Oberlin native here. I've been going to Gibson's since I was a kid. You're getting an incomplete picture of this sad drama and the Gibson family does not deserve your sympathy.
I'll preface by saying that no one in this story comes out looking good – certainly not the shoplifters, who expected get out of jail free cards despite being thieves; nor the college, whose greatest fear is offending its fragile student body, with predictable results like this.
What you're not going to read in this article or others like it is that the Gibsons aren't heroes either. There are two important details I'd bring to your attention:
1. Allyn Gibson, the man who tackled the shoplifters, really is a confirmed racist. I know this both first hand (we are peers), and from his many social media posts in which he casually rags on immigrants and black people (expect he identifies them using the n-word). The judge in this case declared that evidence inadmissible, for some reason.
2. The Gibsons are not a put-down, working class family who were nearly bankrupted by this protest. They're one of the wealthiest families in town, and were millionaires before this all happened. Gibson's Bakery is a hobby business; they turn a modest profit selling some baked goods and beer. Their actual livelihood comes from rent – they're the second largest landowners after the college, and own most of the commercial and residential rental property in town. The idea that they were impacted by this protest in any consequential way is frankly laughable to anyone who knows anything about them and their business. Once again, the judge declared evidence of their wealth to be inadmissible in court.
This doesn't absolve the college of blame. But this isn't the black-and-white, "David vs Goliath" story the media is making it out to be. Unfortunately this story just fits too neatly into a national narrative about "woke" politics going too far, so you're not going to see any nuance from the media.
That evidence was likely inadmissable because the case wasn't about whether Gibson's was racist. It's difficult to defame someone by calling them "racist", which is to a large extent a subjective statement of opinion. Defamation must comprise false statements of fact. Oberlin can probably arrange a boycott of Gibson's owing to their racism. What they can't do is circulate flyers saying that Gibson's employees assaulted Oberlin students when that didn't happen.
Regardless, this is new information for me; thanks for posting it.
Unless Allyn Gibson did not in fact post things to Facebook criticizing immigrants and Black folks, or the Gibson family does not in fact own a huge amount of real estate in town, there's no possibility of any of that comment being libelous. Anybody can call anybody racist any time: that's a statement of opinion, and opinions cannot be defamatory.
So Elon Musk calling that guy a pedophile was an opinion and therefore shouldn't have been considered defamatory?
Realistically any opinion based comment could be taken offence to and then whether it is defamatory or not depends on the evidence that individual has for having said opinion.
I'm a bit confused here. How was it refuted? I'm not sure up to date on the whole thing and only really remember the substack article where she kinda admits that the store is run for sentimental reasons.
It's an article about how Oberlin was refusing to pay a defamation award --- which it was not, it was simply exhausting its appeals --- which was followed almost immediately by Oberlin paying the defamation award.
These claims of prejudice can be so detrimental for wellbeing, whether it's racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, etc. I personally think that this serves as an example of when woke justice goes wrong. Always fact check individually; if one student in that entire college, she could been the one to do some research and stop it before it came too far. This is a great data point of the bystander effect, in that regard. I'm devastated for the bakery owners. :(
It’s also worth pointing out that the victims here aren’t the bakery owners. It’s also minority college students who are persuaded to believe they live in a more racist society than they do. After all, if even the local bakery in a famously liberal college town is racist, then the rest of the country must be much worse right? This perception, in turn, negatively affects their mental health, jobs, and interracial friendships.
It seems many of the policies advocated for by “the woke” are motivated by such simplistic logic that they ultimately have the opposite effect of their intentions. We must balance grace with truth.
Of course in this case oberlin leadership just acted very poorly and there is no excuse.
The "grace" framing makes it sound like it's about being fair to white people. I have some sympathy for people who are falsely accused, but honestly shit happens.
