Last week, the Classics Department hosted the Charles Beebe Martin Classical Lectures, presented by Argyropoulos Chair of Hellenic Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara Helen Morales under the title “Art, Activism, and Ancient Fiction.”

Founded in 1927, the Martin Lectures honor former Professor of Classics Charles Beebe Martin, OC 1876. Occurring almost annually since then, they are regarded as one of the most prestigious Classical lecture series in the country. As Chair of Classics Kirk Ormand noted in his introduction to this year’s opening lecture, the series differs from most other endowed classical lectureships in that rather than being funded by a single large gift, it was funded by an extensive collection of small donations from alumni. Each year, the Martin Lectures are given by a guest lecturer on a single topic, serving as an example and learning experience for lecturers in the audience.

This year, Morales’ lectures were held Oct. 30, Oct. 31, Nov. 2, and Nov. 3. Each lecture had a distinct topic and title within the overarching theme and explored several ancient stories including some of Aesop’s fables, “Secundus the Silent Philosopher,” and “Apollonius of Tyre.” 

In the first of four lectures in the series, “Re-encountering Antiquity with Harmonia Rosales,” Morales discussed the art of contemporary Afro-Cuban, Los Angeles-based artist Harmonia Rosales. 

“[Her art] takes Renaissance artworks that feature Greek and Roman myths and history and reimagines them to tell the myths and history of the Yoruba people, who were abducted, enslaved, and trafficked from West Africa to Cuba during the Atlantic slave trade,” Morales said.

Rosales’ artworks include “White Lion,” a re-imagining of Jean François de Troy’s “The Abduction of Europa,” and “Garden of Eve,” a re-interpretation of Lawrence Alma-Tameda’s “The Roses of Heliogabalus.”

In subsequent lectures titled “Aesop, Slavery, and Queer Kinship,” “Riddles of Incest,” and “Heliodorus’ Blackness,” Morales focused on numerous literary, artistic, and political themes. It included  how both ancient and contemporary dehumanizing depictions of Aesop, who was  said to have been an enslaved Greek man in the medieval fictionalized biography The Life of Aesop. That book portrayed  conceptions of family beyond the traditional nuclear family, and images of Apollo — specifically the Apollo Belvedere — were used to support racism and white supremacy.

Morales also explored power imbalances and incest in the ancient story “Secundus the Silent Philosopher.” It’s about a young man who, in order to test whether all women can be bought, arranges to sleep with his own mother and takes a vow of silence so he can never again speak of it. These themes were also brought to light in “Appolonius of Tyre,” in which the King of Antioch rapes his daughter, leaving her only able to speak in riddles. Morales discussed other ideas as well, including ancient notions of race through the lens of Heliodorus’ “Ethiopian Tales.”

Ormand explained the considerations of the Classics department when seeking a Martin Lecturer.

“The Classics department looks for a scholar with an international reputation who is doing cutting-edge and relevant work,” Ormand wrote in an email to the Review. “In recent years we’ve also tended to look for scholars whose work is in some way interdisciplinary.”

For this year’s Classics faculty, it was Morales’ scholarship on an under-studied area of the field and her commitment to working through an activist lens that confirmed their decision.

“We were interested in Professor Morales for several reasons: her work on the ancient Greek novel, which is a genre often overlooked, as well as her general engagement with issues of equity and social justice as they relate to Classical scholarship,” Ormand wrote. 

Mildred C. Jay Professor of Medieval Art History Erik Inglis, OC ’89, who attended three of the lectures, noted the contemporary relevance of the series.

“Professor Morales’ lectures were remarkable to me in … her ability to take texts unfamiliar to me and make them urgent and interesting,” Inglis said. “I was particularly enthralled by her discussion of Heliodorus, which demonstrated that bringing contemporary questions to ancient texts is both historically responsible and intellectually generative. The enthusiastic response of the large audience confirmed Morales’ success.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why did you start working at the Review?

When I was applying to Oberlin, I first heard about The Grape and was looking for jobs there. On the class of 2023 Facebook page, I saw a posting there about a production editor job with the Review. I was like, “That looks cool — I don’t know anything about copy editing, I’m gonna apply to this.”

How has working at the Review changed your experience and perspective as an Oberlin student?

