by Griffin Larson-Erf, Staff Writer
If you are like me and have Generalized Anxiety Disorder—which, if you go to this school, you probably do—then there is a chance that Oberlin freaks the shit out of you sometimes.
My GAD looks for problems in the world around me, then offers the existnce of those problems as proof that I live in Hell, I am utterly fucked, there can be no escape, and at any moment drug-crazed bikers will kick my door in and beat me to a pulp. If you’re thinking that only a comparatively well-off white boy could think that way about their life not being perfect, you’re on to something. Still, for a brain that loves to find problems, there are plenty to choose from at this school.
There is the housing lottery, which any current second-year will gladly rant to you about: room-selection times gone undistributed, information poorly disseminated. There is the Student Health Center, which both Oberlin Review contributors and friends of mine have described not as the place one goes to get medical care, but as the place one goes to not get medical care. There is Woodland Hall, where fire alarms are a “when,” not an “if.”
And those aren’t even the most serious causes for concern. My mind goes to September 3’s “Conversations with Counsel” session held by President Ambar alongside Oberlin’s Vice President and General Counsel Josh Nolan in response to ICE action at Walmart that morning. There, I heard students voice their dissatisfaction with the College’s communication about what to do if ICE comes to campus, with the limited amount of secure housing available to undocumented students, and with the extent to which the administration has supported undocumented students.
When I applied to colleges, Oberlin was the only place I wanted to go: a quirky yet career-focused institution that churned out writers of the caliber I wanted to reach. While my family waited to find out whether sending me here was financially feasible, I prayed for the first real time in my life. Getting here and seeing so many things wrong with the place has made me wonder, at times, whether all that hoping was worth it.
And then I remember the SIC.
I have been to Oberlin’s Sexual Information Center twice. The first time was at the beginning of my freshman year, when questions about sex and relationships were weighing on me to the point of keeping me from functioning. The staffer who met me was warm and knowledgeable, able to talk about sensitive matters with an ease I had never seen before. I left that appointment with one less boulder on my shoulders.
As current staffer Rose Solga explained to me, that kind of attitude is necessary to have on a college campus, where students’ previous education in the realm of sex can vary widely. “...Some students come into Oberlin with very, very little previous sex education knowledge,” Solga said. “They went to maybe a public school that didn’t have quite as much funding in a conservative area, so their sex education was more of [an] abstinence-only model.” Or maybe they’re like me, and were in fact the beneficiaries of robust, indeed progressive sex ed, and just managed to forget almost everything they learned. What matters is that those people have a place like the SIC, a place where they are not looked down upon for what they don’t know, but accepted—and taught.
What’s more, at the SIC, sex-ed and counseling work is only the tip of the… (iceberg. I was going to say iceberg.) The Center also makes Plan B available for any student who needs it, at no cost whatsoever—and this at a time when, per Planned Parenthood, the non-generic version can cost as much as forty or fifty dollars. If you like free things, then check out their supply of gender-affirming products—gaffs, chest-binding tape, Stand-to-Pee devices, and more. By this point, you may be starting to see why this org won the Oberlin Office of Student Leadership and Involvement’s Health & Wellbeing Award last year.
But this is an opinion piece, not an ad. The fact that the SIC offers all of these things is more than a lovely slice of reality: it says something about Obies, about the kind of people they are. They want good things for each other, from enjoyable sex to gender euphoria, and they will work—for decades, if need be—to make those things available. This organization has been around since 1979, and according to Solga, it’s almost inevitable that it would be. “If the SIC were to not exist, I think it would exist again, somehow,” they said. “People would get together and be like, ‘Hey, this is really important to me that we talk about these things,’ or like, ‘Hey, maybe we should figure out how to distribute Plan B for free, and figure out how to make that happen through the College.’”
Having a place like the SIC on campus lets me understand why I haven’t left Oberlin in the dust. There are certainly things wrong with it, as there would be at any college I chose. Yet for all its flaws, the amount of people it manages to enroll who all want each other to be happy is astounding.
I’ll take it. Choke on that, GAD.
