evergreen state college protest leaders

Ta-Nehisi Coates, no apologist for the far right, made this point very clearly recently when explaining to Chris Hayes why Donald Trump but neither George W. Bush nor Mitt Romney should be considered a white supremacist. 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. $20 million spent on faculty is $20 million not spent on administrators. Campus police detain two students after a week of escalating Internet conversations. The protests at Evergreen State College were a Cassandra-esque prophecy we naively ignored, believing these things wouldn't happen outside the insulated and hyper-leftist bubble of. The report outlined an elaborateand if the council got its way, mandatorystep-by step plan for the 2016-2017 academic year and beyond. 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. Evergreen undergraduates, who make up the vast majority of its students, instead sign up for year-long, multi-credit, interdisciplinary programs that typically include a range of hard-science, social-science, and humanities fields. Thank you. It's difficult all the time to kind of navigate your way around institutions that are not created for you. But as Evergreen students have complained online, too many of their loosely supervised classmates simply coast along majoring in drugs and tattoos. Sep 18, 2017 DailyWire.com. 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. ", "It's the first thing I'll do. They barricaded campus spaces, wrangled with campus police, and stormed the president's office. 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,. The opening sentence of Bridges's statement in response to the students' demands set the tone and the tenor for everything that followed: "I'm George Bridges, I use he/him pronouns.". Ivette Feliciano shoots, produces and reports on camera for PBS NewsHour Weekend. For years students of color, trans and queer students and other minorities have been asking, then demanding, for mandatory equity training for staff and faculty. I am going to execute as many people on that campus as I can get a hold of. And really, you know, mourning the loss of an institution that I loved. 2 dead, 1 critically wounded in shooting at Cal Anderson Park in Seattle, Think Seattle-area property taxes are rising fast? According to school data, 29% of the student body is not white. But there was a big public backlash, including from the liberal left, and it died down for a decade. Protesters use furniture to barricade the main entrance of the library building, which houses the administration on its third floor, hand out fliers that depict Brown dressed in a KKK outfit, and chant outside of Bridges office. 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. 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. But what those clips leave out is the fact that those students for years had been going about things the, you know, quote unquote "right way." Some like, Fox News, mischaracterized the day of absence as a mandatory event where all whites were being forced off campus. Thats when it started going crazy and out of control. She says a 40-person planning committee, which included white members, made the change to the Day of Absence event as a show of solidarity with students who were feeling increasingly unwelcome at the school. A T-shirted student stood up holding a plastic-cup drink and waved her hand sarcastically: "People of color have to work in threatening environments every day! 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. For someone who's like already in a situation where they are afraid to ask for help, being told no it's like another setback. "We commit to annual mandatory training for all faculty beginning in fall 2017," Bridges said. Weinstein later described himself to Carlson as a "deeply progressive person" who had supported socialist-leaning Bernie Sanders in the 2016 presidential primaries. President Bridges holds a meeting with students at 5 p.m. in the Longhouse, and fields criticism for a stark refusal to disarm the police, and, for the most part, repeating patterns instead of acting, implying that many things are out of his control, the Cooper Point Journal reported. While it is absolutely true that no one on a college campus is indispensable, it is difficult to see how the loss of these four individuals improves the Evergreen environment. I was really surprised at how angry some of the white students were at the black students that were protesting, she said. "And that Equity Council handed youhanded youa way to do this EASILY! Prior to joining Newshour, Zachary was an Associate Producer for Need to Know on PBS, during which he assisted in producing stories on gun violence and healthcare, among others. The faculty member who was seen berating colleagues with foul language, who, on Facebook, asked Could some white women from Evergreen come and collect Heather Heyings racist ass, and who regularly and publicly called Weinstein a racist, remains in her faculty position. These racist teachers have got to go!" It was terrifying. .  .  . Evergreen gets high marks from U.S. News for its teaching (small classes, high engagement), and its marine-biology offerings are considered first-rate. Demonstrations disrupted last years convocation and a ceremony dedicating a remodeled building to former President Les Purce, as well as a swearing-in ceremony for the former campus police chief. The protestors demanded that she be fired but provided only vague, if overly incendiary, reasons. On May 18, Wendy Endress, Evergreen's vice president of student affairs, issued an email inviting students to a "conversation" about the recent events to be hosted on May 19 by George Bridges. 