By Abraham Socher
Monday, August 26, 2019
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.
The fact that the students’ guilty plea was the result of
a plea deal, as most criminal convictions are, and that the students’
allocution was compelled by the court (a feature of criminal justice with deep
roots in common law) encouraged many students and faculty to believe that somehow
this had still been a racist incident. How, exactly, was never made clear. What
should Allyn Gibson have done with an underage customer who had just shown him
a clearly fake I.D. and now had two bottles of wine under his shirt? Perhaps if
Gibson had said something like “Come let us reason together: I can’t sell you
wine, but I can share a nice cold Snapple with you while we discuss my family’s
exceedingly thin profit margins and how we are both oppressed under
neoliberalism,” things would have been different. They might even have found
out that they had something in common, since Jonathan Aladin was the student
treasurer at Oberlin, which also has thin margins.
In the fall of 2017, Roger Copeland, a distinguished
professor of the history of theater, wrote in to the student paper. The
college’s stance toward Gibson’s, he said, had been “evocative of the
topsy-turvy value system in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, wherein
the Red Queen declares, ‘Sentence first—verdict afterward.’” Now that an actual
legal verdict was in, he urged the students, faculty, and administration to
accept it:
The facts of this case are no
longer in question. And yet, a counter-narrative has taken hold, one that
refuses to allow mere “facts” to get in the way. . . . At what point do you
accept the empirical evidence, even if that means having to embrace an
“inconvenient” truth? . . . The time has come for the Dean of Students, on
behalf of the College, to apologize to the Gibson family for damaging not only
their livelihood but something more precious and difficult to restore—their
reputation and good standing in the community.
Copeland’s letter was headlined “Gibson’s Boycott Denies
Due Process.” He wasn’t wrong about the boycott. As the student editor of
another campus publication wrote that fall, addressing new students, “the
social implications of being seen at Gibson’s are much worse than any freshman faux
pas I can imagine.”
But it was Copeland’s letter that upset administrators.
Upon reading it, Oberlin’s Vice President of Communications Ben Jones texted
Meredith Raimondo the following: “FUCK ROGER COPELAND!” To which Raimondo
responded, “Fuck him. I’d say unleash the students if I wasn’t convinced this
needs to be put behind us.” Which is to say, if prudence hadn’t suggested
otherwise at that moment, Oberlin’s dean of students thought it would be a good
idea to incite students against a professor for urging a respect for facts,
law, and the welfare of one’s neighbors.
Copeland knew something about unleashed students and
summary social justice on campus. Three years earlier, he had had a sharp
exchange with a student during the rehearsal of a play and ended up being
investigated for “a possible violation of Title IX,” the civil-rights law that
prohibits discrimination in education based on sex. He was directed to sign a
document acknowledging the complaint, though he was not allowed to know his
accuser or the details of the complaint. In what is perhaps the best-known line
of a widely read New Yorker article about radical politics at Oberlin,
Copeland told author Nathan Heller that he had thought “I’m cast in one of my
least favorite plays of all time, ‘The Crucible,’ by Arthur Miller!” Raimondo
was in charge of Title IX enforcement at the time. When Copeland got a lawyer,
the complaint evaporated. (After reading the crude texts about him, the
Gibsons, and others from erstwhile colleagues, one wonders if Copeland now
thinks Oberlin might be closer to Mamet than Miller. Call it “Ideological
Perversity in Ohio.”)
Copeland wasn’t the only professor urging reconciliation
now that the Gibson’s version of events had been unambiguously vindicated.
Booker Peek, a longtime professor of education and Africana studies who heads a
program in which Oberlin students tutor students in the local school, lamented
the rift between the town and the college, and urged an out-of-court
settlement, noting that Gibson’s had, “to its credit, [done] all that it could
to keep the matter from ever going to trial in the first place.” Appealing to
history, he reminded his readers that the Gibson family had come to Oberlin in
the 19th century because of their opposition to slavery. Moreover, “a
bare-knuckled, nasty, public fight will leave ugly scars and a putrid smell
with no true winner.” Meanwhile, Kirk Ormand, a professor of classics, urged
the administration to address the problem of student shoplifting more
seriously. “I’m so sick of Kirk,” Dean Raimondo wrote to her colleagues.
