* Students steal from bakery.
* Students malign bakery through appeal to one-sided sensationalism.
* Students go after everyone who does business with bakery, which implicates...Oberlin.
* Oberlin shits their pants and joins the mob to avoid accusations of "supporting racism."
The ruling is correct-- spinelessness is not a defense. But I don't envy anybody put in this position.
The colleges have been in the making of little red guards in decades, it is inevitable that some of the little red guards became school administrators.
That's understating it -- they stole from the bakery, and assaulted the employee that tried to stop them, then ganged up to attack him on the ground[1].
It's a great illustration of Scott Alexander's Toxoplasma of Rage article[2], where you're left thinking, like, even if the store employees were discriminating, and even if you could make the case, why would you cite this incident as an example of it, where it manifestly was not discrimination, and the victim committed serious crimes?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibson%27s_Bakery_v._Oberlin_C...
[2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage...
Many true believers on planet Oberlin... (probably majority). Preference falsification is indeed a thing but you will never know if these actors lie predominantly to themselves or others to save their hide.
Practically speaking, it doesn't matter
If anyone thinks this way about Student Free Speech you have to have willing and purposefully choose to stick your head in the sand and ignore the fact that school admins acting in their official role and on the clock for Oberlin joined in these protests, even supplied material, and broke contracts without paying the penalty required by the contract.