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Chapter 4  RECLAIMING EQUAL EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITY, 1960–85 T his chapter contains 0ve documents that focus on the renewal of Oberlin College’s commitment to black education—as well as a new commitment to diversity initiatives—between 1960 and 1985. During this time of rapid societal change and wide-ranging educational innovation, campus leaders examined civil rights issues, studied the service and learning needs of black students, worked to increase minority enrollment, and implemented an African American Community and Student Development Program that led to a Department of African American Studies. The process of recruiting and retaining larger numbers of African Americans as well as making them stakeholders in the campus community was a di2cult institutional exercise. Only sixty-three black students attended Oberlin between 1956 and 1959, and even fewer arrived in the early 1960s.1 In the 1961–62 school year, for example, black enrollment constituted only 2.7 percent of the student body at Oberlin, suggesting either a weakness in Oberlin’s admissions eforts or a token, symbolic integration.2 During this de0ning time for the college, which had long valued both disinterested moral obligation and Christian responsibility for character forming, it was assumed that the opportunity for an undergraduate college 138 degree should be open to everyone who could pursue it successfully.3 How could this homogeneous academic community compel itself to be a part of a national educational goal and reclaim its historic commitment to creating an integrated society that ensured equal opportunity for all Americans? Black students demanded participation in all phases of student life, including a desire for greater access to the college’s governance system. Given that Oberlin had trained so many black leaders for the nation’s academies and communities, the key question before the Governance Commission in the early 1970s was whether the college was “willing to trust Blacks as coequals in the leadership of its own academic community.”4 Oberlin was also asked to transform itself from a predominantly upper-middle-class, white-run school into an institution more relective of its founders’ ideals. The politics of educational reform, including community activists who wanted to adopt race-conscious policies, challenged Oberlin’s senior administration , general faculty, and student senate to share authority and responsibility for the purpose of serving the interests of black students within and beyond the college. The advancement of a college with a diverse institutional mandate had to become a priority.5 The 1960s were, in a word, years of confrontation. The civil rights movement , cultural nationalism, and social polarization regarding the Vietnam War contributed to the tension of the times. Before the end of the decade, these matters forced Oberlin’s leaders once again to become dreamers on a scale unparalleled since the arrival of the thirty-two Lane Seminary Rebels at Oberlin in 1835. Oberlin faculty and students moved aggressively and purposefully toward humanizing living and learning environments, rede0ning the service function of a formal liberal arts education, and joining the struggle for social justice, peace, and human rights. Newer members of the faculty, especially, valued economic, social, and racial diversity and understood ethnic experiences as a legitimate area of academic inquiry. In ad hoc groups, committees, and task forces, small numbers of individuals challenged the status quo by joining the constructs of integration and pluralism and by trying to make Oberlin a more suitable environment for black students. Yet, Oberlin was by nature an incrementalist institution and still drew its sense of unity largely from the integrationist model.6 To move toward a new model or vision for Oberlin would not be easy, even for committed Reclaiming Equal Educational Opportunity, 1960–85 139 liberals. To delect charges that Oberlin was a racist institution and no longer a welcoming place for minority students, the administration identi0ed new institutional resources to support admissions, community relations , curricular change, and special assistance programs. The objective was to ensure that the United States would not be a nation of two societies, “one black and white—separate and unequal.”7 External forces—the Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee, Martin Luther King Jr.’s three memorable visits to the campus, the 1963 March on Washington, D.C., black political radicalism, and the 0ndings of the 1968 Kerner Commission report—reminded Oberlin that it could not operate in a vacuum. The potency of the 1960s catalyzed students and faculty to reexamine existing attitudes and procedures for implementing change at Oberlin College. Some contemporaries observed that the break in silence among a growing...

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