So how, exactly, did a famously liberal liberal-arts
college end up looking and acting like the arrogant, small-minded, vindictive
corporation in a second-rate John Grisham novel?
Turning from East Lorain onto College Street with its
spreading old elm and maple trees, I put that question out of my mind and
thought instead of the quirky, talented, sometimes brilliant students I had
taught at Oberlin for 18 years, from 2000 to my retirement in 2018. There was
the scholarship kid from Indianapolis who ended up clerking on the D.C.
Circuit, the violinist who became obsessed with how Maimonides cited scripture,
the girl from rural Minnesota who understood Spinoza better than anybody else,
the neo-Hasidic defensive lineman, the kid from Cameroon who compared the
Talmudic law of lost objects to the oral traditions his mother had memorized .
. .
Oberlin students were rarely as disciplined as the
intimidating academic thoroughbreds I had briefly taught at Stanford, but they
were often more interesting. They had come to Oberlin, literally, out of
curiosity.
So to reframe the question: How does an institution take
kids like that, and, by precept and example, teach them to rush to judgment,
ignore evidence, disdain the legal system, and demonize neighbors who are
different? On that last point—that of difference, as we say in the
academy—Dean Raimondo went to Brown and Emory, President Krislov had been a
Rhodes scholar, Jonathan Aladin had come to Oberlin from Phillips Andover.
Allyn Gibson? He’s a fifth-generation townie.
Oberlin doesn’t run summer sessions, so there weren’t
many students in town when I drove in, but there were a lot of middle-aged
folks on College Street with nametags and shopping bags. It looked like an
alumni event, but it turned out to be the annual conference of the Socialist
Workers Party—the Trotskyite group that broke with the Communist Party during
the 1930s Stalinist show trials. When I walked into Gibson’s, there was an
unusually large stack of the local newspaper, the Chronicle Telegram,
with the headline “Gibson’s Total Award: $44M.” Along with Gibson’s chocolates
and locally famous whole-wheat donuts, the Socialist Workers were buying up
souvenir copies of the newspaper and congratulating the cashier on the victory.
They seemed not to have gotten Oberlin’s progressive memo about Gibson’s—or
rather to have rejected it. “This was always bullshit,” a demure woman with an
SWP nametag said. “I’ve been coming to Gibson’s for years, they’re good
people.”
I’ve also been coming to Gibson’s for years. When I
interviewed for a job here two decades ago, one of my faculty hosts, who, like
many professors, was himself an Oberlin graduate, took me by the store,
rhapsodized about those whole-wheat donuts, and bought me one of the Gibson’s
postcards they still have up by the cash register. It’s an undated picture of
the storefront in the twilight after a light snow and looks as if it could have
been taken anytime since the 1930s (in fact, the store was founded in 1885 and
has been at its current location since 1905). Allyn W. Gibson, who must have
been about 70 at the time, rung up the sale. Walking around the store now, I
was struck by how sparsely the shelves were stocked, and wondered if it was a
result of the student boycott. I bought three postcards, a Snapple, and a copy
of the paper.
The Chronicle Telegram has followed the Gibson’s
case from the outset, with detailed reporting from reporters Scott Mahoney,
Dave O’Brien, and Jodi Weinberger. Cornell Law School professor William
Jacobson has also discussed it from the beginning on his Legal Insurrection
blog, along with local freelance reporter Daniel McGraw, who covered every day
of the trial in great detail for Legal Insurrection. While following the case
as a former Oberlin professor was depressing, reading all of these excellent,
unpretentious journalists as they chronicled the conduct of local police
officers, attorneys, and judges calmly ascertaining facts and administering
justice was a bit restorative.
The Gibson’s v. Oberlin College story is about
campus politics. As such, it is frequently ridiculous. But insofar as it shows
in stark, petty detail the ideologically driven failures of deliberation and
judgment, the craven political calculations, and the cynical abuses of power in
an institution ostensibly devoted to higher learning, it is instructive. Robert
Caro famously wrote that “if you really want to show power in its larger
aspects, you need to show the effects on the powerless, for good or ill.” Oberlin
College has more than $1 billion in assets, about 3,000 students, and several
hundred faculty and staff. Gibson’s is a small family grocery that has depended
on the college in direct and indirect ways for its business for over a century.
