Oberlin College - Hi-O-Hi Yearbook (Oberlin, OH)

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l 840 Four big decisions in the first few years helped define the specific innovations in Oberlinis educational dream. The first had to do with manual labor. Every student was expected to contribute four hours of hard labor each day to the cause of the College and his or her own virtue. Much of this work took place on the College farm in the southwest corner of the town. The College farm lasted less than 20 years, and manual labor as an educational reform disappeared even sooner. Students proved to be no match for local farmers when it came to raising crops. As President James Fairchiid later recalled, ftTo discuss first principles became their pastime. They rested on their hoes in the cornfield to look into their inner consciousness, and the manual labor cause suffered in the interests of philosophy. But the cause lives on - in the stern motto of the College tLearning and Labori; in the concept of a sound mind in a sound body tthe governing philosophy behind the emergence of physical education as an academic discipline at Oberlin in the early 20th Centuryi; in the Farmers Co-op, an organic farm located near the railroad tracks on South Professor Street, which emerged from an ad hoc biology course in the early 19705; and in the flourishing program of housing and dining co-ops that dates from the 19505. The second big decision early on was to educate women along with the men. In light of the fame and controversy which swirled around the College for pioneering coeducation, itfs odd to discover how little local discussion it provoked at the outset. Womenis education was apparently more a means of producing as many Christian teachers and missionaries as possible, than it was a direct feminist goal in itself. Also it was hoped that coeducation would reduce the frivolous follies common to youth in those bygone days. When women were placed alongside men as fellow students, they were less likely to be regarded as sex objects. As the local pre-Civil War journal, the Oberlin Evangelist, put it: thhe idea that the young lady is a toy or a plaything is very thoroughly exploded by the practical working of intellectual competition. Coeducation proved to be a more daring invention than the founders intended. Oberlinians spent the next 50 years trying to curb the most feared consequences of what they had launched, to call the lie of the critics and scoffers who said it couldn't be done. College authorities developed an elaborate machinery of sexual segregation to keep men and women apart - the two exceptions being dining halls and classrooms. For a long time co-ed Classes were separated by a wide central aisle a males on one side, females on the other, to keep everyone's mind in proper focus. Even the library remained segregated till the 18905, with separate hours for each sex. LH tRl M LR tNDiNUX HXXIQY Ilahh I H'l'ths

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m maawmtm ' m t ' ' ' ., g i i ii 2 g T?X'W i JV. i ' ., -v 3 .4 , i 333 t . t . . ,s A ':2 i i -r a a f: f: ' i 1 2' aw ., T . t1 x22..XA.M , w 3 . '73.: 1.... 94,. AMlyT . ' M Jan ' ' .7 4:; $Mxrzx57f I ' . 594 .; I A s;' t SOME 1833 RECXHLDS OF THE OBERIJN COLONY AND INSTITI'TE M the top is a receipt for work performed on the Boarding Housc -0berliu Hall. mom originals in the Miscellaneous Archivesi PRESIDENT VA HAN'S HOl'SE by the Institute for him in I835. Occupied by him to l850 and by Professor Morgan from then until 1831. and hv t t Tonscnratory of Music from 188: to 1883 when it was demolished. It was on the site of the present Warner Hall. 1839 Oberlin's location was chosen by its founders, Reverend John Shipherd and his partner Philo Stewart, for both practical and educational reasons. It was originally a desolate swamp forest. The land came very cheap, the only large tract in the region left unsettled because it seemed to have no earthly value. The site fitted nicely with the founders' aim. Shipherd and Stewart wanted to be left alone in their clearing in the woods with their friends and followers, to work out an experiment in higher education on their own terms. Their purposes were big, and bold, and authentically radical. They dreamed of saving the popularion of the raw new American West from ignorance and degeneration. Although the College never tied itself to any specific religious sect, it was profoundly protestant and evangelical in its origins. Oberlinis founding was part of a broad wave of millenial, reform-minded Christian Perfectionism which came sweeping out of New England and upstate New York and across the Middle West during the 30 years before the Civil War. This dream of human perfectibility could take many forms. It could involve tinkering with family relationships among wives, husbands, and children; it could involve testing the idea of communal sharing of property and labor; it could inspire the drive for abolition of slavery, and the beginnings of the women's rights movement. Oberlin's early history was interlocked with many of these impulses. But the Oberlin version of perfectionism was mainly oriented toward missionary education. Underneath its theological complexities, it strove to help people cast aside their momentary imperfections and experience through personal behavior the fullest reward of emancipation from original sin tby which they meant selfishness, egotism, and pridei and so lead more moral and more useful lives. As John Shipherd gathered recruits for his colony across New England and upstate New York, he carried in his saddlebag a written covenant, which each recruit had to sign as a condition of joining. The Oberlin Covenant is a fascinating document. It is keen on plain, straight living - no smoking, no chewing, no drinking tand that included coffee and tea. Jewelry and tight dresses were renounced, as are fancy houses. The Oberlin Covenant combined with severe economic hard times in the early years to enforce the 19th Century plain style of Oberlin domestic architecture which still marks the town, in contrast to the striking variety among the buildings of the 20th Century campus. The Oberlin Covenant served as a kind of screen or filter which controlled the sorts of people who came with Shipherd to found his colony. They were a very earnest, headstrong batch of men and women. There was nothing otherworldly about them. They were determined to change people's behavior here and now. From the outset, colony and College were gathered in a common cause e education for moral service to a world in need of saving. This was the Oberlin latch-key to perfection. 5

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