can turn on ports even more automatically than this year," he said.
Students were required to give information about their computer and their port on ResNet's web page and wait one business day for their room ports to be registered.
Think one person can change a viewbook? Al Moran doesn't.
Moran, vice president of the Office of College Relations, said the College is about to begin working with an outside company to reassess the school's external publications.
"It's time to take a look at all our publications," said President of the College Nancy Dye. Dye said if publications aren't periodically examined, small things like students' clothes will begin to look outdated.
"We may keep things, we may just tweak things," Moran said. "We're not committed to turning everything upside-down."
Surveys will be conducted both on- and off-campus to determine directions for the viewbook.
"What we feel here may not be the same as students in Columbus or students in Timbuktu," Moran said.
The company charged with helping to develop publications will meet with students and faculty.
Copyright © 1997, The Oberlin Review.
Volume 126, Number 2, September 12, 1997
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