The Fallout Continues at Evergreen

This was a first. When the riots broke out amid claims of widespread institutional racism at the famously progressive college, Evergreen president George S. Bridges’s first move was to relieve protesters of their homework obligations, offer them free gumbo, and generally accede to their laundry list of demands for more diversity officers and mandatory anti-discrimination training for faculty. The last thing on Bridges’s mind May seemed to be holding any of those students responsible for the lawlessness that many Americans saw on the numerous videos of the protests that surfaced on YouTube and elsewhere.

Furthermore, on May 24, the very day after the protesters had blocked the library entrances and swarmed the classroom of Evergreen biology professor Brett Weinstein—who had provoked calls for his firing by refusing to participate in an April 10 “Day of Absence” event in which white Evergreeners were asked to leave the campus—the college’s interim provost, Ken Tabbutt, wrote an email to professors urging them to relax their grading standards for students who had participated in these disruptive incidents (Evergreen doesn’t hand out letter grades, but professors do write evaluations of individual students’ performance in their courses). The email, which surfaced in early July on the website of Campus Reform, asked the professors to consider “the physical and emotional commitment” of the protesters when writing up their evaluations and make “accommodations for that effort, including the learning that is going on outside of your program.”

Around the same time as Endress’s statement came a came a surprising memo from Jamie Cooper, Evergreen’s associate vice president of student and academic support services, stating that the college’s bias incident response team had found that the protesters had racially discriminated against a white Evergreen student and that the university would include bias against white students in its training procedures . Evergreen junior Steve Coffman had attended a contentious May 23 meeting involving Bridges and the protesters and according to a complaint he filed with the bias team, had been told twice by other students that that as a “white person,” he shouldn’t be sitting in chairs “reserved for people of color.” When Coffman refused to move—or stand in the back of the room as a reverse Rosa Parks as the protesters demanded—he was repeatedly harassed, he said. Cooper’s memo stated that the bias response team had “determined there to be elements of bias based on perceived race” in the May 23 incident. “Your complaint will be included in the yearly summary of cases,” the memo continued, according to The College Fix,” which had obtained a copy, “[This matter will be discussed with directors in my area as a training topic for students working on organizing campus events.”

That was the good news. The bad news is that Evergreen’s campus police chief, Stacy Brown, who, like Weinstein, had been the object of raucous calls for her firing, resigned on August 2 after less than a year at her post. Brown’s troubles had begun at her swearing-in in January 2017, when a group of 20 to 30protesters disrupted the ceremony, where Brown’s children were in attendance, and grabbed a microphone from an administrator. The animus there seemed to be that the very idea of having a campus police force was racially oppressive. At a May 24 protest where some students distributed fliers depicting Brown in a Ku Klux Klan outfit. Bridges again seemed to side with the rowdy students. He had refused to let Brown wear her service revolver during that contentious May 24 confrontation, and had generally required the campus police force to stand down as the protesters reportedly strode around campus with baseball bats intimidating their fellow students.

Weinstein, however, is still scheduled to teach this fall, although he has a $3.8 million claim pending against the college for allegedly failing to ensure his safety and that of his wife (an Evergreen professor who was also the target of protester), and for allegedly tolerating and even encouraging “egregious violations (and even crimes) purportedly to advance racial social goals.”

Bridges, for his part, currently seems to be somewhat chastened and is no longer functioning quite so prominently as student rioters’ BFF. At a July 11 meeting of the college’s board of trustees (which had condemned the May protests) he acknowledged that that enrollment is currently down at the 4,000-student campus on the Puget Sound.

Indeed, Evergreen staffers and volunteers have been desperately calling about 1,200 newly admitted Evergreen freshmen who haven’t actually enrolled for the fall semester. Bridges also promised to beef up the campus police force and that Evergreen has actually begun disciplinary proceedings against six students plus some faculty members who were alleged ringleaders of the protest.

That’s a far cry from Bridges’ soft-focus stance toward the rebellion on May 26, when he told the protesters that he was “grateful” for their “passion and courage” in taking over the campus and obliging Weinstein to teach one of his classes in a public park in Olympia because Brown’s police force couldn’t guarantee his safety. But any positive news, no matter how feeble, is good news at Evergreen.