The courses were created to provide students with pre-professional programming and prepare them for their careers, according to Anthony Pernell-McGee, executive director of Career Exploration and Development and pre-law advisor.

“We have a 97 percent acceptance rate for law school,” Pernell-McGee said. “So I know, as a former lawyer, that students want to go to law school. And I think that it is our responsibility to help them prepare for the LSAT so that they [can] get into the school of their choice. And we have a lot of Obies who do have an interest in law, so it just makes common sense to do it.”

The LSAT Program is an on-campus project and is being held in collaboration with the Princeton Review. Princeton Review will provide live remote instruction to participating students. 

All students will receive 30 hours of instruction, the LSAT Pathways course books, 365 days of online Princeton Review student portal access, and 16 full-length practice tests, including all available practice questions. Over the course of the Winter Term, students will sit for the LSAT practice exam four times.

According to Pernell-McGee, the impetus for the creation of the course was that students were requesting funding for LSAT Winter Term programs, which led the CED to begin preparing an on-campus program to provide an alternative to individual projects.

The program’s enrollement fee is $700, which Pernell-McGee said was a good deal, as the course would normally cost students thousands of dollars. 

While the program is open to all students, preference will be given to graduating fourth- and fifth-years. The deadline to commit has been extended by the CED to Nov. 17, 2023.

College second-year Eli Ramer, who is considering law school but is not registered for the LSAT Winter Term, said that he would consider doing the project later on in his Oberlin career. 

“I’d like to do some Winter Terms that put me in the field more and give me some more hands-on experience rather than studying for an exam,” Ramer said. “But perhaps once I’ve completed my Winter Term requirements, or if I omit one of the years before the Winter Term during our [fourth] year, I would think about it then.”

The Princeton Review has also been contracted by the College to teach the MCAT Program. Participating students will receive 66 hours of instruction, and have access to MCAT Pathways course books, 365 days of online Princeton Review student portal access, and 16 full-length practice tests, including all available Association of American Medical Colleges practice materials. Similar to the LSAT program, students will sit for four practice tests. 

The MCAT Program will also give preference to graduating fourth and fifth-years and cost $1100. Both programs are capped at 15 students. 

The EMT program is similarly designed to aid students who are planning careers in medicine. Assistant Director for Career Readiness Samantha Rohner, who also sevres as the medical, global health, and stem career community advisor, spoke to the Review about the program. 

“Oberlin has many pre-med, pre-health students who actually already have EMT certification that they got either before college or during college,” Rohner said. “We want to offer this course as an option for them to complete that during Winter Term. There are actually colleges in the country who do offer EMT courses currently during winter or January terms. So that’s something that we felt was attainable for Oberlin.”

The EMT Program will consist of 10 full-day training sessions, small-group and independent study, and test prep. At the end of the program, students can take the National Registry of Emergency Medical Technicians exam, which is required in Ohio and some other states to practice as an EMT. 

According to Rohner, students who complete the EMT certifications will be qualified to work as EMTs during the summer, and the CED plans to reach out to local organizations to see if the newly certified students would be able to work with them in the community.

College second-years Susanna Weiss and Izzie Braun said that they were concerned about the MCAT and EMT Winter Terms, citing the sheer amount of material that the courses would cover in a single month.

“[F]or both programs, it’s like, how the hell are you going to function next semester if you’re trying to cram that much information into your skull during that one month?” Braun said.

Weiss also added that the one-year availability of materials is also a concern, explaining that most people would probably take gap years before heading to medical school. 

“I don’t like the one-year deadline,” Weiss said. “[I]f you were to take the one year off to make money, then you would hypothetically start studying the year later… It would not make sense for people to take that course if they weren’t immediately going to do med school right after.”

All of the courses will also include off-campus social activities, with a chance to engage with career communities and meet students enrolled in the other programs. 

One of the main advantages of having these on-campus projects, according to Rohner, is the opportunity that students have to work together.

“Many students do study for [the] MCAT on their own, but doing this course over Winter Term will provide participating students with an opportunity to study in a group, which can be a benefit because it promotes a more collaborative and supportive environment,” Rohner said. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Can you tell me a bit about your life, your career in journalism, and how you got to where you are today? 

