Biting Back

I seem to be writing a great deal about higher education lately.  In the decade since Jonathan Cole published his book The Great American University, which extolled the superiority of the American system of higher education, much has changed.  Cole correctly assessed that the American university system is by far the best in the world.  It is the one industry in which public and private organizations run parallel and make each other better.  And among American universities, he singled out Columbia and The University of Chicago as the finest, particularly because of their common core requirements.

The Gibson’s Bakery verdict against Oberlin College under which the bakery was awarded $33 million plus legal fees for the actions of its administrator that falsely accused the bakery of racial profiling and whipped up a boycott of the bakery after 3 black youths attempted to steal merchandise and then assaulted a store employee.  The bakery was accused of racial profiling, the dean helped organize a boycott of the bakery and the university canceled its longstanding contract with the bakery.

The jury found that the bakery had engaged in no such profiling behavior.

Since his work was published in 2009, we have had the emergence of “safe spaces,” “trigger warnings,” the emergence of segregated dorms for African-Americans, white shaming classes, and a “rape crisis” on college campuses which precipitated sexual assault allegations to be handled not by trained law enforcement officers and subject to a judicial process, but by a tribunal of university administrators.

The Gibson’s Bakery case is just the latest instance of a university having to pay the price for its role in advancing false claims in order to advance a narrative.

A number of schools have suffered the pain of large settlements after wrongfully expelling male students because of false accusations of sexual assault.  Most notorious was the Amherst case in which the woman (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/campus-sexual-assault-policies-are-unfair-to-the-accused-this-case-shows-how/2017/08/16/2ab6781e-7de0-11e7-a669-b400c5c7e1cc_story.html?utm_term=.bee104cedb9b) filed the case 18 months after the incident occurred and was the actual perpetrator.  The college excluded evidence that would have exonerated the young lad. Similarly Columbia ended up shelling out a handsome sum to the male student accused of assaulting the infamous Mattress Girl (later photographed at a BDSM club) that walked around campus with a mattress on her back (https://nypost.com/2017/07/14/columbia-settles-with-student-accused-of-raping-mattress-girl/) 

That this attack by a university on a bakery is even more egregious.  I know a little about the bakery business.  This was not just some large, faceless, monolithic corporation.  Gibson’s, like many bakeries, is a family owned and operated place, passed down from the previous generation.   The family members work hard, often getting up at 3 a.m. to bake goods.  Margins are very thin and they employ people at or near minimum wage.  It’s a hard life and a labor of love.

But the New Left cares not about that. 

Scholarship should be an endless, relentless and iterative search for truth.  The judgment and jury award levied against Oberlin is an unambiguous message that the university abdicated its responsibility to that mission.  The search for truth has become subordinate to the advancement of an agenda and the indoctrination of youth in the foundations of that agenda.

In the world of the social justice warriors, oppressed and  oppressor designations are assigned merely by belonging to a certain category.  In the Gibson’s Bakery case,  as in the Amherst and Columbia sexual assault cases, that distortion was taken a step further.  Not only was truth abandoned, but inverted.  The accused perpetrator of a wrong was actually a VICTIM.

While universities may have abandoned their mission to search for truths, judges, juries and our system of jurisprudence have not.  And they are not taking kindly to the politics of personal destruction.  Hopefully, the sting felt by Oberlin and some of these other universities will begin to disincentivize them from engaging in this irresponsible and destructive behavior.