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This chapter examines the frustrations and accomplishments of young African-American women who studied at Oberlin College in Ohio in the years prior to the Civil War. Immersed in an otherwise all-white student body and taught by an all-white faculty, African-American women students resented and resisted misunderstandings and incidents of outright discrimination in campus by pursuing antislavery activism. Nevertheless, young women of different races enrolled at Oberlin showed strong affinities, shaped by the values of “respectability” and the doctrines of “practical abolitionism.” Respectability prompted black women undergraduates to join with their white counterparts in the cause of “female moral reform,” allowing them to exhibit the “virtue” that slavery and skin color had presumably denied them. The women at Oberlin drew strength from autonomous networks of African Americans as well as from sympathetic whites in their construction of a vital role for black women in the work of emancipation and in their quest for equality and empowerment.

This chapter provides a local analysis of lived experiences on three integrated college campuses – Berea (KY), Howard (DC) and Oberlin (OH). Selected from among thirty colleges open to blacks and whites after 1870, these three were widely endorsed as models for replication by important cultural, political, and media figures. Diaries and personal letters from college presidents, students, and others reveal the intensity with which campus-level actors were attached to the ideal of integration. Administrative reports, budgets, fundraising materials and detailed minutes from Board of Trustee meetings illustrate decision-making processes and practices in structuring racial contact on campus. Fundraising materials, including speeches, pamphlets and letters to donors show how the colleges depicted their mission to potential students, donors, and policymakers; an independently-constructed data set of over four hundred newspaper articles shows how these colleges were portrayed to readers across the United States. Berea, Howard, and Oberlin differed in racial composition, recruitment strategies, and black representation on faculty and administration. Despite variation on key factors thought to predict inter-racial cooperation, on-campus dynamics were insufficient to resist segregationist pressures from beyond the campus gates.

Rollo May’s college career. He enters college at Michigan State, becomes a student rebel, and leaves for a more appropriate campus. He goes to Oberlin, where his love of antiquity is born and commitment to a religious calling in Christianity is solidified. At MSC he encounters Bennett “Buck” Weaver through work at the YMCA. Weaver gets him into Oberlin. All during college, he participates in various programs of the national YMCA, including some that exposed him to therapeutic forms of pastoral counseling. Oberlin helped to shape his liberal Christian outlook and also his passions for philosophy, music, and art. He also began to perfect his style of synthesizing ideas in various class assignments. Finally, he followed the Oberlin tradition of doing missionary work after college, in May’s case in Greece.

This chapter discusses William Mercer Cook as he grew from child to adolescent. It explains several important points in his life, from the death of his father, his journey with his mother, and the life that he had when he stayed with his relatives. It also narrates Will’s decision to pursue his latent desire to study music at Oberlin College. It adds that his artistic ability was undoubtedly inherited from his paternal grandfather, who once organized an orchestra in Detroit, wherein he played the violin and clarinet. It then explains that the violin was to become the instrument upon which Will would choose to express his musicality.

This chapter focuses on Jennifer L. Morgan's freshman year at Oberlin College, which coincided with a nearly volcanic outpouring of written work by black feminists. Like many of her generation, Morgan felt as though something elusive and profound had slipped through her fingers by virtue of having been born a bit too late. She clung to the story of her parents finding each other in the crowds during the March on Washington in the summer before they married, and worried that her attendance at the “No Nukes” and “U.S. out of Central America” rallies was little more than a weak echo of something far more real. Morgan was looking for something in the here and now—the desire to be caught up in something important was, after all, precisely what had propelled her to Oberlin in the first place.

