Evergreen College Punishes 80 Students For Menacing Protests That Shut Down Campus

After standing idly by as radical cultural Marxists forced biology professor Bret Weinstein into hiding, the Evergreen State College administration has decided to penalize 80 students for their involvement with disruptive protests earlier this year that transformed the sleepy state school into a symbol of leftist repression.

Initially, College President George Bridges promised that no students would be held accountable for effectively seizing control of the campus library after a confrontation with Weinstein erupted into a full-scale riot last semester. That incident marked the beginning of months of demonstrations and protests aimed at punishing “racist” administrators, teachers, students and virtually anybody who disagreed with the students’ demands or their characterization of authority figures as racist, malevolent villains.

During the student uprising. school officials at the 4,000-student school received approximately 120 incident reports involving 180 students during the days-long series of protests, according to the Daily Caller.

“Of those 180 students, approximately 80 were found responsible for their actions,” Evergreen State spokeswoman Sandra Kaiser told The Olympian. “They received sanctions ranging from formal warnings, community service and probation, to suspension.”

An unidentified person who does not attend Evergreen State was also “arrested and permanently barred from campus,” an Evergreen spokesman said.

Video footage from the campus was widely shared on YouTube and social media. In one memorable video – recorded at the beginning of the protests over the administration’s refusal to fire Weinstein -  students at a tense community meeting can be heard going berserk, obscenely screaming about “racist white teachers” and “white-assed administrators.”

Weinstein, who published an editorial in the Wall Street Journal about his experience at Evergreen, and his wife were paid $500,000 by the school to settle a $3.8 million lawsuit he filed after he was forced to flee while students toting bats and clubs stopped and searched cars traveling through campus searching for him.

In early June, classes at Evergreen were canceled for three days after the school received a threat of violence on campus. In an disturbingly ironic twist, the school later had to send an email kindly asking students to stop forming vigilante patrols armed with blunt weapons.

The threats forced Evergreen State to shell out approximately $100,000 to rent a nearby minor league baseball stadium for its commencement ceremony, which had traditionally been held on the campus quad, which is called…wait for it…Red Square (the is derived from its red-brick surface).

It was around this time that public opinion appeared to turn against the students, as the protests were roundly mocked in the media, inspiring some Washington State lawmakers to threaten to revoke the school’s funding.

In a troubling sign for the school administration that no doubt played into their decision to punish the offending protesters, enrollment at the school plunged by 5% for the current academic year, leaving the school with a $2.1 million budget shortfall.

"Create Your Re-Education Camp On Your Own Dime" - Lawmakers Propose Defunding Evergreen College

Republicans in the Washington State legislature have proposed a bill to revoke $24 million in annual state funding for Evergreen State College after social justice warriors effectively shut down the school"s campus for two weeks after a faculty member objected to a planned demonstration that asked all white students and staff to leave campus for a day, as Campus Reform reported.

Protests erupted late last month after biology professor Bret Weinstein sent an email to his colleagues arguing that the planned “day of absence” protest was itself a “form of oppression.”

The email was eventually published in the student newspaper, angering snowflakes on campus. On May 23, more than a month after Weinstein sent the email detailing his objections, an angry mob of about 50 students disrupted his class, accused him of being a racist and demanded that he resign, as Weinstein recounted in a column published in The Wall Street Journal.

As Weinstein noted in WSJ, the day of absence protest is a tradition at Evergreen. In previous years, students and faculty of color would meet off campus. But this year, the events’ organizers – who claimed that the election of President Donald Trump made them feel “unwelcome” on the campus of the far-left institution – instead invited white students, staff and faculty to leave campus.

Weinstein objected to the protest in an email sent to staff and faculty back in March where he argued that “on a college campus, one’s right to speak – or to be – must never be based on skin color.”

And now, in response to the farce, Washington state lawmakers have proposed legislation to revoke Evergreen"s public funding, calling the students an "embarrassment." The bill is being spearheaded by Republican State Representative Matt Manweller, who introduced it alongside a letter to Washington State"s Human Rights Commission requesting an investigation into the administration’s conduct.

“You are a taxpayer funded school and the taxpayers expect you to provide an environment of education not a dystopia of indoctrination,” Mr. Manweller wrote.

“If your goal is to create a modern-day version of a reeducation camp, then do it on your own dime.”

While it would strip away some of the school"s funding, students at Evergreen would still be eligible for financial aid if it passes.

Evergreen’s administration kowtowed to the protesters, with President George Bridges promising that no students would be disciplined for their disruptive and threatening behavior.

“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."

"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 told Campus Reform.