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 centering himself is not only dishonest, but contributes directly to the culture of hostility that students protested. The tactics might not have necessarily been the most appropriate but I think. Yes, some will say, indeed, some have said, that with their departures Evergreen has four fewer white supremacists in its midst. In addition to the losses outlined above, student numbers are significantly down leading to a major budgetary crisis. Republican state Rep. Matt Manweller, R-Ellensburg, announces that he will introduce a bill to privatize Evergreen and called for an investigation to see if the college has violated civil rights. She believes the country's university system is designed for white Americans. No. What happened next alarmed those on both sides of the debate. "This is about THEIR needs!" 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. And so this was an opportunity to say, "No, you do belong here. Even perennial ultra-liberals such as New York Times columnist Frank Bruni and Huffington Post contributor Matt Teitelbaum have been shocked at the spectacle of a professor held prisoner by students at his own college and taunted for racism for disagreeing with faculty colleagues. You're useless!". Prior to that, Ivette was the Associate Producer of Latin American news for Worldfocus, a nationally televised, daily international news show seen on Public Television. I have claustrophobia. The campus is evacuated in the late morning because of a phoned-in threat. After weeks of brewing racial tension on campus, hundreds of students at The Evergreen State College in Olympia protested against the college administration. I thought it was very ironic that the people who were telling me that they wanted to give a platform for minorities to speak weren't listening to mine. Weinstein and Heying filed a lawsuit against the college and received a 500-thousand-dollar settlement in September. 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. It was really scary. Later, in a meeting with college administrators, deans and a collective bargaining team for the faculty union, students present a list of demands. Feeling dumbfounded. Oddly enough, despite its blue-chip progressive credentials, Evergreen State has been marked by quite a bit of racial tension. 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. We've been grieving. Ivette Feliciano, Zachary Green In the past, administrators were there to serve the faculty and students. Ho ho! There are no letter grades (professors submit narrative evaluations of their students' proficiency), and there are no coursesor majorsas the words are generally understood. During the protests, students called for Bridges to fire Weinstein. Mumia, on death row at the time (prosecutors have since agreed to let him serve a life term without parole), delivered his 13-minute speech from behind bars. Classes offered include "alternatives to capitalism" and "climate justice". Brown resigns from Evergreen to become a Tumwater police officer. Senior Odette Finn was a student of both Weinstein's and Heying's and identifies as multi-racial. The couple agree to resign from their faculty positions, and will receive $450,000, and an additional $50,000 toward legal costs. Ho ho! I think if that's the only thing you ever see about this event or about anything that's happened at Evergreen, then I can definitely see how people are like, "Oh, these are just privileged, spoiled kids, who are, like, crying racism whenever they get the first chance." 2023 BuzzFeed, Inc. All rights reserved. In 2010, she co-produced a documentary series on New Yorks baseball history that aired on Channel Thirteen. ", 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.". Among other proposals, it called for mandatory anti-bias workshops for staff and faculty and prioritizing diversity in all future hiring decisions. 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.". Subconsciouslyor perhaps archetypally, since none was alive when Deliverance was ringing up the cash registers during the early 1970sthe Evergreen protesters similarly seemed to smell blood with the eager-to-please and ultimately hapless Bridges. 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. And people felt that even more, I think, in the political climate. You have that? Definitely. You communist, scumbag town. . The school had to move the location of graduation. Just keep your eyes open, you scumbag.. But racial tension at the college had been brewing for months. Labelling virtually everyone as a white supremacist trivializes the concept and emboldens those who are the embodiment of white supremacy. After Chief Brown made it clear to Weinstein that his welfare was at risk if he appeared on campus and that she was not being permitted to protect him from student protestors, he was forced to teach off campus. Bridges was amenable to that order, too: "We'll be paying for a potluck anyway," he replied. Weinstein sent an email to protest the changes to the Day of Absence, arguing that encouraging another group to go away was quote "a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself". It was about the use of the n-word. The Cooper Point Journal said the students sent out a news release stating: We have already voiced our experiences over this year and Wendy (Endress) and George (Bridges) have made it obvious they dont care about how recent events are affecting the student body. Weinstein and his wife, anthropology professor Heather Heying, who also works for the school, filed the suit over the summer . A video posted on YouTube and elsewhere that seems to have been made at 3:40 p.m. on May 23hours after Weinstein's class had been invadedshows an enraged Naima Lowe, a black professor of film studies and a member of the Equity and Inclusion Council, hurling F-bombs, defending the protesters, and telling some puzzled-looking white faculty members huddling outside the library that the campus unrest was their own fault for ignoring the council's recommendations. In November, she