#oberlin-college — Public Fediverse posts

Oberlin #Luddites Reject "Year of #AI Exploration" Adopted by School

September 19, 2025

To President Carmen Twillie Ambar and Oberlin Community:

We are drafting this letter to you on a typewriter that is over 70 years old; this is a machine that we know well. With it, we ditch the crutches of spell-check and generative AI, and we think intently about every phrase we pound out. As we force ourselves, for once, to slow down, we engage in an inner dialogue.

Most of us did not enroll at Oberlin in search of superficial perfection, nor of lazy convenience. Rather, we chose it for its quirky individualism and a tangible education — the challenging of our young minds’ potential, not the chasing of institutional “gold-star” approval.

This college, which was built on a legacy of learning and labor, now risks straying from these principles. With ChatGPT at the helm, our emails, essays, and discussion posts will be generated for us. Not by us. And let’s not fool ourselves. This is precisely what these platforms will be used for.

You claim that this year will be one of “experimentation,” not adoption. But even one semester of accepted (even encouraged) chat-bot use will jettison our student body down a lazy, irredeemable tunnel of intellectual destruction.

We see this fetish for efficiency in other ways at this college: in the takeover of our beloved library cafe by a “bookstore” with no books in stock and an app replacing customer service — through automated instead of hand-pulled coffee.

Who gains from this if not the students? Sam Altman of ChatGPT and Sundar Pichai of Gemini may be plying their wares to colleges at low or no cost, but it’s no secret that every engagement with these platforms is an effort in surveillance in which our data is extracted and monetized. President Ambar, as you embark on your year of AI, we’ll embark on our own year of self-actualization — of realizing the fruits of our labor, and of embracing human imperfection and raw inquiry. We reject information technologies operating out of data centers that guzzle water and precious energy sources (and that contradict our campus’ carbon-neutral policy). We will not stand by and witness the further atrophying of our liberal arts education. Rather than strengthening Silicon Valley, we build our own skills and generative sweat. We urge all members of the Oberlin community who feel similarly to join us and sign our “AI-Opt-Out Letter.”

As for you, President Ambar, we ask that you terminate the College’s contract with Google Gemini and OpenAI. Our position may risk disapproval, perceived backwardness, and the outward appearance of naiveté. But let us not ask what the Silicon Valley oligarchs can do for Oberlin students, but what Oberlin students can do for ourselves while we still have the brain capacity to do so.

–The Oberlin Luddite Club

Charlie Mclaughlin, Logan Lane, Mary Claire McGreivey, Simon Puchner-Noel, Marlowe Blantz, and Sawyer Van Dyck

#LudditeClub #OberlinCollege #AISucks #NoAI

Hype for the Future 77/284: City of Oberlin, Ohio

https://novatopflex.wordpress.com/2026/01/16/hype-for-the-future-77-284-city-of-oberlin-ohio/

First Hacktivist Protest? Oberlin College Anti-Apartheid Computer Shutdown in 1984

People say there’s nothing new on Earth and certainly when it comes to hacking and hacktivism someone did whatever it is you are thinking of before you think anyone did.

To understand the background of this story we need to understand apartheid in South Africa, the system of racial segregation put in place and maintained by successive white governments from 1948 through to 1994.

People in South Africa were given racial classifications and their legal rights, ability to move freely, employment opportunities and education were all dependent on this classification.

Millions of Black Africans in South Africa were stripped of their South African citizenship and forced from their homes into what the South African governments called “tribal homelands”, with over 80% of the nation’s land set aside for the white minority to hold.

As time went on more and more people around the world began to protest against the inhumanity and cruelty of apartheid, and pursued boycotts and demands for economic divestment to pressure the South African government to abandon the apartheid system.

I came across the story of the 1984 Oberlin anti-apartheid campus protests that took on a hacktivist element when I read through some back issues of Computerworld magazine, while doing some research on another topic.

First though I want to stress that the part of the wider protest that involved school computer resources was not the main protest, which revolved around traditional peaceful protest tactics.

In November of 1984 Oberlin College held a board of trustees meeting, around 300 students protesting against the college holding millions of dollars in stock in companies that were based in South Africa lined the entry ways to the Mudd Library where the meeting was being held.

A much smaller group of students decided that they would take their protest to the school’s computer systems.

The December 17th Computerworld magazine article “System used in protest” by Donna Raimondi states that Student Coalition Against Apartheid “activists here tried but failed to overload the campus computer system to bring attention to their demands that Oberlin College divest itself of stock in South African companies” and describes this as a “futile attempt”.

John Harvith, Oberlin College’s public relations office representative is quoted as saying that “student organization got together to determine how to protest, and the organization as a whole decided not to use computers to do it” and that a smaller splinter group of activists numbering between 4 (his estimate) and 12 (as listed in the Rotunda article below) students tried to overload the college’s Sigma 9 computer system.

The group of students simultaneously sat at terminals and ran tasks that they believed would eat system resources, in this regard they were an early example of what I call a “voluntary human botnet”, people coordinating performing a manual denial of service attack. Some of the students also ran print job loops that caused college printers to keep “spewing out garbage printouts”, this is similar to so called “black fax” tactics used in the 90s to run through fax machine ink while also tying up the attached phone line.

