On Sunday, Students for a Free Palestine commemorated the 74th anniversary of the Nakba with a vigil on Tappan Square. The Nakba marks the day in 1948 when over 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes by Israeli forces. The Oberlin vigil featured a number of student speakers and a candle lighting in honor of murdered and displaced Palestinans.

College first-year, vigil organizer, and international student from Palestine Farah Sabbah spoke about her exposure to violence as a child at Sunday’s vigil.

“Before going there and speaking, I was actually so nervous, but at the same time I wanted to … talk about my experience living in Gaza my whole life and share it with students here who don’t know anything about Palestine or what’s going on there,” Sabbah said.

College third-year and vigil organizer Osama Abdelrahman also spoke at the event and emphasized the importance of speaking out against the ethnic cleansing and other injustices Palestinians suffer.

“In a situation of injustice, there is no such thing as ‘I’m not taking sides,’” Abdelrahman said. “You have to take sides; you have to find where the truth is and support it, because if you’re not supporting the truth or if you’re not taking sides, then you are basically on the side of the oppressor.”

Many students gathered on the lawn around Memorial Arch to listen to the speakers talk about the need for more active support for Palestine. However, College second-year and vigil organizer Lulu Chebaro noted that there was still more work to be done.

“It was a good turnout, and I think people that were there really cared and were really present and listening,” Chebaro said. “But if you look at a lot of other events we have on this campus, … a shocking amount of people were not there. Honestly, the turnout is really telling of a larger issue on this campus where people just don’t care.”

Despite this, the vigil served as an important platform to allow students to grieve for murdered and displaced Palestinians, including Shireen Abu Akleh, a journalist who was shot and killed by Israeli forces last week.

“As a child [I] experienced all of this — someone my age shouldn’t experience such things,” Sabbah said. “People should speak up about what is happening there and what’s going on there because it’s worse than you actually would expect.”

Last week, the Oberlin Student Cooperative Association raised the food budgets for all dining co-ops to account for inflation in food and gas prices resulting from global economic trends. The change comes after food buyers at various co-ops have spent the semester adopting creative strategies to cope with the unexpected rise in prices.

Each co-op has two elected food buyers who plan food purchases for the co-op. They work weekly to ensure that their respective co-ops have adequate food to feed members.

Recently, economic inflation has risen to around eight percent — up from the Federal Reserve’s target of two percent. This has challenged food buyers who not only need to stay within their budget but also need to ensure that the variety of food they purchase meets all co-op members’ nutritional needs, including the needs of those with dietary restrictions.

“The budget we were given at the start [of the semester] doesn’t reflect how much food actually costs and doesn’t take into account how much it costs to get food delivered,” Pyle Food Buyer and College third-year Jessica Norris said. “So the amount of food we needed to buy to feed the co-op was not something that really fit within the budget we were working with.”

When food buyers approached the All- OSCA Board with concerns about the difficulties in sourcing food within the budget, they found the board receptive and willing to make changes to ensure that the co-ops had adequate food.

“To account for [food and gas prices], we raised all the co-op budgets to go and meet the level of inflation that it’s at right now,” said College fourth-year and OSCA treasurer Alicia Rey-Miller. “It’s nothing that will come out of members’ pockets… OSCA is here to provide food for the members. So we are gonna provide food for the members. Everyone should be eating well.”

Before OSCA raised the co-op food budgets, food buyers put in extra hours to balance the co-op’s nutritional needs with budgetary restrictions. Buyers resorted to buying locally grown food items like carrots and beets rather than produce grown farther away, like cauliflower or brussel sprouts.

“Me and my co[-food buyer] were coming up with these big price comparison Google Docs of where oil is cheapest, where rice is cheapest, what produce is cheapest from what vendors,” Norris said. “We started looking at the cost of vegetables a lot, trying to buy vegetables that were $1 a pound instead of $2 a pound.”

Besides the challenge of increased prices, OSCA also hosted the College’s consultant team, which is currently working on the Dining Master Plan. The group is touring all campus facilities before it makes recommendations for enhancements to dining options and facilities.