My point is different: that exaggerating racism harms non-white people. I know other Asians who say stuff like "oh, I wouldn't want to go to the south because people are racist." And they're missing out on good food, warm weather, and friendly people. Trump won my precinct (which weirdly encompasses just my subdivision) 58-34 in 2016 when I moved there. It's a lovely place to live with lots of kids and friendly neighbors. A minority who is told by authority figures that the local bakery in Oberlin Ohio is a hotbed of racism might be too scared to come where I live. And that's not good for anybody.
> I know other Asians who say stuff like "oh, I wouldn't want to go to the south because people are racist."
Interestingly, it was southern states that elected the first two governors of Indian descent: Bobby Jindal in Louisiana (2008-2016)[1] and Nikki Haley in South Carolina (2011-2017)[2].
An Indian American has a better shot running for governor in a red southern state than in Maryland or New York. In blue states, race quite explicitly matters a lot in politics. But Indians are at a disadvantage because they Indian voter community is small compared to Black or Hispanic people.
Are you accounting for the fact that Asians overwhelmingly live in blue states? 40% of Indians live in just California, New York, and New Jersey. The latter two states have no federal or statewide south Asian politicians. California has had four, but none in statewide office. (Not counting Harris, who identifies as politically Black.)
Red state desis represent a small share of the overall south Asian immigrant population—they mostly come from an earlier wave of migration that has since been vastly outnumbered by post-H1B immigrants to coastal hubs—but have seen outsized success in appointed and elected positions.
I didn't account for anything; I just read what you wrote, said to myself "hm", and went to see if there was data. I'm just asking if you have data. I'm not dunking on you, just trying to calibrate where your comment lies on the spectrum of message board truth.
Indian Americans are a small minority, and Indian American politicians are an even smaller one. I don’t think there is anything but anecdote from which to draw impressions. I think that’s pretty obvious from the nature of the subject without needing a bunch of throat clearing in the comment.
Of course it does, but you phrased it in a way that implies that the racist aggressors are always white.
Exaggerating racism & racism itself hurts _everyone_. There are people that are racist to white people, there are non-white people that are racist other non-white people.
It's racism itself, in a general sense that we're fighting. I think especially in a non-white context, as it's so ignored - I've had non-white friends be incredibly racist to other cultures and it's oddly just a weirdly accepted thing. Like before recent events in Hong Kong, a friend of mine from there talking about "mainlanders" and how trashy/uncultured/animals they are.
Idk man, if you actually can write decently well, it's not that hard to get a professorship or think tank role in one of these "grievance studies" majors. That's pretty good for your career. Hell, they may end up as an ethics in AI professional at the FAANG making 300K a year!
It turns out that in a world that rewards virtue signaling financially, you can literally major in it!
> Always fact check individually; if one student in that entire college, she could been the one to do some research and stop it before it came too far.
One of the previous threads here had a link to a pdf somewhere in the comments, that looked like it had excerpts from the court filings. It had quite a few emails saying variants on "my experience with them says these accusations aren't true at all".
So no, I don't think one student pushing back would have helped.
It's a town of 8000 people, of which 4000 are college students and staff.
When you gather that many social justice warriors together in a location where there is no actual injustice to prosecute, they will creatively invent some so that they can do the thing they enjoy doing.
You see a similar pattern with firefighters. When there haven't been many recent fires to put out, you start seeing more firefighters getting arrested for arson.
Many small towns pay their volunteer firefighters when they respond. They just don't get paid when there's no fire.
See here:
"It is important to know that most of the fire stations/departments do not pay for the services of a volunteer firefighter. However, they may get reimbursed for attending training and meetings, responding to fires and emergencies, and time spent on shifts. The amount of reimbursement is generally at the discretion of the fire department."
Oberlin lost because it was the dean and admins themselves that perpetuated it. They printed and handed out flyers about it. If they're federally funded they need to be blacklisted from student loans and grants. Once closed, wipe it clean and start over. Or else that culture will infect and continue to cause irrepairable harm.
This is exactly the kind of cancel culture that Oberlin demonstrated toward the bakery. "They did something unforgivable! Eliminate them!"
