A few minutes later Bridges pleaded over the din to let him please adjourn the meeting so he could read the list of demands: "You have to give me some privacy, folks. By the time 5 p.m., Friday, May 26, rolled aroundthe deadline the angry students had given to President Bridgesthe protesters had broadened their chant to "Hey hey! Since May 23, the 4,089-student public liberal arts college in Olympia, Washington, has been embroiled in what the media euphemistically call "student protests" over perceived racial grievances. Bret Weinstein has got to go!". Europe: 50 (+6) countries, 230 languages, 743M people 1 subreddit. Weinstein, who identifies as politically left, had announced he was boycotting a decades-old event created by students of color at the school. 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. Weinstein spoke to the media, and some homed in on the viral youtube videos as the latest example of a growing political correctness culture on college campuses. Evergreen State College (whose enrollment has tanked to 50% pre-protest) has hired someone to run a "Office of Spirituality & Meaning Making." Their job includes a daily Tarot reading. This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. 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. 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. All campus activities would be subsumed into this quest, which would include some version of "mandatory anti-oppression training for the faculty" (a condition that Evergreen professors, progressive though they might be, rejected by majority vote); the creation of a new administrative position for a "VP for Equity and Inclusion," who would be independently budgeted and operate autonomously; "equity"-based curriculum planning and assessment of student learning; and a requirement that all future faculty hires be subjected to an "equity justification." . class kills 16-year-old, Washington school says, Arts Walk returns with a flourish as Luminary Procession takes to the streets, Whats happening this week around Thurston County, Lacey Elementary would add 100 students under proposed boundary change, district says, Tukwila superintendent appointed to top job at Capital Region ESD 113, North Thurstons Deb Clemens is a finalist for top job at Capital Region ESD 113, Olympia school closures off the table for now as district cuts budget deficit to $10.5 million, Evergreen board accepts $2 million in gifts as it hears mostly positive news about the college, WA only has two Women in STEM chapters. Evergreen students wanted her fired because, well, because she was the chief of police. In exchange, they left their jobs and the college, and the college didnt admit liability. 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. Campus police detain two students after a week of escalating Internet conversations. About 120 incident reports involving 180 students were filed during the campus unrest, college spokeswoman Sandra Kaiser told The Olympian. It's difficult all the time to kind of navigate your way around institutions that are not created for you. Police Chief Brown was asked by protesters to attend without weapons, and Bridges told her to adhere to that request. Evergreen State is already having trouble attracting studentsand it might take a lesson from the University of Missouri, which is shutting down dorms and laying off staff in the wake of a 23 percent freshman enrollment decline after widely publicized student-protest belligerence in 2015. About 80 protesters have been sanctioned for breaking the student conduct code at The Evergreen State College in Olympia last spring, when race-related protests . And she too was declared to be a racist when she expressed displeasure with the administration for not permitting the police to protect her husband. In 2015, two unarmed black students were shot and wounded by an Olympia police officer for allegedly stealing beer and assaulting the officer with their skateboards. Weinstein talks about the protests and his views on Tucker Carlsons FOX News show, in a segment called Campus Craziness.. Do I feel responsible for it? "Hey hey! But what seems to have triggered the most recent fracas was a May 10 post on Evergreen's Class of 2020 Facebook page by a black student at Evergreen who goes only by the name Jamil. Meanwhile, Evergreen's administration has not decided if the Day of Absence Event will happen this year. 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. Weinstein centering himself is not only dishonest, but contributes directly to the culture of hostility that students protested. No. You communist, scumbag town. The Evergreen State protesters at the May 24 meeting, munching their pizza slices while a jacketless, white-shirted Bridges stood abjectly before them holding a multipage list of their written demands, clearly regarded such solicitude for their sensibilities as so much contemptible weakness. In 2010, she co-produced a documentary series on New Yorks baseball history that aired on Channel Thirteen. Ivette holds a Masters degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where she specialized in broadcast journalism. I, at least, have been going through a mixture of feeling betrayed feeling angry. SEPT. 21, 2016: STUDENTS PROTEST . Brown, herself a graduate of Evergreen, had hoped to bring an enhanced sense of community policing to the campus and to break down barriers between students and campus police. If youre not paying me cash money, working on an impeachment plan, or burning a cop shop to the ground, we dont have much to say to each other, according to faculty member Bret Weinsteins tort claim filed this summer against Evergreen. Bridges countered that the University of Chicago was simply "tone deaf to the academic and developmental needs of many students.". Evergreen's likely most famous graduate is Matt Groening (class of 1977), creator of The Simpsons. "Made by my mama!" The school's motto isno jokeOmnia Extares: Let it all hang out. 281 votes, 94 comments. He is charged with making terroristic threats, criminal coercion and raising a false public alarm, according to police and federal officials. And there was more: the creation of an "equity center." A sociologist by training, he specialized academically in studying racial disparities in the sentencing of criminal defendants, thus burnishing his liberal credentials. . The council also proposed only hiring faculty who can incorporate race into their teaching, which Weinstein opposed. 