In its original form this chapter was delivered at a late-1970s forum sponsored by the Commission on the Status of Women in the Profession of the Modern Language Association. It had a kind of underground, mimeographed existence for a few years before seeing print in Feminist Studies in 1983. It has made its way and continues, I think, to be useful for those studying the canon. I have therefore not undertaken to change it. Judith Fetterley has raised one important criticism of the piece. In her fine introduction to Provisions: A Reader From 19th-century American Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985, pp. 18–19) she argues that the exclusion of nineteenth-century women writers from the literary canon began far earlier than the 1920s, in fact during the nineteenth century itself. There is significant evidence to support that contention. John Macy’s 1911 volume The Spirit of American Literature, for example, devotes its sixteen chapters to sixteen white men, though his “Preface” expresses admiration for the work of Jewett, Freeman and Wharton, and even passingly for Stowe. Brander Matthews’ similar volume, An Introduction to the Study of American Literature (1896, rev. 1911), focuses fifteen chapters on individual white men and then devotes one to “other writers,” including Whitman and Stowe. These very likely reflected the state of much academic opinion, though volumes like An American Anthology, 1787–1900 (ed., Edmund Clarence Stedman, 1900) and Mildred Cabell Watkins’ young adult primer, American Literature (1894) offer countervailing evidence. And, of course, as I outline in the article, other older academics like Fred Lewis Pattee and Arthur Hobson Quinn offered a far wider version of American letters. Fetterley thus provides what I think is a useful corrective to broad generalizations about academic canons, especially with respect to early and mid-nineteenth-century writers. But the central point, in my view, is that dominantly male academic accounts of the American canon were far less weighty around the turn of the century than they became in and after the 1920s.

I teach in a liberal arts college in a small, attractive Ohio town located in an agricultural county 14 miles south of Lake Erie. The town formerly had train service that connected it easily and comfortably to the wider world. Sometime in the 1950s the trains stopped coming, and the tracks were eventually converted into a bike trail. In the intervening four decades, students arrived on campus in a variety of ways, including bus, plane, car, and a few intrepid souls still come by train to a decaying Amtrak station eight miles distant. Now many, perhaps most, come in cars that they own and that they park anywhere and everywhere in town. So like many campuses, ours is overrun by cars. And like many other colleges, we find ourselves locked in conflict with the local authorities over parking policy. Our policy is roughly to tell students, “Y’all come and bring it with you.” Unless there is a sudden outbreak of intelligence, we are likely to respond to prodding by city officials by building yet another parking lot and thereby reducing to that degree the loveliness and serenity of the town already jeopardized by urban sprawl. That, however, is an aesthetic matter on which people can and will disagree. What they cannot dispute is the cost of parking. The cost of a single parking space is estimated to be $7,000 in a paved lot and double that for a parking deck. Then there is the annual cost of policing, lighting, removing snow, and landscaping parking lots, perhaps another $1,500. From this perspective, one obvious solution is simply not to build extra parking and split the savings with those who do not to bring cars to college or drive them to work. So in return for not adding to the problem, cooperators would get a check for, say, $5,000. Those who continue to drive for whatever reason would pay a fee equal to the real costs imposed on the institution by their driving habits. Reasonable? Not according to many who believe that driving is a sacred right guaranteed somewhere in the Constitution (or was it the Declaration of Independence?) and to those who believe that automobility is now indelibly written into our behavioral genes and cannot be further altered by evolution or reason.

As commonly practiced, education has little to do with its specific setting or locality. The typical campus is regarded mostly as a place where learning occurs, but is, itself, believed to be the source of no useful learning. A campus is intended, rather, to be convenient, efficient, or aesthetically pleasing, but not instructional. It neither requires nor facilitates competence or mindfulness. By that standard, the same education could happen as well in California or in Kazakhstan, or on Mars, for that matter. The same could be said of the buildings and landscape that make up a college campus (Orr 1993). The design of buildings and landscape is thought to have little or nothing to do with the process of learning or the quality of scholarship that occurs in a particular place. But in fact, buildings and landscape reflect a hidden curriculum that powerfully influences the learning process. The curriculum embedded in any building instructs as fully and as powerfully as any course taught in it. Most of my classes, for example, were once taught in a building that I think Descartes would have liked. It is a building with lots of squareness and straight lines. There is nothing whatsoever that reflects its locality in northeast Ohio in what had once been a vast forested wetland (Sherman 1996). How it is cooled, heated, and lighted and at what true cost to the world is an utter mystery to its occupants. It offers no clue about the origins of the materials used to build it. It tells no story. With only minor modifications it could be converted to use as a factory or prison, and some students are inclined to believe that it so functions. When classes are over, students seldom linger for long. The building resonates with no part of our biology, evolutionary experience, or aesthetic sensibilities. It reflects no understanding of ecology or ecological processes. It is intended to be functional, efficient, minimally offensive, and little more. But what else does it do? First, it tells its users that locality, knowing where you are, is unimportant. To be sure, this is not said in so many words anywhere in this or any other building. Rather, it is said tacitly throughout the entire structure.