Whether the extraordinary verdict against Oberlin will
force a cultural reckoning of some kind remains an open question. Oberlin’s
reputation has certainly suffered, as Professor Peek predicted, and the college
has signaled that it will appeal. Immediately after the verdict, current
college president Carmen Twillie Ambar wrote to faculty and alumni, stating:
“This is, in fact, just one step along the way of what may turn out to be a
lengthy and complex legal process. I want to assure you that none of this will
sway us from our core values.” Even if the college were to win its appeal on,
say, narrow technical grounds, it wouldn’t show that the assault on Gibson’s
was somehow about anyone’s “core values,” even Oberlin’s.
Here is what happened.
Although Jonathan Aladin, his friends, and Allyn Gibson
are all formally on the record as agreeing on the events in Gibson’s on the
afternoon of November 9, third-party accounts begin with the Oberlin police
arriving a few minutes after the initial contretemps. When Officer Victor Ortiz
got there, he later testified, “We saw two young ladies standing over [Gibson]
and throwing haymakers…The two women would stand over him and kick him, and
then crouch down and throw punches. As we got closer, we could see [Gibson] on
his back, with the male [Aladin] on top of him and punching him.”
The next day, between 200 and 300 Oberlin students
mounted a protest against Gibson’s. They chanted “wake up, stay woke” as they
held up hand-lettered signs, some of which had familiar slogans (“No Justice, No
Peace,” “Black Lives Matter”) and others of which specifically called out Allyn
Gibson and his family as racists who should be boycotted.
A confident representative of the black student
organization, ABUSUA, led chants and danced a little as she read a statement to
kick things off:
We are here today because yesterday
three students from the Africana community were assaulted and arrested as a
result of a history of racial profiling and racial discrimination by Gibson’s
Bakery. There is a need for justice to be served to hold Gibson’s accountable
for its injustices and patterns of unlawful behavior.
She made no mention of shoplifting. Neither did the
protest flyers, which had an old-school agitprop aesthetic and read, in part,
“This is a Racist establishment with a LONG ACCOUNT [sic] of RACIAL PROFILING
and DISCRIMINATION. Today we urge you to shop elsewhere in light of a
particularly heinous event involving the owners of this establishment and local
law enforcement. PLEASE STAND WITH US.” Above these words was a starburst with
“DON’T BUY” at its center. It also had the following description of the event
at Gibson’s:
A member of our community was
assaulted by the owner of this establishment yesterday. A nineteen y/o young
man was apprehended and choked by Allyn Gibson…. The young man, who was
accompanied by 2 friends was choked until the 2 forced Allyn to let go. After
The young man was free, Allyn chased him. . . tackled him and restrained him
again until Oberlin police arrived. The 3 were racially profiled on the scene.
They were arrested without being questioned, asked their names, or read their
rights.
The flyers were apparently run off for free on an Oberlin
College copier in the nearby Conservatory of Music. Students were told that if
they ran out of flyers, they could go back and copy more. The administrative
assistant at the Conservatory who helped them was also fairly certain that an
assistant dean who worked for Meredith Raimondo had himself run some off during
the protest, though he denied it on the witness stand.
One of the principal requirements for proving libel is to
show that the defendant has in some sense published the defamatory claims—for
instance, by printing hundreds of copies and handing them out at a rally. In
his jury instructions, trial judge John R. Miraldi explained that, if the
flyer’s statements were determined to have been false, that would suggest the
flyers were “libelous per se, meaning that they are of such a nature that it is
presumed that they tend to degrade or disgrace plaintiffs, or hold plaintiffs
up to public hatred, contempt, or scorn [and] … injure plaintiffs in their
trade or profession.” Using Oberlin equipment to make copies of the flyers was
a ruinous decision—since no history of racial profiling and discrimination by
Gibson’s, long or short, was demonstrated in the court or, for that matter,
outside it. Indeed, Oberlin’s legal defense implicitly acknowledged this by
arguing not that such claims were true but that it had had no part in making
them. It was just the students.