Organizations have problems. People are imperfect. Society needs justice. But cancel culture is a mob mentality that goes far beyond justice and is harmful to society.
> "They did something unforgivable! Eliminate them!"
They claimed it falsely and without evidence though. The same is not true for any action that would be taking against the college.
When someone claims that a random person committed a crime, kidnaps and imprisons them, we call that kidnapping and false imprisonment. But we won't shy away from taking the perpetrator off the street and in turn locking them up so they don't do it again.
"This is a RACIST establishment ...": That's a statement of opinion, not actionable.
"... with a LONG ACCOUNT of RACIAL PROFILING and DISCRIMINATION.": That's a statement of fact, and it was therefore actionable and cost Oberlin's insuror millions.
That seems like a reasonable way to split the difference between free speech and libel.
Are you a lawyer with experience handling these kinds of cases? "This is a RACIST establishment ..." sounds like a defamatory statement to my naive ears when it is made without any fact behind it.
The power of the word "racist" (like all woke-words) is that it has lots of definitions, which the speaker can slip between depending on the needs of the moment.
In this case, the two definitions and their purposes would be:
Definition 1. "One not actively working to create equal outcomes for non-white groups (even simply being neutral/disinterested is racist in this definition)". This is the definition of racist in the popular How to Be an Antiracist. This would be used to attach the word to the target.
Definition 2. "One directly and intentionally harming people of non-white races out of conscious and deliberate hatred". Basically the KKK definition. This is the implication that's attached to the target, after definition 1 is used to "stick" the word onto the target.
It's an amazing "stick and stab" tactic that, somehow, we haven't yet developed cultural antibodies against.
The modern redefinition of racism is that it requires someone both be classically racist as well as having a higher privilege than the victim. So if you are racist to someone perceived as being higher privilege, it isn’t racist.
I think the point is that, while the book was popular, one doesn’t just get to redefine a word using a new opinion.
The entire premise is ludicrous but it’s shocking how many just adopt that line of thinking without any critical thought.
“If you’re not actively fighting against illegal rhino poaching, you are a literally a poacher. It’s not enough to simply “not poach”. You must actively go around physically stopping other poachers.”
Point being you can’t just pick one pet issue and proclaim that anyone who isn’t actively involved in irradiating that issue is necessarily complicit in the issue. There are just too many causes one might be interested in.
There is an example that always comes to my mind regarding this “logic”, and which I think used to crop up from other commentators around this. It’s potentially even more powerful since it comes from the other side of the political fence: The beginning of The War On Terror (™), and “if you aren’t with us, you’re with the terrorists”. This is exact the same manipulative fallacy. However, pointing this out would need to assume those using it are good faith actors, whereas I’d suggest this argument is evidence of bad faith
Yep, it's entirely based around the equivocation fallacy. "Bats are small flying mammals. Baseball is played with bats. Therefore, baseball is played with small flying mammals."
It's 1A but it's also SCOTUS precedent. If NYT v. Sullivan were to be revisited, these limits could change. Justice Thomas has expressed (on multiple occasions, though I don't have the opinions handy) that he wants to do that. Personally I think it should be revisited. The recent case of a Duke volleyball student claiming that racial epithets were yelled at her during a came turned out to be false, but not after the usual cycle of social media enabled outrage. I bring it up because it's another instance where all of the facts are easily verifiable, and journalists seem to not care to actually look at them and report what actually happened.
Laws like that are in place, and they’re what ended McCarthyism.
One problem is they are very civilly focused. How much money did you lose? A corporate execute might be out millions, while the guy at MacDonalds might be out a few thousand.
>Today, Oberlin College and Conservatory initiated payment in full of the $36.59 million judgment in the Gibson’s Bakery case, an amount that represents the awarded damages and interest owed. Please see the college’s public statement below.
>While this outcome is a disappointment, our financial plans for this possibility, which included insurance coverage, mean that this payment will not impact or diminish our academic or student life experience, or require us to draw down Oberlin’s endowment.
