The Oberlin incident.

"Oberlin Cancels Classes After Figure in KKK Robes Spotted Near African Heritage House" — so read the headlines yesterday. The article referred also to "a string of hate-related incidents at Oberlin," such as graffiti on Black History Month posters crossing out the word "Black" and scrawling in the N-word.

But who's the culprit and what's the real motive? I avoided blogging this story when I saw it yesterday because I expected an update, and here it is:

According to a person with access to the faculty mailing list, faculty members had been told—"unofficially," (i.e., not through official channels)—that "the investigation into this incident was dropped when it was discovered that the person responsible was someone within the MRC [the Multicultural Resource Center], who would be disciplined internally"; according to conversations with other members of the Oberlin community, this appears to be a widespread, and widely-believed, rumor. (The same source, who asked to remain anonymous, claims that the MRC, whose former director, Eric Estes, is now the Dean of Students, has been criticized for the amount of student college money it receives, and that its leadership has "had trouble justifying how many campus coordinators they have on staff.")

When you don't know who has said/written/done something, don't take the expression at face value. Where the identity of the speaker/writer/actor is hidden, think about who has a motive, who has an interest.

How many class hours were taken from tuition-paying students (who also pay the fees that support, perhaps lavishly, things like the Multicultural Resource Center)? Impulsive, biased assumptions are made by the authorities and normal lesson plans give way to a teach-in about a problem that may not even be the problem. A university should model intelligence and reason.

Will we ever learn the real story? Do the students even care?