And what of the “particularly heinous event” perpetrated
by Gibson and the police as described in the flyer? Well, Allyn Gibson’s
actions in chasing down a shoplifter may have been overzealous or foolhardy
(given the beating he took), but they were certainly not heinous. Moreover,
police bodycam footage depicted officers calmly going about their business,
acting firmly but avoiding confrontation and collecting evidence, trying to
understand what happened. The footage shows Aladin asking the officer why he is
being arrested and not Gibson, and the officer responds, “Well, when we got
here, you all were on top of him whaling on him.” Every statement—every
statement—on the protest flyer was false and defamatory.
The protest did not take place on campus, but Dean
Raimondo was on hand. Indeed, emails show her calling a staff meeting to
prepare for it early that morning. Raimondo and the college maintain that she
was merely there to “support” the students in the value-neutral sense of that
word. However, accounts of her actions at the rally by several witnesses do not
paint the picture of a neutral bureaucrat-observer. Although she at first
denied doing so, Dean Raimondo gave a copy of the defamatory flyer to at least
one person at the protest—who, unfortunately for her and the college, turned
out to be Jason Hawk, editor of the Oberlin News-Tribune. She also tried
to prevent him from taking pictures. (“Very challenging interaction with guy
who says he’s a photographer for the Tribune,” she texted Director of
Communications Scott Wargo.) Hawk testified that he saw her addressing the
crowd with a bullhorn to tell them there was free pizza and soda for them
provided by the college in the Music Conservatory building across the street.
According to a FAQ sheet Oberlin sent to professors and staff after the
verdict, Raimondo handled the bullhorn for no more than two minutes, but Rick
McDaniel, a former Oberlin College director of security, thought she was on the
bullhorn for more than 20 minutes. McDaniel also testified to being harassed by
a college employee when he tried to take pictures.
Trey James, an African-American employee of Gibson’s who
was working during the protests, testified that he saw Raimondo “standing
directly in front of the store with a megaphone,” as Legal Insurrection
reported. “It appeared she was the voice of authority. She was telling the kids
what to do, where to go. Where to get water, use the restrooms, where to make
copies.” As for those flyers, James testified that “she had a stack of them and
while she was talking on the bullhorn, she handed out half of them to a student
who then went and passed them out.” James, a thoughtful, witty man with whom
I’ve chitchatted over the years, has also forcefully and repeatedly asserted
that the Gibsons are not racists, as have other African-American friends and
neighbors. During the protests, a shaken Lorna Gibson, Allyn Gibson’s mother,
was comforted by Vicky Gaines, an African-American nurse who grew up in Oberlin
and works for the college. Later she told the jury, “I’ve known them for about
40 years, our kids played together, we go to their sporting event, eat at each
other’s homes, no, never even heard of the thought of them as being racist.”
Although the mood of the students ranged from boisterous
to a kind of glum self-righteousness, there seemed to be very little sense that
the Gibsons themselves might be suffering. Student Kameron Dunbar, who was
perhaps the most widely quoted of the protesters, instead emphasized, in an
interview with the Blade, how hard the protest was on him.
“Nobody wants to protest. Students
don’t get joy from waking up in the morning and asking, ‘What are we gonna
protest next?’” he said. “[These] were some of the most emotionally exhausting
days of my life. … I think it’s easy to essentialize this moment into another
‘college kids gone crazy’. … For the Oberlin community, this is so serious, and
I just wish the broader community was afforded the opportunity to gain the
nuance that I have.”
Among the “nuances” Dunbar and his fellow protesters
appeared not to get was the relevance of the facts of the case and the
financial and emotional stress being inflicted upon an innocent family. A
liberal-arts education is often said to teach students how to put themselves in
the shoes of their fellow citizens. Suppose that Dunbar and his friends had
thought about what it was like for the Gibsons and their employees to see
hundreds of angry students marching out of their castle- and cathedral-like
campus buildings and over the massive manicured lawn of Tappan Square to try to
destroy their business because they had the temerity to try to stop a
shoplifter. (Neither the New York Times, nor Rolling Stone, nor
any of the other media outlets that quoted Dunbar noted that he worked
alongside Jonathan Aladin in the Office of the Student Treasurer and was a paid
blogger for Oberlin’s Office of Communications.)
