Whether someone is a victim of assault or rightfully practiced self-defense is often a difficult question dependent on the states of mind of the people involved in a volatile situation, remembered through the veil of faulty human memories. Details like who used force first are pretty much impossible to determine without a video recording. Of course, police officers are as fallible as anyone else. Defamation requires a willful disregard for truth, and I have a hard time believing that “they committed assault” would be defamation when “they got in a fight” is accurate.
For what it’s worth, I consider myself a liberal, and I went to a liberal arts college cut from the same cloth as Oberlin and wrote anonymous posts debating what I perceived as the excesses of liberal campus activists.
I don't know if you caught that. But for me, "they pled guilty!" is meaningless. People are coerced into that all the time. So speaking generally, to those who think saying that is shorthand for winning an argument, it's quite silly.
In general it may not mean much. People do plead guilty even when they aren't, for many reasons, and even more so with minorities. In this specific case though we're talking Oberlin students, not some poor kids from the ghetto, already making this less likely, and even worse, while I would not necessarily expect rioting progressive students to make any sort of logical and factual argument, I would expect better from the administration. But interestingly, they also never presented anything based on logic, let alone facts, and never even made the claim that the assailants were coerced to plead guilty, witnesses bribed, investigations botched. They just took the narrative that fits with their ideological view and ran away with it, facts be damned.
There was no allegation that the Oberlin student acted in self-defense. As to the guilty plea, there are indeed lots of people who plead guilty to crimes they did not commit. It’s a country of 300 million people—in absolute terms, there are lots of people who do any given thing. But in percentage terms, any given guilty plea is likely the result of overwhelming evidence of guilt.
For what it’s worth, I consider myself a liberal, and I went to a liberal arts college cut from the same cloth as Oberlin and wrote anonymous posts debating what I perceived as the excesses of liberal campus activists.