I was an Opinions Editor for a year, then I served as Editor- in-Chief for two years. If there’s been something bad to say about Oberlin, it has been said to me. Every day for the last four years, I’ve thought about the problems with this place. It can feel really hopeless. I was a tour guide, and one of the reasons I said I couldn’t do the job anymore was because when someone asked me a question about Oberlin, my job was to say, “Here’s the good stuff,” which is true, but my answers would always lean toward, “But also, Oberlin is not a diverse school, and in more than enough moments, you’re going to find yourself being alienated or feeling alone.” There’s also the side of things which have humanized the space for me, because as a reporter, I’ve had to talk to basically anyone and everyone who has ever had anything to do with this institution. I think that for all of my understanding of the ways in which I disagree with their decisions — and God knows I disagree with the various leadership of this institution — I understood where they were coming from.

What would you say are the biggest challenges you’ve faced working at the Review?

I’ll start this framing as a personal challenge. We don’t get paid very well, which means that not only is your day-to-day tougher, but also the amount of work that each of us are putting into this is significantly more than we are paid for. As Opinions Editor, I was working a 25-hour week; as EIC, I worked 40 hours every week for two years. I think that becomes really disheartening and makes it difficult to justify to myself why I am doing this job. I think my second challenge as Editor-In-Chief is trying to push my team and feeling anger when something isn’t the way that I wanted it to be, and having to come to terms with the fact that we are doing the best we can given that our circumstances are not ideal. I think it was simultaneously learning how to work better with my team, but also learning how to better work myself and reorient. It’s constantly been that back-and-forth in myself, of what I am setting as my expectations and how much I can commit to get to that point.

If you could change one thing at Oberlin, what would it be?

I would make it so that people ask themselves why they’re doing what they’re doing more often. For instance, when faculty were protesting not having sufficient pay in the spring of 2022, I was upset that students were in that space talking about student pay because while both need to be addressed, they’re tied to different issues. Student pay could definitely be better, it could always be better, but the reasons for our problems are not tied. So I was upset that people were like, “Hey, it’s all pay. Let’s take over this faculty protest and make it about students.” Yes, it’s important to ask that, but why are you asking that now? I would just make sure that every time someone was about to do something, a little voice in their head went, “Why am I doing this?”

What is your favorite Review memory?

In March of 2020, the Review didn’t know what was going to happen. We knew that we’d have to keep reporting, but we didnʼt know if we’d be able to keep producing a paper. Instead of having an end-of-spring-semester farewell for seniors, we had it in March. That night ended up being one of the last times that we, in my first year at the Review, were all together. We had a really great time in the office, and then we all went to Nathan [Carpenter, OC ’20]’s house and sat on his patio for several hours. Then we went to Catrina’s, the last time I went, since it’s shut down. We just goofed around. It was the last time I saw a lot of these people. It’s a bittersweet memory, but it’s also one of my favorite moments because I felt part of something, and that’s when I knew that I’d stick it out with the Review.

Who at Oberlin do you want to thank?

I want to start with former Production Manager Devyn Malouf, OC ’20, for hiring me at the Review and for being incredibly supportive and just a great friend. Nathan and Katherine [MacPhail, OC ’21] as my first two Editors-in-Chief. They’ve both been an incredible part of my life; they’re both very good friends and they continue to provide me with advice and counsel. Kate Fishman, OC ’21, who was Managing Editor and was a pretty big supporter of my time as Opinions Editor. I didn’t get to know Anisa [Curry Vietze, OC ’22] well enough until I started being EIC with her. We fought a lot early on, but we figured out how to communicate with each other, and working with her and becoming friends has been among my greatest privileges. My friendship with Former Managing Editor Gigi [Ewing, OC ’22], who joined production with me at the same time, and we ran the paper for a year together, has honestly been one of my favorite friendships of all time. Emma [Benardete] and Nikki [Keating] have been incredible co-editors this past year. I want to thank the staff that I worked with. I want to highlight the fourth-years who have been such an incredible part of the newspaper. It’s been an honor to work with you. I’ve saved the best for last: Ananya Gupta, OC ’20 and former Managing Editor. There has been no better mentor I could have asked for. There is no one person I’m more grateful for and grateful to than Ananya.

I know you were a Physics major in college; what got you into writing fiction?

I had a very influential professor of literature whose honors seminar I took as an undergrad. He was an extremely powerful thinker, and the amount of insight that he could draw out of a text was so impressive. This idea that storytelling was deep and rich, and deeply illuminating about the tellers and listeners, that was all very seductive to me. While I did have very specific skills — I was very good in math and problem solving and analytical tasks — I also took a great deal of pleasure out of connecting things, out of getting a big picture. 

