It is necessary that OSCA sees Oberlin's contract with Marriott
The word "townie" seems to connote isolation and superiority
The Review fails to live up to highest standards
OCSA needs to know how the College and Mariott (CDS) are working together. Unfortunately, their contract is "confidential," meaning that students cannot see it. This is important, as OSCA and the College are in the midst of negotiating a rent contract which will allow the co-ops to operate for the next three years. OSCA has existed as a student-run organization for the last 48 years, and is today one of the largest, strongest, most self-run and democratic student cooperatives in the nation. The College is proposing to change OSCA in fundamental ways, claiming that their legal liability demands less co-op autonomy. The OSCA rent contract negotiating team (some gang members and our paid staff, Iris and Michael), however, believes that OSCA should continue running the way it has since 1950 - thus preserving opportunities for students to learn about how to run their own democratic cooperative.
Our negotiations demand OSCA knowing the details of the College's relationship with Mariott, which provides the cafeteria alternative to OSCA. There are differences; the College has a "management agreement" with Mariott, while for the last 50 years OSCA has been renting its buildings from the College, giving us much more autonomy. By the same token, the College pays Mariott to provide dining for about 2,000 students, while OSCA pays the College about $1 million a year out of board bills under the current contract to do the same for it When Steen xt year, virtually no one will be eating off-board. Everyone will either be members of OSCA, which provides housing and dining to students at cost, or eating in CDS. For better or worse, CDS is a central part of campus life. As students, we all need to know, among other things, how much Mariott is getting paid to provide meals to students. In order to negotiate our contract with the College, OSCA needs to see Oberlin's contract with Mariott. It's pretty important that everyone else is able to see it, too.
Reading the Perspectives page in the review last week, which solicited opinions from both students and townspeople on whether the gym should be open to Oberlin kids, I noticed that several of the students referred to people who live in the City of Oberlin as 'townies. I don't know if this is something I would have noticed if the quotes it was included in hadn't been side by side with quotes from residents of the city. I was surprised and embarassed to see it on the same page with the resident's perspectives - 'townie' is a word I would never use if I thought someone who lived in the city would hear me, probably because none of the residents quoted used it to refer to themselves. It's a word we use certainly not because of its accuracy and truthfulness (otherwise it would be used interchangeably with resident) but because the college is isolated, so it's easy to assign residents a nickname that puts them all in one group (not us) and to continue using that name unchecked. I know most Oberlin college students are genuinely well-intentioned, and see themselves as a part of a larger community, I don't think the world is coming to an end because the word townie exists; I do think its usage gives the impression of a mentality of college isolation and superiority. It is important to think about why we're using this word and if it really is reflective of our mentality, because our mentality is reflected in the interactions we have with townspeople, and it is these interactions, however small, that give us impressions of each other which allow us to see ourselves as more of a community or less of one. So if I can be prescriptive - just think about the way you think about the city community. It can have concrete effects - both positive and negative.
I read with some interest my quotations in last issue's article on the proposed CDS changes. After a short interview I handed the reporter du jour a piece of paper which contained quotes I had written down for her. They were altered, albeit insignificantly, in the article.
The substance of the changes is of little consequence, but the implications of the Review's journalistic standards are severe. One of the inarguable tenets of print journalism is that quotation marks contain the words of the person to whom they are attributed, verbatim.
These tenets are not optional-adding to or changing the text of a quote is not an editorial privilege. I wish that this were the only error, technical or otherwise, I've ever found in the Review. When a readership grows accustomed to errors, a publication's claim to credibility is tenuous at best. Oberlin's newspaper of record, I find, often fails to live up to the high standards of the institution it purports to represent.
Copyright © 1998, The Oberlin Review.
Volume 126, Number 18, March 13, 1998
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