OCREECAS opens the door to Russia and Asia

by Adam Kowit

The new Oberlin Center for Russian, East European and Central Asian studies (OCREECAS) is now ready for business. Funded by a $750,000 endowment from Edith Clowes, OC '73 and the Clowes Fund, the center will provide students and graduates with community-based internships and careers abroad, and bring foreign scholars, artists and writers to Oberlin.

Tim Scholl, the center's first director and an associate professor of Russian, sees the center as an appropriate and timely move for the college.

"We have an astonishing array of people here involved in Russian studies, covering sociology, political science, language, literature and history. In the French department, Viktoria Skrupskelis is a specialist in Lithuanian poetry, and Laszlow Scholz spends half of each year in Budapest," he said.

William Hood, art professor and chair of the art department, agrees. "The establishment of the center demonstrates the college's wise perception of the future of this country: that it's deeply involved in central Asia and eastern Europe," he said. "The extraordinary cultural wisdom that has been generated in that part of the world is at last available to the west."

The center aims to get students more closely in touch with post-Soviet communities by providing locally-based volunteer and service opportunities, rather than ones run by foreign organizations like the U.N. or the Red Cross. During winter term, the OCREECAS will pay to send two to three students to work at an orphanage in Russia. "You can't imagine what a horrifying place a Russian orphanage is," said Scholl. "They are very lonely."

"I think it will be really great once they get it worked out," said Oberlin senior Wesley Steele, a Russian language major. "Not knowing what to do with my Russian concerns me. I want to live abroad but don't know how to pay for airfare and food. The center is going to provide incredible opportunities for students to find Russian internships. They will be able to choose something off the beaten path instead of at a place like St. Petersburg or Moscow."

OCREECAS will benefit the larger Oberlin community as well by facilitating interdisciplinary programs. "The on-campus part of the program is aimed at non-Russian majors," said Scholl. "They may be interested in Russian economics or may want to take a course with a Russian writer-in-residence. A course by someone from Latvia coming to talk about democratization would be aimed at the general Oberlin population."