All three are no longer in the positions they filled during the spring and two are no longer employed by the college. And of that group, about 5 percent categorize themselves as non-Hispanic black or African-American. Weinstein later described himself to Carlson as a "deeply progressive person" who had supported socialist-leaning Bernie Sanders in the 2016 presidential primaries. Both students are black, and were led out of their dorms at about 11:45 p.m. by their residential directors to be questioned by police, according to the Cooper Point Journal. Some faculty members said they felt Weinsteins actions were racist, and that his appearance on conservative-news outlets brought unwanted attention to the campus. From the outset the protesters wanted (at least) three members of the faculty and staff to leave their positions, preferably by being fired. Later, in a meeting with college administrators, deans and a collective bargaining team for the faculty union, students present a list of demands. Attendees passed through metal detectors for Evergreen State College's commencement on Friday, which was held at a baseball. The Day of Absence/Day of Presence activity is based on a play about an imaginary Southern town in which all black people disappear for a day to demonstrate their contribution to society. That changed last year, when controversy over the event led to protests, counterprotests, threats and national debate. Four months later, what about the leaders of the protest? She says a 40-person planning committee, which included white members, made the change to the Day of Absence event as a show of solidarity with students who were feeling increasingly unwelcome at the school. Evergreen has held the event for many years, and last spring, instead of having students of color go off campus, organizers invited white students to stay off campus for the day. ", The Evergreen protesters ought to have walked away grinning from ear to earalthough 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. Weinstein, who had criticized the colleges equity-action plan and a change to the format of the campuss annual Day of Absence/Day of Presence, became a target for demonstrators at the liberal-arts school and a folk hero for conservative news outlets. In the months following the 2016 presidential election, Love says flyers for black, transgender and undocumented student programming were torn down from college spaces. Apologies to the Native Americans whose "land was stolen and on which the college stands"? pay $100,000 to rent Cheney Stadium, Tacomas minor-league baseball stadium, arrested for allegedly making phone calls, tells the state Senate Law and Justice Committee, Evergreen student: It could be a really great year or it could be really awful, Dueling demonstrations at Evergreen State College, Olympia School District adds music program, more staff to list of budget cuts, Attorney Generals Office wont defend Legislature in public records lawsuit, Police investigating mans death in west Olympia as a homicide, Gruesome freak accident in P.E. In exchange, they left their jobs and the college, and the college didnt admit liability. In his time at NewsHour, he has reported on a wide variety of topics, including climate change, immigration, voting rights, and the arts. You can find our alumni everywhere!". It's difficult all the time to kind of navigate your way around institutions that are not created for you. "This is about THEIR needs!" The Evergreen State College closed again Monday, the second time in days that security concerns led college officials to shut down a campus that has gotten national attention after protests over race. That includes evergreen's chief of police, Professor Weinstein, and his wife Heather Heying, who is an evolutionary biology professor. But those are people who seem to view anyone who disagrees with them as a white supremacist. Evergreen State College will pay Professo Bret Weinstein $500,000 for failing to protect him from rampaging student protesters, according to a settlement agreement reached on Friday. Later, the student who took the mic was accused of defacing the rear window of a police vehicle with the words We Bash Back.. "In response to a . Ivette Feliciano shoots, produces and reports on camera for PBS NewsHour Weekend. 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. One protester had demanded that Bridges "disavow white supremacy." The lesson to be learned by students, faculty and staff alike is that viewpoints differing from the loudest voices on campus will not be tolerated. Before protests erupted on The Evergreen State College in May, student unrest against police and the college's administration had been building up for months. (Will anyone ever forget the fervently aggressive chanting as students held the campuss administration hostage: Hey, hey, ho, ho, racist faculty have got to go?). . I am currently a third-year student at the University College Maastricht studying psychology and Neuropsychology. Thank you. Zachary Green. 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. About. Will Republicans really pick the one candidate Biden can beat? In addition to the losses outlined above, student numbers are significantly down leading to a major budgetary crisis. You're useless!". President Bridges holds a meeting with students at 5 p.m. in the Longhouse, and fields criticism for a stark refusal to disarm the police, and, for the most part, repeating patterns instead of acting, implying that many things are out of his control, the Cooper Point Journal reported. Four months have passed since the riots that brought The Evergreen State College to the attention of the world occurred and with the start of the academic year quickly approaching for the college it is well worth taking stock of where things currently stand. . One Evergreen student told Olympian columnist Matt Driscoll: "There has been meeting after meeting with the administration. But tensions mounted last April when a request was made to change things up to allow participants of color to hold the Day of Absence activities on campus, while white allies participating in the Day Of Absence activities were asked to go off campus. Throughout the spring and early summer, many students and faculty of color were flooded with violent and racist emails. 