“These are not students who would not be able to attend college without aid from Oberlin.”
And it’s likely many would choose elsewhere without that merit aid.
“These are not students who would not be able to attend college without aid from Oberlin.”
On the other hand, if the (grammatically illiterate) defense attorney is telling the truth “it also means less [sic] students who are not able to afford a college education will be able to do so.” The implication is that Oberlin will have to cut need-based aid rather than merit aid (i.e. ultimately become need aware rather than need blind) since presumably students on need-based aid are subsidized to a greater extent than those on merit aid.
In common with many other midwestern LACs, they’ll have to carry on trying to attract those students who think $50K+ sounds like a good deal compared to a $70K+ sticker price. But if some of those parents or students are turned off by the lawsuit, there will be a double whammy of having to offer more merit to attract full pay students while not being able to afford to meet full need for poorer students.
I saw that Oberlin’s slogan from like 50-100 years ago was “somewhere in the middle of nowhere”. I wonder how that went over with the locals in the county.
One’s environment matters. What is “normal” on campus may be viewed differently outside of that “bubble”. Oberlin’s outside counsel should have pressured or persuaded the college to face reality from an outsider’s perspective. This case should have been settled.
The claims of College attorneys notwithstanding, Oberlin’s 2018 Financial Statements show that the College has over $300 million in unrestricted endowment. So funds are clearly available to pay this judgment, including the punitives. It would no doubt hurt, but it was disingenuous to plead poverty. https://www.oberlin.edu/sites/default/files/content/controller/documents/reports/oc_2018_afs_for_website_v2_revised_2019-01-07.pdf
Institutional disconnects are fairly common.
Administrators have no actual “skin in the game” since they play with “other people’s money”. For academia the dissipation of wealth is largely an abstraction with few real life implications.
And the “echo chamber” is “deafeningly insular”.
A couple of street smart lawyers who have spent virtually their entire existences gaming various scenarios, a principled client and an aggrieved jury pool are a deadly cocktail.
This battle was determined when the college failed to secure a change of venue.
Trial was in Elyria, the county seat. The jury would be made up of county residents. It’s likely the jurors were not from Oberlin as those in Oberlin are more likely to know the parties or work for the college.
I don’t think the trial was ‘small towned’ as both the college and the Gibsons are locals.
^ that is correct. The trial was in the county seat, Elyria. Most of Lorain county’s residents are a different demographic than the residents of Oberlin, so I don’t see this as a “townie” verdict. Plus, the only local lawyers involved were representing the college.
That said, Lorain County (where I grew up) is an old school, union democratic county for the most part, with a growing number of professional-type commuters on the eastern side of the county. There is a significant disconnect culturally between much of the county and the more classist/progressive bent of the college community. That had a huge impact here. And there has been some criticism of how the college’s team tried this case, which is only going to intensify in the coming weeks. I was not in the courtroom and do not know how the case set up. But I do personally know several of the lawyers involved, and I would assume they were operating in a pretty limiting band of how they defended the case, probably by direction of the school. At the end of the day, the facts here were horrible for the college, and when you try a case like that to win it (as opposed to limit the damages) then things can get out of control fast. Once Miraldi let it go to the jury, it was pretty clear the Plaintiff would hang a big number.
As far as an appeal, and understanding that I have not seen the jury interrogatories, I believe there is at least some likelihood of a remittur (reduction) here, because Ohio law limits non economic tort damages in most cases to $350,000 per individual, a number the jury assumedly exceeded here. There is an open question under the law as to whether the punitive cap (2x actual damages) applies to the verdict as awarded or the verdict after the reduction caused by the non economic damage cap.
Pretty good incentive for both sides to settle honestly. I’m guessing this is a massive amount of money for the family, even if it gets substantially reduced. The family can go from running a small business where they work a lot of the hours themselves to being set up for life.
