Last Friday, the Review staff missed deadline by a remarkable seven hours. As most Review-readers noticed, the Review was absent from dining halls and the mail room at our regular 5 p.m. distribution time. When we were finally able to go to press Monday morning (which was the next available press time once we had missed our regular Friday time), we stated "technical difficulties" and "computer problems" as our reason for delay.
However, in the three days that we were missing from your daily routine, numerous rumors and reasons were generated as to why we didn't go to press on Friday as normal. The most common of these rumors was created in the flyer entitled "The Real Story." Here, we found a great tale that the administration had called for a media blackout and had prohibited us in some miraculous way from printing a paper at all - let alone anything about the student protest at Cox the day before.
In actuality, we were ready to go to press and had what I thought was going to be one of our best issues of the year. The so-called media blackout was not administration-related in any way, but rather a freak technological mishap which devastated us.
The Review is fortunate enough to run our own server. It's a new Macintosh G3 running AppleShare IP 6.0 right here in our office. Once in a great while, the server will crash (it is a Mac, after all). At approximately 6:30 a.m., the power in the Burton basement did one of those on-and-then-off-and-then-on things. A unanimous moan was released from all of us at our 13 computer terminals and our computers shut down. Our server, however, is thankfully on an APC power conditioner and kept right on chugging. Our layouts and stories, on the other hand, had to be rebuilt from the last time the user had saved.
We recovered from this minor setback and then our real problem made itself known. At 9:32 a.m. Friday morning, our server crashed. In about 30 seconds, each one of our terminals lost their network connection and froze. So, as we normally do when our server freezes, we restarted it and expected to have to rebuild and move on. This time, however, it was different. Upon rebooting our server, the unwelcome error appeared. "This disk is unreadable by this Macintosh. Would you like to initialize the disk?"
"No, I wouldn't," I said. Realizing that this was looking bad, I embarked on a four-hour journey to save the issue that we had spent all week working on. Our two 4.5 gigabyte drives are mirrored. This means that while it looks like we save to one drive, the server actually saves to two. In the event of one drive failing, you should be able to rebuild the failed drive from the mirrored drive. I tried this, but our mirrored drive was gone too. I talked to five people in the computing center and spent a few hours on the phone with Apple's G3 Server guy, and the best thing they could tell me was, "My, you're really in a pickle."
The next line of defense was to call in our computer manager John Matney. John also works in Networking at the Computing Center and is truly one with the Mac. Again, we came up dry. At 1:23 p.m., we knew it wasn't coming back. No person, no software, no ultimate computer knowledge was going to bring our issue back to us. It was gone.
In our state of growing delirium and now an hour and a half after our deadline, we began to try to put an abridged issue together. While we had lost every story, layout and photo, we sat down and tried to pull what we could together. We shrank from our planned 28 pages to 20. Using layouts that had been printed for editing before 9:30 a.m., we tried to fix what we could and make an issue from draft copies of pages. We rescanned negatives to get some photos back. We called writers to see if they could bring us their disks again to retrieve unedited versions of stories. We re-wrote some stories from memory and quotes we had on paper.
In the next five hours, our staff worked very hard to make this past issue come out at all. Never in known Review history had we not published. Never since when we began doing layout on the computer in 1992 had the server crashed and an issue disappeared. Going back to the basics, we did layout with an exacto-knife and wax. We fixed page numbers by printing out the numbers and physically cutting and pasting the numbers onto the pages. A test of our old-school layout abilities, no doubt.
And by 6:30 Friday night, we had an issue. A brief, incomplete issue full of typos, but it was all we could do to get that far. We apologize for missed coverage or poor writing or layout, but we felt it was better than not printing at all. Some news is better than no news.
In the days since, our staff has dedicated numerous hours to rebuilding our records. We lost all of our layout templates, our advertising and billing database, our subscriptions database, our budget breakdown - everything, right down to our writer contact lists and the past two issues of the Review. Additionally, we have restructured our server so that a similar crash wouldn't do such widespread damage to our records and we have tried to allocate funds for a feasible back-up system.
