It has been interesting as a senior to see the cycles of discourse and focus on campus shift and be recycled. When I was a first-year, one of the big pushes happening was around financial transparency and demanding that the Oberlin Board of Trustees disclose its investments, particularly in the wake of a sweep of austerity and financialization measures put in place by the College, such as the outsourcing of 113 campus dining and custodial workers in 2020. The movement lost momentum for a range of reasons, and divestment — whether from fossil fuels, companies with ties to Israel, or arms and weapons manufacturers — became the new goal and tactic for community input surrounding College finances.
Now, the newly founded Oberlin chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists of America is creating a campaign with a similar focus on financial transparency. It makes me hopeful that this idea is coming back into conversation again and ideally going hand-in-hand with divestment. The campaign also highlights the need for shared knowledge and passing on lessons from different moments and movements on campus and in Oberlin’s history.
Institutional memory is hard to build when you are only here for four or five years. It is even harder to build when you are trying to do it outside of the institution, or when what you are trying to preserve is in opposition to the institution and its action. But that demonstrates why it is all the more important. Right now, we are seeing incredible displays of state repression every day and at every level, from Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programming being banned in schools to the arrests and deportations of undocumented and immigrant community members and those organizing for Palestine. As communities are being erased and silenced, so is generational knowledge. On an Oberlin scale, the barriers to the board and the administration, the lack of general and financial transparency, and the marginalization of community and town sentiments make it critical for us to preserve what we know about this place. Without that, we risk running in circles over and over again. Worse, we risk losing memories of people, moments, and places that no longer exist but were integral in making this community what it is.
This is obviously not new. All organizing spaces with political frameworks pull from previous revolutionary thinkers and movements as sources of inspiration, lessons, and hope. Recognizing the histories of different fights, whether on a broad or small scale, helps root us in what we are doing and why we are here and reminds us that we are not alone. I would not have learned about the outsourcing of the 113 UAW workers without upperclassmen organizers telling me about it. I would not have learned about the segregation that Black students at Oberlin faced during their supposedly progressive admittance in 1835 without professors teaching me. I would not have learned about the ways the College has monopolized and financialized the town, pushing divides between Oberlin residents and non-resident college students, without talking to community members. That is community knowledge in action.
Truthfully, as a senior, I do not feel like I know anything. I have no answers. From speaking with other people in my year, I think that it is a widely shared feeling. But I remember what has happened, for at least as long as I have been here, and that is valuable. I think passing on that knowledge and experience is something that those of us graduating have a duty to do, knowing that the terrain and climate of this place will change, but the takeaways can still be impactful. There are people who know how the board works more intimately than others and can advise on tactics for speaking with different members; there are others who have direct action experience and have seen the differing impacts and responses from the school; and there are those who know labor history, trans history, undocumented history, Black history, and other histories that people are actively trying to erase. What good is knowledge, particularly in building community and capacity for resistance, if we keep it for ourselves?
Learning about the movement against Apartheid in South Africa at Oberlin, the resistance of students against Vietnam War recruiters on campus and in the town, and the decades-long movement for a free Palestine brings me hope. There is so much to learn, and it can be daunting. No one who has spent four or five years at Oberlin has all the answers on how to organize or strategize for divestment or other demands, and neither does anyone who has lived here for fifty years; if any of us did, it would have happened by now. What we do have, though, is each other and a responsibility to pass down knowledge of what has worked, what hasn’t, and what we have learned.