When I got to college, I took a 100-level writing course because I wanted to get better and feel more confident in writing. And in that class, we read a piece that I later learned was what we would call literary journalism. And I was like, “such an interesting way to want to learn about something is to just dive in headfirst.” When you’re in grad school, you’re writing lots of stories.  Right after I graduated, I was like, “Okay, I gotta keep writing.” I had gotten really interested in a genre of writing called participatory journalism. It’s basically like, there’s a world you want to learn about, and so you join that world. I learned that there was a thing called the National Beard and Mustache Championships. I was like, “why would anybody compete in that?” The way I figured I would answer the question is, “Okay, well, I’ll compete in it.” And so I grew this enormous beard over like nine months and wrote about this experience.

How did you decide to write about the A-10 Thunderbolt II, which is the focus of your book?

There were a lot of talks about how this airplane, the A-10, was going to be retired, and there was a lot of controversy because people were saying, “Well, hey, this airplane is really great. It’s really durable. It’s really well-designed. It’s really cheap. So why are we retiring it?” I wanted to understand that controversy a bit more, and I was like, it feels like there’s a story here. For me, what makes a compelling story is there has to be tension. And to me, one of the initial tensions was, hey, if this thing’s really well designed, and it’s still working, why do we want to replace it? Then I wondered if the person who’s largely responsible for its design is still around, like this airplane. 

I emailed him cold. It just turned out he had retired from working in the Pentagon, and now he owned a recording studio. His name’s Pierre Sprey. He was working in the Pentagon at the height of the Cold War. And so the story just kept getting bigger. This isn’t just a story about an airplane. This is a story about this remarkable group of individuals who were championing human-centered design.

What was your process for researching and writing the book?

I reached out to Pierre, and then he started connecting me with more folks to talk to. Because I had him vouching for me, these other people would agree to speak with me, and then they would put me in touch with folks, and this story kept unfurling. So it was a bit overwhelming for a while because there’s just so much to keep track of. 

I came up with a theory that the A-10 is like the Forrest Gump of airplanes, I feel like its story coincides with all these other moments in history and innovation and technology. As I had to tell the story of its design, I had to learn the history of how the Air Force came to be. When did airplanes first start being used in war? Why did we start using them? How were all these figures connected to all these important developments in aviation?

Could you tell me more about the subject matter of the book? 

The A-10 itself was first conceived of as an idea in the late ’60s, because there wasn’t an airplane that could perform what’s called close air support, which is to fly low to the ground and support troops. It wasn’t exactly the most exciting thing to design a really slow airplane at a time when we were putting people on the moon: we were designing airplanes that could go three times the speed of sound. This airplane can barely fly slower than a commercial airliner. 

The whole reason that A-10 has this really big gun is it needs something to destroy tanks effectively and cheaply. So once they had a gun, the GAU-8/A Avenger, they built an airplane around it, which is kind of this ingenious design principle. A lot of times, guns were added to airplanes after the fact. 

Pierre was like, “We need to study how airplanes have gotten damaged in the past so that we know how to make this thing not indestructible but survivable.” This was the philosophy of human-centered design. They wanted the engines mounted high as opposed to low to the ground so that they could take off from dirt roads. It has turbine engines, which had the benefit of not being a jet engine, which can go really fast but are very fragile. When the wheels retract up into the airplane, they actually still poke out of the bottom a little bit so that if there’s a problem where they can’t lower, the airplane can still land. If something shoots the wiring and eliminates the hydraulics, the plane can still remain in flight due to a mechanism called manual reversion, which is pretty rare. It’s not designed idealistically; it’s designed realistically. It’s designed with the expectation that chaos is unavoidable. Accidents will happen, and things will go wrong. 

Could you tell me about the public perceptions of the A-10?

Very early on in my writing process, I was deciding that I wanted to write about this thing. I had to reckon with the fact that I’m writing about design, but fundamentally, I’m writing about a weapon, and what I did not want to do in any way was glamorize a weapon or glamorize violence. The A-10 inspires a lot of fandom for a lot of positive reasons; it has saved a lot of lives. But there are also less savory opinions that essentially glamorize its violence. And I did not want to do that. I thought about that really long and hard, and the justification I came to early on is that the A-10 is really ugly. You’ll see all these images of A-10s that land, and they’re filled with bullet holes and oil, grease, and all of that. There are some observers who could see that and think that’s awesome. However, I think the more discerning observer will see an A-10 and realize this thing has experienced and participated in this tragic, horrific thing that is war. The really sleek fighter jets present a sinister illusion of war that may seem sterile. There is nothing sterile about the A-10. It doesn’t hide its purpose or what it’s participated in. I think that it’s important that it doesn’t hide that because it forces the viewer to reckon with what it does. And so I think that to me, the A-10 in the public consciousness, there’s one view that sees it in a not-so-serious way. But I think a lot of folks who are devoted to the A-10 are devoted to it because they are aware of its purpose and its job and the responsibility of that and the difficulty of performing that job.

