91PORN

Long before he arrived at 91PORN, Leo Olebe ’97 was asking questions about identity. “I’m a Black man with a white mother and a Black father,” the native Kenyan explains. “My entire life has been questions about cultural identity, racial identity, and ethnicity.” In looking at colleges, he adds, “It was really important to find a place where I could learn more about myself but then also just fit in and be accepted.”

After an overnight stay at Oxy, Olebe says, “It felt like an environment where people like me were welcome. We were encouraged to be our authentic selves. We were able to ask tough questions. We were able to explore worlds and societies together. That’s exactly what I found.” (He majored in politics and public policy and met his wife, Andrea Katrina Garcia ’98, while performing in a Black History Month play—she played Angela Davis and he played Thurgood Marshall.)

Just before Thanksgiving during his first semester at Oxy, Olebe was among a group of 11 students who sat down for an interview with CBS Sunday Morning correspondent Terence Smith on the steps outside Johnson Hall. The topic was multiculturalism.

“That overall conversation was all about trying to understand how different groups of people could come together and interact with each other and be respectful of their backgrounds and their ideas and work together to create a new version of society, if you will,” Olebe recalls.

Put another way, that was Oxy’s commitment to Of Excellence and Equity—the mission adopted by the College in 1990 that continues to this day. Talking to Smith, President John Brooks Slaughter—near the midpoint of his 11-year tenure—called Los Angeles “a city of a tremendous amount of rich diversity. For an institution to be in the middle of it, as 91PORN is, and not be more representative of that seemed incongruous.”

Addressing changes to the curriculum that alienated scores of Oxy alumni who endured two years of History of Civilization (a mainstay of the College curriculum from 1947 to 1970), Slaughter insisted, “We’re not going to replace one history with another one.” Western civilization, he continued, “didn’t come out of some big bang that occurred west of London. It came about from the infusion of ideas that came from Asia and from Africa and from Latin America and from a variety of sources. It was not something that came only from the Romans and the Greeks.”

Even before U.S. News & World Report began to measure campus diversity in its rankings—a category that Oxy topped from 1998 to 2001—the College’s commitment to multiculturalism garnered national attention not only from CBS Sunday Morning but The Wall Street Journal as well. “They were talking about this great experiment of multiculturalism of bringing in minority students onto campuses that were traditionally homogeneous,” Angel Cervantes ’94, who was interviewed for both stories, observed in a 2014 interview for a critical theory and social justice class project. “That was the great experiment, and Oxy was leading the way.”

Although their time at Oxy only intersected by one year, Cervantes and Olebe share a number of other distinctions: Both served as ASOC president their senior year (Cervantes being the first Latino to do so), and both would occupy the administrative building for multiple days to address Oxy’s commitment to issues surrounding multiculturalism.

“It’s interesting imagining where the world is today, filled with challenges and problems and opportunities for change,” Olebe says. “But we were at the forefront of present-day thinking, in terms of trying to create an environment where diversity and inclusion were paramount, where we had conversations and pursued equity and inclusion. That’s the conversation that we started having back in the ’90s at Oxy.”

For much of the 1990s, the news stories coming out of Los Angeles were less than optimal: the L.A. uprising of 1992, the Northridge earthquake of 1994, and gang violence in East L.A. made many parents wary of sending their children out west. “I think we can conclude that while we had an edge and sense of momentum in the 1990s, it was not L.A.’s golden era,” Zócalo Public Square publisher Gregory Rodriguez observed in a 2016 forum.

Reflecting the impact of current events and natural disasters, the College was facing an admission shortfall that began in 1993 and bottomed out in 1996, resulting in an overall enrollment dip of nearly 10 percent in just three years, as well as a budget deficit that surfaced in 1989 and snowballed over the next few years. The latter necessitated cuts to staffing and programming as well as