>Like me, the majority of the campus was not here at the beginning of this matter in 2016. But it is also true that this case has been difficult for all of us who love this institution and its hometown. I am looking forward to all that is ahead, and remain focused on Oberlin’s core mission of providing a truly excellent liberal arts and musical education. Carmen Ambar Signature Carmen Twillie Ambar
So they're basically just claiming insurance will cover it
As someone who has had insurance cover a nuisance lawsuit's judgment, trust me, the insurer is not very pleased with you. In my case, it was the cost of doing business with the usual trolls going after intellectual property, and even still, the insurer was pretty angry.
Oberlin's insurer is going to get them back in the next renewal period considering they were blatantly in the wrong. And all other insurers know; the history is open.
It seems very odd that any insurer would insure under these circumstances. If one did then it seems even odder that it didn't refuse to pay the claim on the grounds that its insurance didn't cover what could easily be deemed as negligence (risky behavior).
I wish I had an insurance company that was so lax with its payouts.
They might have a tough time getting re-insured after gross negligence, but insurance that covers legal settlements for this kind of thing is normal and expected for almost all medium to large businesses to carry - even my small business carries it (and maybe many more do). It's simply too dangerous to operate in the current American legal environment without this kind of insurance, though it is quite expensive.
Right, I'm not in the US even though I've been there many times including having worked there and I've relatives who live there.
I suppose I should have given that more thought as I'm well aware of the high litigation factor in the US. Where I am it's significantly less.
The trouble with litigation taken to extremes and outrageously high payouts is that it puts a high overhead on everyone who does business. In some ways I'm surprised there hasn't been a significant backlash against this.
>> The trouble with litigation taken to extremes and outrageously high payouts is that it puts a high overhead on everyone who does business. In some ways I'm surprised there hasn't been a significant backlash against this.
All the sums are pretty small, so people just see it as the cost of doing business. In a sense it's true. People love the UK "loser pays" system but it really discourages your average person from filing a lawsuit they don't feel 95% to win.
The American legal system allows for plaintiffs to abuse the system, but the upside is that filing lawsuits for recompense is easier for your average person.
Everything has tradeoffs. Not saying it's perfect here, but my mind was at least shifted slightly when the above was explained to me.
When blinded by ideology it’s hard to see things in a clear light. Im sure not only Oberlin but other universities will learn from this. It’s the hefty $sum that will carry this message very far. While I think these lawsuits have ridiculous compensations, they do serve as a deterent in the future
Is there any evidence this was driven by "ideology"? Seems more likely this person was an opportunist or narcissist like Eric Cartman from South Park than a genuine ideological thinker.
I wouldn't hold your breath...I doubt anyone who could get into a position of authority at Oberlin could comprehend that what happened was wrong. They would at most regret not getting away with it.
"this payment will not impact or diminish our academic or student life experience"
Very slippery wording. Their insurance premiums will now presumably be much larger, in which case they'd indeed have to lower spending on other things to cover it. Or possibly they will become un-insurable.
> Like me, the majority of the campus was not here at the beginning of this matter in 2016.
This is a dynamic not enough people appreciate: universities are not generally permanent communities.
This fact is lost again and again in public debate.
For example, there’s debate about how allegations of rape should be handled by a university.
However the university handles possible rapes, they have to take into account the fact that everyone involved: victim, accuser, and witnesses, might drop out or graduate a week into the investigation.
Uni lead "investigations" would be illigal under any other context. You are not allowed any rights in their "investigation". No representation. Their is no standard or rules of submitting evidence. The panel is not comprised of qualified jurors, nor are they generally of peers. They're positions applied for, so only those whom want to remove men from universities apply today.
Now they're installing far more cameras, telling students to report on one another about everything, and giving campus mall cops free reign to harass students into giving false information and unreasonable search and seizures.
Wish I was making that up, but that's what happens when we value "safety" more than rights.
