Photo: Oberlin College

Who says woke women can’t run a college?

Let’s take Oberlin, the snooty (and expensive–$74,000 for tuition, room, and board when I last looked) liberal arts institution near Cleveland. And let’s say this happens, back in November 2016 (from the Oberlin Chronicle-Telegram):

[At Gibson’s Bakery, a 124-year-old family-owned business across the street from the Oberlin campus] [a] student tried to buy alcohol with a fake ID and shoplift from Allyn D. Gibson, David Gibson’s son. Allyn D. Gibson followed the student out of the store, and the two got into a physical altercation. Two other students got involved, and police have said when they arrived the three students were hitting Allyn D. Gibson while he was on the ground. Allyn D. Gibson is white and the students are black. The three students pleaded guilty in August 2017 to misdemeanor charges and read statements into the record acknowledging that Allyn D. Gibson was within his right to detain the shoplifter and that his actions were not racially motivated.

Case closed, right? Not if you have woke women running a college. Because (according to the Chronicle-Telegram):

In the two days following the shoplifting incident, Oberlin College students protested in front of the bakery and passed out the flyers urging people to boycott the bakery because of the bakery’s history of racial profiling. Oberlin College stopped ordering from the bakery….

And, allegedly:

[D]ue to a hostile environment created or sustained by the college, vehicles of Gibson’s Bakery employees were keyed and tires were slashed, damage was done to David Gibson’s home and Allyn W. Gibson [the 90-year-old father of David Gibson] was injured after anonymous people knocked on the windows of his apartment late at night and he fell after opening the door.

And this (also from the Chronicle-Telegram):

As the November 2016 protests outside of Gibson’s Bakery by Oberlin College students continued to escalate, Oberlin police considered calling in the county’s riot team to break up the crowd, a former Oberlin police sergeant testified. Victor Ortiz, who was with Oberlin police at the time of the protests, said he and other officers were at the scene of the protests to try to maintain order. As a sergeant, Ortiz said other officers from the department were coming to him for direction. “The officers would come to me and say, ‘Hey, this is really disorderly; we should make arrests,’ and I said, ‘Absolutely not,’” Ortiz testified. “We were so far outnumbered; there was no way. That would have been like putting gasoline on a fire.”

Enter the brigade of woke women. First off, we have Meredith Raimondo, Oberlin vice president and dean of students. Her strategy: Let’s me and a bunch of other Oberlin administrators get down there to Gibson’s and join in with those students!

Jason Hawk, editor of the Oberlin News-Tribune, also was called to testify. He said students were shouting obscenities at him, calling him names and even spitting at him. Hawk also said that he was approached by Raimondo while he was at the scene, which he was covering for the weekly publication. Hawk said Raimondo tried to block him from taking photos and gave him a copy of the flyer students were circulating that declared Gibson’s Bakery to be a racist establishment with a history of racial profiling. Raimondo also was communicating with students through a megaphone during the protest, Hawk said. He said she was telling students there was a location where they could go to rest and get refreshments.

And:

A former Oberlin College employee testified that during the November 2016 protests by students against Gibson’s Bakery, a college staff member who reported to Meredith Raimondo was carrying a stack of fliers encouraging people to boycott the bakery and tried to hand him one

Good work, Meredith! The fallout: Gibson, having lost a projected $5.8 million in business from its lost account with Oberlin, the student boycott, and the plunging of its reputation, sued the both Raimondo and Oberlin after the misdemeanor plea for “libel, interference with business relationships, interference with contracts, intentional infliction of emotional distress and trespass.”

Woke Woman #1 Raimondo having dug Oberlin into a hole, it was up to Woke Woman #2 Carmen Twillie Ambar, president of Oberlin since October 2017, to…dig deeper. Yeah, some of our students are begging us to settle this case outside of court--but why do that when we can have a jury trial and watch the jury put those racist townies in their place! Oh, and let’s call a smart-alecky CPA “certified valuation analyst” to the witness stand to say that the Gibson business enterprise was actually worth only $35,000 before the protests–about the price of a semester at Oberlin. That’ll teach the little people not to sue their betters.

Well! There was a trial, all right:

A Lorain County jury on Friday awarded the owners of Gibson’s Bakery more than $11 million from Oberlin College in finding that the college inflicted emotional distress, interfered with business relationships and libeled the family-owned bakery in downtown Oberlin. The jury also found that Meredith Raimondo, the college’s vice president and dean of students, libeled the family and business.

Now, many a college, on hearing that kind of news, might go off quietly and hang its head while wondering privately how to explain all this to the alumni. But many a college doesn’t have Woke Woman #3 Donica Thomas Varner as its general counsel. The Chronicle-Telegraph reports:

[M]members of the Oberlin College Alumni Association did receive an email from Donica Thomas Varner, vice president, general counsel and secretary of Oberlin College. The email — obtained by The Chronicle-Telegram — updated members on the verdict. “We are disappointed with the verdict and regret that the jury did not agree with the clear evidence our team presented,” Varner wrote.

Translation: The jury was too dumb to understand our sophisticated legal case.

Good going, Varner: The jury isn’t quite finished yet–it meets this week to decide on how much in the way of punitive damages to award the Gibson family. Those could triple the verdict against Oberlin to $33 million. I hope the jury is sufficiently sequestered not to read that email of yours.

Ah, woke women. They really know how to run a college.

Posted by Charlotte Allen