Below is my column in the Hill on the recent controversy at Oberlin College where students are alarmed by the appearance of a risk manager on campus to address the costly lawsuits draining the school.
Here is the column:
Over its almost 200 years of existence, Oberlin College has faced a civil war, an economic depression and pandemics. But until this year, it had never faced the likes of Kalinda Watson. Student editors on The Oberlin Review have risen up against the addition of Watson to the college ranks as an existential threat.
No, Watson is not a conservative or a Republican — groups that haven’t been welcome on campus for many years. Oberlin is ranked in the top three most liberal colleges in the country, and finding a conservative professor is about as likely as finding a licensed, practicing wizard.
No, Watson is far, far worse. She is a risk management expert.
The panic over the arrival of a risk management expert in this small college is that she may be working … wait for it … to lower the risk of lawsuits at the college. Oberlin, it appears, attracts lawsuits as much as liberals.
The students fear that she will create “risk aversion” that could chill future protests.
Indeed, some of us have written about Oberlin for years as a case study of why higher education is declining in America. The college has yielded to the mob in past controversies that have cost the school a fortune.
The most obvious example is the college’s disgraceful history in a campaign targeting Gibson’s, a small family store and bakery that has been part of this small community since 1885. Despite that long association, the store became the focus of a campaign of destruction led by college officials after three African American students were arrested for shoplifting in 2016.
The arrests sparked an immediate campaign calling the store racist. Undeterred, the police found clear evidence of shoplifting and noted that, over a period of five years, 40 adults were arrested for shoplifting at Gibson’s Bakery, but only six were African American.
Nevertheless, the local prosecutors appeared to cave to the pressure and cut a plea deal to reduce the charge to attempted theft. But a local judge refused to accept the deal and said that the plea was the result of a punishing series of protests and a “permanent economic sanction.” Ultimately, all three students pleaded guilty.
Dean of Students Meredith Raimondo reportedly joined the massive protests and even handed out a flier denouncing the bakery as a racist business. When some pointed out that the students admitted they were guilty, special assistant to the president for community and government relations Tita Reed (who also reportedly participated in the protests) wrote that it did not change a “damn thing.”
The jury in June 2019 awarded the Gibsons $44 million in compensatory and punitive damages. A judge later reduced the award to $25 million. But the college continued to drag out the appeal in what seemed like a revenge litigation against a store that refused to give up simply because it was innocent.
So that brings us back to the student panic over the hiring of a campus risk manager. Rather than look at its own conduct and the lack of responsibility and leadership exercised by Oberlin College President Carmen Twillie Ambar and the Board of Trustees, the college is hiring someone to study what is abundantly clear: that the college is burning through a lot of money in what is little more than woke performance art. One wonders how many students could have been given free rides to the college with the amount of money Oberlin has paid in litigation and insurance.
For the student editors, they do not even want “risk” to be raised because “it seems unlikely that a college living in fear of litigation . . . will behave favorably toward activist efforts in the years to come.”
Oberlin is, of course, not alone in its lack of courage in holding students accountable. Recently, many people were appalled when students shut down a federal appellate judge from speaking at Stanford Law School. Associate Dean Tirien Steinbach even joined in condemning conservative appellate judge Stuart Duncan for causing trauma by sharing his views. While Stanford Law School Dean Jenny Martinez denounced the canceling of the speech as a denial of free speech, she refused to hold the students accountable.
At Northwestern University, students took over a class and forced it to end because the professor invited an immigration officer to discuss issues with students. Those students then gave public interviews celebrating their success, but the university refused to punish them.
In other cases, professors have actively participated in canceling speakers and even committing violent acts. Feminist studies associate professor Mireille Miller-Young was sentenced for criminally assaulting pro-life advocates on campus at the University of California – Santa Barbara. She was not fired. Instead, she was supported by faculty and even honored by other schools as a role model.
Most recently, at the State University of New York at Albany, sociology professor Renee Overdyke unplugged a pro-life display and then allegedly resisted arrest. Even though the school passed out flyers reminding students that they cannot stop others from speaking, Overdyke allegedly did precisely that. The videotaped arrest showed students screaming “She’s a [expletive] professor!”
