“You Americans do not rear children, you incite them; you give them food and shelter and applause.”
— Randall Jarrell, “Pictures From an Institution”
Oberlin College has an admirable liberal past and a contemptible progressive present that will devalue its degrees far into the future. This is condign punishment for the college’s mendacity about helping to incite a mob mentality and collective bullying in response to “racist” behavior that never happened.
Founded in 1833, Oberlin became one of the nation’s first colleges to admit African Americans, and its first coeducational liberal arts college. It has, however, long since become a byword for academic self-caricature, where students protest, among many microaggressions, the food service’s cultural appropriation of banh mi sandwiches, sushi and General Tso’s chicken. Oberlin could have been Randall Jarrell’s model for his fictional Benton College, where people “would have swallowed a porcupine, if you had dyed its quills and called it Modern Art; they longed for men to be discovered on the moon, so that they could show that they weren’t prejudiced toward moon men.”
In November 2016, a clerk in Gibson’s Bakery, having seen a black Oberlin student shoplifting bottles of wine, pursued the thief. The thief and two friends were, according to the police report, kicking and punching the clerk on the ground when police arrived. Social justice warriors instantly accused the bakery of racially profiling the shoplifter, an accusation complicated by the fact that the shoplifter and partners in assault pleaded guilty.
