In the world of Oberlin, there is high culture in the form of concerts, recitals, exhibits and plays, most of which can be read about every week in these very pages. Which brings me to my next point. At the opposite of all this high culture, there is the Review, the bastien of everything low brow here in Oberlin.
To quote myself, if it's not too much to swallow, two issues ago I called this paper the most public forum on campus. Which it is. The Review is everything the Conservatory, the art department, the dance department, and even the Voice are not. It is the one thing on campus about which every member of the community is allowed, and expected to, have an opinion. The Review is ubiquitous. One can lament the fact that art classes are over-crowded, that the Women's Studies faculty is too small. But only, presumably, if one knows from whence they speak. Whereas biology majors from New Mexico and cello majors from Connecticut can both agree: the Review sucks.
At least, this seems to be the consensus. Every week, all three of the people who have actually read that week's issue hunt me down to tell me how the Review is obviously written and published by morons. And everyone else agrees after reading Security Notebook aloud over dinner at Stevenson. Not that I'm bitter. Not that we here at the Review feel underappreciated or anything.
But seriously, I have heard people say that the Review reflects the predominant conservatism of this campus. What? Excuse me? A campus that's willing to shell out to bring Karen Finley, conservative? I have the luxury of being able to tear apart her performance in Hall last week because her feminist politics are outdated. I imagine her at a more conservative institution facing protests and booing, not for reasons of aesthetics, but for politics. Oberlin students are so entrenched in their liberalism that they've ended up as conservatives. If one writes a story in the Review which is not overt pro-union propaganda, then the Review must take the blame for being at least as conservative as, say, Pat Buchanan.
But those are the breaks when you're just pop culture. You lose your ability to self-identify since everyone around you attatches their own adjectives instead. You become an entity that can be deconstructed and analysed independenlty of whatever your own intentions may be.
On a campus which seems to take the New York Times as gospel-how many people a day can you spot lugging that enormous rag to class?-one might have hoped our college audience would have a more sophisticated understanding of what a newspaper is. For the Review is everything that the Times is, with respect to this community, and I would argue that people who don't read the Review are the worse off for it, whereas people who don't read the Times can get by on snippets from NPR and conversations overheard in politics classes.
The Review is pop culture because it's something everyone can refer to, like Madonna, or the Pope. Everyone has their opinions about those two. But no one can quite agree on what they want from the Review. Publicity people from plays and dance companies are constantly calling and asking us to come see their productions, then lamenting our serious appraisals of their work. Campus activists request coverage but when we fail to accept their one-sided take on the issues they cry foul. Do people want honest, constructive criticism, or do they want feel-good, thoughtless praise in print? Do readers want the Review to be an intelligent paper? Are we one?
The Review is a serious institution, and therefore by definition a conservative one. We support certain standards of reporting and expression and are therefore supporting the status quo. But that means we're responsible. If we failed to maintain these standards, we'd be publishing poetry, like the Voice, if we published at all.
Again, I'm speaking as a Review staffer, but I feel confident in saying we're one of the most thoughtful entities on campus. Staffers genuinely torture over every decision, every word. The editors and writers, photographers and designers of this publication care about creating an intelligent publication, and no one could point out the flaws in this paper more readily than any of this staff.
The fact is that we are the only form of campus discourse readily available to students, faculty and staff and that's why we're held to such high standards. We need to please lots of people every week, and it's simply not possible.
So love us or leave us, we're the Review.
Copyright © 1998, The Oberlin Review.
Volume 127, Number 12, December 11, 1998
Contact us with your comments and suggestions.