{"id":1311649,"date":"2019-06-20T21:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-06-21T03:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.postindependent.com\/will-column-oberlin-has-graduated-from-self-caricature-to-disgrace\/"},"modified":"2019-06-20T21:00:00","modified_gmt":"2019-06-21T03:00:00","slug":"will-column-oberlin-has-graduated-from-self-caricature-to-disgrace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/local-news\/will-column-oberlin-has-graduated-from-self-caricature-to-disgrace\/","title":{"rendered":"Will column: Oberlin has graduated from self-caricature to disgrace"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

WASHINGTON \u00ad\u2014 Oberlin College has an admirable liberal past and a contemptible progressive present that will devalue its degrees far into the future. This is condign punishment for the college\u2019s mendacity about helping to incite a mob mentality and collective bullying in response to \u201cracist\u201d behavior that never happened.<\/p>\n

Founded in 1833, Oberlin became one of the nation\u2019s first colleges to admit African Americans, and its first coeducational liberal arts college. It has, however, long since become a byword for academic self-caricature, where students protest, among many microaggressions, the food service\u2019s insensitive cultural appropriation of banh mi sandwiches, sushi and General Tso\u2019s chicken. Oberlin could have been Randall Jarrell\u2019s model for his fictional Benton College, where people \u201cwould have swallowed a porcupine, if you had dyed its quills and called it Modern Art; they longed for men to be discovered on the moon, so that they could show that they weren\u2019t prejudiced toward moon men.\u201d<\/p>\n

In November 2016, a clerk in Gibson\u2019s Bakery, having seen a black Oberlin student shoplifting bottles of wine, pursued the thief. The thief and two female friends were, according to the police report, kicking and punching the clerk on the ground when the police arrived. Some social justice warriors \u2014 they evidently cut class the day critical thinking was taught, if it is taught at Oberlin \u2014 instantly accused the bakery of racially profiling the shoplifter, an accusation complicated by the fact that the shoplifter and his partners in assault pleaded guilty.<\/p>\n

The warriors mounted a protracted campaign against the bakery\u2019s reputation and solvency. But with the cowardice characteristic of bullies, Oberlin claimed in court that it had nothing to do with what its students did when they acted on the progressive righteousness that they imbibe at the school. However, at an anti-bakery protest, according to a complaint filed by the bakery, the dean of students helped distribute fliers, produced on college machines, urging a boycott because \u201cthis is a RACIST establishment with a LONG ACCOUNT of RACIAL PROFILING and DISCRIMINATION.\u201d (There is no record of any such complaints against the bakery, from which Oberlin bought goods until the hysteria began.) According to court documents, the administration purchased pizza for the protesters and authorized the uses of student funds to buy gloves for protesters. The college also signaled support for the protests by suspending college purchases from the bakery for two months.<\/p>\n

A jury in the defamation trial awarded the bakery $11 million from Oberlin, and $33 million more in punitive damages. The $44 million probably will be reduced because, under Ohio law, punitive damages cannot exceed double the amount of compensatory damages. The combination of malice and mendacity precluded a free-speech defense, and the jury accepted the obvious: The college\u2019s supposed adults were complicit in this protracted smear. Such complicity is a familiar phenomenon.<\/p>\n

As Stuart Taylor and K.C. Johnson demonstrated in their meticulous 2007 book \u201cUntil Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case,\u201d Duke\u2019s administration and a large swath of the faculty incited hysteria against a few young men accused of a rape that never happened. The University of Virginia\u2019s administration similarly rushed to indignant judgment in response to a facially preposterous magazine story about another fictitious rape.<\/p>\n

The shoplifting incident occurred the day after the 2016 presidential election, which Oberlin\u2019s president and dean of students partially blamed for students\u2019 \u201cpain and sadness\u201d and \u201cfears and concerns\u201d during the \u201cdifficult few days\u201d after the \u201cevents\u201d at the bakery. From Oberlin\u2019s despisers of Donald Trump, the events elicited lies and, in effect, cries of \u201cfake news,\u201d the brazenness of which the master in the White House might admire. Oberlin alumni who are exhorted to contribute to this college, which has been made stupid and mendacious by politics, should ponder where at least $22 million is going.<\/p>\n

Continuing to do what it denies ever doing \u2014 siding against the bakery \u2014 Oberlin, in impeccable progressive-speak, accuses the bakery of an \u201carchaic chase-and-detain\u201d policy regarding shoplifters and insists that \u201cthe guilt or innocence of the students is irrelevant\u201d to the \u2014 of course \u2014 \u201croot cause\u201d of the protests against the bakery.<\/p>\n

Oberlin\u2019s president defiantly says \u201cnone of this will sway us from our core values.\u201d Those values \u2014 moral arrogance, ideology-induced prejudgments, indifference to evidence \u2014 are, to continue using the progressive patois, the root causes of Oberlin\u2019s descent beyond caricature and into disgrace.<\/p>\n

George Will\u2019s email address is georgewill@washpost.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

via:: Post Independent<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON \u00ad\u2014 Oberlin College has an admirable liberal past and a contemptible progressive present that will devalue its degrees far into the future. This is condign punishment for the college\u2019s mendacity about helping to incite a mob mentality and collective bullying in response to \u201cracist\u201d behavior that never happened. Founded in 1833, Oberlin became one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[160],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1311649","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-local-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-19 10:51:25","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSKE Ski Country","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1311649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1311649"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1311649\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1311649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1311649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1311649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}