“We must never go back to a segregated society - whether it be drinking fountains, buses, or school buildings."

“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 exclaimed.

While the bill’s chances of passing are unclear, Manweller says he’s optimistic.

Meanwhile, the Washington Times reports that more than 50 faculty members have sent a letter urging the administration to discipline Weinstein for…wait for it…endangering the college’s students, faculty and staff:

"Weinstein 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.”

Of course, the irony of this is statement is staggering. As Weinstein told WSJ: Campus police recommended he hold class off campus because of threats made by protesters, some of whom stopped and searched cars traveling through campus, allegedly looking for Weinstein.

When The Left Turns On Its Own

Authored by Bari Weiss, op-ed via The New York Times,

Bret Weinstein is a biology professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., who supported Bernie Sanders, admiringly retweets Glenn Greenwald and was an outspoken supporter of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

You could be forgiven for thinking that Mr. Weinstein, who identifies himself as “deeply progressive,” is just the kind of teacher that students at one of the most left-wing colleges in the country would admire. Instead, he has become a victim of an increasingly widespread campaign by leftist students against anyone who dares challenge ideological orthodoxy on campus.

This professor’s crime? He had the gall to challenge a day of racial segregation.

A bit of background: The “Day of Absence” is an Evergreen tradition that stretches back to the 1970s. As Mr. Weinstein explained on Wednesday in The Wall Street Journal, “in previous years students and faculty of color organized a day on which they met off campus — a symbolic act based on the Douglas Turner Ward play in which all the black residents of a Southern town fail to show up one morning.” This year, the script was flipped: “White students, staff and faculty will be invited to leave campus for the day’s activities,” reported the student newspaper on the change. The decision was made after students of color “voiced concern over feeling as if they are unwelcome on campus, following the 2016 election.”

Mr. Weinstein thought this was wrong. The biology professor said as much in a letter to Rashida Love, the school’s Director of First Peoples Multicultural Advising Services. “There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and under-appreciated roles,” he wrote, “and a group or coalition encouraging another group to go away.” The first instance, he argued, “is a forceful call to consciousness.” The second “is a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself.” In other words, what purported to be a request for white students and professors to leave campus was something more than that. It was an act of moral bullying — to stay on campus as a white person would mean to be tarred as a racist.

Reasonable people can debate whether or not social experiments like a Day of Absence are enlightening. Perhaps there’s a case to be made that a white-free day could be a useful way to highlight the lack of racial diversity, particularly at a proudly progressive school like Evergreen. Yet reasonable debate has made itself absent at Evergreen.

For expressing his view, Mr. Weinstein was confronted outside his classroom last week by a group of some 50 students insisting he was a racist. The video of that exchange — “You’re supporting white supremacy” is one of the more milquetoast quotes — must be seen to be believed. It will make anyone who believes in the liberalizing promise of higher education quickly lose heart. When a calm Mr. Weinstein tries to explain that his only agenda is “the truth,” the students chortle.

Following the protest, college police, ordered by Evergreen’s president to stand down, told Mr. Weinstein they couldn’t guarantee his safety on campus. In the end, Mr. Weinstein held his biology class in a public park. Meantime, photographs and names of his students were circulated online. “Fire Bret” graffiti showed up on campus buildings. What was that about safe spaces?

Watching the way George Bridges, the president of Evergreen, has handled this situation put me in mind of a line from Allan Bloom’s book “The Closing of the American Mind.” Mr. Bloom was writing about administrators’ reaction to student radicals in the 1960s, but he might as well be writing about Evergreen: “A few students discovered that pompous teachers who catechized them about academic freedom could, with a little shove, be made into dancing bears.”

At a town hall meeting, Mr. Bridges described the protestors as “courageous” and expressed his gratitude for “this catalyst to expedite the work to which we are jointly committed.” Of course, there was also pablum about how “free speech must be fostered and encouraged.” But if that’s what Mr. Bridges really believes, why isn’t he doing everything in his power to protect a professor who exercised it and condemn the mob that tried to stifle him?

The Weinstein saga is just the latest installment in a series of similar instances of illiberalism on American campuses. In March, a planned speech by Charles Murray at Middlebury ended with the political scientists escorted off campus by police and his interviewer, Professor Allison Stanger, in a neck brace. In April, a speech at Claremont McKenna by the conservative writer Heather Mac Donald had to be livestreamed when protestors blocked access to the auditorium.

Shutting down conservatives has become de rigueur. But now anti-free-speech activists are increasingly turning their ire on free-thinking progressives. Liberals shouldn’t cede the responsibility to defend free speech on college campuses to conservatives. After all, without free speech, what’s liberalism about?