How Do We Turn This Woodland Hall into a Woodland Home? or, Under(neath/standing) the House of Cards

by Sebastian Cruz, Staff Writer

The late summer afternoon light dispersed through privacy screens. The light went crooked out of the individual bedrooms, and it rested upon an empty house, a small house, a cold house, a grey house. The floors a tasteful marble linoleum, the interior light perfectly alien. I have walked into a dormitory at peak collegiate efficiency. No stovetop, no problem. A whole three degrees of choice for the thermostat. A hum of indeterminate origin comforts me…

Or something like that.

Oh, come on, can’t a guy get a little elevated around here? Before the thing was even open, I got a good sense of what Woodland Hall would be like. Functionally tip-top, spankin’ new to the delight of grateful sophomores, satisfied juniors and incandescently disappointed seniors. Freakishly isolating.

Consider how all of this hullabaloo pinpoints the moment that Oberlin College happens to be moving through. In my contractually-limited scope of things, the cogs of transition have been churning like mad since the very, very beginning. 

It’s been a long three years of transition for myself, into higher ed, social responsibility, hookup app gaffes, the whole shebang. In my first year, Waved into Wilder on the promise of disc jockey jollies and jams, I came out the other side as a staff member for WOBC, as co-chair of Hip Hop Workgroup (which is very funny.) Our responsibilities were simple: comb through all hip hop-related media, keep what’s basically okay, chuck the rest. It didn’t come far into the semester before the scope of the whole operation came into focus. A final organization of the music archive, after which comes the relocation and then the shutdown.

The Wilder beautification project is just one of what feels like dozens of churning changes to the makeup of our campus, all consolidations, shut-downs, re-tools and edits. Woodland Hall crowns them all, however.

It’s a great relocation, the administration hugging us all closer to its bustling center. The sheer magnitude alone is something out of a space colony. Pods (“units”) for gratification all schoolyear long. In the settled dust — the quad now furnished with the requisite drinking monkey poster, appliances that fall over each other on the cute, infuriating kitchenette (emphasis on “ette”), a slightly nasty couch — the ambiguity surrounding Woodland Hall begins to fade into the tedious. 

Not that there aren’t glimpses of excitement. 

Our overactive fire alarm system is a kind of pitch-perfect reminder into what we’re dealing with now. It’s a bit like a real-life math problem. Take 100 rooms for 400 people, add a (purportedly!) self-regulating indoor ventilation system, subtract windows that can open, you’re getting something approximating ambitious chefs and bummed smokers trying to get their fill. 

There is also the fact that the building isn’t quite finished. If I were to look out of my window, beyond the clouded visage of that privacy screen, the courtyard below is but a dirty, brown suggestion of something beautiful. Occasional raps of the construction workers prepping the faux-brick facades bound around the vicinity; if you wish upon a star, they WILL pound outside of your bedroom before you have to wake up. 

Don’t be alarmed, but this is living, in a certain sense. Many of the sentiments I introduced in my little prequel article “Into the House of Cards of ResLife and ResEd” are to be echoed here; how the coronation of Woodland Hall into the Oberlin campus residential smorgasbord is an exercise in testing entitlement. In my final-year bubble, the disappointment is thick and unavoidable. Through trial repetition and a good attitude through clenched teeth, the effort to stay grateful and purposeful chugs us along. 

Yet, once I begin to peel back the layers, the admin’s greed begins to show face. I stand staring at our meager cooking implements: a complementary microwave to boot. There’s this widespread yearning for independence, a comfortable distance from this institution that positively correlates with our readiness to shed it. The axing of the majority of off-campus housing is nothing if not a cold hard look into admin’s intentions to keep us where they like us. With such an intention, they lined the hallways with security cameras, a convenient surveillance.

Food is everything; particularly, food is a life of its own. A meal is one step closer to that naked “real life” that gets so terrifying and tantalizing as the semesters roll along. It’s a small and deeply discomfiting point of dissonance in campus life as it relates to Woodland Hall, that the corporate entity that is Oberlin has us tethered through omission of resources. This, of course, precipitates more participants in their rapacious meal plan ploy that is meant to rip you off with impunity. 

Sure, I’ve made my living here as nice as I could. My intrepid quadmates and I have searched true for the appropriate accouterments. That’s that good-good, that “independence” so extolled. The significance of it all is small potatoes. Looking down the barrel of domestic movement from dorm to dorm to dorm to dorm to probably your parents’ place (if you make it that far — I may not), it’ll all evaporate in due time. 

But then comes that insidious phenomenon, that “institutional memory” we toss around. What are we to impart upon this generation of Oberlin hopefuls? It was better? Could we even claim that? If we do our best to recall, what even is there? 

Woodland’s significance remains nebulous, and the days before its introduction is now decimated by time’s flying arrow. It doesn’t matter anymore. WOBC is temporary-squared; Azzie’s now gets to split the rent at half the space (not actually, I don’t think); the Gilbane Construction trucks back up and squeal in the background, in a chorus of architectural progress. I bet if I look in the eyes of any of ye bushy-tailed new students, you’d tell me you were having a good time, even steeped in all of this change. 

The sun sets beyond the privacy screen. It is night in Woodland Hall. Under tasteful warm lights instead of the cold perfection of the building lights subtle enough to rock a constant migraine, I wonder, can this be mine? It’s possible I don’t even want it, but I have it and it sucks, and it’s also quite wonderful. It’s like a cremation ground, everything torched to ashes to be rebuilt upon.

Ball in our court, Woodlanders, and happy housing.