When it got a little chilly in the evening of the first
day of the protests, a student-organizer bought the remaining protesters
gloves. Raimondo approved a reimbursement for the gloves the next day.
On the first day of the protest, less than 24 hours after
the incident, the Oberlin Student Senate passed a resolution that began by
saying that as a result of “conversations with students involved, statements
from witnesses, and a thorough reading of the police report, we find it
important to share a few key facts.” It went on:
A Black student was chased and
assaulted at Gibson’s after being accused of stealing. Several other students,
attempting to prevent the assaulted student from sustaining further injury,
were arrested and held by the Oberlin Police Department. In the midst of all
this Gibson’s employees were never detained, and were given preferential
treatment by police officers.
Gibson’s has a history of racial
profiling and discriminatory treatment of students and residents alike. Charged
as representatives of the Associated Students of Oberlin College, we have
passed the following resolution:
…WHEREAS, Gibson’s Food Market and
Bakery has made their utter lack of respect for the community members of color
strikingly visible, therefore be it
RESOLVED that the Students of
Oberlin College immediately cease all support, financial and otherwise, of
Gibson’s Food Market and Bakery; and be it further
RESOLVED that the students of
Oberlin College call on President Marvin Krislov, Dean of Students Meredith
Raimondo, all other administrators and the general faculty to condemn by
written promulgation the treatment of students of color by Gibson’s.
As with the protest flyer, virtually every statement here
would prove to be misleading, demonstrably false, or aimed at directly harming
Gibson’s. Indeed, although the student senators made a show of fact-finding,
they plainly rejected the police report because it did not tell the story they
wanted to hear, and the only witnesses they spoke to were the students hanging
out across the street from Gibson’s in Tappan Square, not those who were in the
store with Allyn Gibson and Jonathan Aladin.
Raimondo was the official adviser to the Student Senate.
In that role, she might have advised the senators that it is impossible to
discern facts that quickly or with that much certitude—as the study of, say,
history, philosophy, politics, literature, and law make plain. She might also
have noted that, after all, incidents of student shoplifting at Gibson’s were
well-known all over town, so it would hardly be implausible that Aladin and his
friends had tried to steal some wine and were now denying it. Indeed, as dean
of students, Raimondo must have known that two (white) students had been arrested
for shoplifting at Gibson’s earlier that week.
Or she could have walked the senators from the Wilder
Student Union over to the library next door and checked out Roland Baumann’s
documentary history of black life and education at Oberlin from 1833 to 2007.
Despite Oberlin’s genuinely admirable history of race relations, Baumann
discusses several controversial incidents of discrimination by Oberlin
businesses, including segregated barbershops in 1944 and the NAACP’s protest
against racial discrimination at two lunch parlors after World War II. Gibson’s
had been an institution in Oberlin for more than 50 years at that point—and its
name is conspicuous by its absence from Baumann’s history.
Raimondo might also have checked out Charles Homer
Haskins’s The Rise of the Universities, in which it turns out that
town-gown conflicts have been about stealing, drinking, and brawling with
townies, in particular local shopkeepers, since the Middle Ages. If students of
every distinguished university since the founding of the University of Paris
had been caught stealing from locals and responded with fists, maybe, just
maybe, Raimondo and the student senators might have speculated, this could have
been the case here as well. But this was not to be a “teachable moment” or, at
any rate, that’s not the sort of teaching that was going on.
The defamatory Student Senate resolution was posted in
the Student Union building for more than a year. That is to say that it, too,
was, in the legally relevant sense of the word, published. This was also the
case for the Department of Africana Studies message on its public Facebook
wall, which read: “Very Very proud of our students! Gibson’s has been bad for
decades, their dislike of Black people is palpable. Their food is rotten and
they profile Black students. NO MORE!”
The following day, with the picketing of Gibson’s still
ongoing, faculty and students received an email from President Krislov:
Regarding the incident at Gibson’s,
we are deeply troubled because we have heard from students that there is more
to the story… We will commit every resource to determining the full and true
narrative, including exploring whether this is a pattern and not an isolated
incident.…Accordingly, we have taken the following steps: 1) Dean Meredith
Raimondo and her team have worked to support students and families affected by
these events, and will continue to do so. 2) Tita Reed, Special Assistant for
Government and Community Relations, has reached out to Mr. Gibson to engage in
dialogue that will ensure that our broader community can work and learn
together in an environment of mutual respect free of discrimination.
