Oberlin run amok
After student crimes, college attacks the victims
Oberlin College in northern Ohio was a hotbed of 19thcentury anti-slavery sentiment — the influential Theodore Dwight Weld was among the abolitionists who spent time there — so the school should be proud of its activist heritage and want to build on it.
But activism must be tempered by other concepts — such as fairness, inquiry and due process — that are just as integral to the pursuit of social justice and a liberal-arts education. In hastily and vehemently condemning a bakery’s treatment of three black students after an attempted theft, the college and its student body didn’t even try to strike that balance or show any regard for the facts. The price to be paid is steep.
A jury last week awarded Gibson’s Bakery $11 million in compensatory damages after ruling that Oberlin and a dean defamed the business, that the college’s actions inflicted emotional distress and that the dean interfered with the bakery’s “business relationships.” The award could go higher, perhaps three times higher, as a hearing on punitive damages continues this week.
The three students were arrested after an incident at the store in November 2016. One was charged with robbery — his goal was to illegally obtain alcohol — and the other two were charged with misdemeanor assault after an altercation with one of the owners.
According to the bakery’s lawsuit, filed in Lorain County Common Pleas Court, the college and some of its students accused Gibson’s of racial profiling and mounted a campaign to damage the bakery. The campaign continued, the suit alleged, even though the three students faced legitimate charges that were publicly adjudicated in the county courts and even though an investigation by the local police department found no pattern of racism at the bakery.
The bakery was nothing but a crime victim.
But according to the suit: The college, which long had patronized Gibson’s, stopped doing so. An Oberlin dean was among those who handed out hundreds of flyers calling Gibson’s a “racist establishment” and urging customers to shop elsewhere. Students protested outside the bakery on multiple occasions, with the college excusing the protesters from classes and providing them with refreshments. Campus guides warned visitors to avoid the bakery.
The owners met with college officials to defuse the crisis, the suit added, only to be asked to give all shoplifters a one-time pass. The bakery alleged that its business plummeted even as the controversy delivered a public-relations boost to a school that, according to the suit, had been under fire in recent years because its reputation for advocacy had been waning.
In the end, all three students pleaded guilty to various charges and gave written statements saying events at the bakery “were not racially motivated.”
So why did the college itself, as an institution, say that they were?
Grove Patterson, the legendary editor of The Blade in Toledo, was a civil-rights pioneer, a distinguished Oberlin graduate and a lifetime trustee of the college. Surely he would not recognize the use of race as a cudgel. Surely he would blanch at the thought of turning the drive for equality and fairness into an excuse, an apology, for criminal behavior.
Oberlin is at a crossroads. It must take stock and correct course — no more political correctness for the sake of appearances or image, no more defense of student misbehavior. The college must admit that it erred and that the owners of the bakery acted as any business owners would under similar circumstances. More shenanigans like this could put Oberlin out of business at a time when so many liberalarts schools are struggling to fill their classrooms.
That’s what happened to Antioch College, also once a distinguished Ohio liberal arts school. It was overcome with unthinking and fashionable leftist radicalism and it made itself a joke. Now it is a pale shadow of its former self. Is this the route Oberlin would like to go?