Who could have predicted that the month-long spat of racist, anti-Jewish and anti-gay messages that has bedeviled the campus of Oberlin College turns out to have been the handiwork of two students?
According to The Guardian, though, it’s true.
The simperingly progressive school canceled all classes on Monday in response to the alleged hate-related incidents the campus, which culminated in “a report of a person wearing a hood and robe resembling a KKK outfit between South and the Edmonia Lewis Center and in the vicinity of Afrikan Heritage House [sic],” according to Oberlin’s president Marvin Krislov in a letter also signed by no less than three deans.
Lieutenant Mike McCloskey of the Oberlin Police Department said that local law enforcement continues to investigate the sighting of a Ku Klux Klan member in full regalia. He also gently proposed that the solitary witness could have made a mistake.
“Officers checked the area and were unable to locate anybody,” McCloskey told the British daily. “College security later saw a student wrapped in a blanket.”
McCloskey also said that police now know the identities of the individuals responsible for at the shocking vandalism on campus. “Whites Only” was scrawled above a water fountain in one incident, for example. “Nigger Oven” was appeared in an elevator. Someone found a note found a note in the Multicultural Resource Center saying “Nigger + Faggot Center.”
Since the scofflaws were reportedly students, Oberlin is apparently handling discipline internally.
“They are no longer on campus,” McCloskey told The Guardian. “The college is dealing with it internally, and we have been working in cooperation with the college.”
“Charges could be happening, depending on prosecutors’ review,” he added.
Given the liberal culture at Oberlin, it’s highly unlikely that the student perpetrators were motivated by racial (or anti-gay or anti-Semitic) animus.
The Guardian suggests a possible attempt at some sort of commentary on free speech.
Another possibility — not mentioned by The Guardian — is that the students who vandalized the campus wanted to call attention to the horror of hate crimes by committing faux hate crimes themselves.
School officials billed Monday’s impromptu vacation as a “day of solidarity,” according to The New York Times. The administration encouraged students to attend a series of campus-wide discussions instead of classes.
The 1,200-seat campus chapel was brimming with a sea of fresh, earnest, mostly white faces when President Krislov spoke.
“From what we have seen we believe these actions are the work of a very small number of cowardly people,” he said, according to The New York Times. Krislov also apologized to any students who have felt threatened.
Oberlin’s Office of Communications had no comment for The Daily Caller.
“You would have to speak with Scott,” an official told TheDC. That would be Scott Wargo, director of media relations, who was off speaking to CNN.