You spent some time living abroad in Thailand and then in the Netherlands. How do you think that’s impacted your writing?

The act of writing is the attempt to see the world from perspectives that aren’t yours, and that’s also what traveling and living in other places does. The moment that you are displaced from your own culture and your own comforts and your own set of assumptions into a place that operates by very different rules and according to very different values, you have to completely rethink what you believe about the world, and it makes you see yourself in a different light. When I moved to Thailand at the age of 11, I was going from a pretty affluent suburb of Chicago and moving to a city on the other side of the world. All of a sudden, everything that I knew about the world was wrong, and I had to relearn it. When I came back to the States, ostensibly my own country, I was really an outsider at 16. I could move about in that culture, I knew the rules, but I was kind of looking at it from the perspective of somebody who had very different experiences, and I think that’s the first step of being a writer. 

In 2019, you won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for your novel The Overstory. Could you talk about what inspired the novel, and what it’s about?

I was teaching at Stanford University after teaching at the University of Illinois for many years, and living in Silicon Valley, it’s a very intense, very utopian, technologically infatuated culture. To get away from this, Iʼd go up into the Santa Cruz mountains just between Silicon Valley and the Pacific and hike in the forests up there, and many of those set-aside forests were recovering redwood forests. When you see a 1,500-year-old redwood tree that’s older than Charlemagne and that’s as wide as a house and as tall as a football field, it changes your way of thinking about time, and changes your way of thinking about our place in the world and about the agency of life. I was suddenly confronted with the evidence of what we human beings have done to the non-human world, and the evidence of how powerful the non-human world was and how deeply we depended upon it. I think it was that awakening that led to this idea that I could write a book that wasn’t simply about humans, and had non-human characters, and explored this kind of forgotten dramatic reality — that we humans are here by virtue of all the other living things that we share the earth with, and that we’re a relative latecomer. 

In 2017, you wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times titled “Keep America Wild” about Maine’s Katahdin Woods and Waters and the plans to develop them. How do you think this piece was in conversation with The Overstory?

It was written at a moment where, after some years of gradually learning that we could not dominate and endlessly exploit and defeat the non-human world, we were instead starting to slip backwards into a much more human-exceptionalist and triumphalist and separatist program all over again. This piece was basically trying to oppose that moment, and like The Overstory itself, it was trying to take the long lens and say any species that tries to go it alone is going to end up with the other 99 percent of the world’s species that have already gone extinct.

Since then, you’ve published another novel, Bewilderment. What is it about, and what inspired it?

Bewilderment is the story of a father who is raising a neurodivergent 10-year-old boy by himself after the death of his wife, and the boy suffers from extreme forms of eco-trauma, as I think a lot of young people do. Basically, this is the story of a father who has to acknowledge and tell his son, “Yes, the human world has gone crazy. And no, I don’t know the answer to what to do about that.” It was inspired very specifically by my own experience with young children who were suffering from a bewilderment at the insanity of the way that the industrial world is treating the living world.

Do you think that you play that role as an author, having to bring attention to the climate crisis in a way that won’t freak people out?

In The Overstory, Patricia Westford, who is kind of the moral center of the book, is tasked with giving a speech at a climate conference. She’s wrestling with this idea that she’s expected to say something that’s true and useful and hopeful, not defeatist, not overwhelmed. It’s very, very difficult to juggle those things, and when you write a book, if your intention is at all to describe who we are and where we are and what we’re doing, it’s very difficult to be all those three things. 

What is it about Oberlin that connected with you and made you say, “Yes, I want to be the Oberlin Commencement speaker”?

I have had numerous friends who are Oberlin grads who have played a role in my own formation and the formation of my own understanding of the world, as a young person and even in middle age and now in old age. My own novels have been so deeply tied up with American history and the crises of American histories, the various wars for realization and liberation of the marginalized and oppressed populations in this country, and Oberlin has been very much at the forefront of those struggles for a long time.

I’m very excited about giving the speech, and it was a chance for me to go back and remember what it was like for me to be 21 or 22 and graduating from college. It was just a real pleasure to go back and try to recall that as precisely as possible, and try to think of what words might have been useful to me to hear at that moment.