And that’s precisely the point. A professor violated the school’s policies and then resisted arrest. The question is whether Albany will penalize or lionize her for obstructing free speech.
The angst of the Oberlin students reflects a fear that the college might not subsidize campaigns that harm other people, including innocent individuals like the owners of Gibson’s Bakery.
Oberlin’s administrators have made such campaigns part of the identity of their students. After all, this is a college where students are honed into such a hair-triggered state that they even protested the serving of sushi in the cafeteria as “cultural appropriation.” Litigation costs are now treated as an entitlement, like entertainment budgets.
They can rest assured. That the college had to bring in a “risk expert” clearly shows it will do little to change its culture or resist future mob actions. If President Ambar and the Board were serious, they would not need an expert. Even after a massive award by the jury, Ambar continued to refuse to apologize.
In their editorial, the students declared “student activism in Oberlin integral to the culture. Without it, what do we stand for?” Putting aside responsible activism, there are always those other values such as higher education and due process that might appeal to them — if nothing else at least as something of a novelty at Oberlin College.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. Follow him on Twitter @JonathanTurley.
Curious that the chief perpetrators and supporters of academic disorder are women. Men can and may support this disorder but it’s more tacit than the amped volume of women testing their megaphones from the height of their new deanships and presidencies in the ivory tower. This is as much a perversion of original feminism as transgendering males competing in women’s sports is to the original intent of Title IX. As always, the not so hidden costs of “good” intentions.
This behavior progresses from the performance of reproductive… human rites. Fortunately, most women and men still do not exercise liberal license to indulge diversity [dogma] (i.e. color judgment, class-based bigotry), and the majority will not tolerate wholesale witch hunts, warlock judgments, or human sacrifice for social progress etc.
Mark Levin had a quest on last night that had escaped from North Korea, a virtual prison state, ended up in America via China and South Korea, and was fortunate enough to get into Columbia University. The news that comes out of the interview is that the ex-North Korean said that Columbia is the same as North Korea, that both the prison state and the university hate America and are begging for it to fail. The very bright young woman tells how there is no dissent at Columbia, no allowance of any thought that is not against capitalism, the US and especially white men. Or should I say white straight men.
I bring this up because I want to point out that it isn’t just the Oberlins that are doing this, it is the entire college world in America and it is even now in our post grad schools of law and medicine. Of course journalism schools have been gone for years.
This didn’t happen by accident, the left wanted to take over the schools, they have succeeded and now the nation is in grave peril. Biden is appointing people like Neena Tanden, a leftist radical that will not allow the old fool to moderate.
Levin had Yeonmi Park. She’s been called out by other North Korean defectors for making stuff up. Her stories of the same incident changed multiple times and those who did come from her home town pointed out a lot of the things she has claimed were not a thing.
It seems she’s discovered how making stuff up can make you a lot of money in American and how gullible a lot of people are. What is really sad is that her BS may be harmful to other North Korean defectors who truly experienced horrible things.
Turley seems to have found the sweet spot for what to provide to his most gullible readers. There’s a mass of voters and people who are so gullible which Republican strategists and “intellectuals” are fully aware of and they expertly exploit it to full advantage. Why? Because they are the easiest to convince with just a bit of clever BS.
Svelaz defends North Korea. Isn’t that how this is played?
So Svelaz, do you think that there is any dissent at Columbia? This is the main point that the defector was making and yet you only attack her????
Reporters Without Borders’ (RSF) World Press Freedom Index released on May 3 has North Korea ranked in 180th place on its list of 180 countries. Not much “stuff” needs to be made up to make it any worse for North Korea than what it is.
I saw that interview. The title of her book is WHILE TIME REMAINS.
https://www.amazon.com/While-Time-Remains-Defectors-Freedom/dp/1668003317
It began with the creation of the bureaucratic welfare state a century ago. The big push to highjack education to dumb down students and create a more collectivist society came from the big foundations – Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie and Guggenheim – not long after those foundations were created in the early 20th century.
