Welcome to the Disorientation Zine! This is a guide to surviving and organizing at Oberlin College. We’ll be catching you up on activist history, explaining the ins and outs of radical organizing, and giving you some advice on how to navigate campus, especially for low-income, BIPOC, and undocumented students. Our goal is to provide you (especially 1st years!) with a perspective that the administration and orientation week will never give. Oberlin is a non-profit corporation that will do anything to grow its endowment at the expense of students’ and workers’ welfare. We are some of its investors, and so it markets itself to us instead of actually caring. We want to help you navigate the hypocrisy of this school: an elitist, neoliberal institution with some real radical traditions and students. We want to help you understand this dynamic and remind you to stay on your toes. This zine is an outstretched hand and an honest act of love from upperclassmen to you. Let’s make sure past radical struggles aren’t forgotten and build momentum for future community organizing on this Campus!

We are building upon a legacy of many past Disorientation Zines. The following pages were written by various past and current Obies. Please UTILIZE THE KNOWLEDGE that you take from this, do not read and move on. This college needs student organizers to hold it accountable and we need one another to survive and thrive within oppressive systems. 

“Oberlin cannot live on its historical accomplishments forever.” 

- Angela Davis, February 1986