The recent protests over alleged racial injustice at Evergreen State College in Washington looked bad: A professor whose classroom was invaded by student radicals so aggressive that he felt forced to hold his next class at a public park off campus; the president held virtual prisoner in his office until he agreed—perhaps all too willingly—to grant the protesters such goodies as relief from their homework assignments and free gumbo at a potluck; and photos of some of the radicals wielding baseball bats and reportedly patrolling the campus looking for dissenters. I wrote about all of this in my June 9 article for THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
But now, a former provost and vice president for academic affairs at Evergreen, in an opinion piece for the reliably liberal HuffPost, has revealed that the protests at Evergreen were even worse and more potentially damaging over the long run to the Olympia, Washington-based public and famously progressive liberal arts college than I’d thought. Furthermore, although the author of the HuffPost article, Michael Zimmerman (currently on leave in Evergreen’s version of a sabbatical), told me in emails and a phone interview that he (understandably) refused to ascribe any particular “motives” to any of the protesters or to Evergreen faculty members who seemed to have egged them on, a picture emerges of an unholy alliance between some of the protesters and some professors and perhaps even more administrators looking to seize more power and wield it at the expense of the rest of the faculty and certainly the majority of the students.
One of the chief engineers of the buildup of administrative power on campus was Evergreen’s president, George Bridges, who had arrived on campus in the fall of 2015 after heading Whitman College, a private liberal-arts institution in eastern Washington. “When George arrived, there were four vice presidents. Now there are six, and they’re recruiting a seventh,” Zimmerman told me. “This at a time when enrollments are down—and those vice presidents are paid more than any other position on campus.”
Zimmerman’s article helps solve a mystery at the center of the protests: why the firing of longtime Evergreen biology professor Bret Weinstein became one of the protesters’ chief aims, leading to the invasion of his classroom. Weinstein had publicly objected to a change in Evergreen’s annual “Day of Absence” that for the first time in the history of the day asked whites to remove themselves from the Evergreen campus. (In the past members of ethnic minorities had voluntarily absented themselves, as a form of dramatizing how important their contributions were to college life.) Weinstein had argued that more or less requiring whites to leave campus (their absence wasn’t mandatory, but it was strongly encouraged in administrative emails at the penalty of being considered insufficiently racially sensitive) was categorically different from minorities’ willing departures. But the disputed Day of Absence had taken place in early April, and it was not until May 23 that a cadre of about 50 Evergreen students interrupted Weinstein’s class and surrounded him with taunts and jeers until campus police intervened.
According to Zimmerman’s article, Weinstein had actually been a focus of controversy—not necessarily among Evergreen students but certainly among some administrators and faculty members—since at least November 2016. That was the month that Evergreen’s Equity and Inclusion Council—a heavily-minority panel of 22 Evergreen staffers and six faculty members that had been reformulated by Bridges soon after his arrival—sprang onto the rest of the professors a “Strategic Equity Plan” for retaining and graduating minority students that would drastically alter Evergreen’s curriculum and faculty hiring practices, all to guarantee equality of academic outcome. According to Zimmerman’s HuffPost article, there were hints that professors who didn’t want to go along with the plan, presented as if with Bridges’s blessing, didn’t belong at Evergreen.
Weinstein, according to Zimmerman, began to question in a series of emails whether the Strategic Equity Plan would actually benefit Evergreen’s minority students. This earned him the enmity of one particular African-American faculty member on the committee, film studies professor Naima Lowe, who repeatedly called Weinstein a racist at several faculty meetings. Zimmerman wrote:
Zimmerman’s article didn’t identify Lowe by name, but he did write that she was the same professor who appeared (identified by name) on a viral May 23, 2017, video made just hours after the invasion of Weinstein’s office in which she hurled F-bombs at white Evergreen professors who had apparently balked at implementing the Equity Council’s proposals. Lowe yelled: “This is about THEIR needs! And that Equity Council handed you—handed you—a way to do this EASILY!”
Furthermore, according to Zimmerman, it was one of Lowe’s classes that directly led to the student riots. On May 10 a black Evergreen student who called himself by the solo name Jamil—and had, according to Zimmerman, already been investigated for allegedly nearly knocking down and seizing the microphone of an Evergreen vice president during the swearing-in of a new chief of campus police in January 2017—posted an entry on the college’s Facebook page calling for people of color to sign up for Lowe’s upcoming class “Mediaworks: Re/Presenting Power and Difference” so as to make the program “majority Black/Brown.” When another self-described student of color objected that this was reverse racism, a series of angry in-person confrontations followed involving that student, Jamil, and a friend of Jamil’s that resulted in the latter two being questioned by the campus police on May 14. The invasion of Weinstein’s office took place a little more than a week later.
Now, of course it’s hard to say whether there was any overt coordination between the Evergreen student rioters and the Evergreen Equity and Inclusion Council—much less whether Evergreen’s radical students were actually patsies for Evergreen’s radical faculty and staff—but it should be noted that Bridges, in pretty much capitulating to the students on May 26, agreed to implement several demands that were already on the council’s Strategic Plan agenda: mandatory cultural sensitivity training for the faculty, for example. And Naima Lowe was certainly a bridge figure between radical professors and administrators and the radical students. But at least Bridges didn’t give in to one demand obviously dear to the heart of both the students and Lowe herself: Fire Weinstein.
