The Whole World Was Watching

Since May 23, the 4,089-student public liberal arts college in Olympia, Washington, has been embroiled in what the media euphemistically call “student protests” over perceived racial grievances. At Evergreen State that has actually meant: invading a professor’s class to taunt him with charges of racism; occupying the library and the college president’s office while the campus police, ordered to stand down, barricade themselves in their headquarters; delivering F-bombs, derision, and assorted demands—firing the police chief, confiscating the guns of the rest of the police, setting up mandatory race-oriented “cultural competency” training for the faculty, excusing the protesters from their end-of-term assignments, and providing free gumbo for a radical potluck—to the cornered president, George Bridges; and creating such a threatening atmosphere for the professor in question, evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein (another target of the firing demands), that he had to hold his class on May 25 in a public park in downtown Olympia. If a photo posted on Instagram is to be taken at face value, it has also meant wielding baseball bats and posing ominously on the balconies of student apartments.

The videos, made on the phones of Evergreen State students, were ubiquitous as the activities of the 200 or so protesters culminated in a literal shutdown of the college (Evergreen State suspended operations from the afternoon of June 1 to the afternoon of June 5, even though it had been scheduled to hold the last of its spring-term classes on those days, after someone made a 911 call threatening to shoot up the campus with a .44 Magnum). The first of the videos featured the May 23 invasion of Weinstein’s classroom at 9:30 a.m. by about 50 angry students provoked by what they characterized as Weinstein’s racism. He had objected to a college-sponsored Day of Absence on April 10, when white students, faculty, and staff had been encouraged to make themselves scarce on campus. This video was excised from YouTube for violating the site’s “harassment and bullying” policy after protesters complained it had been selectively edited to make them look like harassers and bullies. Fortunately for the curious, the much-copied video is available in whole elsewhere on the Internet (the website Heterodox Academy claims to offer a 12-minute “unedited” version) and in snippets on YouTube of a 6-minute interview that Weinstein gave to Fox News’s Tucker Carlson on May 25.

The 12-minute video shows the husky, bearded Weinstein, clad in an outdoorsy-biology-prof black T-shirt, trying patiently to engage the students who have shut down his classroom in a “dialectic,” as he called it. Weinstein later described himself to Carlson as a “deeply progressive person” who had supported socialist-leaning Bernie Sanders in the 2016 presidential primaries. But the Evergreen students captured in the May 23 video were having nothing to do with Weinstein’s attempts to lift the conversation to a high-minded, fancy-word “dialectic” plane:

“This is not a discussion—you lost that one! You said racist s—! Now apologize!”

Weinstein responded: “I did not!”

“Stop telling people of color they’re f— useless! You’re useless!”

“Yeah, resign!” screamed another student.

“Resign!” screamed yet another.

“I’m not resigning.”

“Hey hey! Ho ho! Bret Weinstein has got to go!”

The video followed the students yelling the chant in unison as they tried to block the campus police (probably called in by one of Weinstein’s biology students) shielding Weinstein as he exited the building.

The funniest—and also the saddest—of the videos might be called the Homework Video, or perhaps the Gumbo Video. Viewed more than 86,000 times on YouTube, it recorded the events of a May 24 meeting with Bridges in his office, which the protesters had invaded and taken over, blocking the exits while some of them checked their phones and helped themselves to what appeared to be university-supplied pizza as they sat at the college president’s conference table. The 66-year-old Bridges, balding, pudgy, bespectacled, and given to sporting bow ties on dressy occasions, had the misfortune of visually calling to mind Bobby Trippe, the adipose city slicker raped by hillbillies in John Boorman’s 1972 backwoods horror flick Deliverance. Subconsciously—or perhaps archetypally, since none was alive when Deliverance was ringing up the cash registers during the early 1970s—the Evergreen protesters similarly seemed to smell blood with the eager-to-please and ultimately hapless Bridges. He had already had an encounter with them the day before, when they stormed his office at 4:30 in the afternoon not long after their successful disruption of Weinstein’s biology class. Their greeting, also captured in a video, had been: “F— you, George, we don’t want to hear a God-damned thing you have to say.” One protester had demanded that Bridges “disavow white supremacy.” Bridges had meekly agreed: “I will disavow white supremacy.”