The plan is the result of Ohio House Bill 592, which stipulated that all 88 Ohio counties must be a member of a solid waste management district. There are currently 52 districts. Oberlin is part of the Lorain County Solid Waste Management District, which has prepared this current plan to last for the next 10 years.

The State of Ohio has outlined the goals behind their push for solid waste management plans: first, 80 percent of the population should have access to recycling; second, at least 25 percent of all residential and commercial waste should be recycled. 

The Lorain Solid Waste Management District is already in compliance with the first objective and aims to meet the second goal with this plan. The district has decided to aim for a higher threshold of recycling 35 percent of all residential and commercial waste by the end of the plan period. 

In his letter to City Council asking for it to ratify the plan, Director of Public Works Jeff Baumann called the plan “realistic though not ambitious,” with the City of Oberlin itself having a much more aggressive goal of achieving 90 percent waste reduction over the next 30 years. 

Baumann wrote in his letter that the plan would not significantly impact either the City’s waste  and recycling collection, or the budget dedicated to the Solid Waste Enterprise Fund.

Alarmingly, the district’s current predictions forecast recycling rates gradually declining from 21.46 percent in 2019 to 19.25 percent at the end of the planning period in 2034.

As a result of changes made in past years, Oberlin’s recycling rate has also declined. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the City’s recycling rate was 29.38 percent, which has fallen to about 24 percent due to the introduction of a subscription-based recycling service, which was launched November 2020 and requires residents to opt into the program and make a pledge not to contaminate their recycling. The service is free of charge. 

Baumann explained the decision to switch to a subscription-based model was in response to a huge increase in the cost of recycling at the Republic Recycling Center in Elyria, where the City currently sends its recycling. From April 2019 to January 2020, Republic increased the City’s recycling fee from $27.50 per ton to $100 per ton. The facility also added a contaminated load charge of $75 per ton, which the City of Oberlin largely avoids paying by requiring residents to pledge not to contaminate their recycling before they can opt in to the program. The City also stopped accepting glass as recycling because it heavily increased the costs of transporting recycling to the Republic Center. 

When asked how the City planned to reach both the 10- and 30-year targets in the face of currently declining recycling, Baumann explained a few new initiatives that the City is planning to introduce. 

One of these is a glass recycling program, which he hopes will be deployed either in late spring or early summer 2024. He explained that the Ohio EPA had given Oberlin a grant to buy a glass-crushing machine that the City could use to crush waste glass to use in road construction. 

Another initiative will expand the City’s current food composting program to curbside pickups on a subscription basis. The City runs its food composting program through Barnes Nursery, and is exploring the possibility of Barnes Nursery building a Class II waste compost facility in Oberlin, which would cut down on the cost of trucking all the waste food to the existing facility. 

Another portion of the plan discussed the importance of Lorain County Community College and Oberlin College to the recycling programs. Neither college responded to the commercial recycling survey in 2019, which meant that the Lorain Solid Waste Management District did not have access to their recycling rates. The plan recommends developing a partnership with both institutions as they could play a vital role in developing the district’s recycling initiatives. 

Baumann told the Review that he felt the plan did well to focus on recycling but did not sufficiently address reducing or reusing waste. 

“For me, the more important part of the equation is, how do we eliminate waste on the front end?” he said. “Obviously, [the City of Oberlin has] a longer-term and much more aggressive goal. But the only way to meet that is to reduce the amount of stuff that we dispose of. That’s a societal problem. It’s a cultural problem. It’s a manufacturing problem. We probably don’t have as much control over that on the front end, so it becomes a question of our educational and promotional efforts. … It’s something as simple as taking your own shopping bag to the grocery store or your own coffee cup into the coffee shop for a refill rather than getting a paper cup. It’s literally thousands and thousands of small actions like that.”

The idea of the event was to highlight relationships that are essential to the work of the Bonner Center, including faculty and students who work on community-based learning courses and in the Bonner Scholars Program. 

“This was an opportunity to celebrate all of our partners and to start some conversations about how we can move that work forward in the months and years to come,” Interim Director of the Bonner Center Thom Dawkins said. 