This special edition of The Oberlin Review is an exploration of the kinds of activism our community has participated in throughout history. The content features recollection, documentation, interpretation, and the imagination of activism through movements like institutional decolonization, the call for divestment from South Africa during Apartheid, recent efforts to combat anti-trans legislation, and much more. Each piece also considers the challenges of activism, like facing opposition from administrators or navigating systemic inequalities. Through these stories, the Review proposes a view of activism that takes on many forms, exists in varied spaces, is enacted by diverse groups of people, and confronts complex ideas. In its entirety, this newspaper is simultaneously a reflection on the past, a marker of our present, and an aspiration for the future of activism at Oberlin. We hope you enjoy reading it.

Naeisha McClain, OC ’20, is a founding member of BSAG and a former thrower on the women’s track and field team. McClain said that their experience as a thrower inspired them to get involved as a founding member of BSAG. Because they knew several Black athletes on their team, they recognized the value of having that community and wanted to create something for other Black students who didn’t have the same experience.

“On some teams, there will only be one Black person,” McClain said. “They probably need community, and it would be nice for us as Black student-athletes to be able to support other people who may not have other Black students on the team.”

They also noted that while there were several Black athletes on the track team, they didn’t know Black athletes outside of their sport.

“I … could recognize by face other Black student-athletes that I had seen around, but not by name,” McClain said.

In addition to building community, Kofi Asare, OC ’22, noted that BSAG also plays an important role in shaping Oberlin Athletics.

“I was just back for homecoming this past year,” Asare said. “This was my first time coming back as an alum, and it was great because you could just tell that BSAG sort of had a footprint into the programming.”

Asare entered a leadership role in BSAG during the pandemic, after the class of 2020 had graduated. A major mandate of the newly formed organization was helping maintain connections between Black athletes in that altered landscape.

“I think that when we first took it up, … one of the biggest things that I was concerned about … was sort of just, how do we sustain the community that we’re trying to build over such a difficult and tumultuous time as COVID?” Asare said. “So a lot of that was networking or trying to do smaller events through Zoom or in person for different members of the group.”

Asare was particularly grateful for the opportunity that BSAG afforded him to get to know younger athletes and act as a mentor.

“I think it just really made it more fulfilling to build the relationships, and cultivate the relationships that I had with other Black student-athletes, especially those who are younger than me,” he said.

Hill described the community that BSAG has been able to build in more recent semesters, after McClain and Asare graduated. For instance, the Executive Board of the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee recently introduced the position of a diversity and inclusion officer, who is elected by BSAG. The role of diversity and inclusion officer is currently filled by second-year basketball player Bryana Woodard, who also serves as BSAG’s liaison and social media officer.

“That was something that the board a year or two ago really pushed for,” third-year track and field athlete and BSAG Secretary and Historian Hayden Hill said. Hill noted that she became involved in the group at the suggestion of some of her teammates who were already members.

“A lot of my teammates were on the board of BSAG,” Hill said. “So especially as a first-year, they’re like, … ‘You’re coming to the BSAG meeting?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, of course.’ So that’s kind of how I got roped into it. But I’m really glad that they did, of course.”

McClain said that the organization’s work is an important way to celebrate the Black athletes who came before BSAG was founded and to honor Oberlin’s progressive legacy. They hopes BSAG will live on, first and foremost, as a space where Black athletes can celebrate each other.

“Oberlin loves to pride itself on [being] the first college to admit someone regardless of their race or regardless of their gender, … but you don’t necessarily get that piece through the Athletics department,” McClain said. “[I hope] that BSAG is able to honor … that legacy as well.”

“Approval for the NeuRx DPS® is intended for use in patients with stable, high spinal cord injuries with stimulatable diaphragms, but who lack control of their diaphragms,” the FDA’s Approval Order Statement reads. “The device is indicated to allow the patients to breathe without the assistance of a mechanical ventilator for at least four continuous hours a day. Its use is only in patients 18 years of age or older.”

The system works by using electrodes to stimulate the paralyzed diaphragm, causing it to contract and allowing the patient to breathe. Dr. Raymond Onders, one of the main project leaders, noted that in certain cases, the electrodes can eventually be removed when the nerves regain function.

“We have very good evidence now of what we call the trophic effect of electrostimulation, and we stimulate the diaphragm and there’s an afferent effect to the nerve that changes the spinal cord milieu,” Onders said.

