letter feb 20 2012

Dear Everyone,

Lucas and I just got back from Ohio. We were on his first college visit trip. We flew to Cleveland Friday night, and stayed at a La Quinta hotel close to the airport (we got to the hotel after 11 PM Eastern Time). We woke, had waffles at the free buffet, and then drove to Oberlin.

Oberlin is pretty famous for the conservatory, and one of the people on our college tour was having a try out that day. Oberlin is also well known for being one of the first higher education institutions that did not discriminate on the basis of race or sex (I don’t know about creed - - that may have been more restrictive. Even today, many Americans are more willing to accept sexual ‘deviancy’ over atheism…) I know it was graduating women from the beginning, I don’t know how many blacks were able to avail themselves of the educational opportunities. It was a bastion of liberal thinking even in the mid 1800’s, and was an important stop on the Underground Railroad. The campus is quite nice, but my trips with Nicola several years ago and this trip have reinforced in my mind why the tuition rates for higher education have increased many-fold faster than the inflation rate. Not all of that money has gone to support need-blind admissions!

Oberlin was also interesting for having several dormitories and dining areas run on a co-op system. The students have to get together and decide what type of food they will be serving, prepare the food, clean the eating area etc. The student heads of the co-ops have a budget of about 2 million dollars. Bananas are a big no-no, since there are free trade and locavore objection to their ingestion. The campus is very environmentally conscious, with the drive to become carbon neutral by 2025. There are big glowing orbs scattered about the campus whose color from green to red indicate energy usage in various buildings.

Few Oberlin students leave the campus to go to Cleveland. Oberlin has 400-500 musical concerts each year, drawing important jazz and classical figures in because of its reputation. I don’t know what else there is to do around there though; the town is tiny. We also saw students borrowing art from the Art museum; about 400 pieces (including Picasso’s and Warhol’s) are available for student loan each semester.

Next, we drove on back roads through central Ohio to visit Denison University in Granville, about 20 miles west of Columbus. We ate at a Bob Evans on the way, which helped me understand why we have an obesity problem in the US. Although Denison is called a University, it no longer has any graduate programs. It is a small college, about 2200 students (Oberlin with the conservatory is about 3000). Granville is a bit bigger than Oberlin, and more religious. Denison started out as a seminary school. The campus is on a hill top and is really well kept. The buildings all look like they are in excellent shape, better than my memory of Wesleyan or Oberlin. We took an informal tour with a freshman friend of Nicola’s named Megan McCormick. She is (so far) a combined French and Telecommunications major. Going up and down the hill all day keeps her in good shape. I don’t know if the students go into town much, but they do go into Columbus. Most freshmen are segregated in one area for living, the juniors in sophomores in a second, and the seniors in the third. Many seniors live in University sponsored apartments.

After our time at Denison, we drove west into Columbus to stay at the Blackwell hotel. This is on the western edge of Ohio State, between the business school and the football stadium. The hotel is owned and operated by business school students. It is a nice hotel, obviously convenient to OSU, and is booked for football weekends some years in advance. While we were there it was booked for a wedding. We drove to a shopping mall just west of the hotel, across the river, where we ate dinner at a Johnny Rockets, and got a discount on movie tickets. We went to see Hugo in 3-D. This was an excellent rendition of the novel ‘The Invention of Hugo Cabret’. I thought the movie was even better then the book for once, since so much of the book is about clockwork and machinery. And of course, it’s a movie about the movies! The end was little bit didactic, however. Scorsese did a great job as a director, and Sacha Baron Cohen was fantastic.

Sunday morning we did a self-guided tour of OSU. Nicola’s friend Kate Keller was not available to help because she was at a special engineering seminar. OSU’s campus is very compact considering the size of the student body is about 52K (42,000 undergrads!). There are definitely some high rises that are used for dormitories, but many of the buildings only go to the 4th story. We saw the Student Union and the 11 story library. There are lots of metal embossed plates in the floor of the library and on the elevator doors in different languages, including Tolkien elvish, Cree, and Labanotation. We walked into the aquatic center that boasts of a 10-lane 50 m pool, and a diving tank with many boards and platforms.

We drove north to Cleveland in the afternoon, stopping at a Chipotle for lunch, and arrived at the Hampton Inn Downtown around 2:30. We registered and then walked four blocks to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. We went through the ground floor which is about the history of Rock, and then to the top two floors where was there a special exhibit about women Rock stars. Then we saw material on previous inductees, and afterwards went through the gift shop. It is a pretty good museum if you like to look at costumes, guitars, and hand written song lyrics, of which there is abundance. There were also a lot of listening and viewing stations. It reminded me a lot of Seattle’s Electronic Music Project, although the latter concentrates on the Seattle music scene. We had a lot of trouble finding a place to eat that evening; the Cleveland downtown is deserted on weekends.

This morning we went to a Case Western Reserve University open house. We were a bit late getting there because only one elevator in the hotel was working this morning, and we decided to climb up and down to the 11th floor. Also, driving around the south western edge of CWRU is a bit crazy; the roads have a strange traffic pattern to catch the unwary stranger, and there is a lot of hospital related traffic. CWRU is a combined institution from 1967 of Case Institute of Technology, and the Western Reserve University. The two football teams hated each other so much that the teams weren’t combined until four years later. The campus has about 4000 undergrads and 5000 grads (yes, more grads). I think the majority of the undergrads are science majors, so I guess Case got the bigger end of the stick. I think there were four or five separate buildings for different kinds of physics or engineering. There was an EE building where we got to see a state of the art circuits lab for undergrads, a polymer physics building, a biomedical engineering building, etc. There wasn’t quite so much in the way of the humanities.

After our tour we went to an informational where Lucas got to speak to a Classics professor (Greek), and one in Anthropology. I don’t think that they had anyone specifically involved with classical archeology and antiquity. The Greek instructor said that it was pretty easy to get a job teaching with a classics diploma these days.

We drove to the airport, unloaded our rental in the confusing off-site rental lot, and had lunch at a Quaker Steak and Lube in the airport. Cindy picked us up. She and Jasper spent the weekend at a meet where Jasper made two more regional times, bringing him to a total of 5 freestyle events, and lowered his time in every race. He’s hoping to make a state cut at next weekend’s regional meet.

Love, H.