The Evergreen disaster
The 2017 debacle at Evergreen State College, in the Washington state capital, Olympia, is an example of “a tremendous failure of leadership” on the part of the university’s president [vicechancellor], “although if you ask him, he would have seen it as enlightened leadership”, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education CEO Greg Lukianoff says.
Low-level protests had been rumbling at the university before erupting in May in a boilover that caused a temporary campus shutdown.
In The Coddling of the American Mind, Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt write that Evergreen, a progressive, liberal college whose mission statement includes supporting social justice, diversity and environmental stewardship, has observed since the 1970s a “Day of Absence”, on which staff and students of colour stay away to symbolically demonstrate the importance of their contributions.
But in 2017, white students and faculty were asked to stay away instead. Biology professor Bret Weinstein objected: there was a huge difference, he said, between members of a group deciding to stay away and encouraging another group to go away. In a shared space, “one’s right to speak – or to be – must never be based on colour”, he wrote in an email to all staff. He was also concerned that whites who attended Evergreen on the Day of Absence would be seen to be unsympathetic to the cause.
On May 23, a group of students marched on Weinstein’s classroom, and surrounded and abused him. They demanded that he not only apologise, but also resign. Fearing for his safety, some of his students called police. Meanwhile, protesters marched on the office of the university president, George Bridges, and abused him. At a meeting later in the day, white students who were not protesting were told to stand at the back and people of colour who supported Weinstein were called “race traitors”.
The next day, the protests escalated further as students occupied Bridges’ office. One asked rhetorically, “Don’t you think it’s continuing white supremacy when the leadership is only white people?” Several administrators agreed with the students (Haidt and Lukianoff describe this as “thereby validating the students’ grossly expanded definition of white supremacy”) and chants of ‘Hey hey, ho ho, these racist faculty have got to go” broke out. Eventually, Weinstein was advised that he should leave the campus. For the rest of that term he held his classes elsewhere.
The authors note that, aside from Weinstein’s wife, who was also a biology professor, only one professor publicly supported him (others did so privately). By early June, bands of students roamed campus with baseball bats, “looking for white supremacists”.
On June 2, the book says, about a quarter of the faculty signed a letter blaming Weinstein for provoking a “white supremacist backlash”. A few months later, Weinstein and his wife came to a US$500,000 ($744,000) settlement with the college, and resigned.
Lukianoff says Bridges was apologetic about things he had no need to apologise for; he acquiesced to student demands, said he was grateful for their passion and courage and hired one of the protest leaders to join his Presidential Equity Advisers group. “The handling of that case is probably the best example of how not to lead a university.”