The system was designed by Professor Emeritus J. Thomas Mortimer of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Mortimer said that he developed an interest in electrical stimulation after a childhood friend was paralyzed in an automotive accident. Mortimer later recruited Onders when he was a resident to help recruit patients for human trials at the suggestion of Dr. Tom Stellato, another doctor with whom he was working on the project. According to Synapse CEO Anthony Ignagni, the device has helped 2,500 people in over 30 countries including Japan, Canada, Australia, the U.S., and others in Europe and the Middle East.

“We’ve completed mapping 11 patients,” Mortimer said. “Tom Stellato says to me ‘I don’t know [what] Ray’s telling these people. He recruited 10 and I was only able to recruit one.’ … Dr. Onders was a critical force in getting this into the place where it is now where it’s a commercial product,”

According to Onders, the DPS was previously approved under Humanitarian Device Exemption Approval, which it received in 2007. He explained that the HDE approval severely limited the number of hospitals at which the device could be used. In order for a device with a HDE approval to be used at a given hospital, it must be greenlit by the hospital’s institutional review board.

“Under this program, there’s a 1988 FDA rule that requires somebody to have an IRB approval to do it, even though it’s not research,” Onders said.

Additionally, Ignani wrote in an email to the Review that the IRB would have to review the data each year, not just as a one-off occurrence, a time consuming process.

“If you’re injured in Iowa or someplace and you don’t have a hospital that’s already doing it, it’s very difficult to transfer,” Onders said.

Onders noted that the COVID-19 pandemic introduced a broader need for the device given a shortage of ventilators.

“So year 2020, roughly, that’s when we started realizing we needed to have improved access,” Onders said. “The COVID pandemic started highlighting that also. … We can help get anybody off the ventilator earlier, and that’s very important when you reach a shortage of ventilators.”

The premarket approval removes the IRB requirement, meaning that any hospital in the country can now use the device. While currently only approved for patients over the age of 18, the device has shown preliminary success with much younger patients.

“I’ve actually implanted NICU babies,” Onders said. “We [also] just implanted a very unfortunate one year old at our hospital within four weeks of her injury.”

Synapse Biomedical was officially founded in Oberlin in 2002 to commercialize the NeuRx DPS. Mortimer and Ignagni chose Oberlin because they were able to find an old seed factory to operate out of without having to pay rent. Onders noted that because agricultural operations are subject to FDA requirements, the seed factory was up to the standard they would need for biotech. Synapse currently employs 29 people out of its office in Oberlin and may expand its operations.

“As we grow our business we will continue to add to our staff in that facility,” Ignagni wrote. “We currently have sufficient people to build our forecasted needs, but certainly know that we will need to add in the future.”

Onders noted that in addition to the NeuRX DPS, Synapse is working on securing approval for a device for stroke patients.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You graduated from Oberlin College in 1986. How are you feeling being back and interacting with students?

Well, itʼs been 37 years. As I was preparing my lecture today, I struggled to remember all of the steps on my journey to where I am now. But my Oberlin experience I really feel was fundamental to the trajectory of my life. I remember when I arrived here, and I felt really lonely because I didnʼt know anyone for the first time in my life. Iʼm sure itʼs the usual first-year experience, but I was just wondering what I was doing here. A couple of days later, as I was walking alone to one of my first classes, the director of admissions at the time stopped me and said, “Hi Melissa, how are you?” And I was like, “He remembered my name.” Then he started to ask me about Marblehead, MA, where I come from, and he knew the details of my life. Then I remembered, this is why I chose Oberlin — because I was not going to be a number here — and that feeling was going to have a huge impact on how I communicate later on. I communicate the statistics of human suffering. I can communicate about the state of our world. Thereʼs a saying, “Statistics are human beings with the tears dried off,” and what I needed to do was to infuse those statistics with stories — stories of history, politics, and more. And those would be the stories I would tell going forward.

Focusing on global communication, how do you think that different forms of media can be used to promote journalism and communication?

I think journalism is so critically important in a democratic and stable society. Unfortunately, it is under threat in our digital age. Social media platforms have pulled advertising dollars away from traditional media, and this has resulted in a collapse of local media. And yet we are in an age where those same platforms are not promoting news, but conspiracy theories, disinformation, and junk science. We need to move back and drive support for traditional media, because what it does is provide citizens with factual, trusted information and holds people and power accountable. Without that pillar, we have an information ecosystem that is totally out of balance.

How do you manage the vast network of U.N. communications around the world?