Acknowledgement from whom? Will the acknowledgment be meaningful to the next class of student?
Acknowledging wrongs is most meaningful when all the stakeholders participate. When you are constantly getting new stakeholders, and losing old ones, it’s hard to meaningful buy in.
> For example, there’s debate about how allegations of rape should be handled by a university.
They shouldn't be handling those allegations in the first place. That's not their role.
We have institutions like police departments and court systems specifically intended to handle such allegations. Now one can certainly argue that the police and courts have many problems (and, I agree: they absolutely do), but those problems are unlikely to be handled any better by amateurs (such as the typical university administrator).
Libel isn't a crime. Nobody is going to go after the students, because a defamation case has to establish damages, and no one student will have done any significant damage to the Gibson family. It was straightforward to demonstrate that Oberlin had.
There is such a thing like criminal libel. The bar is high and hard to prove. Civil procedure is technically a form of prosecution. The main goal of the students was a financial damage to the bakery. In fact, students action led actions by the college.
Find a criminal defamation statute in Ohio. I don't believe you can, but I stand ready to be surprised. Civil procedure is not technically a form of prosecution. And students can have a goal of damaging the bakery, but to be liable for defamation, they have to:
(1) individually succeed in causing countable damage to Gibson's, and
(2) do so by circulating false statements of fact --- for instance, you cannot sue someone for defamation simply for pointing out something somebody else said: "I read in this flyer that Gibson's assaulted a student" is not defamation, even if the flyer is.
People have a lot of weird ideas about what happened here. The court filings are on the Internet; you can just go read them.
First, you can't "prosecute" someone for defamation, because it isn't a crime.
Second, "society and justice" can't do anything. To sue someone for defamation, you have to have standing: you have to be able to demonstrate harm to yourself.
Third, it won't be "hard"; it will be impossible. Most of what the students said isn't defamatory (contrary to widely held opinion on these threads, calling the Gibson family "racist" is not defamatory, as it is a statement of opinion), and what defamatory things were said probably didn't cause any actual damage on a student-by-student basis.
Later
I updated this comment to change "very probably not defamatory" to simply "not defamatory" after doing some reading and learning that, lol-no, you cannot sue someone for calling you racist; courts do in fact hold that to be a statement of opinion.
November 2016: Oberlin professors and deans defamed bakery
August 2017: lawsuit
September 2022: Oberlin agrees to pay 36 million to plaintiff
so yes, justice was served, but it took six years. I feel bad for the bakery people. I have filed suit in federal court before. I think my case only lasted a few months, but it was stress I would not wish on anyone. Who knows what these people have been through.
> Gibson Jr. then took out his phone to take a picture of Aladin, who slapped the phone from his hand and caused the device to strike Gibson Jr.'s face
> Before their sentencing, each student read a statement acknowledging that Gibson's was justified in trying to restrain Aladin
She should remove testimony of what happened by the alleged victim's mother, because the accusation did not result in a conviction? It is also immediately followed by
> David was afraid the incident would blow up, since the students claimed to the police that my son had assaulted them—not the other way around.
giving the reader testimony of all parties involved. But by your logic, the media could report only on court decisions.
What value does this school provide compare to let's say Ohio State?
Cost 2x more with approximately the same rated programs, and much worse STEM like programs.
If I recall a big part of it was kids who couldn't get in anywhere else can took massive loans for a small college experience. And had equally small outcomes.
This college is very much a scam that provides an income for its staff at the expense of its student body.
For what it's worth, numbers like 80k per annum are usually sticker price. In my experience, very very few people end up paying that kind of money. Most of my friends were paying about 20-35k instead. Still a lot but not "80k per year".
I don’t believe Oberlin is a scam though I think they messed up quite big with this case. By this logic a lot of private unis are scams which is quite a large brush to paint with.
All these little private schools charging $80k/year are part of a scam. The scam is the federal US government lending students a blank check with no underwriting as long as it is spent at an “accredited” school. And then the young adult emerges from the school with $100k and $200k and $300k of debt while only able to earn income of $60k to $80k per year.