Bridges assumed the presidency of Evergreen State only in the fall of 2015, after serving for 10 years as president of Whitman College, a small, well-regarded liberal-arts institution serving 1,500 students in Walla Walla, Washington. A sociologist by training, he specialized academically in studying racial disparities in the sentencing of criminal defendants, thus burnishing his liberal credentials. Those credentials received another touch of polish with his marriage to former congressional aide Kari Tupper, who had helped end the long-running political career of Sen. Brock Adams, maintaining that the Washington Democrat had sexually assaulted her in 1987. (Adams, who died in 2004, was never criminally charged but in 1992 abruptly declined to seek reelection after eight other women accused him of sexual misconduct.) Tupper for several years taught women’s studies at the University of Washington in Seattle, where her husband had been a professor and dean. In August 2016 Bridges wrote an op-ed for the Seattle Times responding to a tough-love letter by University of Chicago dean of students John Ellison that had warned incoming freshman that “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” for the easily psychically bruised wouldn’t be forthcoming at Chicago. Bridges countered that the University of Chicago was simply “tone deaf to the academic and developmental needs of many students.”

The Evergreen State protesters at the May 24 meeting, munching their pizza slices while a jacketless, white-shirted Bridges stood abjectly before them holding a multipage list of their written demands, clearly regarded such solicitude for their sensibilities as so much contemptible weakness. The meeting opened with this exchange between a female protester and Bridges:

“All of us are students and have homework and projects and things due. Have you sent an email out to your faculty letting them know? What’s been done about that?”

“It’s the first thing I’ll do. I have not done it yet, I will do it right now.”

“So they need to be told that these assignments won’t be done on time, and we don’t need to be penalized for that.”

Jeers and general derision followed, as Bridges tried to shush them with his free hand and make himself heard.

“Y’all can’t keep doing these pointing fingers,” a female student reprimanded him, after he had apologized and meekly placed the offending hand in his pants pocket.

A few minutes later Bridges pleaded over the din to let him please adjourn the meeting so he could read the list of demands: “You have to give me some privacy, folks. . . . I have claustrophobia.”

That psychological condition might have resonated with the high achievers at Whitman. It went over at Evergreen State like an IED in Mosul. A T-shirted student stood up holding a plastic-cup drink and waved her hand sarcastically: “People of color have to work in threatening environments every day! Welcome! Welcome! Get to work!”

The meeting ended with the Gumbo Potluck Demand. A male student standing behind Bridges informed him that if he didn’t respond to the occupying students’ list by 5 p.m. that Friday, May 26, “you need to pay for a potluck.”

Bridges was amenable to that order, too: “We’ll be paying for a potluck anyway,” he replied.

“We want gumbo!” another student shouted.

A knot of students on the other side of the table turned that into a chant: “We want gumbo!”

“Made by my mama!” shouted the young man standing behind Bridges.

Evergreen State, founded in 1967 in the state capital, Olympia, a waterfront city of about 50,000 at the bottom of Puget Sound, 60 miles south of Seattle, was part of a 1960s wave of brand-new college campuses, many of them publicly funded, that aimed to serve an expanding baby boom population and also to experiment with nontraditional models of post-secondary education. (The best-known of these colleges is the University of California, Santa Cruz, founded in 1965.) Many of the nontraditional colleges, including Evergreen, quickly became known as “hippie colleges” because they tended, as they still do, to attract a distinctly nontraditional student body. Evergreen, for example, proudly bills itself as “progressive” on its website. There are no letter grades (professors submit narrative evaluations of their students’ proficiency), and there are no courses—or majors—as the words are generally understood. Evergreen undergraduates, who make up the vast majority of its students, instead sign up for year-long, multi-credit, interdisciplinary programs that typically include a range of hard-science, social-science, and humanities fields.

Evergreen’s likely most famous graduate is Matt Groening (class of 1977), creator of The Simpsons. The college’s likely most famous nongraduate was Rachel Corrie, accidentally bulldozed to death in 2003 in an Israeli military operation in Gaza during the Second Intifada. (Corrie had been in Gaza as part of a senior-year independent study project and had joined a protest group that positioned its members in front of bulldozers destroying houses that the Israelis said were used as cover to shoot at their troops and smuggle arms.) Evergreen’s commencement speaker in 1999 was Mumia Abu-Jamal, convicted in 1982 of murdering a Philadelphia police officer. Mumia, on death row at the time (prosecutors have since agreed to let him serve a life term without parole), delivered his 13-minute speech from behind bars.

