Oberlin College. A private liberal arts college and conservatory of music in Oberlin, Ohio. Founded in 1833, it is the oldest coeducational liberal arts college in the United States and the second-oldest continuously operating coeducational institute of higher learning in the world. The Oberlin Conservatory of Music is the oldest continuously operating conservatory in the United States.
In 1835, Oberlin became one of the first colleges in the United States to admit African Americans, and in 1837, the first to admit women. It has been known since its founding for progressive student activism.
The College of Arts & Sciences offers more than 60 majors, minors, and concentrations. Oberlin is a member of the Great Lakes Colleges Association and the Five Colleges of Ohio consortium.
The college’s founders wrote voluminously and were featured prominently in the press, especially the Abolitionist Movement newspaper The Liberator, in which the name Oberlin occurred 352 times by 1865.
Oberlin’ was an idea before it was a place. It began in revelation and dreams: It was East Coast progressives’ motivation to emigrate west, attempting to “educating a missionary army of Christian soldiers to save the world and inaugurate God’s government on earth, and the radical notion that slavery was America’s most horrendous sin that should be instantly repented of and immediately brought to an end.”
The Oberlin student body has a long history of activism and a reputation for being notably liberal. The college was ranked among The Princeton Review‘s list of “Colleges with a Conscience“ in 2005.
In the 1960s, Oberlin students were deeply engaged as civil rights activists and its anti-war movement. Oberlin supplied a disproportionate number of participants in Mississippi Freedom Summer, rebuilt the Antioch Missionary Baptist Church in the Carpenters for Christmas project, supported NAACP–sponsored sit-ins in Cleveland to integrate the building-trades, and with the SCLC participated in demonstrations at Hammermill Paper.
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