Not much more needs to be said on the conflict between Oberlin College and Gibson\u2019s Bakery<\/a>\u00a0and on the court decision that settled it.\u00a0 Something remains to be said about a former Oberlin president\u2019s read of this series of events.<\/p>\n The basics of the recent case: the treatment of three African-American students in a 2016 Gibson\u2019s Bakery shoplifting incident generated ferocious protest from Oberlin students, supported by the school\u2019s administration, alleging that the bakery was racist. Gibson\u2019s sued. Last month a jury awarded $44 million in damages, a figure the judge reduced to $25 million.<\/p>\n The case touched many sensitive points:<\/a>\u00a0America\u2019s polarized political culture, free speech on campuses, limits of litigiousness. Interesting, too, has been the way this small Midwestern liberal-arts college seems to provoke outsized reaction, positive and negative. Critics and champions both notice that preference for moral absolutes seems to be in Oberlin\u2019s DNA<\/a>.<\/p>\n Founded in 1833<\/a> by a minister and a missionary, the school was named in honor of Alsatian pastor and reformer John Frederick Oberlin. Charles Finney served as the college\u2019s second president. Revivalist, perfectionist, and opponent of slavery, Finney<\/a> was among key cultural influencers in the first half of the nineteenth century\u2014and was a proponent of the very anxious bench from which this channel claims its name.<\/p>\n As former Oberlin President S. Frederick Starr sees it<\/a> in a Wall Street Journal<\/em> piece, the spirit of Finney is at odds with that of the pastor Oberlin. John Frederick Oberlin encouraged harmony and understanding among those with different opinions, Starr recalls, while the absolutist Finney was likelier to identify his own righteousness at cost of the other\u2019s villainy. Starr writes, \u201cFew if any students, administrators or trustees know anything about Finney, and today\u2019s zealots are militantly secular. Yet they concur with each other and with Finney on the need for enemies.\u201d\u00a0 Starr explains:<\/p>\n The institution itself seems to have embraced the extremist doctrine that every \u201cevil\u201d thus identified must be destroyed so that society can enter an age of bliss.<\/p>\n Pastor Oberlin would have been appalled. But the founder of Oberlin College, Charles Grandison Finney (1792-1875), would not have been. Finney, a fierce enemy of Calvinism and the sparkplug of the so-called Second Great Revival, believed human beings could be perfected if only specific evils and their perpetrators could be stamped out. In this frightening doctrine, Finney manifested what the University of Virginia psychiatrist Vamik Volkan called \u201cthe need to have enemies and allies.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Now, plenty of thoughtful people in the nineteenth century and today might find objectionable Finney\u2019s theology, his break with predestinarian doctrine and his exhortations that sinners do something to lay hold of their own salvation. But it\u2019s a strange way for a twenty-first century commentator in a business-minded newspaper to attack Finney, on grounds that he was hostile to Calvinists. \u00a0Further, scholars might disagree about the scale and scope of the Second Great Awakening<\/em>, but neither Finney nor those waves of conversion and reform are properly summarized as a narrow-minded stamping out of specific evils.<\/p>\n One even may agree with Starr that human perfectibility is a questionable prospect and that stamping out of particular evils won\u2019t solve all problems generated by greed, decay, and misunderstanding. But if we recall that the \u201cspecific evil\u201d Finney\u2019s Oberlin most vociferously opposed was slavery, we might concede that that deserved stamping out. At first I surmised that perhaps Starr was put off by the general range of moral uplift mid-nineteenth century campaigners addressed, but wasn\u2019t thinking about slavery directly. But he does address slavery directly:<\/p>\n In its early years Oberlin College found many dragons to slay. Slavery was high on the list. John Brown\u2019s father was an Oberlin trustee, and the college briefly employed Brown himself before he unleashed his war of terror on Kansas. Other dragons included \u201cthe demon drink\u201d (the Anti-Saloon League was founded in Oberlin), art (one early Oberlin president, after visiting the Louvre, vowed never to enter an art museum again), and those heathens world-wide who resisted the efforts of the legions of missionaries sent from Oberlin. Book burning was not unknown in early Oberlin\u2019s early days.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Some efforts to end slavery might be more effective than others, slavery opponents yet could be self-righteous or even racists themselves. \u00a0But grouping these evils together as equivalent and associated ones miscasts the character of each. Dismissing them whole as \u201cdragons to slay\u201d is blamably glib. Haters of paintings and burners of books may be criticized, but in the piece, Starr hardly comes off as champion of arts and letters.<\/p>\n Starr wants us to appreciate Oberlin by recognizing that not all its loyal sons and daughters are those flame-hot moralizing types. He urges that we distinguish two separate cadres inheriting the Oberlin mantle. He describes the kind he favors, remarking, \u201cBy the early 20th century, Finney\u2019s dour legacy had waned and the college embraced modern learning in all its forms.\u201d (Dour!) By the twentieth century, Oberlin could take credit for having educated paragons of \u201cmodern learning.\u201d<\/p>\n Graduate Robert Millikan earned a Nobel Prize for physics and founded Cal Tech, while Roger Sperry won a Nobel in medicine for discovering the functions of the brain\u2019s hemispheres. Countless other \u201cObies\u201d achieved distinction in science, music, literature and business. Typical was Charles Martin Hall, who invented the electrolytic process for refining aluminum and founded\u00a0Alcoa<\/a>.\u00a0 Thus there exist two radically different Oberlins: the gloomy sectarian training ground inspired by Finney and the one that affirms modern learning, thought, music and art.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n