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. The student who played the largest role in the protest, the one who organized the taking of administrative hostages and who was seen patrolling the campus with a baseball bat, was rewarded for those efforts by being hired by Evergreen to serve as a "Presidential Equity Advisor" over the summer. About. A faculty member asked if it was okay for white students or other white people to use that word and looked at me. 2023 BuzzFeed, Inc. All rights reserved. ", That psychological condition might have resonated with the high achievers at Whitman. There are seven patrol officers in the Evergreen force, which is stretched thin covering 24-hour shifts. And so the result of that was to really get their attention without the administration being able to get out of it. Near the end of the semester, Evergreen was closed for three days because of threats from people who were opposed to the student protests, and officials elected to move its graduation ceremony off campus. On November 11, 2016, slightly more than a year into Bridges' presidency at Evergreen, the Equity and Inclusion Council released a 39-page report. A Campus Argument Goes Viral. ", "So they need to be told that these assignments won't be done on time, and we don't need to be penalized for that.". In the months following the 2016 presidential election, Love says flyers for black, transgender and undocumented student programming were torn down from college spaces. The protestors demanded that she be fired but provided only vague, if overly incendiary, reasons. Weinstein and Heying were two of Evergreens most popular instructors and their offerings always had waiting lists of students hoping to enroll. Some Evergreen faculty members and students say his appearance fueled attacks on the campus from the alt-right. 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. On March 15 Weinstein shot off a polite but strongly worded email to Love in which he pointed out that although she and the First Peoples office had used the language of "choices" in setting the new Day of Absence policy, "encouraging" whites to stay awayin contrast to the past practice in which minorities had voluntarily absented themselvesamounted to a "show of force, an act of oppression in and of itself." 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. Professor Weinstein protests against the new format for Day of Absence/Day of Presence, in which whites will be asked to leave campus, rather than the tradition of having people of color leave campus. Ivette Feliciano, Zachary Green 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. L. Purce, had held the presidency from 2000 until his retirement in 2015, embarking on an ambitious building program and other capital improvements to the campus, whose 1960s infrastructure (judging from photos) hasn't aged particularly well. Several days of vociferous student debate and back-and-forth charges of racism ensued, culminating on the night of May 14 in a confrontation between Douvia and Jamil, who was accompanied by another black student, Timeko Williams Jr. Douvia called the campus police afterwards to say that he felt "unsafe," and the police detained Jamil and Williams for questioning for several hours before releasing the two early on the morning of May 15. Andrea Seabert Olsen was the student conduct officer, the person responsible for overseeing the student code of conduct. 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. 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. Some students call for a boycott of a conversation Bridges scheduled with students on race relations. Sophomore Justin Puckett often feels like an outsider in his classes. (Corrie had been in Gaza as part of a senior-year independent study project and had joined a protest group that positioned its members in front of bulldozers destroying houses that the Israelis said were used as cover to shoot at their troops and smuggle arms.) The students who are in the most danger in the current climate and culture of both the Evergreen campus and the United States do not view Seabert Olsen as a safe person to seek help from. Shes no longer serving as the student conduct officer, a position shes held for many years. The strippers were black, and the white fraternity brothers had treated them in a "disgusting and degrading" fashion that involved smearing them with ketchup and penetrating them with cucumbers. But racial tension at the college had been brewing for months. The healing. Hey hey, ho ho racist teachers have got to go. Whats going on there? Thank you. This video was excised from YouTube for violating the site's "harassment and bullying" policy after protesters complained it had been selectively edited to make them look like harassers and bullies. Lowe yells. It was pretty shocking, actually, said Brian Stewart, 38, of Onalaska, who was in the class and is pursuing a masters degree in Evergreens environmental studies program. Jeers and general derision followed, as Bridges tried to shush them with his free hand and make himself heard. And Evergreen reports a lower retention rate for students of color than for white students. The departure of Weinstein and Heying from Evergreen has another critically important downside for the college and its students. 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. Thanks to these sorts of things, what we're seeing now is an inversion. 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. One or more people blared an air horn repeatedly, preventing anyone from hearing much of anything, college officials wrote. But, while Evergreen is far from perfect, pretending it is a hotbed of racism is both disingenuous and dangerous. When you look at those videos from last spring, they were calling him a white supremacist, racist, and, you know, shutting him down. I was really surprised at how angry some of the white students were at the black students that were protesting, she said. 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. They are making an effort to diminish our voices and take control of a situation they refused to acknowledge until it began to tarnish their reputation. Will Republicans really pick the one candidate Biden can beat? Sharon Goodman, Evergreen's director of residential and dining services, felt obliged to send around a memo on June 4 reminding the bat brigade that "the use of bats or similar instruments is not productive.". You have that? Evergreen's commencement speaker in 1999 was Mumia Abu-Jamal, convicted in 1982 of murdering a Philadelphia police officer. 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. Participation in the Day of Absence event was voluntary. That email was circulated widely and fueled attacks that led to the charge that he was a racist. . ", 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.". Graduation day at Evergreen State College. Lawmakers in Washington State are looking to strip funds from Evergreen State College in the wake of chaotic, radical protests and a threat that shut down the campus on Thursday. And that is on the people who behaved that way, not on me for exposing it. 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. Administrators can help win the battle for money and power by A) inviting external regulation and accreditation of faculty, B) imposing strict and overly broad speech, harassment, and ideological codes, and C) requiring faculty syllabi to fit administrators' commitments. It was terrifying. Student Protestors And Their Faculty Allies At The Evergreen State College Win A Battle But Lose The War. She says she was turned away from one such resource available to first generation and low-income students because she is undocumented, and that the school offered her no other options. 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. He was also a vocal member of the faculty consistently calling for open debate and discussion about many issues including those centered on the campuss equity initiative. The faculty's refusal to undergo mandatory equity training rankled in particular.
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