Jazz petitioners meet with Con administrators

Students upset about preceived lack of support for Jazz Studies

After circulating a petition to demand that the school make Hales gym the permanent and dedicated center for Jazz Studies at Oberlin, students have begun to meet with administrators about the issue.

Following a meeting with Dean of the Conservatory Karen Wolff, Conservatory senior Micha Patri, who initiated the petition, "realized that this is not going to be easy."

Though the jazz students have regained 24-hour-a-day, seven days a week access to the building, they have yet to achieve some of their other major goals.

Patri and Conservatory junior Burny Pelsmajer met with Wolff last Friday to discuss the petition, signed by approximately 250 individuals, with demands that range from repairing Hales' roof rain gutter to adding removable soundproofing to studio windows.

Assistant Dean of the Conservatory John Jacobson, prior to the announcement of his resignation last week, had told Patri that winter term would be a convenient time to put new carpeting in some of the studios, another one of the petition's requests. A primary concern for Patri is that the installation still occurs.

In an interview earlier this week, Wolff said, "Jacobson met with students. Some of the things are beyond the purview of the Conservatory. He was able to resolve what he could."

"We met with Wolff and she doesn't support all the renovations of Hales because she wants to put money behind a whole new recital hall and a new building that would include the recital hall," Patri said.

Patri and other jazz students want to maintain Hales exclusively for jazz.

"I don't care what she says; I don't feel like she supports us," he said.

Additionally, according to Patri, Wolff believes that petitioning should have been the faculty's role instead of the students', with which he disagrees since students are the ones using Hales as a practice facility and paying tuition.

Patri objects to what he said was Wolff's feeling that Hales is an inconvenient location for rehearsal. Patri said Wolff discussed converting the basement of South Hall to practice areas for Conservatory students. "She keeps trying to take the issue away from Hales," Patri said.

"We have everything we need in terms of instruments at Hales and in fact prefer to rehearse at Hales," he said. "We're sticking with Hales because [Chair of the Jazz Studies Department] Wendell Logan first opened Hales as separate from the Conservatory."

Patri said he and Jacobson have already sound proofed his own practice area.

"This clearly is a situation that needs tending," President of the College Nancy Dye said. "It's fallen through some cracks, given that the College has very little money for programmatic improvements. But we will attend to it. It's something to think about for all of Hales."

Wolff said, "I have agreed to talk this over with the President. I'll talk with her sometime after Thanksgiving."

Wolff is out of town and could not be reached for comment in response to Patri's complaints.

Patri is now writing separate letters to both Jacobson and Wolff to address his grievances. He also hopes to see a meeting after Thanksgiving between Jacobson, Wolff, Logan, Dye and jazz student representatives to "decide on long-term planning."

"I hope that happens," he said.