resigned from her position as Director of Evergreen's Multicultural Advising Services. "In response to a . Check. Perhaps because it's mostly relatively affluent white people who have the financial wherewithal to identify as hippies, the undergraduate student population at Evergreen (according to its own figures, using the Department of Education's ethnic categories) is 67 percent non-Hispanic white. This includes elimination of policies, practices, attitudes and cultural messages that reinforce differential outcomes by race or fail to eliminate them." He says it brought threats that eventually drove him and his wife, Professor Heather Heying, off-campus over safety concerns. The call for his firing was at the epicenter of the protests. Les Purce did not provide his prepared acceptance speech, rather he used the time to attempt to engage with the demonstrators, stated a memo shared with Evergreens top leaders. When you look at those videos from last spring, they were calling him a white supremacist, racist, and, you know, shutting him down. What's been done about that? Participation in the Day of Absence event was voluntary. But now administrators have far more power, and more and more faculty are there to serve the administration. That night, Evergreen faculty member Naima Lowe posted on Facebook: To my white friends: Youre on notice. A sociologist by training, he specialized academically in studying racial disparities in the sentencing of criminal defendants, thus burnishing his liberal credentials. ", Bridges assumed the presidency of Evergreen State only in the fall of 2015, after serving for 10 years as president of Whitman College, a small, well-regarded liberal-arts institution serving 1,500 students in Walla Walla, Washington. I. The Evergreen State College professor at the center of campus protests this spring will receive $500,000 in a settlement that was announced Friday. 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. The protests, which began on May 14, are the culmination of this, of years of documented and undocumented racist aggressions both from and within the institution of Evergreen. That changed last year, when controversy over the event led to protests, counterprotests, threats and national debate. You are also agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. The video followed the students yelling the chant in unison as they tried to block the campus police (probably called in by one of Weinstein's biology students) shielding Weinstein as he exited the building. As one faculty member has written, The scorched earth style of leadership by the college administration is disheartening for many of us. When voices are lost, homogeneity increases and critical thinking, the hallmark of the liberal arts, is diminished. 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. 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. Racist graffiti appeared on and off campus. A few days later, according to a report from a faculty member, Evergreen administrators sent out email notices warning students and others about the likelihood of violent off-campus white supremacists fired up by the Weinstein controversy coming to campus. Stacy Brown was Evergreens chief of police. The ring of students was ripped apart by officer Timothy ODell when he shoved through protesters, injuring two students.. A student aggressively approached and took the mic away from Wendy Endress, the vice president of student affairs. 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. When the cops arrived, student protesters formed a protective ring around the students of color conversing with Weinstein, the Cooper Point Journal reported. Students and staff at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, are teasing out how to define and express issues of racism and oppression on campus almost one year after an annual event there provoked a national conversation on free speech and civil rights. The changes to the Day of Absence event came on the heels of other major changes on campus that Weinstein and Heying felt were being forced upon the faculty with no room for discussion. Weinstein is in the crowd. (Will anyone ever forget the fervently aggressive chanting as students held the campuss administration hostage: Hey, hey, ho, ho, racist faculty have got to go?). Now the College Is Under Siege. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. Andre Thompson and Bryson Chaplin, two brothers had been shot by an Olympia Police officer in 2015 during an altercation, are found guilty on lesser assault charges in the high-profile case. . That includes evergreen's chief of police, Professor Weinstein, and his wife Heather Heying, who is an evolutionary biology professor. Weinstein talks about the protests and his views on Tucker Carlsons FOX News show, in a segment called Campus Craziness.. As the new academic year begins at Evergreen, student protestors and their faculty allies got much of what they wanted and the college has been weakened as a result. ", Still, Brennan wrote: "In the late '90s, we saw a wave of behavior like this: hyper-vigilant language policing, shouting down speakers, and the like. It's no Bellingham, WA lawmakers deadlocked as drugs ravage Snohomish County, rest of state, Woman shot in West Seattle, hours after 2 killed on Capitol Hill, Oregon tells a cautionary tale about drugs, but we're not listening. He is charged with making terroristic threats, criminal coercion and raising a false public alarm, according to police and federal officials. 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. They explained that we are trying to give voice to those who don't have a voice. 