The letter did not use the word “shoplifting,” which
Krislov worried in an email to his staff might “trigger” student anger.
Meanwhile, Gibson’s supporters were getting a little
angry themselves. By the evening of the first protest, people from Oberlin and
all over Lorain County, many of whom had grown up going to Gibson’s, were
coming to support the store and walking out with baked goods, ice-cream cones,
and groceries. Bob Frantz, a conservative talk-show host in nearby Cleveland,
came and urged his listeners to support Gibson’s, and a counter-protest “cash
mob” of supportive customers was planned for the coming Saturday. Apparently
concerned that the protests were backfiring, a worried Raimondo emailed the
Oberlin Student Senate: “At this point, demonstrations are driving u[p]
Gibson’s business.” The Saturday demonstrations were duly cancelled, a fact
that suggests that Raimondo knew not only how to “unleash the students,” but
how to re-leash them.
Shortly thereafter, Oberlin’s food services cancelled its
weekly bakery order from Gibson’s, under orders from Dean Raimondo. When owner
David Gibson (Allyn Gibson’s father and the elder Allyn W. Gibson’s son) met
with representatives of the college, he was told that the order would not be
resumed as long as Gibson continued to press charges against the students. The
following semester the orders were resumed, though the crippling informal
student boycott continued; when Gibson’s later filed suit, the orders were
cancelled again. Emails revealed at the trial showed several members of the
Oberlin administration discussing the financial hit Gibson’s was taking and
speculating on the leverage it gave the college in the dispute. A professor of
music theory who had been at Raimondo’s planning meeting for the student
protest wrote of the Gibsons that “they own so much prime property in oberlin
[sic] that boycotting doesnt [sic] hurt them that much. The smear on their
brand does, and that’s been taken care of.” In fact, both the boycott and the
smear hurt not only the Gibson family but the employees the bakery found itself
forced to lay off.
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.
Emails, texts, and other evidence that came out in the
trial don’t paint a picture of a billion-dollar institution full of
intellectually accomplished people committing “every resource to determining
the full and true narrative.” Ben Jones, the head of Oberlin PR who drafted
that letter for Krislov, called the police report “bullshit” based on vague
rumor and speculation. Ferdinand Protzman, Krislov’s chief of staff, was forced
to answer that although neither he nor his colleagues believed the Gibsons to
be racists, they also never considered publicly declaring that the Gibsons were
not.
As for Raimondo and Tita Reed, who were named as the
point persons in finding that “full and true narrative,” David Gibson testified
that Raimondo warned him that she had sent people door-to-door to ask if the
Gibsons were racists. Raimondo denied that in court—but in any event, no such
witnesses were produced by Oberlin (truth is, of course, always an absolute
defense against libel). While she was ostensibly working on finding the “full
and true narrative,” Reed was forwarded an email from an Oberlin employee and
resident of the town who wrote: “I have talked to 15 townie friends who are poc
(persons of color) and they are disgusted and embarrassed by the protest. In
their view, the kid was breaking the law, period (even if he wasn’t
shoplifting, he was underage). To them this is not a race issue at all and they
do not believe the Gibsons are racist. They believe the students have picked
the wrong target. … I find this misdirected rage very disturbing, and it’s only
going to widen the gap (between) town and gown.”
The college president’s special assistant for community
relations responded: “Doesn’t change a damn thing for me.”
“Oberlin is peculiar in that which is good,” said John J.
Shipherd, one of its 19th-century Christian utopian founders, riffing on Paul’s
epistle to Titus, which, in turn, alludes to God’s choice of the people of
Israel as his “peculiar treasure,” because of the willingness to obey His law.
And Oberlin was peculiarly good, accepting and graduating students
regardless of race or sex from the very beginning, including some of the most
academically accomplished women and black Americans of the 19th century. It was
also an important stop on the Underground Railroad when Charles Grandison
Finney, a charismatic leader of the Second Great Awakening of evangelical
Christianity, was president of the college.