The Bonner Center also brought in guests from outside Oberlin to speak. Two of these speakers were Marina Barnett, interim assistant provost for civic engagement at Widener University, and David Scobey, director of the educational organization Bringing Theory to Practice. 

“You heard throughout the day stories of trial and error and … how it just takes persistence to be able to achieve these goals, that things may not happen immediately,” Barnett said. “Our goal is for you to be changemakers, ultimately, to be good stewards of this world that we’ve been given.”

After a brief introduction in which Scobey and Barnett addressed the attendees, participants split into breakout rooms to have discussions on specific topics: Connecting the Classroom to the Community, The IMPACT of the Arts, The Oberlin “One Square Mile Project,” and The IMPACT of AI on Writing and Community. 

The Connecting the Classroom to the Community breakout session was facilitated by Barnett and afforded students the opportunity to meet with leaders in the community, including Ray English, City Councilmember; Margie L. Flood, executive director of Oberlin Community Services; and Elyria Mayor Frank Whitfield.

“One of the things Thom and I talked about in our breakout session was [how] we wanted students to come out of that session with a sense of agency,” Barnett said. “It’s not just ‘What are the problems?’ it’s ‘How are you going to fix them?’ … We started off by talking about things very generally. But by the time we finished, it was ‘Let’s talk about what you can do.’”

The IMPACT of the Arts breakout room discussion was centered on using deep listening as a mode of inquiry for community-building and creative practice. The room was hosted by Nina Fisher, OC ’08, program director of MAD* Factory Theater Co.; Hannah Wirta Kinney, curator of academic programs for the Allen Memorial Art Museum; Michael Boyd Roman, assistant professor of design and Black visual culture in the Studio Art and Africana Studies departments; and Louise Zeitlin, associate professor of Community Engagement in the Conservatory and director of the Community Music School. 

The third breakout room on the “One Square Mile” project focused on connecting attendees with Bonner community partners at the Wilson Bruce Evans Home Historical Society and Oberlin-Wellington Rescue Theater Project. 

Carol Lasser, emerita professor of History and executive director of Evans HHS, and Eric Steggal, managing director of the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue Theater Project, hosted the discussion.  The  “One Square Mile” project takes a place-based approach to community revitalization by focusing on one designated square mile of the community.

The last breakout room covered the impact of artificial intelligence on writing and community and was hosted by Ryo Adachi, OC ’22, coordinator of academic initiatives in the liberal arts, and Josh Kesterton, program coordinator and lecturer. They encouraged participants to think about the pros and cons of the use of AI in community building. 

“For the folks who attended, I hope that the impact was that they realized there are interesting things … in and around Oberlin that happen not during class hours as well,” Bonner Scholars Program Director Gabriella Valentine said. “We saw, at least from a few of our survey results, that people enjoyed being in a room where those conversations were happening intentionally.” 

Dawkins also noticed positive responses to the Summit.

“There was great energy there,” he said. “Folks walked away with projects that they want to work on, with [lots of] folks connecting and exchanging information, wanting to work together … across these typical divides of students, community partners, faculty, and staff.” 

Barnett shared in their excitement.

“I think one of the best things that I saw that came out of the conference was that students got a chance to speak to each other, they got a chance to interact with community partners, they got a chance to interact with faculty and administrators in ways that they may not normally have an opportunity to do,” she said. “That’s always what we want, … more opportunities for communication.”

Aside from organizers, students also gained valuable insight from the IMPACT Summit.

“I think it was really helpful to see the ways that the College and the community can intersect and connect and work together,” College second-year Katia Chapin said. “And I grew up around a college that really was very separated from my community in a way that I didn’t love. It was refreshing to see how both people from [the] College and [outside sources] are working to make the College’s presence here beneficial to everyone else and not just … where we’re benefiting from them exclusively. It made me feel more connected to the community and find ways that I could be more involved.”

The speaker of  Canada’s House of Commons, Anthony Rota, said on Tuesday that he would resign as speaker after inviting Ukrainian-Canadian Yaroslav Hunka, who fought for the Nazis in World War II, to attend a speech in the Canadian Parliament delivered by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine. President Zelenskyy was visiting Canada on Friday for the first time since the Russian invasion of Ukraine last year. For the visit, Rota invited 98-year-old Hunka, a constituent of Rota’s legislative district, to attend the joint session of Parliament. During the session, he praised Hunka as a “Ukrainian hero” and a “Canadian hero.” Lawmakers from all parties gave Hunka two standing ovations, and President Zelenskyy gave him a raised fist. However, Jewish groups were quick to point out that Hunka served in a Nazi unit known as the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, which was a volunteer unit that fought alongside Germany during World War II and declared allegiance to Adolf Hitler. All main opposition parties have called for Rota to step down over the incident, and Karina Gould, the government’s House leader, said that lawmakers had lost confidence in Rota. The incident played into Russian propaganda that its invasion of Ukraine was to “de-Nazify” the country, which Kyiv has dismissed as baseless.

