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Ted Morgan
Belated thanks to Steve Katz for posting RIchard Spear's remarks on Oberlin's "evisceration" of the Finney Compact and the lead role of the faculty in College governance. I couldn't agree more with Professor Spear. [Interesting that he began his Oberlin career the same year we did.] That was a fundamental step in the increasingly market-driven corporatization of Oberlin.
As Peter Griswold notes Oberlin is changing with the times; indeed higher education has been increasingly market driven and corporatized for years. The problem, in my view, is that this exactly what today's world does NOT need --more the opposite of this: visonary, creative, critical-thinking, activist graduates seeking a much more democratic, just, and sustainable world. This is what I remember and value most about the Oberlin we have known. My Oberlin education --within and outside of the curriculum-- was a crucial piece of what has made me an informed critic of an increasingly capitalist, militarized, and unsustainable world
As Professor Spear noted Oberlin was a top liberal arts college in the nation when he arrived in 1964, and it has declined fairly precipitously since then, in part because of the shift of many liberal arts institutions to co-education. I've always felt there was something unique about Oberlin, and I suspect it had a lot to do with the kind of students it attracted --questioning, challenging, creative students imbued with a democratic spirit--and faculty drawn to teaching that kind of students. Arguably the degree of faculty-led governance at Oberlin was part of its uniqueness.
I wonder today how much of that uniqueness still survives at Oberlin. I'd be interested in how much the reunion attenders may have perceived these qualities in today's students and faculty, to the degree that you interacted with them.
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