Oberlin Online Censors Faculty
Perspectives Essay
by John Scofield
Professor of Physics

A couple of weeks ago I presented a paper at a professional conference. When I returned, I e-mailed the Office of Communications a short description of my presentation which I expected would be posted in the Faculty/Staff Notes on Oberlin Online. (Oberlin Online posts weekly listings of faculty and staff professional activities, in some cases describing them in considerable detail.) The note which I provided to Oberlin Online is printed below:
“On Friday, March 23, I gave a lecture at the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association’s annual Conference on Building Energy at Tufts University entitled “First Year Energy Analysis for Oberlin College’s Adam Joseph Lewis Center.” Scofield showed that the AJLC has, so far, had an annual energy use of about 200,000 kW-hr which corresponds to an annual building source energy of 150,000 Btu/sf. He compared this to 1995-96 data for 33 other Oberlin College buildings and showed that the AJLC has used slighly more source energy than the average non-residential OC building. Scofield also presented the results of his calculations for the projected energy production for the rooftop PV array and compared this with actual energy production for the last three months. His results show that it should produce about 65,000 kW-hr annually. Scofield also presented the results for DOE-2 building energy simulations for the building.” The URL for the NESEA Building Conference is www.nesea.org/buildings/index.html.
I expected that my submission, with appropriate editing for length and style would appear on Oberlin Online. A listing did appear on Monday, April 2, but I was surprised to see that only the first sentence of my description was posted on the College web site. In fact, it was impossible from any information provided on Oberlin Online to learn the key result of my study –– i.e., to know how much energy was being used by the Adam Joseph Lewis Center and how this compared to that used by other Oberlin College buildings or the amount produced by its rooftop PV-Array.
After I complained to the editor of Faculty/Staff Notes about the short listing she did add another descriptive sentence and, at my request, a hyperlink to an Adobe PDF file which contained the slides used in my presentation. But she refused to post any of the other information I had originally sent –– a site visitor would have to download and look through a 40-page presentation to find the results of my study! I would guess that only a small fraction of Oberlin Online visitors would go to this extent to retrieve the information.
It is rather disturbing to think that a faculty member can present his research at a professional conference and have his results published outside of Oberlin (I am preparing several papers, including one to appear in the proceedings of the NESEA conference) but that the final conclusion of his professional work cannot be stated on Oberlin Online. This strikes me as pure and simple censorship and it is unfortunate.