Education: Oberlin’s 125th

To the hairy-handed frontier town of Elyria, Ohio came the Rev. John Jay Shipherd to join battle with the Devil. The struggle lasted three years and was foredoomed; faster than Congregationalist Shipherd could preach the old time religion, Elyria’s storekeepers passed out free whisky to boost trade. The Rev. Mr. Shipherd abandoned the town to its wickedness and with one disciple, the Rev. Philo Penfield Stewart, set out into north Ohio’s dense elm forest. On swampy ground, a safe nine miles away, he founded Oberlin College in 1833.

The college survived the swamp; and last week, as Oberlin began full-dress celebration of its 125th birthday, visiting speakers had no trouble finding triumphs to praise in their complimentary preambles. In 1835 the college became one of the first in the U.S. to adopt a policy of admitting Negroes, and in 1841 became the first coeducational college to grant bachelors’ degrees to women; its football team beat Ohio State as recently as 1921. An impressive number of educational observers call Oberlin the best coeducational college in the country, and there is much to support its right to top rank.

Intransigence & Righteousness. The college today can look back on some turbulent early days. Oberlin was a way station on the Underground Railway, and once a sizable faculty mob swarmed ten miles to free a runaway slave from a U.S. marshal. Something in the air fed intransigence; fire-breathing Feminist Lucy Stone was a graduate (1847), and later Oberlin’s rich soil of righteousness produced the Anti-Saloon League. Present-day manifestations are less obvious: a bluntly worded faculty defense of academic freedom, a tone of ineffable moral superiority in the student newspaper’s lectures to the college administration.

Oberlin’s 2,300 students are above-average bright—61 of this year’s 450 freshmen were first in their high school classes—and apt to be complacent about it. Said one recent graduate: “We loved to remind each other that our average IQ approached the threshold of genius.” Most Oberlin people go on to graduate school, do especially well in the sciences. Equalitarian Oberlin bans automobiles, and although almost every student pedals a bicycle, the hot spots of Cleveland—and Elyria—are out of effective range. But high spirits burst out, sometimes beerily. Night climbing expeditions have been known to ascend the lumpish fagades of classroom buildings, and a recent visitor saw two happy collegians reeling along on a motorcycle, one sitting backwards and whanging a guitar.

Teaching & Money-Raising. Because Oberlin is keyed to the demands of graduate schools, curriculum experiments are few (one enterprising exception: sending the entire junior class of Oberlin’s top-ranked Conservatory of Music to study for a year at Salzburg’s Mozarteum). A weakness : an almost interminable list of required courses, which tends to prevent a student from exploring deeply any subject except his major. The faculty is well-paid ($4,700-$12,500), deliberately weighted toward men who are good teachers first, publishing scholars second. The result —in addition to excellent teaching — is that while professors respected in their fields are plentiful, Oberlin has no scholars of towering national reputation.

It is no discredit to Oberlin’s able President William E. Stevenson to say that while his predecessors were scholars, he —a onetime Wall Street lawyer — is primarily a money-getter. Even for a relatively wealthy ($50 million) school such as Oberlin, money-getting must color almost all public pronouncements. It is no accident that at last week’s 125th anniversary convocation, three of four outside speakers — the Ford Foundation’s Henry Heald, the Carnegie Foundation’s John Gardner and Standard Oil of New Jersey’s retired Board Chairman Frank Whittemore Abrams — were close to the strings of huge corporate purses.