Instead of unleashing the potential of students, students were unleashed on an innocent family and business.

An interesting account of Oberlin fiasco from a recently retired Oberlin professor. Pulls together all the bits and pieces from the fragmented and often incomplete reporting of the past few years. Sounds like every time the administration had a chance to stop digging the hole they were in, they instead went out and bought new shovels.

There is an institutional tragedy here, entirely of their own making. From O Oberlin, My Oberlin by Abraham Socher.

I went back to Oberlin on a Friday in June for the first time in a year or so. Even retired professors like me have to return books to the library (eventually). Driving off the Ohio-10 freeway, down East Lorain Street, past the organic George Jones Farm—named for a beloved botany professor, not the great country-and-western singer—I saw the first of several yard signs supporting Gibson’s Bakery in its lawsuit against Oberlin College and its dean of students, Meredith Raimondo, who is also vice president of the college. The previous day, a Lorain County jury had awarded Gibson’s an astounding $33 million in punitive damages in addition to the $11.2 million it had already assigned to the family business for compensatory damages.

The jury found that Oberlin College and its dean of students had maliciously libeled the Gibson family as racists and deliberately damaged their business by suspending and later cancelling its century-long business relationship with the bakery—all while unofficially encouraging a student boycott. And the jury found that the college had intentionally inflicted emotional distress on the Gibsons themselves.

At least neither Dean Raimondo nor anyone in the Oberlin administration was found to have harmed the Gibson family dog. But someone did slash the tires of their employees’ cars; there were anonymous threats; and someone harassed the 90-year-old paterfamilias, Allyn W. Gibson, in the middle of the night, causing him to slip and crack three vertebrae. All because on November 9, 2016, his grandson and namesake, Allyn Gibson, who is white, had caught an underage African-American student named Jonathan Aladin first trying to buy and then trying to steal wine from the store with two college friends. When Gibson tried first to call the police and then to take a picture of Aladin with two bottles of wine under his shirt, Aladin slapped the phone out of his hands and ran out of the store. Gibson chased him across the street, tried to stop him, and was beaten up by Aladin and his friends. “I’m going to kill you,” Gibson reported Aladin saying. Aladin and his friends, Endia Lawrence and Cecelia Whettstone, were arrested. The Gibsons pressed charges against the students despite the college’s repeated demands that they drop them.

In court, Raimondo and other key players in the Oberlin administration were shown to have actively supported two days of student protests against Gibson’s after the arrests, cursed and derided the Gibson family and its supporters in emails and texts—“idiots” was among the milder epithets—and ignored those within the college who urged deliberation, compromise, and restraint. Oberlin President Marvin Krislov and others rejected the Gibson family’s repeated pleas to renounce the charge that they were racists, even when presented with strong statistical and anecdotal evidence that this was not the case.

In August 2017, nine months after his arrest, Jonathan Aladin pled guilty to misdemeanor charges of attempted theft, aggravated trespassing, and underage purchase of alcohol. His friends pled guilty to the first two charges. All three students read statements to the court acknowledging that Allyn Gibson had been within his rights to detain them and that his actions had not been racially motivated. On the sidelines of the court, the director of Oberlin’s Multicultural Resource Center and interim assistant dean of students, Antoinette Myers, texted her supervisor, Dean Raimondo. “After a year”—that is, after the students were eligible to have their criminal records expunged—“I hope we rain fire and brimstone on that store,” Myers wrote.

It gets worse as the article continues.

If you live in a reality based world, numbers can help you understand that reality. Numbers matter. But apparently they can be ignored if you are pursuing a hate driven ideological agenda.

David Gibson brought statistics from the Oberlin Police Department to the college showing that of the 40 people arrested for shoplifting at Gibson’s over the previous five years, 33 were students of the college, 32 were white, six were African American and two were Asian, which almost perfectly matched the racial makeup of the city. Despite its stated determination to explore “whether this is a pattern and not an isolated incident,” Krislov’s administration was unmoved. At trial, the college’s lawyers tried and failed to have the statistics quashed as evidence.v

Why did Oberlin act so villainously?

However, I think there are two other reasons that come closer to the heart of the current crisis over the mission of the university and the nature of a liberal-arts education. If Oberlin and Raimondo seem to have treated Oberlin’s activist students as a constituency to be manipulated, they also catered to them as customers. And the customer, unlike the student, is always right. When asked why the college could not send out a notice supportive of the Gibsons, Krislov’s chief of staff, Ferdinand Protzman, replied that “both the college and Gibson’s are dealing with the same customer base,” and there was no profit in irritating the most vocal members of that customer base. In short, the college participated in the “smearing of the Gibsons” because, like easy grades and better banh mi sandwiches, it’s what the customer wanted. But, of course, real education consists in helping students to see that the most desirable thing is knowledge.

The second reason?

The second and final reason I would suggest begins with an observation: At the height of the protests, no more than 10 percent of Oberlin’s students were standing in front of Gibson’s, even though there is not a lot to do on a weeknight in Oberlin, Ohio. Moreover, although an alarming number of administrators, and perhaps a handful of professors, were involved in the protests and ensuing conflict with Gibson’s, it was an even smaller percentage. There is a kind of modified Pareto principle working at schools like Oberlin in which the radicalized 5 or 10 percent of the population establishes the tone for the entire institution. Of course, this is true of all organizations, but it seems to me that colleges are especially susceptible to this phenomenon precisely because liberal-arts education calls out for a unifying principle or goal, something that holds together this four-year experience of 130 credit hours in the history of this and the structure of that. Oberlin, like Cardinal Newman, used to have a theological answer to that question, one that underwrote one of the most principled stands on racial equality in the 19th century.

I think this is a critical one because both conditions apply to almost all universities. Of course callow kids, no matter how bright or how much their potential, don't know near as much as they think they do and are at an emotional stage in life where everything can be existentially emotional rather than rational.

It is up to the administration to reign them in and give their potential the opportunity to grow. It is up to the administration not to behave like a callow student. Which shouldn't be hard as it is only 5-10% who are the problem. In fact, I would guess it is more like 2-3% who are truly stupid and ideologically committed, with another 2-3% along for the excitement. All the administration has to do is have the courage of their convictions in order for things to not get out of hand.

But frequently the administration does not have the courage (see Mizzou). Or, as in the case of Oberlin, the administration shares the ideological outrage of the 2-3%.

Socher concludes:

Over the last century, politics replaced theology. “Think one person can change the world? So do we,” has been Oberlin’s official motto for quite some time. It’s just advertising (I remember some campus graffiti from the early 2000s—“Oberlin: changing the world for $30,000/yr”—now it’s closer to $60,000). But the attitude expresses the self-image of many liberal arts colleges, and many more professors, and since only radicals “know” how to change the world, it cedes them the high ground. The upshot, at least here, has been the furthest thing from idealism possible. Instead of unleashing the potential of students, students were unleashed on an innocent family and business.