I remember how it was -- JR
Ohio college racks up millions in interest on cash owed to bakery over false racism allegations
The behavior of college officials in the matter was so extraordinary that their hopes from an appeal must be rated as being as unrealistic as the original offensive actions. They carried political correctness to the point of insanity. "Blacks can do no harm" seemed to be their guiding principle
The school and a former dean were found guilty of libeling the bakery as racist
Ohio court upheld $32 million win against Oberlin College over false racial accusations
Oberlin College in Ohio racked up more than $4 million in interest after not paying the more than $30 million in libel damages to a local family-run bakery over false racism allegations made in 2016.
Gibson’s Bakery was awarded $31.6 million in July of 2019 after students and a college official were found guilty of libeling the establishment as "racist" following an altercation a store employee had with three Black students.
The judgment now stands at more than $36 million after the school accumulated $4,300 daily in interest over the more than 1,000 days it went unpaid, local outlet The Chronicle reported last month.
The damages stem from false racism allegations that were promoted by a former dean at the school.
Allyn Gibson, the son and grandson of Gibson’s Bakery and Food Mart owners David Gibson and Allyn Gibson, chased down and tackled a Black Oberlin student in 2016 who was suspected of stealing bottles of wine.
Two other Black students at Oberlin College, who were friends of the suspect, also became involved in the physical incident, prompting accusations of racial profiling.
All three students were arrested, according to court documents, and ultimately pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges and read statements claiming that Gibson’s actions were not racially motivated.
The shoplifting altercation – which occurred one day after former President Donald Trump was elected president – sparked widespread condemnation from Oberlin students and claims that the Gibson family racially targeted the students.
Gibson’s Bakery filed a lawsuit against Oberlin College in 2017, claiming they were libeled, and their business was hurt.
Students boycotted the bakery and protested outside, while the school stopped buying food from the bakery. The Oberlin College Student Senate additionally passed a resolution accusing the bakery’s owners of being racist, which was emailed to the school community, Fox News Digital previously reported.
Oberlin College vice president and dean of students, Meredith Raimondo, also handed out flyers stating that the bakery is a "RACIST establishment with a LONG ACCOUNT of RACIAL PROFILING and DISCRIMINATION," according to court documents.
College resources were used to print the flyers and buy food and other supplies for the protesters, court documents also showed.
A jury ultimately found the school and Raimondo guilty of libel. The jury also found the college guilty of intentionally inflicting emotional distress on owner David Gibson, who has since died, as well as intentionally inflicting emotional distress on his son.
The jury originally awarded the bakery $44 million, but Lorain County Common Pleas Judge John Miraldi later lowered the damages to $25 million. In 2019, the court ordered Oberlin to pay an additional $6.5 million to the bakery to reimburse its legal fees.
Now, the Gibson family is demanding Oberlin pay the full $36 million, which includes the roughly $4 million in interest, the Chronicle reported last month, after Oberlin College asked the Ohio Supreme Court to issue an order halting the payment.
Attorneys for the bakery filed documents with the Ohio Supreme Court in late June opposing Oberlin’s request to halt the payment.
"The Gibsons have correctly completed every step necessary to properly execute" a jury's award and Judge Miraldi's 2019 judgment, the lawyers wrote in a motion last month, according to The Chronicle.
It is unclear when the state’s highest court might hear the arguments, according to the outlet.
Gibson’s Bakery did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
When approached for comment, a representative for Oberlin College directed Fox News Digital to a webpage on the school’s site concerning updates on the case. The most recent update on the page is the school announcing on June 1 that it filed an appeal with the Ohio Supreme Court in May, and had the support of organizations such as the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, NAACP and Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
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East Germany has been reinvented in American universities
Jeff Jacoby
AS AN undergraduate in 1977, I took a course on 20th-century European diplomacy with the historian Roderic Davison. The material was absorbing but challenging and I had to work hard to earn a B. Professor Davison's lectures were unfailingly interesting, but after all these years I have only one specific memory from my time in his classroom.
He was describing the breakdown of German society during the Weimar Republic and explaining the lure of the Nazi movement under Adolf Hitler. Suddenly he reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a small black comb. With his right hand, he quickly combed his hair forward across his brow, then held the comb horizontally against his upper lip. His left arm he shot stiffly outward and began declaiming in German. Most of my classmates laughed at the unexpected impersonation of the Fuhrer. But I was shaken. For me, with my family history, Hitler was no laughing matter. Davison's spoof upset me badly.
My response? I did nothing. I knew perfectly well that my professor had intended no offense. I didn't think his behavior had been improper. I may have been taken aback — in today's parlance, "triggered" — but I assumed that my discomfiture was my own problem. The lecture resumed, the course went on, and to this day I regard Professor Davison's course as one of the best of my college years.
What brings that long-ago episode to mind is the latest poll of undergraduates conducted by researchers from the Challey Institute for Global Innovation at North Dakota State University. The annual survey, which involves 2,000 students at 130 colleges and universities nationwide, gauges the views of students on multiple subjects, including viewpoint diversity and how higher education is influencing their views.
What the new poll reveals is a generation of college students deeply committed to the belief that if they are offended, someone ought to be punished.
In one eye-opening finding, 74 percent of undergrads endorse the view that a professor who says "something that students find offensive" should be reported to the university. By a majority almost as lopsided, 65 percent believe that a fellow student who says something they consider offensive should be turned in. That informers' mindset is especially pronounced among students who identify themselves as politically liberal, fully 85 percent of whom would report a professor who offends them. But even among self-identified conservatives, a solid majority — 56 percent — are of the same mindset.
