-Chuck
Friday, September 09, 2022
Oberlin College “has initiated payment in full of the $36.59 million judgment in the Gibson’s Bakery case”
It looks like the Gibson family’s long struggle with Oberlin College is over, and the college will pay the judgment it has been fighting for years. Unfortunately, David Gibson (featured image) and “Grandpa” Allyn Gibson did not live to see it, having passed away after the trial verdict.
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If you're like me, you don't know the backstory here, and the article doesn't get into it or provide too many useful links. A quick search led me to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibson%27s_Bakery_v._Oberlin_College
ReplyDeleteIf you can get past the usual wikipedia biases (they actually managed to work a "climate change denial" reference into the article) the quick summary is: the good guys won for a change, and somebody's race card got declined...much like the fake ID that black kid tried to use before he stole the wine.
This may be the death knell of Oberlin. Losing $36 million in funds probably made a major dent in their endowment. If the Board lays off all the dead wood in the college, and eliminates the useless courses, it may survive, but I wouldn’t count on them doing so.
ReplyDeleteOberlin has somewhere in the neighborhood of $1B in their endowment funds. Their budget is something like $180M a year. $36M will hurt but they will keep woking onward. Oberlin's never apologized or done anything other than claim they are the victims.
DeleteAs good as the news of Oberlin's demise would be, $36M is hardy going to put a dent in their $1.09BILLION endowment.
DeleteIn a just world what should have happened is the judge ordering the college to re-instate all of their contracts with the bakery, the BOD and the President of the college fired and the original perp jailed, in addition to the judgement.
Oberlin's just butthurt that they got caught in a lie by a conservative business and more butthurt that they were ordered, under penalty of contempt, to pay the judgement against them.
Nemo
As Anonymous said, Oberlin's operating budget is - ample. Real ample.
DeleteThe staff and student body at Oberlin are always right, always moral, and always fair. In their mind they've never done anything wrong, ever, either as individuals or collectively.
I think the term for this is hubris.
I graduated from Oberlin High School in 78 and the college and it’s students were on the cutting-edge of “woke” even then. Fuck em! While I would certainly like to see this break them, I doubt it will. The school has been around since 1832 and is a bastion of liberalism. The wokies won’t let them go brokie. Eod1sg Ret
ReplyDeletegraduated from Lorain C atholic in '71 .... the liberated nun who taught us US History invited in a PC token-admit from Oberlin, and he told us his story and 'axed' us questions
Deletethe rot has been working for 50 years
Oberlin was one of the colleges that offered me a scholarship to play football there, which would have been in the fall of 1978. Following much debate, and some very hard decisions, I eventually was hired into a steel making factory that made metal for the investment cast industry, where I spent over 35 years making metal to go into everything from guns and gun parts, boat propellers and the fins of the sidewinder missile tail fins, to jet engines, and a bunch of things that you could not imagine, including Craftsman ratchet's ratchets or the spurs of a fighting cock, or the dipping molds of a Mickey Mouse balloon.
DeleteI find that I don't miss having a BA degree, and have gone to college for my own increased knowledge, from science classes like Biology to Physics 101, to about a year taking the first part of a Pastoral studies degree. While I didn't carry but a 3.0 in high school, I carried a 4.0 in my college classes, including the Physics 101, which is a pretty hard class no matter how you slice it.
While it was Oberlin that I didn't go to, my older brother did go to Olivet college, down in the lower part of Michigan. He graduated in 1978, with a teaching degree. He went on to teach for a career in Michigan, after working in Kansas for 2 years, due to the glut of teachers at his graduation. Then, after coming back, he taught in Michigan until his retirement, while getting his continuing education required for all state teachers. So while doing that, he went and finished his Masters degree, and received a large raise, which allowed him to get much more money when he retired. Then, he went back to work for his wife's uncle's foundry, driving castings and empty molds back and forth to customers. He is now 66 years old, and probably headed to retirement when he turns 67, come January of next year.
The thing that struck me as sort of funny is that there were years that I made more money than he did, due to my overtime, than he, with his Masters degree did. Of course, I had to work a lot of overtime, but for an uneducated foundry type worker, who was just an untrained and uneducated person, who worked my backside off, 70K or 80K some years was pretty good money to get. And having threatened to get a union in there once, they gave us more money, as sort of a bribe.
Since I was there to earn a living, and having felt that a union would not really help those of us who were really just willing to work hard, for what we earned, a union had little meaning to me. And having so much time invested into that place, I was one of just a few that knew how to do every single job in the shop and lab, without need for further training. So I was pretty valuable for my skills, and was able to keep my job when others were laid off.
It only became an issue when my migraine headaches and my FMLA protection made them angry, since I used it, and there was nothing that they could do to get back to me about it. So they trumped up charges against me, saying that I failed a random drug test, with alcohol in my system, and fired me. Of course, you cannot win against a corporation like them, being as their owned by Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffet's company. So I just let them fire me, and they let me draw unemployment for 18 months. I then got a maintenance job in a trailer park, until I was able to get SSD, for migraine headaches and a bad back that I broke during my early 20's.
C-M?
DeleteWiscoDave
Gibson’s was willing to drop monetary demands if the college would have simply apologized and admitted they were wrong. It cost them. The college might survive if they save big personnel costs and lay off their Diversity/Equity/Inclusion staff, but that’ll never happen. Be great if that institution of “higher learning” folded. BTW the president of the college is a “POC”. Big surprise.
ReplyDeleteSic Semper Tyrannis
ReplyDeleteI read the settlement includes attorney and court fees, plus interest accrued from delaying payment. The monies due from Oberlin are nigh 43 million.
ReplyDeleteThe college president's statement (down near the bottom of the link) states that the funds to pay the award to the Gibsons will come from 'planned funds' and insurance, and will not be taken from the endowment. Pity.
ReplyDeleteOberlin the Undefeated, inscrutable to the last.
(Apologies to James Thurber's 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty')
I am SHOCKED. I did not think they would pay up until deputies/marshals showed up and arrested college officials or attached college accounts/funds.
ReplyDeleteI’ll believe it when the bakery actually has the MONEY!
ReplyDeleteI'd insist on a certified check.
DeleteUnfortunately, this crap isn't over. Ambar's declared the judgement is just the cost of doing business. Guarantee oberlin is still going to call the Gibson Bakery 'racist', they're just going to be more subtle about it.
ReplyDelete-lg
Won't the IRS and the State of Ohio have theirs hands out, saying 'fork it over' after the money is paid?
ReplyDeleteYes, the income tax people will claim a share (I think 35% federal, plus whatever the maximum state bracket is), but even after that, each and every Gibson will be a millionaire.
ReplyDeleteOberlin College's biggest problem is not the payout, it's the publicity. Any parent who bothers to do any research will learn that Oberlin teaches its students to steal (which is why a jury of townies slammed them for everything they could), and calls calling the cops on a thief "racist". There aren't so many parents "woke" enough to want to put their kids into that.