But Oberlin needs to get this out of the news cycle. The timing is actually pretty good for them in June. they don’t want everyone talking about this and it making headlines in the fall, and they certainly don’t want to happening in April when people are deciding where they end up going. What they really don’t need is to see this thing drag on for years. They need this to die and go away.
The trial record tells a different story.
The defendant fought vigorously for a change of venue.
Get the facts.
Given that “Revenues dropped by a huge amount (from about $900,000 in 2016 down to about $500,000 in 2018)” it seems likely that any settlement will have to be at least $10M ($7M after attorney fees) just to compensate for the economic harm, which is likely to continue, since:
“On a walk through campus several weekends ago, this reporter talked to about 20 students at random on campus, and every one of them said they would never shop at Gibson’s because the business and family are racist. When shown the police reports and the fact that the three shoplifters plead guilty and claimed “no racial profiling” was involved, most of the students I spoke with said, “Cops lie.””
Does that leave room for a settlement which Oberlin will accept, given the president’s latest statement that “I am confident that when we resolve this matter, it will look substantially different than it looks today”?
The perceived culture at the college is adjudged to be so far outside the mainstream that only a Berkley or Madison type jury would consistently view them as a sympathetic party.
And the actual merits of the case turn on a couple of very fine points of law that could (and often do) result in opposite outcomes.
Many will view the verdict as a referendum on the leadership and policies of the respective parties.
This case was won when the venue was set.
I think the administration has decided this is the hill they are willing to die on. and at this point from a self-preservation point of view they are probably correct. If they don’t end up somehow winning this, they are probably out of jobs and possibly careers.
But I doubt if the trustees feel the same way. I really don’t know much other than what I’ve read here and clicking on some of the links, but I would be surprised if this case isn’t settled and a couple of administrators aren’t replaced within the next six months. The trustees should be looking at the next hundred years, not looking at being willing to sacrifice the long-term viability of the college for one issue that they are probably wrong on anyway.
For a self proclaimed champion of civil liberty, I find the following statement quite peculiar:
“We are disappointed in the jury’s decisions and the fragmentary and sometimes distorted public discussion of this case.”
It is expressly acknowledged that a couple of editorialists have tried to couch the matter as an issue of free speech as opposed to the claims of libel and interference reflected in the verdict.
The court of public opinion will render the final word here - monetary damages are one thing to absorb. Recovering from a toxic and tarnished reputation is another.
Yeh, I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that these big verdicts are often reduced on appeal, but usually settled before appeal. It is likely the family would like to settle as it would be a huge amount of money to them. Obviously, this is all bad publicity for Oberlin, but not sure if they understand it would be better to settle, given they let it go this far.
But the venue was set by where the tort occurred, as it is in most cases. The college would have had to prove a need for a change of venue and they couldn’t do it.
Moving to a different part of Ohio may not have helped.
I used to work in the courts in Boulder Colorado. You’d be surprised how conservative those juries were. Jurors were small business owners or engineers from IBM or Ball Aerospace, not students (only 2 students in a year, and one was an 18 year old just out of high school). The jurors were pulled from the entire judicial district which did stretch beyond the Boulder city limits. SJW do not get jury duty or do not get picked.
In my opinion, the juries usually got the decisions, and the damages, right. The cases that end up in trial are the ones where the damages and fault are not clear, where one side thinks they should get millions and the other thinks they should get nothing. That’s what we have here too, where there wasn’t a settlement because the parties were just too far apart.
I agree but it’s not clear to me that the Oberlin administration realizes its reputation is toxic and in tatters. It’s like they’re blind to it.
“but not sure if they understand it would be better to settle,”
Very interesting.
Not sure I see all the doom and gloom for Oberlin’s rep. To many of their supporters and prospies, Obi stood up for their (activist) principles…Even after the verdict, I’m not even sure that the Admin and Trustees believe that they were wrong. To them, they were just doing what they’ve been doing (for social justice) for 100+ years.
For the activists, this could be spun to a win-win.