Oberlin And Gibson’s Bakery Revisited

10/16/2021 Update

The request to unseal and publish Allyn D. Gibson’s privately posted Facebook posts was denied by the 9th District Appellate Court but unsealing has been subsequently ordered by the Common Pleas Court trial judge in the case — who was in turn ordered to unseal by the Ohio Supreme Court. Allyn was not a party in the original lawsuit, was only an employee of the Bakery, and was not an owner of the Bakery.

JD’s most recent visit to Gibson’s Bakery encountered a large surge in traffic from earlier visits, despite the embarrassing FaceBook posts by Allyn Gibson that are now public.

[Comment received recently from a law professor “Bizarre that appeal decision taking so long. Not sure if that’s a good or bad sign, or neither. Also wonder if they added a third judge to the panel now that one wasn’t reelected.” ed.] A third judge has been added to the panel. There is no information on when a decision will be forthcoming.

Visiting Gibson’s Bakery, 2/11/21

JD was in Oberlin today and stopped at Gibson’s Bakery to buy one of their goodies. Both the bakery and town were deserted since it was supper time. Only an Oberlin City Councilperson passed me on the street. She was not bubbling over with enthusiasm.

JD asked the Gibson clerk if there had been any developments in the litigation with the college and received a response worthy of the Hogan’s Heroes TV sitcom’s Sgt. Schultz. “I know nothing!”

The three-judge Appellate Court panel heard the case in Nov. 2020, and no decision has been published as of 7/18/2021. This is strange because the term of a judge on the panel expired in February. That means that the panel should have decided the case while all three involved judges were still on the court. JD will leave it to the world’s great legal minds to decipher what might happen from this date forward.

JD observed earlier that Dean Meredith Raimondo would be slaughtered for her role in the Gibson mess once sufficient time had passed.  The College has announced that she is “stepping down” from her position as Dean to go on sabbatical and return as a tenured professor. It might be worth it to pay her $500K or more to disappear.

JD suspects that this announcement is a cesspool of euphemisms because the BOT works in wondrous ways its perfidies to perform. Perhaps Shakespeare said it best when he penned the words, “A rose, by any other name, would smell…”

Revisiting Gibson’s Bakery, 3/29/20

It is now clear that we have seen the end of two eras in the last four years. The first era began with President Trump’s election and the resultant outbreak of irrationality directed at Gibson’s Bakery. This earlier era’s death has stretched over several years and has been brought to a conclusion by the second era, kicked off by the coronavirus quarantine. There is no going back from the current mess for the College or the world. This new era is a major and permanent change.

There should be no surprise in the national financial chaos that has ensued over the last several March 2020 weeks. However, no one expected this chaos to come as the result of an epidemiological event or come as fast as it has. It is unlikely that the BOT has had any reasonable contingency plans for the events of these weeks. The fact that the events moved as fast as they have is not an excuse for not having thought about the ongoing problems developing in the financial world and how they would affect Oberlin.

JD has posted extensively elsewhere on this blog about the breach of fiduciary duty and dereliction of duty by both the BOT and Administration toward the Gibsons. We find it appalling that that situation could have happened, considering that the former and current presidents of the College are both people who went to law school. One would think that they would have learned that slander and libel are not good things and that basing a legal defense against them on inadmissible hearsay evidence is not wise.

The College would have known from the pretrial discovery process that the College had given the Gibson’s an arsenal of devastating evidence to use against the College. Common sense would indicate that the College’s best approach at that point, as it would have been at each earlier point along the way, would have been to seek a settlement and accommodation with the Gibsons. This did not happen in constructive ways, apparently because some blindly bullheaded idealists were determined to believe the slander and gossip about the Gibsons.

The idealists fought the “evil” Gibsons in court with virtually no admissible evidence against the Gibsons and no regard for the litigation’s cost to the College. Current financial and medical developments guarantee that the College will substantially reduce resources for performing its mission even without the Gibson expenses. These new reductions are on top of the already planned One Oberlin project reductions.

What is happening with the Endowment?

One grim reaper can change the world
Credit LegalInsurrection.com