Thousands Flee as Azerbaijan Invades Disputed Province; Provincial Leader Arrested

On Wednesday, Azerbaijan arrested Ruben Vardanyan, a billionaire banker and philanthropist who was the leader of Nagorno-Karabakh, a breakaway region of Azerbaijan. Karabakh is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan but is mostly populated by ethnic Armenians. The province broke away from Azerbaijan in 1991 and has remained autonomous ever since. Last week, Azerbaijan began a military offensive to regain control of the province and has since claimed total control over it. Vardanyan’s arrest was announced by Azerbaijan’s border guard service, which said Vardanyan was captured as he tried to cross into Armenia. The takeover has resulted in a mass exodus of Armenians from the region, with over 50,000 reported to have left, representing more than a third of the population. Those fleeing fear reprisals despite Azerbaijan’s promise to respect the rights of the residents of the province.

Gunmen Take Over Kosovo Monastery; Four Killed

On Sunday, around thirty ethnically Serb gunmen stormed an Orthodox monastery in Banjska, a village in Kosovo near its border with Serbia. Kosovo, founded in 2008, is recognized as a sovereign nation by the United States and a wide range of other countries, but is still claimed by Serbia. The incident triggered a gunfight in which one police officer and three attackers were killed. Kosovo’s Prime Minister Albin Kurti accused Serbia of sending the attackers into Kosovo. Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic retorted by saying that the attackers were Kosovo Serbs who had had enough of “Kurti’s terror.” According to Kosovo, the gunmen escaped to Serbia, and the Kosovo government called on Serbia to hand over the gunmen to them. The incident has inflamed tensions between the two nations. United States Ambassador to Kosovo Jeffrey M. Hovenier called the attack “coordinated and sophisticated.” The U.S. condemned the attack and urged the governments of Kosovo and Serbia to  end their decades of antagonism.

Russian Video Sheds Doubt on Ukraine’s Killing of Black Sea Commander

On Tuesday, Ukrainian officials expressed some uncertainty over their Monday announcement that they had killed Admiral Viktor Sokolov, the commander of Russia’s Black Sea fleet. Kyiv claimed that the admiral was among 34 officers killed in a strike deep behind enemy lines. However, Russia released a video Tuesday that purported to show the admiral at a meeting in the Russian Defence Ministry. On Wednesday, the Russian government released more videos of the admiral. It is not clear when any of the videos were filmed. If Sokolov’s death were confirmed, he would be the highest-ranking official killed by Ukraine since the war began.

The amended Charter prohibits the use of “artificial intelligence software or other related programs to create or assist with assignments on the behalf of a student unless otherwise specified by the faculty member and/or the Office of Disability & Access.”

The decision comes in the wake of questions surrounding the threat to academic integrity posed by generative AI chatbots, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. 

AI cases could have been pursued under the old Charter, Associate Dean of Students Thom Julian said, and the new clause simply acts as a clarification rather than a change in policy.

“The school felt it necessary to add to the Honor Code,” Julian said. “We started to see issues come up within the classroom last year, and … [at] a lot of our peer institutions, I saw that they were also having some similar issues. We just wanted to be able to provide really clear guidance around it, not just for faculty, but for students, so everyone has clear expectations within the classroom.”

The Student Honor Committee and liaison made most of the edits, according to College second-year Kash Radocha, a member and panelist of the SHC. The proposed changes were then reviewed by peer institutions, and a legal review was conducted. After it attained approval from the SHC, it was also approved by the Faculty Honor Committee and General Faculty Council. The new changes came into effect for the fall 2023 semester after going through the Student Senate and the General Faculty. 

The addition of AI is only one of the changes that were made to the Charter. Another revision allows both claimants and respondents to appeal decisions, unlike the earlier system where only respondents were allowed to. Additionally, if a student is found not guilty by SHC, the faculty member is recommended to grade the assignment in accordance to its merit and note the reported violation. The College has also increased the maximum number of SHC seats from 15 to 20 and changed the process of removal of a member.