The school’s motto is—no joke—Omnia Extares: Let it all hang out. Some students have clearly thrived in the campus’s do-your-own-thing atmosphere, on its thousand-acre waterfront campus that combines towering eponymous fir trees with concrete-overloaded Brutalist architecture. A curriculum that mixes empirical and deductive-reasoning fields such as math and science with the humanities can be exhilarating, even if the “humanities” these days largely mean excursions into arcane ideologized “theory.” Evergreen gets high marks from U.S. News for its teaching (small classes, high engagement), and its marine-biology offerings are considered first-rate. But as Evergreen students have complained online, too many of their loosely supervised classmates simply coast along majoring in drugs and tattoos. Evergreen has a 98 percent acceptance rate of applicants (in contrast to the 45 percent acceptance rate at the state’s flagship University of Washington), and 20 to 30 percent of its freshmen either drop out or transfer after the first year—perhaps because they seek a more focused curriculum in these tight-economy, post-2008 crash days when the hiring market can be dicey, or perhaps because they decide that they were never college material in the first place (in-state tuition is relatively cheap at $6,500 per year, but it’s not free). Enrollment at Evergreen has been steadily dropping since a record 4,891 students in 2009. The college website sounds a note of desperation as it tries to persuade applicants that better-paying job titles than barista might await them: “Graduates of The Evergreen State College do well in graduate schools all over the country and in all sorts of careers. You can find our alumni everywhere!”

Oddly enough, despite its blue-chip progressive credentials, Evergreen State has been marked by quite a bit of racial tension. Perhaps because it’s mostly relatively affluent white people who have the financial wherewithal to identify as hippies, the undergraduate student population at Evergreen (according to its own figures, using the Department of Education’s ethnic categories) is 67 percent non-Hispanic white. About 29 percent of Evergreen students describe themselves as “students of color.” And of that group, about 5 percent categorize themselves as non-Hispanic black or African-American. Still, before Bridges arrived on the Evergreen campus, a highly popular African American, Thomas. L. Purce, had held the presidency from 2000 until his retirement in 2015, embarking on an ambitious building program and other capital improvements to the campus, whose 1960s infrastructure (judging from photos) hasn’t aged particularly well.

Nonetheless, the demographic statistics at Evergreen have been just divergent enough from those of the U.S. population as a whole—63 percent white, 13 percent black, and 17 percent Hispanic (only 10 percent of Evergreen’s students are Hispanics of all races, according to Education Department criteria)—to trigger the formation of a campus faculty-staff group that titled itself the “Equity and Inclusion Council.” The council aimed not just at matching the percentages more exactly but at ensuring the retention of minority students, who seemed to be dropping out of Evergreen at a higher rate than their white classmates. It hardly mattered that the Pacific Northwest is overwhelmingly Nordic, thanks to massive Scandinavian immigration around the turn of the 20th century, and that a slight overrepresentation of white students on a state-school campus might therefore be expected. The word “equity” is a newish term of art in the lexicon of race-based activism. One website defines it as “the condition that would be achieved if one’s racial identity no longer predicted, in a statistical sense, how one fares. .  .  . This includes elimination of policies, practices, attitudes and cultural messages that reinforce differential outcomes by race or fail to eliminate them.” In other words, “equity” is all about ensuring not just equality of opportunity for ethnic minorities but equality of academic outcome: a one-to-one correlation between their demographic representation in the population as a whole and their representation on the evaluation sheets that Evergreen professors prepare for their students.