I don't really know about typical artist's fees in the US, but I would expect most musicians to make less than $60k - unless they play in a renowned orchestra. If someone has some actual numbers or first-hand experience, I would be glad.
At least with private ivy league schools like Cornell you have ranking advantage, but with Oberlin they are tricking kids into paying top-tier tuition for bottom-tier ranking.
are there any other takes that the legal system cannot reveal?
is it common for other students to attempt to buy alcohol with fake IDs and these students were the ones stopped for it?
what I read - my first time reading about this - is that the shop owner correctly identified something sketchy was going on, and this escalated into an altercation with 3 underage patrons that the police got involved in as all 3 were arrested. The initial observation of "assuming theft" is supplanted by "trying to purchase with a fake ID", something common in a college town. How were these two things conflated? This isn't answered.
All three people plead guilty to different things unrelated to an assumption of theft, but pleading guilty doesn't reveal anything when understanding just how many people can't defend themselves in court.
The college shouldn't have gotten involved at all, regardless. This trend of "using your platform" needs to have counter-deterrents and consequences.
The people that actually boycotted and did slander-like things, shouldn't have acted without being more discerning.
But there's still something else in between that I can't garner from this. Anybody local have more personal accounts?
Outside of that incident are there other grievances against that shop and owner in that town, to lend any weight to the optional actions everyone chose to take?
When I took a job as RA advisor in college, I was told:
“You can’t be a part of the students - if they get drunk or do drugs or anything like that, you can’t be part of it. You’re either the grown up in the room or you leave.”
> Oberlin is a small liberal arts college with a reputation for turning out students who are strong in the arts and humanities and for its progressive politics... Tuition at Oberlin is more than $61,000 a year, and the overall cost of attendance tops $80,000 a year.
This is why student loan forgiveness is such an important issue.
Are you saying that the government should pay off everyone’s loans regardless of the cost of an institution or the value of that education? Or just that college costs are too high in general?
I understand loan forgiveness in certain situations, even as proposed by the US current administration [1]. But choosing to attend a small liberal arts college and agreeing to pay more than 80k a year I don’t think is one of those situations.
Here are some Facebook posts made by Allyn Gibson (son of the store owners / same guy who chased the black shoplifter):
“I wasn’t racist ever … but this ** and the way people treat me now because I am “white” is racist and is making me racist,” Allyn Jr. wrote. “I don’t owe a damn person a damn thing. If these lazy *** want to start working then they could earn their own money. That’s what my family does for money… work.”
///
So yes, he is a racist, and the family could well be. Just thought I'd throw that out there.
"if people treat me bad and call me racist by being white, then I'm racist" is not a definition of real racism.
Is another case of: "if all is racism, then nobody is racist". The term has been abused to defend thievery, so now is devoid of any real meaning. This is a big problem in itself.
This college has been characterized in various places as being "prestigious", but I can't imagine any context where learning that someone is a recent graduate would be a positive signal. Yet, this notion persists.
I went to a similarly indoctrinated, "prestigious" school, and I think I turned out all right. I think an underrated benefit of going to some ideological powder keg of a school like this is that you learn not to stir the pot. You learn to be careful about what sets people off, and I think it's a skill that has helped me become more of a positive presence on my teams. But yeah, if you're seeing that some potential hire is deep in this type of cancellation and stuff, then that would certainly be a negative signal.
No disrespect to you, friend, but a lot of what you said could apply to the mentality of an abused spouse. ‘Just don’t say the wrong thing, don’t set them off…”
If you don't know what Oberlin is, you can just ask, rather than stand here in puzzlement about why an elite private college is regarded as prestigious.
Why is that important? Seems to me the most important detail is how ideological blindness led an entire college to make false accusations against innocent people, and then double down when all facts came to light, to the point of losing $36M and all not apparently acknowledging that they were ever wrong. Isn't that weird? Isn't that really, freaking weird?? What does it imply about academics, society, racism, ideological capture?