More than a century after that, long after the biblical
resonance of Shipherd’s statement was forgotten, there was a campus joke that
Oberlin was, instead, “good in that which is peculiar.” But the Gibson’s
episode wasn’t even peculiar, it was drearily predictable. In 2013, the
administration fell for a racist hoax. A sudden spate of Nazi graffiti and
racist flyers caused such hysteria on campus that a student reported seeing a
hooded Klansman. Oberlin cancelled classes for a day and held a teach-in
against racism in Finney Hall. I remember a first-year girl crying as she
spoke, innocently asking, “Is this what it’s like here?” Well, yes and no. The
local police later suggested that the Klansman was just a student with a
blanket draped over her shoulders—or maybe nothing at all. Meanwhile, by the
time the college administrators had called off classes, they already knew that
the perpetrators were a couple of student trolls with murky, but seemingly
liberal, politics, and they’d quietly removed them from campus. When President
Krislov appeared on CNN to extoll the educational value of the day off,
students could be heard behind him chanting “bullshit, bullshit!” Little did
they know.
Two years later, students protested “cultural
appropriation” in the dining hall: The banh mi sandwich was made with soggy
ciabatta not a crispy baguette, General Tso’s chicken was steamed not fried,
and so on. This too made the national media, where it was widely noted that
banh mi is already a French-Vietnamese mashup, that General Tso’s chicken is an
American invention, and that, well, dorm food is . . . dorm food. Later in the
fall of 2015, the black student union, ABUSUA, presented the college with an
extraordinary 14-page list of demands. These included the complete overhaul of
the curriculum along prescribed ideological lines, stipends for black student
leaders, the immediate or guaranteed promotion/tenuring of 19 favored
professors and administrators, the summary dismissal of no fewer than seven
other professors and administrators, designated “safe spaces” for black students,
a bridge program for recently released prisoners—the compatibility of these
last two demands was not addressed—and much, much more. Krislov summarily
rejected the demands to significant national acclaim, but there was grumbling
on campus among radical students and a few faculty members. It wasn’t that they
actually expected the college to implement millennial Maoism, but they might
have sensed that this act had depleted the presidential courage bank.
That spring, an article by David Gerstman at The Tower.org
revealed that a young African-American assistant professor of rhetoric and
composition named Joy Karega was pushing wild anti-Semitic conspiracy theories
on Facebook, for instance that Israel and super rich “Rothschild-led banksters”
were really behind 9/11, the Charlie Hebdo attacks, and ISIS. As it
happens, Karega was one of the professors singled out for guaranteed
insta-tenure in the student demands. President Krislov first issued a terse
defense of free speech while noting only that these posts “do not represent the
views of Oberlin College.” When, as chair of Jewish Studies, I pointed out to
him that no one thought that Oberlin held these views but that a representative
of the college ought to be able to say precisely what kind of views they were, he
demanded that I clear anything I wrote with his PR man, Ben Jones. I ignored
him and began planning my retirement, though I didn’t realize it at the time.
Krislov had already announced his retirement at the end of the year, and his
administration continued to flounder wildly in its response to Karega until a
frustrated board of trustees took the matter out of their hands and announced
her dismissal.
How, after such public debacles costing millions of
dollars in lost students, donors, and prestige, could Oberlin yet again
condescend to its students, betray its finest traditions, and make itself a
national laughingstock? Or as another Oberlin professor put it to me in a pithy
email after the Gibson’s v. Oberlin verdict, “how idiotic can the
college be always?”
If there is one thing that Oberlin’s critics and its
administration have agreed on, it’s the significance of the fact that Jonathan
Aladin was caught stealing wine on November 9, 2016—the day after President
Trump was elected. Those were extraordinary times in traumatized liberal and
left circles, and the college encouraged us to help our students work through
their shock. Certainly this was part of what was going on in the Gibson’s
protest. The small-town petit bourgeois shop owners were made to stand
in for all that was wrong and bewildering in America. But does that really
explain two-and-a-half years of systematic and unremitting hostility?
If campus politics are often ridiculous, they are always
local, and the Gibson’s initial complaint suggested a set of local reasons for
the trouble that were left largely unexplored in the trial and its coverage.