While we are funded by the College through the Student Finance Committee and we do have a faculty adviser, we are in no way controlled by the College or the administration. We interview them on a weekly basis for stories, but in no way are we influenced or controlled by them. Our adviser is there when we need her, but leaves us to our own devices otherwise. We get into trouble on our own, spend money on our own, and make decisions all on our own. We are a student paper. We do our best to represent as equally as we can the student body, the administration, faculty and staff and the Oberlin community that we are a part of.
What happened to the Review last Friday was not a media blackout inspired by the administration. A staff of over 30 would never let go of a 28 page issue two-and-a-half hours before deadline for anyone. We put too much of ourselves into each page to let something like that happen to us. Our efforts Friday afternoon and since prove our desire to print and get the news out to the community.
For those of you who somehow haven't heard the news, there are a few things you should know about the Review.
Every week Al Moran, vice president of college relations, comes down to check our issue before we go to press, just to make sure nothing we print will tarnish the College's image.
We also have "exclusive access" to President Dye each week. No one is really sure what "exclusive access" means, but it sounds serious, doesn't it?
And don't even try to write us a letter, since we only print what we like and what we agree with.
These are misperceptions I have heard many times from the mouths of students and faculty. There seems to be a general belief that the Review's integrity is somehow corrupted by the administration in a systematic way. It is hard for people to believe that the views we take (and mistakes we make) are our very own, not Nancy Dye's.
As preposterous as these assumptions are, I heard my favorite misperception this week.
In "The Real Story" - a newsletter dedicated to getting the "real story" (student protesters' story) out about the occupation of Cox last week - the (anonymous) editors pointed to the media blackout that coincided with their takeover of Cox last Thursday.
It must have been fun to make this one up. "Did you hear that the Review didn't come out this week because they are against the protest?" "Yeah, I bet that the administration told them not to publish."
But in truth this is wrong. The Review did not come out last week because we lost our computer server at 9:30 Friday morning. After about four hours spent trying to recover the data, we had to give up and start over again. We used printouts we had, rewrote some articles and finished the abridged - and messier than usual - issue by Friday evening. But since we missed our print run time, we had to wait until Monday to print it.
Now I know that Hollywood movies are more fun to watch than documentaries. It is easy to know how to feel, since good and bad are so clearly dilineated. For a few hours you can forget that very little in the real world is as simple as good and bad.
In the same way it is more satisfying to assume we did not print because of a massive administrative conspiracy, rather than good old-fashioned computer problems. But sadly for those conspiracy theorists among us, Dean Koppes did not sneak into the Review and unplug our server Friday morning. He has much more important things to do.
The worst kinds of Hollywood flicks are those blockbusters that dress up in politically correct clothes. Filmmakers exploit very real issues of oppression to create dichotomies in movies, but these dichotomies are almost always far too simplistic to really capture the essence of the oppression they are discussing. Behind these films are very shallow notions about the way power is held and controlled in society.
In the same way, the student demonstrators' notions that bunch the Review, Peter Goldsmith and the administration on the side of corruption and conservatism are misguided.
The Review is clearly "bad" in the eyes of many, if not all, student activists on campus. We have historically been labeled as conservative. If conservative means we do not simply accept the propaganda thrust at us by protesters as truth, I will gladly admit we are conservative. But I'm not sure that conservative is the best word in this case. As a newspaper, we try to ask important questions and understand both sides of an issue. To me this is not conservative; it is simply responsible.
As I have met with administrators this week, several have asked me what I think really led to the protest. I think there is clearly mistrust between students and the administration, and some blame needs to fall on administrators. The administration needs to wake up and take actions that actually mean something to students. Honesty and openness need to replace canned all-campus mailings and administrative rhetoric.
But I also think that if students stopped thinking Oberlin is the setting for the next Hollywood blockbuster, some of this mistrust might be eliminated. Students here want to assume that Cox is the pentagon and the Review is Dateline. Unfortunately for them, this isn't the case.
I understand it is easier to stand up for something when you feel that you have real, concrete enemies. At Oberlin, Cox is a convenient target, as is the Review. But decisions at Oberlin are made all over campus, and power exists in everyone. It is easy to become a senator, it is easy to be named to an administrative committee, it is easy to become active in OSCA or student organizations. Oberlin is hungry for real, responsible, smart student leadership. There is a lot of power available to students if they would just take it.
Copyright © 1999, The Oberlin Review.
Volume 127, Number 21, April 9, 1999
Contact us with your comments and suggestions.