After the fall of the Iron Curtain a generation ago, Americans were appalled to learn about the pervasive culture of betrayal that had taken root in East Germany, where hundreds of thousands of citizens informed on each other to the secret police. Yet the Challey Institute's findings suggest that on American college campuses today, something similar is becoming normal. Indeed, the survey implies that most students not only believe that wrong-thinkers should be penalized, but that they are oblivious to the chilling effect created in such an environment.
In what at first glance seems like an encouraging finding, 72 percent of undergraduates report that their classrooms are places where "people with unpopular views would feel comfortable sharing their opinions." Drill down into the data, however, and it transpires that it is overwhelmingly those students — the ones who say their classrooms are receptive to unpopular ideas — who also say that anyone making "offensive" comments should be turned in.
The survey doesn't define the term "offensive" but instances of heterodox views on college campuses being silenced, shouted down, disrupted, vetoed by hecklers, or turned into firing offenses have become almost too numerous to count. And what is true of undergraduates, according to a report published by the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, is also true of advanced students: Express an opinion that others find offensive, and the consequences can be serious. The CSPI study found, for example, that 43 percent of American PhD candidates would back efforts to expel a hypothetical scholar whose research raised doubts about the benefits of racial and gender diversity.
Is it any wonder that, in academia as in society at large, self-censorship has grown pervasive? There is "a sustained campaign to impose ideological conformity in the name of diversity," the historian Niall Ferguson has written. "It often feels as if there is less free speech and free thought in the American university today than in almost any other institution in the U.S."
Perhaps the illiberal trajectory of American higher education can be reversed, though it seems quite a long shot. I only know that I'm grateful to have gotten my education before the politics of resentment and grievance became such unstoppable forces on campus. That was a golden age, though none of us knew it at the time.
https://jeffjacoby.com/26314/informers-on-campus
***********************************************Gender Fox in the Henhouse: Biden’s New Title IX Rule Puts Women in Danger
Once considered a feminist triumph, Title IX was enacted to prevent sex-based discrimination at any educational institution receiving federal funding.
The administration has opened sex-segregated spaces like bathrooms to anyone who identifies as a woman regardless of that individual’s biology.
The new Title IX rule removes commonsense student due process protections in campus sexual assault and harassment proceedings.
Conservatives have had plenty to celebrate recently: the end of Roe v. Wade, the reinforcement of the Second Amendment and the triumphs for the free exercise of religion, free speech and school choice. But not all is on the right track.
On its 50th anniversary, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972—the pinnacle achievement of sex equality in education—took a massive hit. Even as the Supreme Court delivered landmark opinion upon landmark opinion, the U.S. Department of Education issued a new rule on Title IX redefining “women” and proposing to undo many of the law’s successes.
Once considered a feminist triumph, Title IX was enacted to prevent sex-based discrimination at any educational institution receiving federal funding. For hundreds of thousands of women, it has opened the door to graduate schools, scholastic sports, study programs and, ultimately, professional achievement.
The rate of female participation in high school athletics is now 10 times what it was in 1972. Women now constitute over 56% of America’s college students. And they hold nearly half of all tenure-track teaching positions.
But on the law’s golden anniversary, and in a twist of nearly Shakespearean tragedy, the Biden administration redefined womanhood in the very law passed for women’s advancement and protection. In its 701-page proposed Title IX regulation, the Department of Education has expanded the term “sex”—plain, unambiguous and understood by the 1972 ratifiers to mean biological distinctions between men and women—to include “sexual orientation and gender identity.”
Seeking to advance his pet policy agenda on transgender ideology, the president has in one swift move made a mockery of the women’s liberation movement and the achievements of women everywhere. While the media fixates on protests over a woman’s “right” to obtain an abortion, a woman’s right to equal protection in education is on the line.
By redefining “sex” to include “gender identity,” the administration has opened sex-segregated spaces like bathrooms, locker rooms, dorm rooms and single-sex admissions programs to anyone who identifies as a woman, regardless of that individual’s biology. But in what can only be seen as his recognition of the issue’s abysmal polling, President Biden has separated out the controversial trans-inclusive athletic issue.
The Education Department “plans to issue a separate notice of proposed rulemaking to address whether and how the Department should amend the Title IX regulations to address students’ eligibility to participate on a particular male or female athletics team,” it wrote.
The use of “whether” is illuminating. The department’s unwillingness to commit to a full-throated repudiation of men competing in women’s sports hints that the proposed rule perhaps already addresses the issue.
Because it does.
After expanding the term “sex” to include gender identity, the proposal goes on to state, “under the proposed regulations … a recipient’s education program or activity would include buildings or locations that are part of the school’s operations. … A recipient’s education program or activity would also include all of its academic and other classes, extracurricular activities, [and] athletics programs.”
Thus, the department has ensured that the sports issue will be decided in favor of biological men whether or not it engages in additional rule-making.
In addition to the above, the new Title IX rule removes commonsense student due process protections in campus sexual assault and harassment proceedings, returning investigative power to the hands of a single, unelected bureaucrat, and gutting the 2020 Title IX rule that established those due process guarantees.
It likewise muzzles students and professors by elevating “misgendering” or a failure to use their preferred pronouns as a sufficient basis to launch a Title IX investigation, creating a heckler’s veto of the highest order.
The burden is on the Department to provide evidence that Title IX requires modification.
Rewinding the clock and pitting males against females once again fails to meet that burden.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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