My Experience with Equity at Oberlin College

Photo by 🇸🇮 Janko Ferlič on Unsplash

Oberlin College, one of America’s most reputed liberal arts colleges, has become famous, or rather, infamous, for the lawsuit initiated against it in 2017 by Gibson’s Bakery. This is a fascinating legal case whose detailed history can be found here[1], so I will give only a brief summary: In November 2016, shortly after the election of Donald Trump, a black student from Oberlin stole two bottles of wine from the store, and when the owner and his son apprehended him, they were assaulted by the thief and two of his friends. The next day, faculty, including the dean of students and vice-president, together with hundreds of students, protested the store’s “racism,” and started a campaign of defamation in which they accused the store of racial profiling. After years of legal fighting, in 2022, Gibson’s Bakery was awarded $36.59 million in punitive damages, which Oberlin College paid in December 2022.

I was a Visiting Assistant Professor of French at Oberlin in Spring 2000—my first job after finishing my PhD. Oberlin is located in Ohio, a 40-minute drive from Cleveland, one of those small American towns that combine charming provincialism with an elite education, home to a reputed undergraduate college and to one of America’s best conservatories of music. I was welcomed warmly by the colleagues in my department, was given a nice apartment at the edge of the campus and enjoyed free concerts of classical music on a regular basis. As it happens, since I didn’t have a car, I was doing most of my shopping at Gibson’s Bakery, the only store within walking distance—but, to be honest, I no longer remember the Gibsons. I also enjoyed my experience as a teacher: my students were bright and, overall, much better educated than the students at the University of Florida where I had previously taught, since most of them had been schooled in private high schools. In short, I was quite happy there; still, years later, whenever I thought back to that time, something rubbed me the wrong way, and it was only after the scandal with the bakery, that I tried to articulate what that was. A few anecdotes come to mind:

During one of the meetings with a student who was doing an independent study—probably my brightest student—, when he found out that I didn’t have a car and I used to regularly take the bus in Florida, he asked me with genuine concern if I was not afraid of being murdered. He was not joking: for him, public transportation was associated with crime. I am not sure what his social background was, but the yearly tuition at the time at Oberlin was $30,000 (today is more than double), and most of my students came from the upper-middle class. At the same time, most of them “identified as” bisexual and, judging from their appearance, many didn’t wash for weeks or months. In fact, I remember how one of my colleagues, a Senegalese man, advised me, laughing, not to get too close to them because I may get lice. They didn’t wash, he explained, for environmental reasons. I particularly recall how once, when I was teaching Ionesco’s Rhinocéros, I could not convince one of the students that in the context of the play, a rhinoceros was a symbol of fascism and/or of bourgeois society; no; for her, the rhinoceros was a poor animal abused by an evil humanity guilty of environmental genocide.

This was the only lens through which she could look at the world, whatever the context. She was not a bad student, but she already exhibited, a quarter of a century ago, all the signs of woke culture: she displayed a monomaniacal view of the world and when she talked about herself, she saw herself as a marginalized “misfit” who was “different.”

My guess is that by “different” she was probably referring to her sexuality—although at Oberlin most of the students were at least bisexual, if not homosexual. As in the case of many American students of her convictions, her “difference” was expressed through her appearance: her hair was unwashed and she put a lot of effort into cultivating an esthetic of ugliness—she wore ripped-off pants and some sort of a baggy, shapeless dress, as if she was trying to desexualize her body, and the patterns and colors of her outfits seemed to be purposely chosen to clash. She looked like a homeless person—a homeless person who could afford to pay $30,000 to go to school. I could not help thinking of the irony of the situation: in the world I was coming from we often didn’t have running water for weeks and had to make considerable efforts to keep ourselves clean; washing and drying my long hair was a complicated adventure, and yet, I was doing it at least once a week. Because the garment industry was very limited, our choice of clothing items was also limited, and our mothers often had to patch them; yet it was shameful to wear frayed or torn-apart clothes, and had we been caught in this situation, we would have been embarrassed. 

I am sure that today, my former student is one of those people who fight for the environment by throwing paint at 19^th century masterpieces. You see, she comes from a world in which she has been taught that she is entitled to have access to some of the world’s greatest art for free. As it happens, Oberlin College has an Art Rental Collection program, allowing works to be loaned to dorm rooms—hundreds of prints by Chagall, Matisse, Dalí, Picasso, Miró[2] and other great artists.

This is what $30,000 paid by mummy and daddy can buy you in America: temporary ownership of, and personal access to a world most people could never dream of, a world that you take for granted all the while valiantly fighting its “capitalist heteronormativity” with your mishmashed clothes.

So, dear reader, when you see another environmental activist hijack another masterpiece, know that only someone who comes from such a world of entitlement can treat art like this. People who grow up in hardship don’t take anything for granted. My illiterate peasant grandmother used to touch books as if they were saintly relics. I have never seen her touch a work of art because there weren’t any around, but I am sure she would have treated art with the same awe and reverence she bestowed upon books. The sad thing is that the person who initiated the art program at Oberlin very likely thought that he was putting the foundations of a world of educated, sensitive individuals who will grow to appreciate beauty and art. But if we look at the results, we can see that the opposite has occurred: Oberlin College, one of the most woke campuses in America today, is, like many similar colleges, the source of generations of entitled young people, who take themselves for “social justice warriors” and are bent on destroying everything created by previous generations.

The reason they feel so entitled is precisely because everything was given to them on a plate—in this case, free access to those great works of art. So, I am afraid that easy access to anything—knowledge, beauty—doesn’t create better human beings, on the contrary.

Speaking of entitlement, upon my departure I found out from my students’ evaluations that a number of them complained that “such a prestigious college” degraded itself by hiring someone with a degree from the University of Florida, who “spoke French with a Romanian accent” (Never mind that the accents of their American-born professors were stronger than mine). Yes, these are the social justice warriors always ready to fight for the disadvantaged and the underdog. This is what $30,000 entitles you to—I assure you that, had they paid $200 (the amount I had paid five years earlier as a graduate student in France for a whole school year), they would not have felt so entitled. And since we are on the topic, when Biden proposed the cancelling of student loans, all the social justice warriors agreed without bothering to discuss the root of the insane cost of education. Had they done that, they would have been forced to address at least one of the causes, namely that this inflated cost is used to pay for the obscene salaries of the many administrators leading all American colleges and universities. The President of an American university receives between half a million and a million dollars a year. Compare this to the salary of a university president in France, who receives a bonus of a couple thousands of euros on top of his regular salary as a professor. Calculate how much all the bureaucrats are costing American universities, bearing in mind their number ranges from the hundreds to roughly 1,500 at elite universities. Keep in mind that many of these administrators have much higher salaries than the educators (somewhere around $300,000-$450,000). That these are the very people lecturing us on “diversity, equity and inclusion,” and that the social justice warriors see no reason to deconstruct, or to rebel against these monstrous corporations that have hijacked America’s education system, that, on the contrary, the very students and faculty who call themselves “Marxist” and “anti-capitalist” are their “allies,” tells you everything you need to know about the roots of the current American insanity. As they say, it is “systemic.”

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibson%27s_Bakery_v._Oberlin_College

[2] https://amam.oberlin.edu/art/collections/art-rental