Students
Neglected in MRC Reorganization
This
past week the campus has seen a major uproar in regards to the proposed
cutting of the intern positions in the Multicultural Resource Center.
The Administration has backpedaled a little by saying that the positions
will not be cut for at least another year, but this move further
highlights the problems of the original decision.
To be sure, the College is facing a very dire financial situation,
as noted in this weeks issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education,
and some measures must be taken to remedy the situation. However,
the postponement of the dissolution of the MRC intern positions
reveals that the move was more of a choice of priority rather than
necessity. There is probably no physical list of actual priorities
of the Administration, but if there were, one wonders where fostering
multicultural communities would be placed on that list. Would it
be given a level of priority based on what the College says about
their devotion to the issue, or a priority more in line with the
decisions they make that actually affect multiculturalism on this
campus?
Or perhaps the Administration was simply bowing to student pressure
when it delayed cutting the intern positions from the MRC. The College
has to make structural changes to streamline finances in order to
try to deal with the multi million dollar deficit, and indeed getting
rid of interns is probably good in several ways since their short
stay at Oberlin could potentially sidetrack the continuity of planning
and resources. However, the interns especially in the MRC
cannot simply be cut. New positions must be created to fill
the roles that the interns did, and these roles cannot be fulfilled
by adding a new position or two in their places. The four MRC interns
serve a unique position as facilitators of Africana, Asian-Pacific,
Latino and LGBT communities respectively, and to assume that one
person could effectively serve more than one of these communities
simultaneously shows a misunderstanding of what these positions
are designed to accomplish and who they are designed to serve. The
students that rely on the MRC for support should be involved in
the planning discussions for what is to come next.
Although sometimes regarded as weak and ineffectual, in a letter
to this weeks Review, Student Senate (see page 11) points
out the harm caused by excluding students from such processes and
asserts the right of the student body to have representatives at
future meetings on this issue. The letter from Senate begins by
focusing on the MRC and the specific lack of queer students and
students of color in the discussion about the staffing changes at
the MRC, and continues to comment on some of the groups affected
by the budget cuts that have seemingly been ignored, such as the
athletics department.
The reality of the situation at hand is that the College is facing
greater financial troubles than it has in the past five years, and
that in order to control the growing deficit, cuts are going to
have to be made that affect all students on this campus. The MRC
may be disproportionately affected, as it is staffed mainly by interns,
but calls for additions of more staff in addition to the retention
of the intern positions are simply unrealistic, and other affected
areas must not be overlooked. Losses caused by budget cuts will
be hard pills to swallow, and the Administration is not sugar coating
the situation at the moment. Once again a situation has presented
itself where basic communication with students prior to the decision-making
had taken place, the Administration could have saved itself some
serious headache.
But perhaps the most disturbing point in the whole situation is
that the director of the MRC Rachel Beverly, an Assistant
Dean was not consulted in the staffing decision, and learned
of the situation second-hand from students. First and foremost,
before the College can even think about beginning a campus dialogue
on multicultualism (or anything else for that matter) it must get
its own communication and decision-making systems in order.
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