Congress passed a resolution creating something called the Reece Commission to investigate those foundations to determine if they were involved in “Un-American” activities. The chief investigator was Norman Dodd. He published the commission’s findings in the 1950s. Few know about it, I suspect, because it was overshadowed by the McCarthy stuff and the left-liberals did everything they could to gaslight and deflect away from the fact that a large number of Soviet spies – many Ivy educated – had infested some of the highest bureaucratic offices in the FDR and Truman administrations.
Dodd was interviewed about the Reece Commission shortly before he died in 1982. Here it is:
It began with Karl Marx’s protege, Abraham Lincoln who espoused or coined anti-free market theories as early as 1837.
“These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert, to fleece the people.”
– Abraham Lincoln, from his first speech as an Illinois state legislator, 1837
__________________________________________________________
“Everyone now is more or less a Socialist.”
– Charles Dana, managing editor of the New York Tribune, and Lincoln’s assistant secretary of war, 1848
__________________________________________________________________________________
“The goal of Socialism is Communism.”
– Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
_________________
“The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.”
– Karl Marx and the First International Workingmen’s Association to Lincoln, 1864
Letter of congratulation and commendation from Karl Marx to Abraham Lincoln: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/iwma/documents/1864/lincoln-letter.htm
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Reading Karl Marx with Abraham Lincoln
Utopian socialists, German communists, and other republicans
Seven years before he and Lincoln served together in the Congress (during each man’s sole term in the U.S. House) Horace Greeley—or “Friend Greeley,” as Lincoln referred to the editor in their correspondence—began the Tribune with a stated purpose: “to serve the republic with an honest and fearless criticism.” He succeeded, more wholly than any American editor before or after his transit of the mid-nineteenth century, in creating a newspaper that was not merely a newspaper. Greeley’s nationally circulated Tribune was, as Clarence Darrow aptly remembered it, “the political and social Bible” of every reforming, radical and Republican household. The Tribune was surely that for Lincoln, whose engagement with the paper would last the better part of a quarter century and eventually extend to wrangling with Greeley about the proper moment at which to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln’s involvement was not just with Greeley but with his sub-editors and writers, so much so that the first Republican president appointed one of Greeley’s most radical lieutenants—the Fourier- and Proudhon-inspired socialist and longtime editor of Marx’s European correspondence, Charles Dana—as his assistant secretary of war.
Greeley’s newspaper was the tribune of the agitation that spawned the Republican Party and its successful presidential campaign of 1860. Lincoln would say of the editor: “every one of his words seems to weigh about a ton.”
This was as Greeley, an epic figure of American journalism, a political and social reformer who reveled in his ability not merely to report upon but to bend the arc of history, intended it.
– ISR https://isreview.org/issue/79/reading-karl-marx-abraham-lincoln/index.html
I watched that as well and what made me so angry was that this change in our culture happened with the tacit apathy of the right. Corruption in our govetnment is rampant yet we send the same sad grifters back year after yeat. We must ask ourselves why and force a true house cleaning.
At the risk of being banned, denounced and probably prosecuted, may I suggest that these kinds of frenzies are related to the change in composition of college bodies: over the past forty years, American colleges have been feminized. Almost 60% of college students are actual biological women. https://www.bestcolleges. com/news/ analysis/ 2021/11/19/women-complete-college-more-than-men/ This has probably had some good effects. But it has also made “performance art” and overheated rhetoric more likely. Since some of the actual biological men now identify as women, the transformation may be greater than the statistics suggest.
I say let them go. The sooner these “schools” drive themselves into closure from bankruptcy the better off the country will be.
Currentsit, I tend to agree, but in the settlement, Oberlin paid out $25 million. Their endowment is so large that without interest, Oberlin could pay out one settlement a year for 40 years or, based on interest alone, could pay out $ 25 million twice a year indefinitely.
Why should gifts to Oberlin not be taxed when the money is used to violate the rights of others?