The Associated Press covered the protest as well, and noted that “students also began checking out and returning armloads of books in an attempt to shut down a library computer.” Associated Press noted though that “although about 1,500 books were checked out, compared with a normal 200 to 300, the computer system was not affected”, once again according to John Harvith, from Oberlin College’s public relations office.

Longwood College’s The Rotunda newspaper, from January 22nd 1985, includes details of anti-apartheid student protests across the U.S. that ramped up in the winter of 1984 and it includes a mention of the Oberlin College computer tactics.

And in a somewhat more radical tactic, 12 members of Oberlin College’s Student Coalition Against Apartheid tried unsuccessfully to shut down the campus computer system and hold it hostage until the school sold off its $30 million in South African-tied companies.

Student Anti-Apartheid Groups Organize, David Gaede, The Rotunda, January 22nd, 1985

Regardless of how well planned or organized the hacktivist element of the wider protest might have been, people certainly paid attention.

While the attempt to shut down the Sigma 9 computer at Oberlin as part of the anti-apartheid protest in 1984 may have failed, Oberlin did eventually divest from South African investments in line with student activist demands after a sit in protest by hundreds of students that lasted 3 days in 1987.

One thing I noticed in all of the mainstream media coverage of the protest was that Oberlin College representatives were at great pains to point out that the protest had been entirely ineffective, that they were able to catch the activity happening and that they took swift action to prevent it impacting computing resources. The articles themselves use words like “futile”.

I wonder if this was as much to discourage other, potentially more technical students, replicating the tactics of the protest in a more successful fashion than it was to simply report that the goals of this particular protest had not been achieved.

If you know of similar protests that involved computers in the 80s I’d love to hear about them, I’m sure it will turn out that there were events that pre-date this one.

#1980s #1984 #antiApartheid #apartheid #AssociatedPress #Basic #blackFax #College #computer #Computerworld #DesmondTutu #divestment #DonnaRaimondi #hacktivism #history #humanBotnet #LongwoodCollege #magazine #newspaper #Oberlin #OberlinCollege #Ohio #politics #protest #Rotundda #sitIn #SouthAfrica #StudentCoalitionAgainstApartheid

𝗪𝗜𝗞𝗜𝗣𝗘𝗗𝗜𝗔 𝗣𝗜𝗖𝗧𝗨𝗥𝗘 𝗢𝗙 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗗𝗔𝗬

✧ Shirley Graham Du Bois ✧

Shirley Graham Du Bois (November 11, 1896 – March 27, 1977) was an American-Ghanaian writer, playwright, composer, and activist for African-American causes. Born in Indianapolis to an Episcopal minister, she moved with her family throughout the United States as a child. After marry...

#UnitedStates #MorganCollege #OberlinCollege #HowardUniversity #Anisfield-WolfBookAward #Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_Graham_Du_Bois

Here's why #sheep grazing on this #Ohio #solarfarm is a no-brainer
#OberlinCollege’s ground crew have complained about how difficult and expensive it was to maintain the field upon which the 13-year-old solar farm sits. So the college’s campus energy and resource manager, Joel Baetens, decided to try #agrivoltaics – pairing #solar power with #agriculture – by bringing in sheep to graze and aerate the grass growing around the #solarfarm.
https://electrek.co/2023/05/30/sheep-solar-farm/

New #openaccess publication #SciPost #physics

Growth of the Wang-Casati-Prosen counter in an integrable billiard
Zaijong Hwang, Christoph A. Marx, Joseph J. Seaward, Svetlana Jitomirskaya, Maxim Olshanii
SciPost Phys. 14, 017 (2023)
https://scipost.org/SciPostPhys.14.2.017

@NSF #UMassBoston #OberlinCollege #SorbonneParisNorthUniversity #UCI #RegionÎle-de-France #SimonsFoundation

Intros seem to be a thing, so hi! I'm Sheera.

I'm a #professor of #comparativeliterature and #jewishstudies at #oberlincollege.

I work on modern Hebrew and Arabic #poetry, with an interest in the intersection of lit. and political crisis and the poet as public figure. Currently completing a book on the national poets of Palestine/Israel.

I'm a mama to a delightful 3 y/o.

I post about Palestine/Israel, motherhood, Jewishness, literature, academia, teaching, and my life. Also an avid deleter.

A late update to my #intro. Some hashtags! #Raleigh #RaleighNC #ADHD #AntiDiet #FairPlay #Cats #Dogs #LiveMusic #Food #Cooking #Photography #Choir #ChoralSinging #Oberlin #OberlinCollege #OberlinConservatory #Hiking #Dogs #Neurodivergent #Therapist #BadChristmasMovies #Allyship #Atlanta #Migraine #MaintenancePhase #Knitting #GenX #Pilates #Kayaking

I'm an organist and student at the Oberlin College and Conservatory, where i'm also majoring in Computer Science. If you play the #organ or other music, or are a student at #oberlin Please follow or DM me so I can follow you! #oberlincollege