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!" It creates a campus where you're just really scared to say anything, so you just keep your mouth shut. . The campus is evacuated in the late morning because of a phoned-in threat. Of those 180 students, approximately 80 were found responsible for their actions, she said. Weinstein centering himself is not only dishonest, but contributes directly to the culture of hostility that students protested. The ring of students was ripped apart by officer Timothy ODell when he shoved through protesters, injuring two students.. Whats going on there? 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 discussionyou lost that one! Campus Argument Goes Viral As Evergreen State Is Caught In Racial Turmoil (HBO) Trump claims he will be arrested Tuesday, calls for protest | GMA ABC News New Bret Weinstein Testifies to. 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 demandsfiring 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 potluckto 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. Can you understand why some people view that as liberal intolerance? One student stood in front of the podium and blocked a speaker from view, and later took the microphone and read a statement that lasted about three minutes. Vasquez said things turned ugly. Weinstein is in the crowd. 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. The funniestand also the saddestof the videos might be called the Homework Video, or perhaps the Gumbo Video. Video clips of the protest in which students are calling Weinstein a racist and demanding his resignation were posted on social media and went viral. Im going to murder as many people on that campus as I can. 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." When I voiced concern over the effect they were gonna have on the college there was a tremendous backlash that accused me of opposing the proposals because I opposed equity itself. Enrollment at Evergreen has been steadily dropping since a record 4,891 students in 2009. 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. 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. Learn more about Friends of the NewsHour. The council also proposed only hiring faculty who can incorporate race into their teaching, which Weinstein opposed. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/evergreen-copes-with-fallout-months-after-day-of-absence-sparked-national-debate, New federal guidance raises questions for legal marijuana. "Yeah, resign!" 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). "Hey hey! I, at least, have been going through a mixture of feeling betrayed feeling angry. 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. You said racist s! Because I had to go out of my way to find those answers to my questions which I feel like as an institution and you should be prepared. She too resigned from her position. About 15 people arrive together at the swearing-in of the colleges new police chief Stacy Brown, and eight stand blocking the podium, preventing anyone else from using it. Bret Weinstein and his wife, Heather. It's not an accident that all of our administration is white. Ho ho! Im gonna execute as many people on that campus as I can get a hold of. So, in the absence of these four people, has the learning environment improved for Evergreen students? Evergreen senior Sarah-Grace Vasquez, 39, described it as a Black Lives Matter event and a beautiful, silent protest.. ", 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.". Classes offered include "alternatives to capitalism" and "climate justice". Campus police detain two students after a week of escalating Internet conversations. But what those clips leave out is the fact that those students for years had been going about things the, you know, quote unquote "right way." A "position that will support undocumented students." Remember the movie PCU making fun of it all? After a number of them assaulted the vice president for student affairs during the aborted ceremony they were brought up on charges of violating the student code of conduct and had to deal with Andrea Seabert Olsen. 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. . Sophomore Justin Puckett often feels like an outsider in his classes. You asked me a question.STUDENT: You're going to listen I would like to answer it.STUDENTS: Hey hey, ho ho, Bret Weinstein has got to go. Charlotte Allen is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard. During the program, which drew about 1,000 attendees, two students stand by the stage holding a sign that reads Evergreen cashes diversity checks, but doesnt care about blacks, according to the Cooper Point Journal. The answer to this question reinforces the lesson about the dangers of questioning the campuss loudest voices. In June, two months after the Day of Absence, Evergreen received a threatening phone call. This summer, Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying, who also was on Evergreens faculty, filed a tort claim a prerequisite to a lawsuit against a state agency stating that the college failed to protect its employees from repeated provocative and corrosive verbal and written hostility based on race, as well as threats of physical violence.. Understanding the Events of the Spring of 2017 at The Evergreen State College: The student protests and unrest that took place in the Spring of 2017 at Evergreen must be understood in at least two different contexts: First, as a particular expression of an unprecedented national student movement of unrest About 29 percent of Evergreen students describe themselves as "students of color." Although his politics are well situated in the progressive portion of the spectrum. . . . Evergreen officials close the campus at 3 p.m. after there are several announcements of multiple demonstrations on campus, including one hosted by the controversial group Patriot Prayer. Prior to that, Ivette was the Associate Producer of Latin American news for Worldfocus, a nationally televised, daily international news show seen on Public Television. Among those who received threats were Rashida Love and her family. Subscribe to Heres the Deal, our politics 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). A Republican state lawmaker from Eastern Washington on Wednesday blasted recent protests alleging racism at The Evergreen State College, and said he wants the Legislature to privatize the. About 120 incident reports involving 180 students were filed during the campus unrest, college spokeswoman Sandra Kaiser told The Olympian. And Evergreen reports a lower retention rate for students of color than for white students. Get to work! Demonstrations disrupted last years convocation and a ceremony dedicating a remodeled building to former President Les Purce, as well as a swearing-in ceremony for the former campus police chief. The call for his firing was at the epicenter of the protests. The word "equity" is a newish term of art in the lexicon of race-based activism. ", That psychological condition might have resonated with the high achievers at Whitman. 