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. (The best-known of these colleges is the University of California, Santa Cruz, founded in 1965.) Check and check. Counter-demonstrators at The Evergreen State College Thursday afternoon confronted a Pro-Trump protest group, as state troopers in riot gear stood post to help keep the peace. Bridges countered that the University of Chicago was simply "tone deaf to the academic and developmental needs of many students.". Some Evergreen faculty members and students say his appearance fueled attacks on the campus from the alt-right. The school's motto isno jokeOmnia Extares: Let it all hang out. 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 first of the videos featured the May 23 invasion of Weinstein's classroom at 9:30 a.m. by about 50 angry students provoked by what they characterized as Weinstein's racism. Some students have clearly thrived in the campus's do-your-own-thing atmosphere, on its thousand-acre waterfront campus that combines towering eponymous fir trees with concrete-overloaded Brutalist architecture. A settlement was just reached that included a monetary payment to Weinstein coupled with his resignation. 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. 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. This summer, Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying, who also was on Evergreens faculty, filed a tort claim a prerequisite to a lawsuit against a state agency stating that the college failed to protect its employees from repeated provocative and corrosive verbal and written hostility based on race, as well as threats of physical violence.. 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. Some students call for a boycott of a conversation Bridges scheduled with students on race relations. About 120 incident reports involving 180 students were filed during the campus unrest, college spokeswoman Sandra Kaiser told The Olympian. 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. 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. Attached below is the most recent list of . The council aimed not just at matching the percentages more exactly but at ensuring the retention of minority students, who seemed to be dropping out of Evergreen at a higher rate than their white classmates. In his time at NewsHour, he has reported on a wide variety of topics, including climate change, immigration, voting rights, and the arts. I think the behavior on Evergreen's campus was exactly the kind of bigotry that would lead to that overreaction by the far right. Subscribe to Heres the Deal, our politics Andrea Seabert Olsen was the student conduct officer, the person responsible for overseeing the student code of conduct. (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 didn't get everything they asked for. The Evergreen State College More activity by Pekka Onnistumisia ja eponnistumisia kv-bisneksess osa 2: Starbucks Ketjulla, jolla on yli 20 000 kahvilaa 70 maassa on epilemtt kokemusta uusien 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. 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. Every spring quarter since the 1970s, Evergreen has hosted a "Day of Absence" event, where many students, faculty and staff of color gather off campus for a day to talk about race, privilege and other issues, while white students, faculty and staff are able to voluntarily participate in related conversations on campus. 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. One senior told us the school doesn't know how to support students like her who speak English as a second language and don't qualify for federally-funded programs. If a photo posted on Instagram is to be taken at face value, it has also meant wielding baseball bats and posing ominously on the balconies of student apartments. What you are seeing is months and years of being ignored." Weinstein's appearance on Carlson alerted the far right to the anti-racist protests at Evergreen, unleashing a flood of hate mail and a credible far-right terrorist threat that led to administrators evacuating the campus for three days in June. A "position that will support undocumented students." The goal was to shift Evergreen from a "diversity agenda"the standard-issue multiculturalism and affirmative action promoted on most college campusesto an "equity agenda," in which equality of student outcomes would be the top priority. She too resigned from her position. Students take over the meeting, according to a college memo. 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. This year, student activists demanded that all white people leave campus or else. 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. In June, two months after the Day of Absence, Evergreen received a threatening phone call. 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. The group consisted of 28 members, six of whom were current faculty members and they set to work to outline a strategic equity plan. People had Googled me to the point that my parents' address and their phone number had been made available. Throughout the spring and early summer, many students and faculty of color were flooded with violent and racist emails. He had objected to a college-sponsored Day of Absence on April 10, when white students, faculty, and staff had been encouraged to make themselves scarce on campus. Whats going on there? Evergreen's commencement speaker in 1999 was Mumia Abu-Jamal, convicted in 1982 of murdering a Philadelphia police officer. Europe: 50 (+6) countries, 230 languages, 743M people 1 subreddit. Evergreen's likely most famous graduate is Matt Groening (class of 1977), creator of The Simpsons. Bridges's refusal to fire him (or any other Evergreen employees targeted on the student list) may be cold comfort to Weinstein, however, because Bridges also declared there would be a "full investigation" of "any complaint of discrimination"and such complaints look highly likely in the future. That email was circulated widely and fueled attacks that led to the charge that he was a racist.

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