David Gibson, plaintiff in the Oberlin lawsuit, has died

This is a very good retrospective on his character and the controversy in which he became involved: https://quillette.com/2019/12/02/on-the-passing-of-oberlin-plaintiff-david-gibson/

I think this story is important for a few reasons:

1. I think it's important that many people know what a decent person David Gibson actually was.  Part of the damage that echo-chamber, ideology driven culture does is that we reduce people to caricatures that fit our narratives.  David Gibson was clearly wronged by this impulse.  He was  a White Man who Called the Cops on Young Black Men--and therefore subjected to all the race-war social justice theories Oberlin incubates.  In cases where the narrative takes precedence over reality and smears a decent person (Covington Catholic kid is yet another example), I think it's important to loudly correct the record.  This article does so.
2. David Gibson's actions strike me as an example of a very American sort of virtue: anybody shoplifting gets the police called on them, because nobody's above the law and everybody gets treated equally.  BUT, he'll work with you and the police: get a lecture, promise to try to be good, the charge will be reduced.  It's a small-town, do-it-yourself, personal-communication-based approach to crime and recidivism.  I like this a lot, because ultimately it's people and not programs who make a difference in troubled lives.  People who think in terms of grand social schemes to reduce inequality and crime overlook this type of approach at their peril.
3. It's still really mind-boggling how Oberlin could have gotten itself into this situation.  It would have been so easy for them to have apologized as requested, and it should have been easy for it to see that it was the right thing to do.  How a collection of supposedly elite intellects could have been so ridiculously wrong and blind about it is a question that demands to be answered.  Sadly, I don't see any impulse among the people who matter to ask this question of themselves.  The universities marinate in absurd ideology and have long lost the ability to honestly grapple with reality outside of it.