On November 11, 2016, slightly more than a year into Bridges’ presidency at Evergreen, the Equity and Inclusion Council released a 39-page report. By this time, the report indicated, the ranks of the ethnic-minority students had been supplemented with students identifying as “LGBTQQ” and students with “reported disabilities.” An appendix suggested that the committee’s efforts had the blessing of Bridges. The report outlined an elaborate—and if the council got its way, mandatory—step-by step plan for the 2016-2017 academic year and beyond. The goal was to shift Evergreen from a “diversity agenda”—the standard-issue multiculturalism and affirmative action promoted on most college campuses—to an “equity agenda,” in which equality of student outcomes would be the top priority. All campus activities would be subsumed into this quest, which would include some version of “mandatory anti-oppression training for the faculty” (a condition that Evergreen professors, progressive though they might be, rejected by majority vote); the creation of a new administrative position for a “VP for Equity and Inclusion,” who would be independently budgeted and operate autonomously; “equity”-based curriculum planning and assessment of student learning; and a requirement that all future faculty hires be subjected to an “equity justification.” In a particularly Maoist-sounding rhetorical fillip, the report referred numerous times to the “Six Expectations” for closing a perceived “equity gap” between the currently “underserved” minority student population at Evergreen and their presumed fully served white, heterosexual, and nondisabled classmates.

Insanely totalitarian as the November 11 report might strike anyone who hasn’t spent time on a college campus recently, there were apparently few objections from the Evergreen faculty, possibly because few had actually read the report, and possibly because the professors feared being branded racists. One professor who did object was Bret Weinstein, who, according to reports (Weinstein did not respond to requests for an interview), used the faculty email listserv at Evergreen to wage a war of words with council members, accusing them of authoritarianism (the report called for a high level of staff intrusion into the contents of professors’ courses) and intimidation. He argued that the equality of outcomes that the council was pushing was a “discredited concept, failing on both logical and historical grounds,” as he put it in a May 30 op-ed for the Wall Street Journal. Weinstein linked the council’s obsession with equity to the pervasive influence of Critical Race Theory—the notion that most social structures are instruments of white supremacy—on the nonscience fields of study at Evergreen.

It was not the first time that Weinstein had publicly taken a lone-wolf ideological stance in a racially tinged campus dispute. In 1987, while a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania, he had written a sarcastic op-ed for the student newspaper, the Daily Pennsylvanian, deploring a campus fraternity’s having hired two strippers in order to attract potential pledges to a rush party (school rules forbade the serving of alcohol). The strippers were black, and the white fraternity brothers had treated them in a “disgusting and degrading” fashion that involved smearing them with ketchup and penetrating them with cucumbers. In a May 30 interview with political commentator Dave Rubin, Weinstein said that although the fraternity was suspended over the incident, he received so much harassment, including death threats, from fraternity members that he briefly dropped out of Penn.

Although the Evergreen faculty never adopted or took any other action on the Equity and Inclusion Council’s report, some of the council’s members, impatient at the professors’ inaction, seemed to be quietly incorporating its recommendations into campus life at Evergreen—while Bridges began a search for what seemed to be exactly the plenipotentiary “Vice President/Vice Provost for Equity and Inclusion” that the council had recommended.

One member of the council was Rashida Love, director of Evergreen’s First Peoples Multicultural Advising Services office, which offers support to minority students. In March 2017, Love announced at an Evergreen faculty meeting that there were going to be drastic changes to the annual Day of Absence (scheduled for April 12), an Evergreen tradition dating to the 1970s, when ethnic-minority professors, students, and employees remained off-campus for a day in order to remind the white majority how crucial their presence was to the college’s operation. The Day of Absence had been inspired by a 1965 play of that name by Douglas Turner Ward in which blacks absented themselves from a town whose whites subsequently discovered how much they depended on the blacks’ services. A Day of Presence (scheduled for April 14 this year) typically followed the Day of Absence, marked by workshops and other events focused on race relations.

This year, however, Love informed the professors, it would be whites who would be “encouraged” (as it was reported) to stay off campus on the Day of Absence while “people of color” held their own “community-building” workshops at various campus venues (there would be no classes that day). Whites were free to attend an off-campus day-long consciousness-raising event of their own, with this ironic touch: They had to bring their own “potluck” lunches to the function, while the people of color on campus received a lunch provided by the college.

On March 15 Weinstein shot off a polite but strongly worded email to Love in which he pointed out that although she and the First Peoples office had used the language of “choices” in setting the new Day of Absence policy, “encouraging” whites to stay away—in contrast to the past practice in which minorities had voluntarily absented themselves—amounted to a “show of force, an act of oppression in and of itself.” He added: “You may take this letter as a formal protest of this year’s structure, and you may assume that I will be on campus on the Day of Absence. . . . On a college campus, one’s right to speak—or to be—must never be based on skin color.”