Welcome to temper-tantrum mob rule in America’s colleges & universities. I’m sure that Oberlin has a committee of dedicated proletariat wannabees actively looking for another Gibson’s bakery candidate for their next anti-racist campaign. Thank you, Jonathan, for an excellent article.
“What do we stand for?” How about excellence in academic achievement? Oh, I forgot, this is a US college. Students are there to act out their revolutionary angst. They’ll work on their math another time.
Excellent idea on Oberlin’s part to bring in a risk expert. I think more students need to learn about risk and chance.
This drives me nuts. The management of the school is in the hands of dozens of people with countless advanced degrees. Each with a hand full of Masters, and at least one Doctorate. But in that group not one is smart enough to run a 5 second, back of an envelope risk assessment????
The people filling these positions, should be selected for the abilities, not the framed number as degrees. But, stupid is as stupid does.
iowan2: They’re not even accepted for their degrees. The “woke” hiring criteria are race and gender. Instead of hiring a risk manager, they could have just fired the president — it would have saved them money and gotten rid of someone who should be a colossal embarrassment to the school.
“But in that group not one is smart enough to run a 5 second, back of an envelope risk assessment????”
What was the risk assessment of Covid by most of our leadership and members of the media, etc?
Aaaaahhhhh! Everyone’s gonna die or be on a ventilator!
True enough PR. Covid exposed all the elites and their limited skill set. You might be the best at using a microscope, but that gives you zero experience in management. What is the focus on all the doctorates, my supposed betters, wave in my face? This example, shows risk assessment, risk management, is not in the set of skill. Why? How do you get hired to do a job lacking key skill sets? And Risk management is not complicated.
Sushi is “cultural appropriation” now?
I have a small library of cook books on three shelves in the kitchen. Just because my skin is brown does not mean I do not have Chinese, Japanese, Italian, German, French, even Nordic cook books.
Just pointing out how absurd woke progressive snowflakes are.
To the topic at hand, tell the students risk assessment and management is part of what is necessary to keep the college from going bankrupt. It will just be factored into their tuition. They can continue on with their protests, and any legal outcomes from it. It will just be an extra $200-$300 per credit hour.
“student activism in Oberlin integral to the culture. Without it, what do we stand for?”
Wrong question. “With it, what do you stand for?” is the question and the answer is prescribed groupthink.
These idiots actually think that they are free-thinking-radicals. They are not, they are (were) simply coddled, unthinking, tools who will do and say whatever some thought-leader (sic) is spoon-feeds them.
They are simply rebels without a cause sufficient to make the nation at large better.
If these radical unis were truly important they would be examining all aspects of social and political life, not just the right. They have honed the right pretty well – what else is there to come after there? Nothing, so they make stuff up – tranny hatred and a fake white on black racism epidemic. These morons refuse to look at reality, to use science, evidence, reason and therefore have to rely on emotive and circumstantial and irrational persuasiveness to push the goals of whomever it is that is telling the kids’ thought-leaders what to think about.
That is why the answer to “…what do we stand for?” is a very real question in many of these kids’ minds. Let’s hope one day they are given the opportunity to find out.
Has Oberlin actually paid any of the settlement yet? I feel like the broader issue in our society is that actions are so far removed from consequences. If every Oberlin student had to open up his or her (or their) wallet on a weekly basis and hand over as little as 50 bucks, still a nominal amount, I feel like they might have very different ideas about risk and risk aversion. Oberlin is the physical and intellectual manifestation of the ivory tower. Meanwhile J6 prisoners have now been sentenced to 14 years in federal prison for standing outside the capitol and urging people not to go in.
This problem will not be resolved by a “risk management expert” and the problem will get worse.These intellectual dolts are smart enough to realize that they have backed themselves into a corner politically and that the only possible response that offers them survival is to double down. If they lose, they know they will be labeled academic pariahs without career potential. If they sustain, they can filter to other institutions or entities and hope to cover their trail. If they win they remain in control of academic suicide and the resultant trashing of thousands of young minds. Which route do you think they will pick?
