Oberlin University is paying the price of political correctness. The university complied with a court order to post a $36 million bond after an Ohio court ruled against the university in a defamation lawsuit brought by Gibson’s Bakery. The case arose from an incident in 2016 when the owner, who is a frequent target of student shoplifters, tackled an African-American male, who was subsequently arrested. The community accused the owner, who is white, of racial profiling, and the university sided with the protesters. During a visit to the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, Oberlin University President Carmen Twillie Ambar said, “You can have two different lived experiences, and both those things can be true.” This sentiment has pervaded academia, where such things as personal narrative and the theory of intersectionality have become the impetus for modern activism. Lived experience has ousted reason. Empiricism has given way to the concept that one’s experience and identity solely inform truth. If truth, then, is based on your exclusive perspective, what sense does it make to engage with a narrative that differs from your own? This shift has had a profoundly negative impact on public discourse, yet also assures us that the answer to a change in education lies in education itself.
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