Lawmakers propose defunding Evergreen State amid protests

State lawmakers in Washington are fed up with the antics of Evergreen State College, and plan to introduce legislation Thursday to privatize the left-leaning institution.

As Campus Reform initially reported, hundreds of students marched through campus last week demanding the resignation of Professor Bret Weinstein, who had questioned the school’s decision to ask white people to leave campus for a day of diversity programming in an all-staff email.

In previous years, non-white students and faculty members voluntarily left campus to attend diversity workshops while their white counterparts conducted their own programming on-campus, but this year the format was flipped in response to complaints that non-white students feel unwelcome on campus in the wake of Donald Trump’s election.

Despite the protesters’ profanity-laced denunciations of him, school President George Bridges praised their “passion and courage” while capitulating to demands that they be excused from homework assignments for the duration of their demonstration.

The bill, spearheaded by Republican State Representative Matt Manweller, will be introduced alongside a letter to the state Human Rights Commission requesting an investigation into potential civil rights violations on campus surrounding the incident.

Manweller and his colleagues are also discussing the possibility of revoking $24,000,000 in annual funding to Evergreen State College, but pledge that all students on campus will remain eligible for full financial aid from the state, should the bill become law.

"These students and their administration are trying to undo the Civil Rights Movement. They are trying to re-institute a Jim Crow approach to education that Americans rejected over 50 years ago,” Manweller said in an exclusive interview with Campus Reform. “We must never go back to a segregated society—whether it be drinking fountains, buses, or school buildings."

Manweller made clear that he places the blame for Evergreen’s current situation squarely on the shoulders of administrators, arguing that they created the conditions for controversy through their unquestioning embrace of social justice and failure to condemn the excesses of student protesters.

“It is incredibly frightening that the administration at Evergreen would tacitly support Brown-shirt tactics we have not seen since 1930s Germany. That they would allow students to threaten professors and other students based on their race is simply horrifying,” Manweller continued. “The administration bears direct responsibility for this situation. They hired the professors who have elevated the pseudo-science of ‘social justice’ to a religious movement. Now all dissent is crushed by threats of violence or actual violence."

Manweller told Campus Reform that he is optimistic about the bill’s prospects, asserting that the internal contradictions of the leftist movement on campus will be its eventual undoing.

“Like all radical movements in history, this movement is also starting to turn on itself and eat its own,” he said. “Professor Weinstein is a liberal professor who teaches liberal values. Now those students have turned on him like they have on so many other professors around the country.”