The story of Gibson’s Bakery in Ohio is a parable in the culture war. The chief lesson from this sorry saga is that the woke will never back down. Even when confronted with irrefutable proof of wrong-doing, ultra-progressive Oberlin College refused to admit it had done anything wrong, and they are fighting tooth and nail – with huge legal costs borne by their endowment, donors, or fee-paying parents – to avoid having to pay out a penny in damages awarded to the long-suffering Gibson family. In terms of intransigence, they are out-Trumping the Donald. In their childish petulance, they are setting the worst possible example to the most fragile and entitled generation in American history.
We’ve previously written about the campus radicals who ruined academic careers at Princeton, Georgetown, Portland State, Evergreen State, Harvard, the University of Sussex, and so many other examples that this seems to be the norm now. Conservatives in academia are an endangered species, and you can count conservative universities on two hands. Academics who take on their proper role of provoking thought, being the Devil’s advocate, or discussing difficult topics in the interests of seeking truth are no longer free to do so. There is an accepted cannon on issues like crime, immigration, sex, and race from which one cannot deviate without bringing down the wrath of the academic mob.
The Gibson’s story, like the George Floyd story, has an epochal meaning and resonance way beyond the small and very ordinary players involved.
Three years ago, they were awarded nearly $32 million by a court in a libel suit against Oberlin. Since then, the patriarch of the family, Allyn Gibson, and his son David have both died waiting for Oberlin to pay out one dime.
Oberlin had to post a bond for the money while they appealed the first verdict. They lost the appeal and were told to pay out. They then appealed again, to the supreme court of Ohio, which hasn’t yet decided to take the case and may well not. The Gibsons have tried to collect the bond and their $32 million (plus interest), but Oberlin managed to get a stay on the case pending the Ohio Supreme Court’s written ruling. Meanwhile, the Gibsons get nothing. Now they’ve filed a motion to get the court to allow them to collect the bond from the Zurich American Insurance Company, through whom Oberlin was working.
The Bakery has been a family-owned business for 137 years, almost since Oberlin was a proud bastion of the anti-slavery movement. The malice with which Oberlin’s leftist administrators have treated Gibson’s Bakery is beyond belief. Only hard-core leftist ideology could maintain that this small, family business is the ‘oppressor’ in a Marxist dichotomy, with poor little Oberlin College and it’s endowment the oppressed.
According to Legal Insurrection, which has covered the story from the beginning, student tour guides are still bad-mouthing Gibson’s and making it a pariah. Oberlin hasn’t resumed buying from the bakery or contracting it for catering events as they had for years. Astonishingly, if this is to be believed, some of the very libelous fliers that Oberlin was held liable for knowingly disseminating are still in place. This kind of scorched earth madness, at the expense of the college, its finances, and its reputation, can only come from an ideological commitment so entrenched that it is impervious to reason.
The current Gibson family owner has gone from being the heir of a prosperous concern to being deeply in debt, with his revenues dried up and properties hocked to the hilt.
To briefly recap the story, back in 2016, the day after Trump won the election, three Oberlin students, who happened to be black, tried to shoplift some wine from Gibson’s and were caught by employees, one of whom was a family member. Gibson’s had been dealing with shoplifting for some time, losing up to $10,000 a year, and a many of the culprits, though not all, were from the college.
Social justice warriors at the school protested outside the bakery the next day and attempted to label its staff as racist. Gibson’s, in addition to being a town fixture long frequented by students, also supplied baked goods to Oberlin’s cafeteria and did catering for college events. Losing Oberlin’s custom was a massive blow.
Protesters distributed fliers at the protests claiming the bakery was a “racist establishment with a long account of racial profiling and discrimination.” Now, students are students, and by definition sophomoric. For them to act like children, and learn how to become adults, is normal.
The frightening thing was that the administration not only didn’t attempt to teach them, or control them, or negotiate a settlement, or even confirm the facts before joining the mob. The college’s dean let the protesters print the fliers on school equipment and paid for it. College staff sent out emails essentially defaming Gibson’s, accepting and enhancing the accusations of racism. College official Meredith Raimondo not only failed to stand up to students and teach them a valuable life lesson. Her active participation in the campaign against Gibson’s (at one point a witness saw her personally handing out fliers) helped cost the college $36 million and counting. Her punishment? A lucrative job at another college.
Oberlin’s leadership dug in from the beginning and hasn’t conceded a thing. In the words of Bill Jacobson, law professor at Cornell and founder of the Legal Insurrection Foundation, Oberlin administrators “continue to make their false accusations of racism against the bakery. They show no remorse whatsoever.” Jacobson explains that Gibson’s owner offered to drop his lawsuit entirely if Oberlin would simply issue a public statement withdrawing the accusations of racial profiling and racism. Allyn Gibson had been active in the civil rights movement in the 1960s, the store employed many minority staff, and police statistics showed that they had called the police on shoplifters with no bias towards any particular ethnic group. They simply wanted their reputation restored. The college refused. In America, especially post-George Floyd America, racism is the kiss of death for companies, celebrities, and anyone with a reputation to protect.
Even in a country where the college campuses are now further to the left than Che Guevara, Oberlin stands out as particularly woke. The administration had only recently caved to demands to hire, fire, or promote faculty based on student preferences and prejudices. Student activists have them by the nose-ring.
Jacobson’s take is that Oberlin and other woke institutions who believe themselves morally infallible are “vicious, vicious, litigants, and people who have no trouble smearing others in trying to destroy them.”
What the Gibson’s story reveals is how the left in general reacts when its shibboleths are attacked. They do not compromise. They do not negotiate. They do not lose gracefully. In Europe, the tide of sanity finally seems to be turning slowly against teaching radical gender theories to small children; mandating “gender-affirming care” that calls for putting children on puberty blockers, castrating boys, and cutting the breasts off girls; arresting people for speech that makes sensitive people feel “unsafe,” and other excesses of progressive activism. America may soon awake from this nightmare too.
When it does, the moral from the Gibson’s fable to remember is this: We should not expect any regret from educators who push ideologically-driven “anti-racism” curricula, and others on the far left. They will, like Oberlin, fight to the end to preserve their gains, and give no quarter. Those of us still living in reality and hoping for the return of moderation need to be as uncompromising about objective reality until sanity is restored.
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To me this is another example of how the message of Dr. King has been woefully misconstrued.