Assistant Vice President and Dean of Residential Education and Campus Life Auxiliary Services Mark Zeno says this process’ resulting recommendations could potentially lead to updates to OSCA’s kitchen equipment as well as other changes to dining facilities across campus.

“I hope [the outcome] is the side of, ‘What are the things that we can do to improve those spaces, to make it more efficient?’” Zeno said. “But if there is something that’s so outdated and inefficient, that’s something they’re gonna note, that, ‘Hey, there are newer, better ways to prepare this with this type of machine that will save everyone efficiently across campus.’”

For the future, OSCA plans to continue working to feed co-op members nutritious meals and creating an affordable alternative to campus dining.

“I think we’re always gonna meet and make sure that everyone’s getting enough to eat,” Rey-Miller said. “Our goal is to be financially affordable, more so than the College[‘s housing and dining options]. So we always are gonna try and provide the best food that we can.”

However, recent international events have made it challenging to predict the future and the lasting economic effects of the pandemic mean that inflation could continue to be a challenge in the fall.

“A lot of the issues we are having have been supply chain issues caused by the war [in] Ukraine and other big political issues that feel very beyond our control,” Norris said. “Those are things that will shape whether or not this continues to be the situation. But the really nice thing about OSCA is that the people who run it are also the people who live and eat in it. So there’s a real incentive to make sure that we are well taken care of.”

According to OSCA, the organization will reallocate surplus in some budget areas to compensate for increased food budgets.

After receiving the largest number of applicants on record, the College concluded the Class of 2026 admissions cycle on Monday, meeting its commitment goal for the year. The record number of applicants comes after increased efforts to lower barriers to apply and offer opportunities for both virtual and in-person recruitment.

“Arts and Sciences received 10,340 first-year applicants compared to last year’s 9,242, a 12 percent increase and an all-time high,” Dean of Admissions Manuel Carballo wrote in an email to the Review.

As a result of the large number of applicants, Oberlin was able to admit an academically strong class with higher GPAs than in previous years. The class of 2026 also has the largest number of U.S. students of color ever at 253 individuals, or 28.7 percent of the class, and the second-most recruited athletes ever at 118.

This year the College and the Conservatory have a combined 954 committed students, and plan to matriculate around 870, on-target for Oberlin’s goals for this year. Every year the College plans to lose about 10 percent of the incoming class to “summer melt” referring to students who decide to take a gap year or are no longer interested in attending Oberlin. Oberlin will continue to move some students off the waitlist in the summer months.

Over the past few years, Oberlin has implemented several policy changes to make the admissions process more accessible. This includes removing barriers such as the “Why Oberlin?” application essay, the application fee, and standardized testing requirements.

Oberlin has also introduced several financial incentives over the last year to make Oberlin more appealing, including the $10,000 Oberlin Commitment Scholarship, which will apply to students enrolling in fall 2023 onward and the $5,000 Oberlin Internship+ Commitment, which begins in fall 2022.

The College also had a strong year in terms of international applicants, although it admitted and plans to matriculate a similar number of students as it has in previous years.

“We have continued to see an increase in our international application pool, a 38 percent increase this year over last year … in no small part because of our current test-optional policy,” Carballo wrote. “With no international travel this cycle, we focused on Zoom sessions for our applicants to be able to connect with Oberlin and relied heavily on our current international students who helped us reach out to our admitted students.”

Survivors of Sexual Harm & Allies held their second annual Take Back the Night event in Tappan Square last Saturday. The event gave space for survivors and allies to gather and was made up of three components: speeches, a march, and a show of resilience through music.

“The energy was honestly very uplifting and very courageous,” said College third-year and SOSHA’s Chair of Community Support Ella Newcomb. “It felt amazing to have people … up there sharing their stories. … I think that one of our strongest things about the community that we’ve created is that we don’t censor survivors. We don’t ask survivors to be anything more than what they are.”

Held at college campuses and in communities around the world, Take Back the Night is an annual event that brings people together to break the association between violence and the night and to stand in solidarity against sexual violence.