Meredith Raimondo had been appointed vice president and dean of students in the
midst of the Karega controversy with the specific mandate to “address campus
climate, including . . . items identified as high priority by ABUSUA.” When the
Gibson’s protests began, Karega’s fate was still officially undecided. But, as
Raimondo must have known, and the students did not, the trustees were going to
announce her dismissal in just a few days. There was thus something fortuitous
in the distraction provided by this new crisis. Whatever the degree of
calculation involved, it proved useful to the administration for activist
students to have spent what one of them called “some of the most emotionally
exhausting days of my life” in picketing Gibson’s little storefront with the
solicitous support of college administrators—rather than picketing the graceful
sandstone Mediterranean Romanesque Cox Administration Building just a couple of
hundred yards away. Indeed, as it turned out, the response to Karega’s final
dismissal the following week was surprisingly muted. Oberlin, one might
conjecture, is Machiavellian in that which is politically correct.
And then there was the real estate. Oberlin is a company
town. In fact, the college was founded before the town. Recall the music
professor’s seemingly irrelevant remark that the Gibsons “own so much prime
property.” That property includes a parking lot behind their store, abutting
the Music Conservatory, that the Gibsons claimed was used by the college as
spillover parking to the detriment of town businesses, including theirs. The
Gibsons’ complaint seemed to imply that, like any ruthless monopolist, Oberlin
College didn’t like competition and wouldn’t mind forcing its competitors into
the position of having to sell cheap.
Such possible motives suggest that Oberlin College acted
like a John Grisham villain because it was one. 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 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.
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.
I thought that there might be a chance that I would never
come back to Oberlin after I dropped by Gibson’s and returned my books to the
college library, but I couldn’t resist browsing in the stacks (it really is an
excellent library), and I ended up checking out a little book called The
University of Utopia, by Robert Maynard Hutchins. Writing in 1953, Hutchins
(a former Oberlin student and the son and grandson of Oberlin professors)
imagined the PR men of the future as secular priests who would point out to
their clients not what they could get away with saying but what they ought
to do. Such “public duty men” wouldn’t be necessary for Utopia’s university,
because that school’s trustees would inevitably hold the university and its
professors to live up to their ideals. Hutchins had famously been the president
of the University of Chicago, not a comedian at Second City, and his irony was
a bit heavy-handed. But he wasn’t wrong. A university ought to remember that it
is not merely a self-interested corporation but a community of scholars,
concerned with truth and convinced that its pursuit is a genuine public good.
Public-spirited utopianism hasn’t been much in evidence
in Oberlin’s spinning and messaging in the wake of the Gibson’s verdict. Before
the amount of damages had even been determined by the jury, Oberlin’s counsel
sent a letter to the faculty expressing disappointment that “the jury did not
agree with the clear evidence our team presented,” a statement that made her
subsequently expressed gratitude for their service sound condescending and
insincere. She went on to say that “colleges cannot be held liable for the
independent actions of their students…[and] are obligated to protect freedom of
speech on their campuses.” But, of course, what the jury found was that the
college had not merely protected freedom of speech on its campus but had gone
out of its way (and, incidentally, off campus) to defame private individuals,
which has never been protected speech. And the First Amendment has certainly
never protected the deliberate infliction of financial and emotional harm,
which is what the jury decided Oberlin had done.
In the aftermath of the jury’s verdict, Krislov’s
successor as president, Carmen Ambar, along with college proxies and sympathetic
journalists, have implied that—guilty pleas, allocutions, and an exhaustive
six-week civil trial notwithstanding—there really was, after all, something
to the claim that Gibson’s had racially profiled Aladin and others. In
interviews, Ambar has hit on a bit of bad philosophy to obfuscate this point.
“You can have two different lived experiences, and both those things can be
true,” she told the Wall Street Journal editorial board. One is tempted
to say that the facile relativism of this—there is a Gibson truth and an Aladin
truth; a townie truth and a college truth—reveals the sophistry behind
Oberlin’s self-destructive approach, but actually it’s worse than that, if not
philosophically at least morally. Nothing in the actions of Oberlin College or
those of its dean and vice president suggests an understanding or empathy with
the Gibson family’s experience.
When I go back to Oberlin to return Hutchins’s book, I
think I’ll stop by Gibson’s on the way out of town to say goodbye.