In the towns and cities across America, it is common to find a town square with a large monument to one military hero or another. Seldom, however, does one find the designers of those towns or town squares similarly memorialized. A smarter and more durable society would first acknowledge those with the foresight and dedication to design our places well, not just those who defended them in times of trouble.We need to recognize a higher order of heroism–those who helped avoid conflict, harmonized human communities with their surroundings, preserved soil and biological diversity, and created the basis for a more permanent peace than that possible to forge by violence. These are quiet heroes and heroines who work mostly out of the light of publicity. The few who do receive public acclaim are mostly reticent about the attention they get. Some like Frederick Law Olmsted, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson develop a wide international following. Most, however, labor in obscurity, content to do their work for the satisfaction of doing things well. John Lyle, professor of landscape architecture at California Polytechnic Institute, was such a man. I met John in the mid-1980s during a visit to Cal Poly. During the two days we spent together, we talked about his concept of regenerative design and his plans for the Center for Regenerative Studies, now named the Lyle Center, and walked over the site–located between a large landfill and the university. In subsequent years, John and I met at conferences and sometimes collaborated on design projects, including one located in a remote, hilly, southern rural community. Our first site visit coincided with an ice storm the previous day that had covered the region with an inch of ice. We got within a mile of the site in a rental car, but had to make our way down a long, steep hill with a sheer drop of several hundred feet on one side. For the final mile on what passed for a dirt road in that part of the country, the rental car was useless, so we began to slip, slide, and tumble our way down the hill. Near the bottom, the road banked steeply to the right, but we had to reach a trail on the left side.

By a large margin 1998 was the warmest year ever recorded. The previous year was the second warmest (IPCC 2001). A growing volume of scientific evidence indicates that, given present trends, the combustion of fossil fuels, deforestation, and poor land-use practices will cause a major, and perhaps self-reinforcing, shift in global climate (Houghton 1997). With climatic change will come severe weather extremes, superstorms, droughts, killer heat waves, rising sea levels, spreading disease, accelerating rates of species loss, and collateral political, economic, and social effects that we cannot imagine. We are conducting, as Roger Revelle (quoted in Somerville 1996, 35) once noted, a one-time experiment on the earth that cannot be reversed and should not be run. The debate about climatic change has, to date, been mostly about scientific facts and economics, which is to say a quarrel about unknowns and numbers. On one side are those, greatly appreciated by some in the fossil fuel industry, who argue that we do not yet know enough to act and that acting prematurely would be prohibitively expensive (Gelbspan 1998). On the other side are those who argue that we do know enough to act and that further procrastination will make subsequent action both more difficult and less efficacious. In the United States, which happens to be the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, the issue is not likely to be discussed in any constructive manner. And the U.S. Congress, caught in a miasma of ideology and partisanship, is in deep denial, unable to act on the Kyoto agreement that called for a 7 percent reduction of 1990 carbon dioxide levels by 2012. Even that level of reduction, however, would not be enough to stabilize climate. To see our situation more clearly we need a perspective that transcends the minutiae of science, economics, and current politics. Because the effects, whatever they may be, will fall most heavily on future generations, understanding their likely perspective on our present decisions would be useful to us now. How are future generations likely to regard various positions in the debate about climatic change? Will they applaud the precision of our economic calculations that discounted their prospects to the vanishing point? Will they think us prudent for delaying action until the last-minute scientific doubts were quenched?