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.". A student aggressively approached and took the mic away from Wendy Endress, the vice president of student affairs. . 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. For someone who's like already in a situation where they are afraid to ask for help, being told no it's like another setback. Students confronted biology professor Bret Weinstein in his classroom. Andrea Seabert Olsen was the student conduct officer, the person responsible for overseeing the student code of conduct. 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 Evergreenwhile 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. Weinstein linked the council's obsession with equity to the pervasive influence of Critical Race Theorythe notion that most social structures are instruments of white supremacyon the nonscience fields of study at Evergreen. creative thinkers and future leaders who study at Evergreen," he said. How to start one at your high school, college. Weinstein sent an email to protest the changes to the Day of Absence, arguing that encouraging another group to go away was quote "a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself". . 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. After Chief Brown made it clear to Weinstein that his welfare was at risk if he appeared on campus and that she was not being permitted to protect him from student protestors, he was forced to teach off campus. What you are seeing is months and years of being ignored." Evergreen is no stranger to protests, but college President George Bridges said some students went too far in May when they interrupted faculty member Bret Weinsteins class, and a day later pushed furniture against doors to create barricades during a takeover of the library building. These racist teachers have got to go!" But now administrators have far more power, and more and more faculty are there to serve the administration. 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. 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! ", 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). Before starting with NewsHour in 2013, she worked as a one-person-band correspondent for the News 12 Networks, where she won a New York Press Club Award for her coverage of Super Storm Sandy, which ravaged the East Coast in 2012. Two Years After Protests, Evergreen State College Works to Boost Enrollment, Retention Sara Weissman Jan 21, 2020 Long known for its lack of majors and its "integrated, team-taught" educational approach, Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington is certainly not your parents' college. 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. You communist, scumbag town. Protesters use furniture to barricade the main entrance of the library building, which houses the administration on its third floor, hand out fliers that depict Brown dressed in a KKK outfit, and chant outside of Bridges office. ", 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. 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. shouted the young man standing behind Bridges. About 1,000 students participate in the event. Racial tensions bubble over to protests at Evergreen State College resulting in protests that lead to questions on. While at Worldfocus, Ivette served as the shows Field Producer and Reporter for Latin America, covering special reports on the Mexican drug war as well as a 5-part series out of Bolivia, which included an interview with President Evo Morales. She says she never saw racism as a problem at the school, but that her opinions about her experience weren't tolerated by many of her peers. My studies at Maastricht University as well as previous work experiences have helped develop a variety of skills that make me . Sep 18, 2017 DailyWire.com. Disagreements about policy, about politics, and about tactics can be healthy especially on college campuses. He also produced a series on guaranteed income programs in the U.S. and won a 2015 National Headliner Award in business and consumer reporting for his report on digital estate planning. 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. This story was originally published September 23, 2017, 1:44 PM. 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. Police Chief Brown was asked by protesters to attend without weapons, and Bridges told her to adhere to that request. 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. But racial tension at the college had been brewing for months. He is charged with making terroristic threats, criminal coercion and raising a false public alarm, according to police and federal officials. 2023 BuzzFeed, Inc. All rights reserved. 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. While it is absolutely true that no one on a college campus is indispensable, it is difficult to see how the loss of these four individuals improves the Evergreen environment. 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." (The best-known of these colleges is the University of California, Santa Cruz, founded in 1965.) Indeed, there was a major demonstration at her swearing in ceremony this past January with students protesting the very idea of a chief of police and of policing in general. Rashida Love helped organize the Day of Absence Events at Evergreen. Attached below is the most recent list of . ", "It's the first thing I'll do. 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.
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