In 2016, Allyn Gibson, a member of the family that owns an off-campus bakery and convenience store, followed and tried to stop a student from nearby Oberlin College with a fake ID who had shoplifted two bottles of wine. The student, joined by two others, proceeded to beat Gibson severely until the police arrived and arrested all three. As the students were black, charges of racism—belied by all available evidence—immediately surfaced on campus against both the police and the bakery. School administrators then incited a mob of students against the business—founded by the Gibson family in 1895—and ceased the college’s own purchases of its products, encouraging others to do the same.
Abraham Socher, a professor emeritus at Oberlin, takes a careful look at the entire shameful saga—which recently resulted in a court’s ordering the school to pay Gibson’s Bakery over $30 million—and the appalling conduct of Oberlin’s administrators in this and other instances:
In court, Dean of Students and Vice-President Meredith 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, and to have cursed and derided the Gibson family and its supporters in emails and texts—“idiots” was among the milder epithets. [Later on], the director of Oberlin’s Multicultural Resource Center and interim assistant dean of students, Antoinette Myers, texted her supervisor, Dean Raimondo, . . . “I hope we rain fire and brimstone on that store.”
By the time Myers sent that text, one could say that the fire and brimstone were already underway. They began when a few hundred students gathered in front of the store the day after the initial incident to demonstrate:
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. . . . Jason Hawk, editor of the Oberlin News-Tribune. . . . 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.
Socher goes on to connect this episode to a previous scandal, involving an African American assistant professor named Joy Karega, whose habit of advertising grotesque and fanciful anti-Semitic conspiracy theories on her Facebook page was exposed just when a radical black student group was demanding that she be instantly granted tenure:
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 [the same student group]. 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 board of trustees was going to announce her dismissal in just a few days. There was thus something fortuitous in the distraction provided by this new crisis. . . . 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.
Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/o-oberlin-my-oberlin/