Gloaters gonna gloat. An "entire side of the political spectrum" would have gloated if the bakery had lost on appeal. Does that matter?
>Why is that important? Seems to me the most important detail is how ideological blindness led an entire college to make false accusations against innocent people, and then double down when all facts came to light, to the point of losing $36M and all not apparently acknowledging that they were ever wrong. Isn't that weird? Isn't that really, freaking weird?? What does it imply about academics, society, racism, ideological capture?
Indeed. Reading the comments on the New York Times article linked to the other recent HN discussion of the case, there are—among many forthright condemnations of the Oberlin administrators and students that caused this catastrophe for the college—more than a few comments lamenting how the worst outcome of this is that "Trumpists" will gloat. Not that a bakery faced six years of litigation (in the legal and public spheres) against the college with the billion-dollar endowment that is the closest thing to "The Man" in their small town, but that the commenters' own ideological enemies might be pleased by the court case's outcome.
Maybe you meant it harmlessly, but this phrase sets off my BS detector. It's invariably used to excuse bad behavior by people who knew better but pretended otherwise for political gain. It conflates when you personally learned the facts with when the involved parties learned the facts.
See also: "no one knew Kyle Rittenhouse didn't murder a bunch of black people in a crowd until these facts came to light in the trial!" or "we didn't know that the Biden laptop was real until these facts came to light in 2022!" or "we didn't know the lab leak was a real possibility until new facts came to light!"
In each case, the facts were already there for everyone to see, they were just ignored for political reasons until it was too late.
Sorry, I don't understand what you're talking about. Kyle Rittenhouse didn't shoot any Black people. Oberlin doubled down even after "all facts came to light".
I don't think they were racist and I am flad for their victory but for the convicts... yeah this is America we're talking about their confession means something only if there was no plea-bargain and I highly doubt 3 young people will in unison confess to a crime without being under duress (plea-bargain). However, the fact that oberlin couldn't prove their racist history in court is all I need to know about the baker's innocence.
Plea-bargains are a mockery of justice as is cops being allowed to lie to get confessions.
Whatever the right and wrong of the matter, the phenomenology of the Academy is certainly of extreme interest and importance to the users of HN.
I haven’t been anywhere near a university in years personally, so I don’t know what credence to lend claims that politics, and in particular non-academic politics, are to an increasing an untenable degree crowding out more knowledge-oriented activities.
With that said, one does hear claims like this, which would be worrying if true, and data points / discussion around it is almost certainly on topic for HN right?
I'll preface by saying that no one in this story comes out looking good – certainly not the shoplifters, who expected get out of jail free cards despite being thieves; nor the college, whose greatest fear is offending its fragile student body, with predictable results like this.
What you're not going to read in this article or others like it is that the Gibsons aren't heroes either. There are two important details I'd bring to your attention:
1. Allyn Gibson, the man who tackled the shoplifters, really is a confirmed racist. I know this both first hand (we are peers), and from his many social media posts in which he casually rags on immigrants and black people (expect he identifies them using the n-word). The judge in this case declared that evidence inadmissible, for some reason.
2. The Gibsons are not a put-down, working class family who were nearly bankrupted by this protest. They're one of the wealthiest families in town, and were millionaires before this all happened. Gibson's Bakery is a hobby business; they turn a modest profit selling some baked goods and beer. Their actual livelihood comes from rent – they're the second largest landowners after the college, and own most of the commercial and residential rental property in town. The idea that they were impacted by this protest in any consequential way is frankly laughable to anyone who knows anything about them and their business. Once again, the judge declared evidence of their wealth to be inadmissible in court.
This doesn't absolve the college of blame. But this isn't the black-and-white, "David vs Goliath" story the media is making it out to be. Unfortunately this story just fits too neatly into a national narrative about "woke" politics going too far, so you're not going to see any nuance from the media.