I suppose Oberlin is going to have to go through at least 1-2 more large and expensive lawsuit and then they may start to to question their actions and motives. Both the college and the students (basically joined at the hip) seemed to be totally lacking in any amount of self reflection or self criticism. A key part of a medical education and practice is self reflection and reassessment. A malpractice lawsuit is a grinding process to go through. Not only the time that is spent preparing for the case, depositions, and trials but because of reassessment of every step and decision in the case followed by exploration of alternatives that might have been pursued. It can be humbling and humiliating (if your are wrong or lose, they don’t always go together). But you are not fit to be a physician unless you buy in to this process. In every other part of life you have to buy into a process like this or you learn nothing. So far these students have learned nothing of value. These actions come at a price and the more they are ignored the worse the price.
You see all sorts of stories of failure in physicians and patients. Occasionally a person is just in the wrong spot when a bolder drops from the sky but usually their life is a endless series of bad decisions, no clue that they are making bad decisions and repetitively making they same bad decision over and over until they are nothing but a collapsed heap on the ground somewhere as people step over them.
Being rich can cushion your bad decisions till you run put of assets. Most of us don’t have that type of reserves. Unless you are a president’s son or something like that.
As a citizen, taxpayer and voter I firmly support the right of Oberlin, as well as Harvard, Yale and Princeton, and many others, to be just as activist as they like. However, I don’t see why I should pay for it. Let’s strip Oberlin and its brethren of their tax exemptions, government grants, federal and state scholarships, and every other penny of public support. If this is the sort of education parents want for their children let them pay full freight and good luck to them.
Agree in principle but, as a practical matter, do you really see congressmen, et al. halting public support over ‘activism’ issues? I mean, these congressmen are the same ones that just voted themselves a ~20% raise and instead of calling it a raise called it a ‘reimbursement’ so as to avoid political and legal fallout.
Oberlin is engaging in a twist on Pay to Play. The solution is simple, but simple minds don’t grasp simple solutions.
We must confront the pernicious agenda pushed by radical progressives whose goal is to undermine our culture, our society, and our economic health as a free capitalist nation. We are running out of time to dispell this proven failed ideology. I fail to understand the lethargy of those who claim that they percieve this nation as going in the wrong direction yet remain silent.
This is one of those schools where it is glaringly obvious what a student is getting themselves into, and yet parents still enroll their kids. I can understand someone with the intellectual acuity of an 18 year-old (particularly one educated in modern primary schools) finding appeal, but their parents? I keep seeing a gaping void where I expect to find *some* tiny sliver of sense. As a hiring manager I would throw a resume with Oberlin on it straight into the round file. 🙄
James: Unfortunately, these are the same type of parent that takes their child to a drag show and allows them to use puberty blockers at whim.
Why wiould Oberlin appeal to students?
Are coed showers a frequent occurence or something?
Excellent idea on Oberlin’s part to bring in a risk expert. I think more students need to learn about risk and chance. Humans in general have a tendency to make overblown very small but scary risks but then deemphasize actual high risks. (Kidnappers are everywhere!!! Eh, I’m gonna keep drinking pop and eating junk food despite being 100 lbs overweight and hypertensive.) Reason and imagination and maybe the ego must get all tangled up with fear and short circuit prudent consideration.
Bringing in a so called “risk expert” is a way for leadership to avoid taking responsibility. Create more bureaucracy to cover for their failed leadership.
Here’s where you say something like, “no, hiring risk expert shows leadership. The leader is taking steps to address the issue.”
The problem with that argument is that it was poor leadership that allowed the issue to form, grow and fester. The cancer is now so large a “risk expert” has been hired to address the issue created by the failure in leadership.
The students will allow the university to reach bankruptcy sooner.
Children attend college to learn . . . yet suddenly we hand them the keys to the place and let them run it? WTH?
Why would any parent send a son or daughter to Oberlin? The “education” they would receive is how to go beyond responsible protest to taking-away the rights of others, slandering innocent people, and refusing to apologize when wrong — even when proven wrong. And how about alumni of the school? Are they proud of how liberal values are being trashed by the mob?
Once upon a time…
https://www.amazon.com/Price-Freedom-Town-Stood-Slavery/dp/0802721664