Meanwhile there had been a series of low-level student disruptions at Evergreen from the very beginning of the 2016-2017 academic year. Those protests apparently stemmed from minority students’ long-simmering dissatisfaction with the way they believed Evergreen was treating them—dissatisfaction that stretched back even to the African-American Purce’s presidency. The faculty’s refusal to undergo mandatory equity training rankled in particular. One Evergreen student told Olympian columnist Matt Driscoll: “There has been meeting after meeting with the administration. For years students of color, trans and queer students and other minorities have been asking, then demanding, for mandatory equity training for staff and faculty. . . . What you are seeing is months and years of being ignored.” Alleged biased treatment by the campus police seemed to be another sore point.

At Evergreen’s opening convocation on September 21, 2016, two students seized the stage carrying a sign that said, “Evergreen cashes diversity checks but doesn’t care about blacks.” On January 11, 2017, the same two students plus several others armed with noisemakers interrupted the swearing-in of new campus police chief Stacy Brown, seized the microphone from another campus official, and began chanting, “F— cops!” The two students were investigated and possibly disciplined.

But what seems to have triggered the most recent fracas was a May 10 post on Evergreen’s Class of 2020 Facebook page by a black student at Evergreen who goes only by the name Jamil. Jamil’s post called for “PoC” (people of color) to sign up for a year-long class program titled “Mediaworks: Re/Presenting Power and Difference” so as to make the program “majority Black/Brown.” Another student, Kaí-Avé Douvia, who called himself a “person of color” but who is not black, accused Jamil of reverse racism and put up his own post substituting the word “white” for “PoC” and “black/brown.” Several days of vociferous student debate and back-and-forth charges of racism ensued, culminating on the night of May 14 in a confrontation between Douvia and Jamil, who was accompanied by another black student, Timeko Williams Jr. Douvia called the campus police afterwards to say that he felt “unsafe,” and the police detained Jamil and Williams for questioning for several hours before releasing the two early on the morning of May 15.

This led a group of students to call for the firing of Brown, the police chief, and to send a news release to the Olympian complaining that “black trans disabled students” were being harassed by campus police. They also broke into an interview with a candidate for the newly formed equity and diversity position to voice their opinions about racism at Evergreen. On May 18, Wendy Endress, Evergreen’s vice president of student affairs, issued an email inviting students to a “conversation” about the recent events to be hosted on May 19 by George Bridges. The protesters organ-ized a boycott of the meeting, sending out a press release stating: “We have already voiced our experiences over this year and Wendy and George have made it obvious they don’t care about how recent events are affecting the student body. They are making an effort to diminish our voices and take control of a situation they refused to acknowledge until it began to tarnish their reputation.”

How Weinstein, whose email objecting to the Day of Absence was already more than two months into the past, became the chief target of the students four days later can be only a matter of conjecture (emails to Bridges and Evergreen spokesman Zach Powers went unanswered). A video posted on YouTube and elsewhere that seems to have been made at 3:40 p.m. on May 23—hours after Weinstein’s class had been invaded—shows an enraged Naima Lowe, a black professor of film studies and a member of the Equity and Inclusion Council, hurling F-bombs, defending the protesters, and telling some puzzled-looking white faculty members huddling outside the library that the campus unrest was their own fault for ignoring the council’s recommendations. “This is about THEIR needs!” Lowe yells. “And that Equity Council handed you—handed you—a way to do this EASILY!”

Bret Weinstein’s brother Eric, a Harvard-Ph.D. mathematician who is managing director of Thiel Capital, posted on his Twitter account a Facebook post purportedly from Lowe asking: “Could some white women at Evergreen come and collect [Bret Weinstein’s wife and Evergreen anthropology professor] Heather Heying’s racist a—.”

By the time 5 p.m., Friday, May 26, rolled around—the deadline the angry students had given to President Bridges—the protesters had broadened their chant to “Hey hey! Ho ho! These racist teachers have got to go!” and put together an additional list of candidates for firing by Evergreen. A meeting took place in the campus’s Longhouse, a handsome wooden “cultural center” surrounded by forest and bedecked with indigenous art that is Evergreen’s nod to the days when cis-het white men—and any other white people—were unknown in the Puget Sound region. The opening sentence of Bridges’s statement in response to the students’ demands set the tone and the tenor for everything that followed:

“I’m George Bridges, I use he/him pronouns.”

