Oddly enough, despite its blue-chip progressive credentials, Evergreen State has been marked by quite a bit of racial tension. Still, before Bridges arrived on the Evergreen campus, a highly popular African American, Thomas. Alleged biased treatment by the campus police seemed to be another sore point. Later, the student who took the mic was accused of defacing the rear window of a police vehicle with the words We Bash Back.. The 12-minute video shows the husky, bearded Weinstein, clad in an outdoorsy-biology-prof black T-shirt, trying patiently to engage the students who have shut down his classroom in a "dialectic," as he called it. Evergreen State College - Wikipedia Zachary Green began working in online and broadcast news in 2009. Seabert Olsen has shown a consistent often violent flaw in judgment when it pertains to the needs and safety of Black students, other students of color, Trans students, students with disabilities, students who have experienced sexual assault. Home | The Evergreen State College She believes the country's university system is designed for white Americans. 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. It was not the first time that Weinstein had publicly taken a lone-wolf ideological stance in a racially tinged campus dispute. Counter-protesters clash with pro-Trump group Patriot Prayer at The protesters organ-ized a boycott of the meeting, sending out a press release stating: "We have already voiced our experiences over this year and Wendy and George have made it obvious they don't care about how recent events are affecting the student body. The protestors received a bonus in this case in that Heather Heying, Weinsteins wife and also a faculty member at Evergreen, was included in the settlement. Campus police detain two students after a week of escalating Internet conversations. 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!" 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. 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." 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 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). 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. In the spring of 2017, Evergreen State College, a public liberal arts school in Olympia, Washington, erupted with protests, and youtube videos of the unrest went viral. 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. A "Trans & Queer Center coordinator." What you are seeing is months and years of being ignored." This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. ", That psychological condition might have resonated with the high achievers at Whitman. Its difficult to see how one could reach such a conclusion. 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. Some students call for a boycott of a conversation Bridges scheduled with students on race relations. (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.) 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. The Evergreen State College professor at the center of campus protests this spring will receive $500,000 in a . It can be kind of draining to have just to just be the only black person or the only a person of color in general and be looked at to speak for the black community as a whole, which I have experienced. Ivette Feliciano, Zachary Green 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. Bridges meets with students at 4 p.m. to discuss Weinstein, the actions of ODell and other concerns. It's difficult all the time to kind of navigate your way around institutions that are not created for you. Evergreen students wanted her fired because, well, because she was the chief of police. Feeling dumbfounded. Evergreen State College reopens after violent threat and property A group of students send the following statement to The Olympian: What started out as anti-black comments on social media has turned into the dismissal of the rights of students and femmes of color, physical violence by police, and false sentencing of students protesting. The meeting opened with this exchange between a female protester and Bridges: "All of us are students and have homework and projects and things due. The call caused the school to shut down for several days and hold its graduation ceremony 30 miles from campus. The students didn't get everything they asked for. Charlotte Allen is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard. newsletter for analysis you wont find anywhereelse. That "mandatory sensitivity and cultural competency training" for faculty? It would have been one thing for my kids sitting in Red Square, where I can see them. Browns children and family were escorted from the area because of concerns for safety and an interest in preventing further presence in the situation, officials wrote. 2021 Regional Innovation Scoreboard: Top three innovation leaders are Apologies to the Native Americans whose "land was stolen and on which the college stands"? Students take over a conversation with the first of three job candidates for the vice president of equity position, and talk about recent events and history of racism on campus. In 2015 Evergreen's president created an Equity Council. February 22, 2018. We've been grieving. Threat to Evergreen College: 'I am going to execute as many people as I The school of about 4,500. What is absolutely clear is that the student protestors and their faculty supporters successfully achieved their main goals. Make no mistake about it, racism exists all around us and white supremacy has been and continues to be responsible for many terrible things. 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. 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. Evergreen professor at center of protests resigns; college will pay Weinstein and his wife, anthropology professor Heather Heying, who also works for the school, filed the suit over the summer . Weinstein is in the crowd. Bridges had meekly agreed: "I will disavow white supremacy. This year, however, Love informed the professors, it would be whites who would be "encouraged" (as it was reported) to stay off campus on the Day of Absence while "people of color" held their own "community-building" workshops at various campus venues (there would be no classes that day). But others say the riot only reinforces the need for tight campus security. He is charged with making terroristic threats, criminal coercion and raising a false public alarm, according to police and federal officials. And more free food, after the meeting adjourned at 6 p.m. That includes evergreen's chief of police, Professor Weinstein, and his wife Heather Heying, who is an evolutionary biology professor. The school's motto isno jokeOmnia Extares: Let it all hang out. . Viewed more than 86,000 times on YouTube, it recorded the events of a May 24 meeting with Bridges in his office, which the protesters had invaded and taken over, blocking the exits while some of them checked their phones and helped themselves to what appeared to be university-supplied pizza as they sat at the college president's conference table. Weinstein and Heying filed a lawsuit against the college and received a 500-thousand-dollar settlement in September. A male student standing behind Bridges informed him that if he didn't respond to the occupying students' list by 5 p.m. that Friday, May 26, "you need to pay for a potluck.". Four months later, what about the leaders of the protest? 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." 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. 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. It includes details on numerous events, including the Day of Absence/Day of Presence activity that Weinstein took issue with, his objections to the implementation of an Equity Plan, actions of other faculty members that he felt were inappropriate, and threats that he and his wife received. . 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. Evergreen continues going the distance on expanding athletics teams with the hiring of cross country coach Built for Times Like These - Evergreen Launches $55+ Million-Dollar Forever Green Campaign to Expand Possibilities for Students Dr. Maxine Mimms honored by The Evergreen State College at Founder's Day Event Don't miss these upcoming events May Head of ESG & Statistical Reporting, Leading Leaders - LinkedIn Evergreen, for example, proudly bills itself as "progressive" on its website. And it already has been, thanks to the smartphone. A school year of events that led to chaos at The Evergreen State College About 25 students stand to the side of the podium with their fists raised during a ceremony to dedicate a $12.75 million remodeled building after former Evergreen president Les Purce. 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 broke out on campus, college officials say. Evergreen State, founded in 1967 in the state capital, Olympia, a waterfront city of about 50,000 at the bottom of Puget Sound, 60 miles south of Seattle, was part of a 1960s wave of brand-new college campuses, many of them publicly funded, that aimed to serve an expanding baby boom population and also to experiment with nontraditional models of post-secondary education. 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. The word "equity" is a newish term of art in the lexicon of race-based activism.
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