This campaign uses our resources in local languages for distribution, and also local media partners, social media influencers, et cetera. So thatʼs one approach to communications built into our strategy, which is based on what I call the three Ws of communications. These are “what,” “why care,” and “what now.” And the W we really focus on is “what,” and we do this really well because we distribute the facts. We have reported on the latest climate science, the statistics of how many refugees are fleeing around the world, sustainable development goals, annual reports, and more. So we have a rich resource for almost anything youʼd want to know about whatʼs happening in the world. But the question is, if you want to communicate effectively, why do people care? Who is my target audience and why should they care about this? And if they should care about it, itʼs because you think that you need to bring them along. How am I going to tell the story in such a way that itʼs going to move them, itʼs going to make them feel and make them want to act? And the next question is, what now? What are you going to ask them to do? It is either a call to action to the reader, or the U.N. has a plan, or this has been solved somewhere else, so we can do it here.

In 2017 you released your book, A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea: One Refugeeʼs Incredible Story of Love, Loss, and Survival, which tells the story of Doaa Al Zamel, a Syrian girl whose life was upended in 2011. Could you talk about her story and how you discovered it?

Going back to the statistics and when I was communicating about refugees every single year, the numbers were growing, and they werenʼt growing by a hundred — they were growing by the tens of thousands. And the Syrian refugee crisis was a really dramatic time, with people fleeing and crossing the Mediterranean Sea. People taking these desperate journeys know that they could lose their lives. I realized we have to tell individual stories. One day I read a story in the Agence France- Presse about this young teenage girl whoʼd survived one of the worst shipwrecks: 500 people had died. When she was rescued, she had two little babies, and she had been on the water for four days and four nights. One of the little girls pulled through, and both of them survived and resettled to Sweden. So her story, every single chapter of her story, told the chapter of the entire Syrian refugee experience — the peace and the beauty of Syria before the war and then the horrors of the war and the refugee experience. What drives people to put their lives in the hands of smugglers to cross the Mediterranean Sea? The incredible resilience of the human spirit allows them to survive.

Has your work with refugees changed your perspective on the world?

I think one of the things that working with refugees changed for me was valuing the security I have and how we take ourselves for granted at home. We all try to say, “We want to get out of here.” But the thing that people value so much is a sense of belonging. I just started questioning the fundamental needs of human beings and how privileged we are not to be living in a war zone or having to flee suddenly. We have the ability to be able to make choices. You think about Maslowʼs pyramid of human needs. I started really thinking about that when I thought about refugees, because most of what we were able to do for refugees was satisfy the survival part. But what I saw in all the refugees that I met is that they all wanted self-actualization, and if it wasnʼt for them, it was for their children. The story that I told that I think exemplifies this is a young boy I met in a refugee settlement in Lebanon. I always asked refugees, “What did you take when you fled from your home? What was the one thing that you took that you couldnʼt leave behind?” And he went into his tent and came back with this silk-covered piece of paper. He lifted off the silk and he held up this piece of paper, and it was his high school diploma. He said, “I took my high school diploma because my life depended on it. Without education, I am nothing.”

Oberlin’s dining co-ops, founded in 1950 with the opening of Pyle Inn, were built upon principles of equity and social justice. OSCA as we know it was founded in 1962, when the first two co-ops, Pyle and Grey Gables, merged together. As OSCA’s website reads, “Throughout the years OSCA has engaged in social justice issues, taken stances on fair labor practices in agriculture, and created policies to reduce our environmental impact, as well as participating in boycotts and working to create partnerships with other like-minded organizations nationally and internationally.” Details of campus protests are often distributed through the OSCA network, and members are required to attend a workshop at a semesterly symposium on privilege and oppression. Given the history and ethos of OSCA, the lack of diversity in our membership is disheartening.

While OSCA must, of course, take responsibility for our lack of diversity and consider ways we can work to mitigate it, there are other important factors to recognize that are largely outside of the association’s control and contribute to the phenomenon, especially regarding the lack of class diversity. The College’s OSCA financial aid policy in particular has contributed to this lack of class diversity. In an effort to address facts presented in the One Oberlin Report, published in May 2019, the College adopted a policy of decreasing need-based financial aid for OSCA members at a level that fundamentally erases any cost-savings. For example, this semester, the most comprehensive meal plan, the GoYeo plan, costs $4,633, and an OSCA dining membership costs $2,575. A student on need-based aid who is dining in OSCA this semester therefore loses $2,058 of their tuition aid.

