Very strange.
Local police are quoted as saying they have identified two students possibly connected to the rash of racist, anti-Semitic and anti-gay writings on campus, but were uncertain as to their motives.
As detailed yesterday, the Oberlin administration is not willing to talk about it, to the point of being unwilling to confirm or deny that it was a hoax or whether racism was the motive.
And surprisingly, the names and motives have not leaked out yet (at least not that I have been able to find).
Oberlin, despite the campus having devolved into an online spitting war, is keeping those secrets pretty well covered.
The Oberlin student newspaper indicates the hunt for the perpetrators continues, which would be contrary to what the police have said:
Mounting circumstantial evidence — including timestamps, common IP addresses, mimicked content and online accounts analyzed by the Review, as well as interviews with confidential sources — strongly suggests a link between hate speech appearing on anonymous Oberlin online forums and incidents of written hate speech on campus.
Michelle Malkin has her theory, which would be consistent with a line of cases we have seen on college campuses:
Update 3-8-2013: Oberlin College asks FBI to investigate possible racial incidents on campus. It’s unclear whether this request was a result of prior incidents, or a reported new round of threats after the story broke in the national news, or both.
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They are pretty good about asking students and faculty to report suspicious activity,
https://oncampus.oberlin.edu/source/articles/2013/03/07/safety-and-security-update
but cannot seem to publicly acknowledge who the suspects in this whole sordid affair are.
Don’t the students and faculty deserve to know who has been apprehended/reported/cited for the acts of vandalism (regardless of whether it was a hoax or not)?
It’s pathetic that political correctness has so infested academia as to make colleges seem like re-education camps.
Can you say Potemkin Village…???
I knew you could.
This is how you answer the door in that neighborhood, “YO! I PAID THE RENT ALREADY!”
A big part of college coursework on too many campuses these days, especially the prestige ones, is discredited political theories and systems thinking and basically trying to frame how students see the world that is a vicious combo of false beliefs and emotion designed not to create empathy but outrage. These students are being primed for fundamental transformation of our social, political, and economic systems and they are ready to go. Just waiting for K-12 to catch up with “psychologizing individuals for change.”
I think this is a huge problem with these hoaxers. The hoaxes seem to come from wanting to taint beliefs that are outside the systems thinking theorists. Oberlin has for decades had a prof named David Orr who is a ringleader in reimagining a different kind of education that moves away from substantive knowledge to what he calls Slow Knowledge. He views the abstract, logical mind as what fostered deadly technology like nuclear arms and longs for a world where there is no distinction between reason and beliefs and emotions when it comes to discussing what constitutes thinking. He wants to return to education based on experience and relying on the instincts from your 5 senses. It is a dark, regressive vision.
http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/aspiring-to-create-new-habits-of-mind-and-mental-models-suitable-for-a-new-culture-society-and-economy/ is a piece I wrote recently on the type of filter and belief systems these higher ed and now K-12 under the Common Core seek to foster.
Literally this morning I was tracking undergrad coursework involving Orr’s vision for the future and Senge’s and Otto Scharmer’s and the Meadows as if they were all factual research. These credentialled students have been primed for a fundamental revolution that has not started yet and they seem to be itching to get the transformation under way. Like cheating in urban school districts pushing a sociocultural focus, these hoaxes are just a byproduct of the nature of the what and why going on in classrooms everywhere.
At great expense. And accelerating.
As to who the perps might be, Ann Althouse posted the other day a hint that purports to come from someone who claims access to a faculty e-mail list. They claim it was someone within the Multicultural Resource Center. (http://althouse.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-oberlin-incident.html)
I had seen that connection alleged, although not attributed to a faculty email list.
OK, it is not like we are approaching this de novo and operating in a vacuum. We have experience to guide us, in this case literally years of experience and scores if not hundreds of examples.
Is this a college? Yes.
Is it a Leftist college? Yes.
Are the original acts alleged such as to promote the Leftist narrative and attack American culture and society? Yes.
Were the alleged acts exploited as such by the college, the Leftist organizations based on and around the campus, and the Leftists in general as characterizing America as a whole? Yes.
Once the culprits were identified, was there a sudden concern for the privacy of the culprits and due process when the same school would gladly publicly flog anyone accused of the same act if they were more conservative than Leon Trotsky? Yes.
Then it is an ontological certainty that the ones who committed the acts were found to be Leftists in order to blame America for the sin of existing.
And they will find a way not to penalize them, when if it was not a Leftist they would be expelled and charged with any crime that they could think of.
We’ve heard this tune before.
Subotai Bahadur
What do you expect when you have a college named after that nutty guy that got fired by MSNBC and can’t even get a job at ESPN.
I see no mention that the residence building walked past by the supposed KKK member is a segregated living facility and resource center only for black students. How is that whites cannot demand and get segregation because it’s bad, but blacks can?? My belief is the same as Ms. Malkin, that it was all perpetrated by leftists/progressives/racists who needed something to get into the media with, to warm up their credentials as victims. What childishness!
Michelle Malkin is probably right. The only other reason for administration silence are, #1, the perps are offspring of a wealthy alumni donor, or #2, a member of the faculty is involved.
Let me see if I have this right. At a college with a history of hoax hate crimes, during a cold and early winter morning a single person at a great distance saw someone dressed in white pointed/ peaked robe type of garment. But it is assumed to be a KKK costume rather than a coed wearing jammies venturing out in the cold, early morning wrapped in a blanket?
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