America’s higher-education system has serious problems, but people are only just now waking up to them.
All of its problems, from the suppression of free speech to administrative cowardice, have been on full display in the continuous stream of debauchery coming out of Evergreen State College. However, it would be a mistake to think the Evergreen scandal is an exception in an otherwise functional education system.
Evergreen, a small public liberal arts college located in Olympia, Wash., entranced conservative-leaning writers nationwide after one of its professors questioned the legitimacy of a school event in which white students and faculty were requested to leave campus. It’s the recreation (or inverse of) a social experiment originating from Douglas Turner Ward’s play “Day of Absence,” where the black residents of a fictional town vanished for a day.
Evergreen Professor Bret Weinstein, who explains the tradition of the aforementioned event far more eloquently than I ever could here, was subsequently berated by students for his dissent in a video that has since gone viral. After confronting Weinstein at his classroom, students proceeded to march through campus in a multi-day protest that, in one case, resulted in the literal hostage-taking of the school’s president and his administrative peers, all of which was proudly recorded by students.
Evergreen President George Bridges was at one point even denied a request to use the bathroom, instead, he was told to “hold it” by one of his students.
Coverage of the Evergreen scandal, however, has been largely ignored by mainstream outlets, and some who have chimed in on the action have missed the mark.
Meghan Daum with The Los Angeles Times, for instance, declared that “mainstream media needs to get on this” because “it’s not just another right-wing snowflake report.” In a sense, it is just “another right-wing snowflake report” as is clearly evidenced by the video that continues to emerge. However, the far greater problem with Daum’s remarks is that most right-wing snowflake reports have always been so much more than mere right-wing snowflake reports, but it has taken a situation as outrageous as Evergreen for people to wake up to that reality.
The fact of the matter is that Weinstein, who says he’s a progressive, is just the latest in a growing line of academics on both the right and the left who have been publicly mocked, reprimanded, and in some cases even disciplined for daring to question the campus mob’s ideological agenda.
Nicholas and Erika Christakis of Yale University were among the first to be made subjects of a right-wing snowflake report after Mrs. Christakis criticized the school’s decision to police what students wore for Halloween. After that, her husband was confronted by a crowd of angry protesters who demanded that he apologize for his wife’s comments. The two eventually resigned from their posts after growing public backlash.
Meanwhile, Marquette University Professor John McAdams has been suspended since December 2014 for a blog post he wrote criticizing a fellow instructor for telling students not to debate the propriety of gay marriage.
One professor, who had just recently been tenured, resigned in June 2016 from California State University at Northridge after facing continuous discrimination from his liberal peers for allowing students to attend an optional event at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.
Similarly, former Providence College Professor Anthony Esolen sparked a campus-wide protest in November for an article he wrote questioning his school’s diversity agenda. Providence College’s president later sent a letter to the entire campus community to condemn Esolen’s article, and Esolen himself has since relocated.
Even more recently, Duke University Professor Paul Griffiths resigned after facing disciplinary action for calling his employer’s diversity training “a waste” and “anti-intellectual.” Notably, in the email that cost him his job, Griffiths wrote that the training’s “illiberal roots and totalitarian tendencies” would show, and was instantly accused of “racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry” by one of the school’s deans.
University of California at Los Angeles lecturer Keith Fink is, ironically, in an ongoing battle to save his popular course on free speech and could even be let go after being subjected to a demonstrably-biased faculty-review committee.
This is just a short list (guaranteed to get longer) of professors from all sorts of political backgrounds whose livelihoods have been destroyed for doing their jobs. What, really, does it say about the current state of academia when professors are fired or harassed for bringing up controversial subjects?
Answers to that question could vary, and solutions, if there are any, are far harder to come by. However, I think we can all agree on one thing: there’s a legitimate problem, and so far right-wing snowflake reports have been the only thing exposing it.
Unfortunately, Evergreen isn’t the beginning of the end. The end started long ago and it may be closer to its final demise than we think.
