I'm an Oberlin student currently and shit like this drives me insane, honestly. Don't get me wrong, fall to the liberal side of things like the massive majority of our campus, but the college's hivemind ideology that gets blown up in the media every couple of months is ridiculous and a lot of students here (myself included) pay no attention to this shit.

I'm at Oberlin to get a serious education and I can honestly say that that's exactly what I'm getting. We have arguably one of the best programs in the country for my field, I have awesome professors, and I bust my ass to get good grades here. I can say with confidence that I'm in a great position to do what I want to do once I graduate. I refused to sign this petition because I don't fucking expect success to be handed on a plate to me and if I have to spend hours studying to do what I do then so should everyone else, in my opinion.

I will also mention that I'm in a STEM field, and the atmosphere is definitely different in my department and others like it compared to the humanities/others (though I am also involved in a department in the humanities). People in my area of study don't give a flying fuck about whatever ~activism~ is going on on campus. Oberlin definitely isn't Yale or Harvard but it's still a highly academically respected institution in a lot of circles (especially in graduate school admissions, which is where it really matters for someone like me who's interested in higher level academia).

Also the media does tend to piece apart the weird activism on campus and only write about the ridiculous stuff that will get media attention. Our whole ~culturally appropriative food fiasco~ went down at the end of fall semester this year and we were blasted on every news outlet for it, but it seems no one wanted to write a piece about the racially targeted death threats made on campus that week. Whether or not the threats were legitimate, we had police patrolling the campus all week and a lot of professors had to reschedule their final exams because of the threats (for precaution/safety of the students). It's not necessarily related to the food incident (which I agree was ridiculous), but it does bother me that I rarely see articles written about the school attempting to critique/criticize it in a non-inflammatory manner.

TL;DR - Oberlin is really fucking dumb sometimes but as a student here I can agree with the above comment that most of us try to distance ourselves from the crazy activism that goes on and I feel that I'm getting a great education and do not regret my choice to attend here