“The amendment of the Charter was a highly collaborative process,” Radocha said. “The process for amending the Honor Code Charter is not a light one, and multiple checks and balances are in place to ensure the changes are valid and widely accepted.”

Professors have also had to grapple with the consequences of their students’ knowledge of AI. Assistant Professor of Philosophy Amy Berg, who teaches a class on Ethics and Technology, said that when she taught the class in the spring of 2023, her students were already familiar with large language models, such as ChatGPT. However, since ChatGPT had only been released a few months prior to that class’s start, she had not been able to add much to the curriculum.

“[T]he academic or philosophical or ethical work on ChatGPT just has not caught up to its use,” she said. “So, I know when I teach the class next time, I’ll have to spend a lot more time on AI and, specifically, on whatever forms of AI are current at the time.”

Some members of the faculty have begun to add ChatGPT to their curriculums in creative ways to allow students to understand what its capabilities are. One example is Assistant Professor of Politics Joshua Freedman, who spoke about a ChatGPT assignment he gave to students in spring 2023.

“I thought that for both my own sake and the students’ that we should use it to figure out what it’s capable of,” Freedman said. “And so, I had … students ask ChatGPT a question of relevance to the course … and then, in a series of … follow-up questions, I had them dig deeper and deeper, keep pushing the AI to give them the best possible answer. To see … how well does this large language model answer the questions that we’re trying to answer in this course.”

Professor Freedman said that he likes the idea of a default ban while giving faculty the power to allow the use of AI for certain assignments. While Professor Berg has not yet changed the structure of her assignments to include ChatGPT, she does think that the way classes are conducted will change.

“I would expect that many professors, maybe me included, will move to oral assignments, in-class assignments, more in-class writing, less done out of class, because we’re concerned that, for various reasons, people will take shortcuts,” Professor Berg said. “I think, also, some professors … will look for ways to integrate ChatGPT into the writing or thinking process, and there are good reasons to do that, too.”

According to Radocha, the addition to the Honor Charter allows the school to better plan for the future of AI.

“It is a precautionary measure for us to include it within the Charter now, so that by the time we review it again in 2026, we can amend the current AI clause based on how we have experienced it via cases in that timespan of three years,” Radocha said.

“Everything has been already packed, we are getting all the produce taken care of, all the deliveries are already on the other building,” Suzette Sanchez, food programs coordinator for OCS, said. “So it’s just moving the office stuff … this weekend.” 

OCS’s Communications and Development Coordinator Jason Hawk gave a timeline for the moving of the food services. The last food distribution will take place Sept. 15. OCS will be closed and services will be suspended Sept. 18–22 while the organization is moving. On Sept. 25, operations will resume in the new location on 500 E. Lorain Street. With the move, they are increasing their parking capacity from seven spaces to 78. The new location will also include a truck turnaround and loading dock leading into their warehouse. This is expected to improve the efficiency of their services. 

When asked about the improvements the new building will yield to OCS, Hawk highlighted two main points: additional parking spaces to reduce waiting lines and increased inventory capacity. 

“The biggest headache that we have here, hands down, is parking, which significantly increases waiting time for people picking up food,” Hawk said. “So everything will just be so much smoother. We’ll be able to move people in faster … Hopefully, [people picking up food] will not have to factor in two hours to come to the food pantry anymore.”

Another issue OCS currently faces is inventory capacity. The seven tons of food distributed weekly take up a lot of space. Moving from their 5,600-square-foot footprint at their old location, the new building on Lorain Street gives the organization 27,000 square feet, about 14,000 of which will be dedicated to the pantry and warehouse.

While the move has benefits for OCS, there are also concerns about the accessibility of the new location, which is not connected to a sidewalk. 

“Even if we were to build a sidewalk in front of our building, there’s nothing for it to connect to on either side. So, it is a concern,” Hawk said. However, he said that out of all the people who receive services from OCS, “It’s a very small percentage that walk; almost everybody who comes here drives.”

Hawk also told the Review that in the future, OCS hopes to convince the city of Oberlin to dedicate a Lorain County Transport stop to their new building. 

Although OCS will start operating in its new location Sept. 25, renovations are still ongoing for office spaces and other parts of the new building, which are not as crucial to the delivery of their services. This means that collaborations with partner organizations will not be conducted this fall. OCS anticipates that those partners can move into the fully renovated office spaces after Jan. 1.

