At Dartmouth, the Vietnam-era storming of Parkhurst Hall by anti-war students is still legendary. But at politically-active Oberlin College -- the new home of Dartmouth's former Dean of First-Year Students Peter Goldsmith -- vocal protest is a part of daily existence.
In fact, a group of students stormed and occupied Cox Administration Building -- the equivalent to Dartmouth's Parkhurst -- for 29 hours during the spring of 1999 to protest the selection of Goldsmith as the college's new Dean of Students.
"Protesting is kind of a seasonal sport at Oberlin," Goldsmith told The Dartmouth last week, while briefly visiting the Hanover area.
He said the process of entering this apparently hostile environment "wasn't fun" as he prepared to move to Oberlin, Ohio one year ago this month.
But at the conclusion of his first year as Dean of Students at Oberlin -- a position similar to Dartmouth's Dean of the College -- Goldsmith said he thinks he has become more accepted by the student body at his new institution, admitting that the change in attitude has been a "gradual" one.
"As people get to know him, they're seeing that he's an excellent person," said 2002 class council President at Oberlin Amy Levin-Epstein told The Dartmouth. She is working in Hanover this summer while living with her sister Lauren Levin-Epstein '02.
According to Levin-Epstein many Oberlin students initially objected to Goldsmith because they saw Dartmouth as Ivy-League and conservative.
Goldsmith explained that the students protesting were not technically speaking out against him but against the selection process, which they believed was not student-driven.
Levin-Epstein added that the protests that have met Goldsmith at Oberlin are not necessarily showing widespread disapproval.
"It's kind of like testing him," she said.
She also explained, "Because Oberlin is so politically active, the voices of a few people can be taken as the voice of the entire student body."
In his new position, Goldsmith is in charge of residential life, counseling, student health, the student union, dining, the chaplaincy and safety and security.
He said one of the key differences between the two colleges is the role of students in the institutions' operations.
"Oberlin students feel more empowered vis-a-vis the running of the
college than Dartmouth students do," Goldsmith said.
As an example of this student empowerment, he noted that the Judicial Board -- which is similar to Dartmouth's Committee on Standards -- is completely student-run. "That would be a shocking idea for Dartmouth," he said.
He said the ever-present air of protest at Oberlin is not a good thing or a bad thing. "It cuts both ways," he explained. "It suggests that there's a student body that takes an interest in the running of the college."
He said the pervasive student interest forces him to spend a lot of time explaining his actions. But he said explaining should, in fact, be part of any good administrator's responsibilities.
"It's very exciting to watch students step outside their own immediate interests," he added, noting that Oberlin students take vocal interest in administrative concerns as well as national and international causes such as labor and environmental issues.
But at the same time, he acknowledged that despite some points of differentiation between the two colleges, there are also many similarities.
Lauren Levin-Epstein, who has visited her sister Amy multiple times at Oberlin, said she thinks there is a difference in the make-up of the student bodies because different types of students are attracted by the colleges' reputations.
But she said the two schools also share qualities like good academics and abundant extracurricular opportunities. Amy added that she is spending the summer at Dartmouth and having a good time, indicating that the difference between the two schools is not as profound as some make believe it to be.
Despite Oberlin's traditional diversity, Goldsmith noted that like at most American colleges and universities, the students there fail to "capitalize on diversity."
In this light, he said one of his key initiatives as Dean of Students is to make it easier for students to talk about race and ethnicity in a more inclusive way.
He said the college experience is a unique one because it places students in diverse settings, and he said he thinks it is important that Oberlin students start moving away from grouping themselves into homogeneous subsections.
"As administrators and faculty, we have to model a kind of behavior that encourages and promotes social border crossing," he said.
Dartmouth is statistically slightly more racially diverse than Oberlin, but according to Goldsmith it suffers from the same sort of racial tensions.
Another of Goldsmith's key projects has been creating a class dean system, resembling Dartmouth's, to integrate the inside and outside of class support structures. He was quick to point out that the planned class dean system, which will go into effect in the fall, is not based on Dartmouth's, but on the model set by many east coast schools.
Some members of the community at Oberlin have accused him of trying to make their college more like Dartmouth, and he denied that such a move was his intention.
He said he thinks it is important for Oberlin students to feel that they can use the college's administration as a resource, rather than seeing it as an adversary. He said the anti-authority attitude so prevalent at Oberlin is not pronounced at Dartmouth, and students here tend to approach deans for advice.
When Goldsmith first accepted the position Oberlin College President Nancy Dye told The Dartmouth, "We've traditionally had a student life administration which has been very different from the academic administration. We would like to have a more holistic approach, rather like Dartmouth's."
Generally, Goldsmith said the move to Oberlin was a good one for him -- but he said he did not leave Dartmouth because of anything internal to the College such as the then one-year-old presidency of James Wright or the Board of Trustees' Initiative.
"I went because I was offered a really wonderful job," he said, noting that he admires his Dartmouth colleagues for the hard work they have done to implement changes prompted by the Initiative.
Goldsmith said he has kept in touch with some Dartmouth administrators and faculty members, but that he and his family are happy at Oberlin.