According to a statement released by the College, OSCA’s current rent contract, negotiated for a five-year term in 2020, stipulates that OSCA will pay a per-student fee to the College of 42 percent of the Gold Dining Plan for dining members and 89 percent of the housing fee for housing members. The statement notes that the fees will “meet the College’s net revenue expectations for each student attending Oberlin,” and that the new contract “equalizes the revenue from room and board fees the College earns from all of its students, regardless of whether they belong to [a] co-op.” In theory, then, the College’s budget should no longer be negatively impacted when its only source of replacement revenue from a given OSCA member is the exemption that OSCA pays for them. Students on need-based aid are arguably paying twice for the right not to participate in College-owned housing and dining: once with their OSCA fee, part of which goes toward the exemption and again with the cut to their financial aid. It is a cruel irony that, for a student paying full tuition like myself, the $2,058 per semester that I am saving by dining in OSCA is far less significant than it would be for a low-income student, yet I am the one that gets to reap the benefit.

The College’s justification for decreasing aid dollar for dollar seems to be that, as dining or housing cost decreases, financial need decreases. However, that fails to factor in the work that members are expected to contribute to their co-ops. As part of our commitment to accessibility, OSCA has a “time aid” policy, allowing students who work campus jobs to subtract from the usual five-hour weekly commitment of contributions to dining operations. Policies vary between co-ops, with Keep’s time aid policy stating that for every five hours worked, a, co-op member is exempt from one cook shift, and every additional three hours of work qualify for an additional hour of time aid, but everyone in the co-op is expected to work one crew shift per week. Thus, each member is contributing labor to the co-op which, for a full-pay student, would be offset by a lower dining cost, but for students on need-based aid is entirely uncompensated. Additionally, many co-op positions require a significant time commitment, meaning students who have to take time-aid are not able to take advantage of everything their co-op has to offer, an issue which would be mitigated if everyone in OSCA, regardless of financial aid status, was able to benefit from the decreased cost. Keeping this in mind, it makes a lot of sense that lower-income students would be far less likely to join OSCA.

It’s also worth noting that, while for some people, like me, joining OSCA is simply a fun way to get involved in a campus community. The benefits of co-op dining for other members are far more important. One of the core tenets of OSCA is accessibility, and we have policies in place to make our programs as accessible as possible. We take dietary restrictions and cross-contact incredibly seriously, and we have numerous precautions in place to keep allergens separate. Clarity Dining Hall, the designated allergy-friendly spot on campus, is free of only the top allergens and is only open during very specific hours of the day (11 a.m. until 2 p.m. and then 5 p.m. until 8 p.m.). Co-ops avoid cross contact of all ingredients, accommodate any food sensitivities or allergies that members note, and use a save-plate system which allows members to ensure a plate will be available for them at any hour of the day. The College’s financial aid policies surrounding OSCA not only dissuade low-income students from enjoying the OSCA experience, they also potentially deprive students of a safe and accessible food source on campus.

33. Oberlin literary and art magazine The __ Review

38. Notions
39. Meat, in Tijuana
40. Color after sunning
42. Something laid by a hen
43. With 42-across, a Christmas drink
46. Digital marketing technical skill,
for short
47. Cause of some stiff hair styles
49. Special agents
51. Sometimes furrowed
54. Avoid, as one’s responsibilities
55. Help
56. Word used to denote a maiden name
57. Wizard of Oz protagonist

DOWN
1. Window portion
2. Pipe unclogger
4. Christmastime church song “__ Maria”
5. Small bit
6. Crete’s highest summit
7. Pirate’s “Hello”
8. In the current condition

10. Lost clownfish
12. Suggestion, in slang
14. Get out of the way!
16. Brief overhead visit
20. Linguist Chomsky
21. Someone at your destination may ask for this (abbr.)

22. Nonprofit known for sponsoring keynotes

23. Spoiled, as food
24. Gizmo
26. Pincered pest
27. Home in the woods
28. What a superhero wears
29. Burden
32.Gained entry
34: Careless
35: Intense anger
36: Cogito __ Sum
37: Barbie’s beau
41: Wonder
44: Singer Yoko
45: Two-wheeled mode of transit
47: Numerical worry of many students
48: Acid
49: Wrongdoing, religiously
50: Ante synonym
52: Subway dwelling rodent
53: Route