Word: oberline
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Ruth Geyer is a biology major at Oberlin, but three days a week (for $3 an hour) she dons an apron to wax furniture, wash windows and mop the floors of a ten-room house in the wealthy Philadelphia suburb of Rosemont, Pa. "I haven't had any other experience, so maybe I'm just lucky to have found it," she says...
When Scott arrived at Oberlin last year, the reaction was surprisingly skittish for a liberal institution that prides itself on being the first white college to admit blacks (1835) and the first college to graduate women (1837): four of the 14 staffers in the athletic department, including the football and basketball coaches, resigned. "Sports will be destroyed at Oberlin," one coach warned darkly. Scott, noting that...
...Oberlin football team had gone winless in eight games the season before he arrived, had an obvious rejoinder: "How can we destroy sports with a record like that? We have nowhere to go but up." Describing himself as a "radical populist," Scott insists that his aim is not to de-emphasize but to "democratize" sports. In an odd non sequitur, he adds: "What no one realizes is that I voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964, and read Ayn Rand...
...been spent almost exclusively on men's sports, Scott added two females to his staff to promote women's athletics and "break down the machismo atmosphere." To help eliminate the distinction between so-called major and minor sports, he did away with admission charges to all Oberlin sporting events. And to give athletes more of a say, he granted them veto power over the selection of coaches and the right to help decide their own training rules. "There's more of a team feeling now," says Marty Dugan, co-captain of the basketball team...
Though Scott's critics scoff at such plans as having team members vote on starting lineups, there is anything but anarchy on the playing fields of Oberlin. In fact, Scott's quest for "excellence without dehumanizing the athlete" seems to be succeeding. Attendance at exercise classes has more than doubled, and over 30 students are now majoring in phys. ed., a department that was all but ignored in recent years. This season the football team won two of nine games with a lame-duck coach, but Scott claims little credit for the improvement. He agrees with President Fuller...