What followed was Evergreen-predictable. Apologies to the Native Americans whose “land was stolen and on which the college stands”? Check. That “mandatory sensitivity and cultural competency training” for faculty? Check and check. “We commit to annual mandatory training for all faculty beginning in fall 2017,” Bridges said. And there was more: the creation of an “equity center.” A “Trans & Queer Center coordinator.” A “position that will support undocumented students.” And more free food, after the meeting adjourned at 6 p.m.

The students didn’t get everything they asked for. Bridges declined a demand for “the immediate disarming of police services and no expansion of police facilities or services at any point in the future”—although he did promise to implement “training” for the campus cops that would include “addressing anti-black racism, de-escalation, minimizing use of force, serving trans and queer students,” and so forth. Nor did Bridges accede to this: “We demand Bret Weinstein be suspended immediately without pay but all students receive full credit” (the “full credit” was a nice touch). Bridges’s refusal to fire him (or any other Evergreen employees targeted on the student list) may be cold comfort to Weinstein, however, because Bridges also declared there would be a “full investigation” of “any complaint of discrimination”—and such complaints look highly likely in the future. Dozens of Weinstein’s fellow faculty members at Evergreen have already signed an open letter asking the college to pursue a “disciplinary investigation against Bret Weinstein” simply for publicizing his predicament: “Wein-stein has endangered faculty, staff, and students, making them targets of white supremacist backlash by promulgating misinformation in public emails, on national television, in news outlets, and on social media.”

The Evergreen protesters ought to have walked away grinning from ear to ear—although in fact some of them, obviously regarding Bridges as a prize pushover, were already agitating for more concessions, as well as needling him for failing to confiscate the cops’ guns as they had demanded. A few days later, according to a report from a faculty member, Evergreen administrators sent out email notices warning students and others about the likelihood of violent off-campus white supremacists fired up by the Weinstein controversy coming to campus. It was a warning that segued directly into the 911 call about an armed campus intruder that closed down Evergreen from June 1-5. Some students started patrolling the campus with baseball bats, hunting for white supremacists and frightening other students fearful of reprisals because they hadn’t gone along with the earlier protests. Sharon Goodman, Evergreen’s director of residential and dining services, felt obliged to send around a memo on June 4 reminding the bat brigade that “the use of bats or similar instruments is not productive.”

But this was a revolution that was televised, and hundreds of thousands of people have viewed those videos. Even perennial ultra-liberals such as New York Times columnist Frank Bruni and Huffington Post contributor Matt Teitelbaum have been shocked at the spectacle of a professor held prisoner by students at his own college and taunted for racism for disagreeing with faculty colleagues. Evergreen State is already having trouble attracting students—and it might take a lesson from the University of Missouri, which is shutting down dorms and laying off staff in the wake of a 23 percent freshman enrollment decline after widely publicized student-protest belligerence in 2015. Rep. Matt Manweller, a Republican state legislator from rural eastern Washington, has already introduced a bill that would ratchet down taxpayer funding for Evergreen, essentially requiring it to privatize. The bill has little chance of passing in the Democratic-controlled state, but it’s an ominous sign.

The best perspective on Evergreen State might come from Jason Brennan, a philosophy professor at Georgetown University’s business school who previously taught at Brown, the “hippie school” of the Ivy League. In an email Brennan observed that “administrators have a financial incentive to impose ideological requirements and the like on faculty. Consider: Faculty and administrators have to compete with one another for power, prestige, status, and money. $20 million spent on faculty is $20 million not spent on administrators. Administrators can help win the battle for money and power by A) inviting external regulation and accreditation of faculty, B) imposing strict and overly broad speech, harassment, and ideological codes, and C) requiring faculty syllabi to fit administrators’ commitments. Thanks to these sorts of things, what we’re seeing now is an inversion. In the past, administrators were there to serve the faculty and students. But now administrators have far more power, and more and more faculty are there to serve the administration.”

Still, Brennan wrote: “In the late ’90s, we saw a wave of behavior like this: hyper-vigilant language policing, shouting down speakers, and the like. Remember the movie PCU making fun of it all? But there was a big public backlash, including from the liberal left, and it died down for a decade. Now there’s a resurgence, and there seems to be a backlash again.”

Charlotte Allen is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.