The building, which is slated to be finished in 2025, is expected to be four stories high and over 120,000 square feet in size. It will be able to accommodate over 370 students and have a mixture of rooms — singles and quads — designed for second-years or higher. Assistant Vice President and Dean of Residence Life and Auxiliary Services Mark Zeno said that the target budget for the construction was $55 million. 

In an email to the Review, Director of Capital Improvements and Deputy Chief Facilities Officer Joe Comar wrote that the building will contain “common spaces for student collaboration and interaction, a full kitchen and multipurpose room for meetings, seminars, and group study, along with acoustically controlled practice rooms for music, theater, and presentations.”

“The new student housing facility will be net zero ready, fully integrated into the SIP system and built to the LEED Gold standard,” Comar wrote.

Zeno articulated why the College felt a need to construct a new dorm.

“In light of growing enrollment, looking at the needs of reassessing our facilities and structures and trying to figure out [if it makes] sense to do a bigger housing master plan that looks at a renovation plan,” Zeno said. “We need to look at what are we doing to provide brand-new housing to students that meet today’s needs.” 

The completion of the project would kick off a renovation plan for the rest of the residential buildings on campus.

 “By having the new 402 bed residence hall on Woodland, it will allow us to look at taking 1–2 residence halls offline each year over the next 5–10 years to improve those structures or plan out a new structure if needed,”  Zeno wrote.

As part of the approval process for the new building, the College also received a zoning variance on the height of the building. While the zoning code for the district only permits constructions to have a maximum height of 35 feet, the College has been permitted to exceed that to 45 feet. 

The College has also agreed to make changes to the north entrance of Wilder Hall to assist with the city’s concern about how to manage pedestrian traffic.

 “What we said to the College was we need to recreate this Woodland Street intersection so that there can be crosswalks on each of the three legs,” Oberlin Public Works Director Jeff Baumann said. “So there’s one on the east side already, and of course, one on Woodland Street itself. But we haven’t been able to put one on the west side because it drops you into the Wilder driveway, and you can’t take a crosswalk in your driveway.”

“The College has agreed to move the driveway in front of Wilder Hall to the east and the parking there to the west and it was a condition of site plan approval for the dormitory,” Oberlin Director of Planning and Development Carrie Porter wrote in an email to the Review.

One of the concerns raised by the project is parking. The construction has closed off the Kettering and Woodland Street parking lots, which had 145 parking spaces. According to Porter, these parking spaces were “used by staff and by students for long-term parking.”

To remain in compliance with local parking laws, the College will provide 201 parking spaces to the new building and create an additional 49 long-term parking spaces for staff and students. The College will also provide 96 offsite parking spaces by extending some of the existing lots.

According to Porter, the College has gotten approval for and is going to “expand a lot that is by … Mudd [Center] and behind the service building,” and will expand other lots, including “the lot by the Adam Joseph Lewis Center [for Environmental Studies]” and “a lot in front of Hales [Gymnasium].” 

The end of construction will also bring about another change in residential policy: the phasing out of off-campus living. 

“As part of Oberlin’s four-year residency requirement, the new residence hall at Woodland will allow Oberlin to expand housing options for students that meet their needs to be successful at Oberlin,”  Zeno wrote. “In the past, Oberlin was not able to accommodate all students in campus housing due to higher enrollment and retention.  As we continue to add additional housing space for students, the need for off-campus living will diminish.”

Zeno added that exceptions will be made for students with extenuating circumstances, such as married students, students with dependent children, commuter students, and those older than twenty-three.

College second-year Cole Mirman said he was concerned about the phasing out of off-campus housing after the completion of the project. 

“I am somewhat concerned about the restriction … on off-campus housing,” he said. “It seems strange to me that they are taking away the option from people just because they have more living space available.”

However, Mirman said that he was open to living in the new building.

“I would imagine that it will have some of the best facilities of any dorm on campus just because it’s so new and so big, so I definitely consider it as an option,” Mirman said. “It also seems like it’ll be in a good location, even if there [aren’t] other dorms right next to it. It’s still in a very central location on campus, so I think that would be helpful.”

This concern led to the creation of the Sullivan Principles, which were aimed at governing American companies’ investments and operations in South Africa. Named for Reverend Leon Sullivan, the principles included the elimination of workplace discrimination, pay equality, education, and sponsoring social programs and community investment. The hope was that companies signing onto the principles would help undermine apartheid on a socio-economic level.

