Oberlin College has taken a public relations beating in the wake of the massive verdicts against it and its Dean of Students Meredith Raimondo in the Gibson’s Bakery case. The verdicts totaled $44 million, but those will be reduced under Ohio’s tort reform law — how much they are reduced will be the subject of court litigation, but there will be a substantial reduction (perhaps more than half) in all likelihood.
The jury handed down a staggering $11 million verdict against Oberlin for a smear campaign against a local business, and it awarded another $33 million in punitive damages to the targeted mom-and-pop store, Gibson’s Food Market and Bakery.
The damages will certainly be reduced, but the verdict is a shot across the bow of well-heeled institutions tempted to join social-justice mobs.
Oberlin thought that it could defame Gibson’s as racist with impunity, that the hothouse rules of campus politics applied (i.e., anyone accused of racism is ipso facto guilty of racism), and that no one would question its superior righteousness and cultural power vis-à-vis a mere local business.
Oberlin College has been ordered by a jury to pay $44 million to a local bakery and convenience store after the midwestern liberal arts school was found responsible for defamation, infliction of emotional distress and intentional interference of business relationships.
The verdict comes nearly three years after a skirmish broke out between Jonathan Aladin, a black student at the liberal arts college, and Allyn Gibson Jr., the son and grandson of the owners of Gibson's Bakery and Food Market, a family-owned establishment near the college's campus in Oberlin, Ohio.
Fighting for Free Speech on America's Campuses
The free-speech watchdog FIRE is a familiar irritant to college administrators, but until this past year, the rest of the country wasn’t paying much attention. An “epic” year is what Greg Lukianoff, president and chief executive of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, calls it. Colleges and universities were forced to publicly and painfully deal with a confluence of national issues — race, sexual assault, gay rights, politically correct speech — mirrored and magnified in the microcosm of campus life.
Something Strange Happening in University Law Schools
Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense. Last December, Jeannie Suk wrote in an online article for The New Yorker about law students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law—or, in one case, even use the word violate (as in “that violates the law”) lest it cause students distress. In February, Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University, wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education describing a new campus politics of sexual paranoia—and was then subjected to a long investigation after students who were offended by the article and by a tweet she’d sent filed Title IX complaints against her. In June, a professor protecting himself with a pseudonym wrote an essay for Vox describing how gingerly he now has to teach. “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me,” the headline said. A number of popular comedians, including Chris Rock, have stopped performing on college campuses. Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher have publicly condemned the oversensitivity of college students, saying too many of them can’t take a joke.
No comments:
Post a Comment