When the Oberlin Review needed a football story last October, senior Ava Harvey wrote a provocation instead — “Put Your Mouth Where Your Money Is: Back Oberlin Football” — arguing that the school’s students were at best indifferent, at worst hostile, to a winless team whose Midwest athletes never felt at home in the school’s “homogenized coastal culture.” The column lit up the dining halls, drew two formal rebuttals, and gave Jesse Dougherty a lens on the small liberal-arts school’s oldest argument about itself.

  • The setup: Oberlin finished 0–10 in 2025 and allowed seventy-four points to Calvin University before the fourth quarter of its opener; Division III means no athletic scholarships, and this year’s roster is just forty-one players, seventeen of them listed at multiple positions
  • The rebuttal: freshman Ghulam Woolman — who didn’t know who Tom Brady was until age six — answered that indifference to football is the same indifference felt toward soccer, field hockey, or someone’s DJ set: “Actually having the football team is the inclusive thing. And we don’t need it to be good for it to be meaningful”
  • The social order is inverted: athletes sit near the bottom of Oberlin’s hierarchy, below co-op kids and contact-improv practitioners, and mostly mix with everyone else only at jazz parties after games
  • The fight has history: Oberlin was the last Ohio team to beat Ohio State (7–6 in 1921) and gave John Heisman his first coaching job in 1892, yet professor Sebastiaan Faber says the Review’s op-ed page has run the abolish-football argument for as long as anyone remembers — it’s “a permanent battle”
  • The national contrast: Ohio State runs on a twenty-million-dollar payroll, LSU fired a coach it still owed more than fifty million, and the Senate is wrestling a bill over college football’s billion-dollar economy

Dougherty’s “core American truth”: football is a reflection of wherever it exists, and Oberlin is no different, no matter how much it wants to be. The campus fight reads as class and culture in miniature — Midwest recruits treated as “fundamentally incompatible with the institution’s values,” in Harvey’s phrase — and as a referendum on whether an elite liberal school can stay normal about the country’s most normal obsession. It is a portrait of a college arguing with itself, which may be the most Oberlin thing of all.