Oberlin College’s Board of Trustees is set to meet on Friday, March 6. The last time the Board arrived on campus, student activists were met with police officers and considerable force — and pepper spray — to disperse a crowd of about 25 students. 

The events of Oct. 7, 2023, happened during my first year at Oberlin. The massacre that the Hamas militia committed, and the ensuing campaign of indiscriminate killings of Palestinian people committed by Israel’s military represented a major flashpoint in Oberlin’s Students for a Free Palestine’s decades-long campaign to compel our administration to divest from Israel. 

In the ensuing months, I watched from the periphery as student organizers mobilized  around SFP to create a divestment petition. Organizations amassed over 1,000 alumni signatures over the course of fall 2023–spring 2024, galvanizing a handful of protests and demonstrations throughout the process. Witnessing these experiences, I was proud to call myself part of a campus community that was willing to engage steadfastly with our institution’s active involvement in funding campaigns of destruction and bloodshed — flagrantly in violation of international law. As proud as I was, I was equally disappointed to see how our College leaders responded to student advocacy. Over the course of three years since arriving at Oberlin, I’ve witnessed how the administration’s senior officials not only turn deaf ears to, but actively penalize, actions taken by students to hold our College to the standards laid out in its own mission statement. 

It is not hard to see how these patterns degrade the climate between students and College administrators. Whenever there are students who are mobilizing by the thousands around an issue — no matter how controversial or fraught — the College administration has an obligation to open continuous channels of dialogue among all student stakeholders to voice their concerns and receive reciprocal transparency. As documented by The Oberlin Review’s electronic archive, one sentiment has remained consistent since at least 2015: We’re not being heard. (“Students to Trustees: We’re Not Being Heard, The Oberlin Review,” Dec. 4, 2015).  The persistence of students’ dissatisfaction with the relationship maintained between them and the administration can make this seem like an intractable problem. “No college student is fond of their administration,” is a frequent line I’ve heard from peers attending other colleges and recent alumni. Say what you will about echochambers or how it is a vogue for students to criticize their administration irrespective of any specific decisions or events; there are tangible causes from which the current climate of contentiousness that has pervaded our campus for over a decade stems.

For starters, the amount of spaces available for students to directly discuss their concerns to Trustees has dwindled. It is worth noting how students voicing their concerns about being heard in 2015 had the ability to do so during an open Trustee-student forum held in King Building. Though it’s unclear when these forums ceased to exist at Oberlin College, it’s obvious that our state of affairs has only regressed. Now, students mobilizing to voice their concerns are met with an allusion enforced by the threat of police violence. Upon student organizations like the Young Democratic Socialists of America, who gathered over 700 student signatures demanding concrete provisions created to boost transparency, Trustees have begun taking proactive steps to reify their procedural seal of confidentiality. This demonstrates the active aversion our Board has to fostering the dialogue that students are interested in.

When this happens, students can find no avenue to seek recourse beyond public demonstrations and confrontation. From what we witnessed in October, the administration’s response to bolster a police presence in hopes of forcefully repressing the students’ will to speak out will only contribute to a volatile, self-fulfilling cycle that will leave people physically injured or worse. 

As I said earlier, this isn’t how things need to be. President Carmen Twillie Ambar, upon the procedural change in language in October, insinuated that procedures allowing students “a chance to go and observe the Board and weigh in on their perspective” was something only public institutions could provide.

However, private institutions like the University of New England have gone as far as to institutionalize two student liaison roles, for which undergraduate students attend all scheduled board meetings and actively contribute to the decision-making process. There is so much space in between our current state of transparency and this case, which demonstrates the necessity for our administration to begin taking tangible steps to rectify the bubbling relationship of animosity that plagues our campus today.

To be clear, our administration is not solely responsible for this paradigm. Even as far back as 2015, when we did enjoy open-forum discussions between the Board and students, it was noted that this was attended by a sparse crowd of only 20 students. Ultimately, it is the obligation of student stakeholders to not only fight for transparency, but to actively maintain the status quo after the fighting is done. There is a dualistic responsibility between our administration and students to maintain an open and adaptive attitude to the moment. When this crumbles, our community as a whole can face detrimental consequences.