The principles proved divisive. While they were heralded by some political and industry leaders as being a constructive way for U.S. businesses to engage with South Africa, activists saw them as a way for U.S. businesses to limit the effectiveness of corporate divestment. Oberlin students at the time also raised their concerns with the principles in a Nov. 16, 1978 open forum with the Board of Trustees. 

The Oberlin administration’s policy was that it would not own stock in any company which had 10 percent or more of its worldwide sales in South Africa or did not comply with the Sullivan Principles. However, many students felt that the College’s mere presence in South Africa guided in providing the apartheid government with financial stability. 

On April 6, 1979, students protested the College’s stance at a meeting of the Board of Trustees on the fourth floor of Mudd Center. As a result of the protests, 105 students were charged with “disrupting the essential operations of the College.” The charge carried the maximum penalty of expulsion, but the students were finally given a letter of reprimand.

Student protests continued throughout the 10-year period between the initial open forum and the College’s decision to divest. In 1986, students were charged on the same grounds as seven years prior when approximately 200 students disrupted another Board of Trustees meeting on the fourth floor of Mudd Center. 

A Review article recounts the 1986 event (“Oberlin 59 Face Charges; Students Gain Wide Support,” The Oberlin Review, Feb. 6, 1987) written by Rachel Seidman. 

“When students began banging on the windows of the Goodrich room where the meeting was being held, Dean of Students George Langeler repeatedly requested them to keep silent,” the article reads. “After several outbursts, during which time the trustees moved their meeting to an inner room, Langeler collected the IDs of 59 students.”

By February 1987, however, the charges were dropped due to the General Faculty voting to urge Langeler to that course of action.

In March of 1987, hundreds of students occupied the Cox Administrative Building. Their protest was expansive, spanning three days and having up to 250 students participating at its busiest times. 

Students filled as many offices as possible and hung signs of protest, such as the African National Congress flag, from windows. Students organizing the protest collected more than 300 student IDs in an effort to make sure no student could be singled out by the College the way the Oberlin 59 were.

Over the three day duration of the sit-in, the administration asked the students to vacate some of the offices, but the students did not comply, eventually leaving Cox only to move the protest closer to the Board of Trustees meeting. 

Oberlin students wanted the administration to divest completely from investments in companies doing business with South Africa. Just a few hours after students ended their sit-in of the Cox Administrative Building, the Board of Trustees began talks to divest from South Africa. 

Armed conflicts in Sudan continued a few hours after a ceasefire was supposed to begin on Tuesday. The internationally brokered truce between the armed forces led by General Abdel Fattah Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group led by General Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, was supposed to come into effect at 6 p.m. local time. The two generals had jointly led a coup in 2021, but disagreements caused violence to break out between their respective factions last weekend. Another attempt at a ceasefire fell through on Wednesday. Residents in the capital of Khartoum faced power cuts and struggled with dwindling food supplies. According to Ahmed Al-Mandhari of the World Health Organization, 330 people have died and more than 3200 have been injured.

Former Member of Indian Parliament Shot Dead During Interview

Atiq Ahmed, a former member of the Indian Parliament, and his brother Ashraf were shot dead on live TV on Saturday. The brothers were facing charges that included kidnapping, murder, and extortion, and Ahmedʼs kidnapping conviction in March carried with it a life sentence. While Ahmed and his brother were handcuffed and talking to journalists before a visit to the hospital, three gunmen pretending to be journalists shot both of them. Amid criticism of increasing lawlessness, The government of Uttar Pradesh — the state in which the assassination took place — has ordered an investigation into the incident.

Fox News Reaches Settlement of $787.5 Million with Dominion Voting Systems

Fox News settled a suit brought by Dominion Voting Systems in relation to the network’s airing of misinformation in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. The $787.5 million settlement represents slightly less than half of the $1.6 billion that Dominion sued for. It is the largest disclosed settlement for a defamation case in American history. The last-minute deal was announced just after jury selection, minutes before opening arguments in front of the Delaware Supreme Court. Fox will now have to deal with another case from the voting technology company Smartmatic, which is suing for $2.7 billion from the network.

Chinese COVID-19 Protesters Released After Four Months

Cao Zhixin, a 26-year-old book editor, and Zhai Dengrui, a 27-year-old teacher, were released on April 20 after four months. The two were charged with “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” which can have a maximum sentence of five years. Many of the protestors in the “Blank Paper” protests who were detained were released after 24 hours or a few days.