Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein tell their Evergreen State story

I’ve written a lot about the ideological shenanigans at The Evergreen State College (TESC) in Olympia, Washington, and about how Leftists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, both professor of biology, were first vilfied, then attacked, and then more or less asked to leave by the University—all because Bret wouldn’t leave campus on the “Day of Departure” to allow it to be occupied solely by people of color. Even the campus police couldn’t protect them against threats because the cops were told to “stand down” by University President George “Invertebrate” Bridges.

Now, in the Washington Examiner, Heying and Weinstein give their joint take on the events, which corresponds pretty much to what I know from other sources.  It’s at once a sad and disgusting tale, and one not much reported by the mainstream media. (Of course, if there were an eruption of white supremacy on a college campus, with black professors asked to leave campus, and then demonized and called “racists” if they wouldn’t, and then mercilessly hounded by the students it would be all over the news.)

At any rate, you can read the 4,500-word piece yourself. It’s fascinating, and I’ll append two excepts:

These protests at Evergreen were not like protests many readers will remember from their own college days. Nor were they like the ones we had participated in ourselves. Both of us protested as college students before the first Gulf War, and again after the bailouts that followed the 2008 financial collapse with the Occupy movement. It was heady stuff, but it never approached violence. And, agree with us or not, we were objecting to policy, not claims of bias that are immune to scrutiny. This was different.

The protesters did let Bret leave[they confronted and surrounded him], but they assigned “handlers” to him and his students. And although Bret was able to have a productive, if tense, dialogue with protesters in small groups, the leaders inevitably intervened to stop such off-script activity.

By the next day, any gains were lost. Protesters stormed the last faculty meeting of the year, where newly emeritus faculty members were being lauded. They took over the meeting, stole a celebratory retirement cake, and said things like “Didn’t you educate us on how to do shit like this?”

The radicals blockaded the library, trapping employees and students inside, frightening several. One faculty member who had participated with the students in shutting down the faculty meeting held court outside the library, telling two faculty colleagues that “you are now those motherfuckers that we’re pushing against.” She told them to “go inside and listen to the students … or take your ass home … Two options: Go inside, go home.”

The protesters subjugated and humiliated everyone who did not fall into line. When they ordered the college president to stop gesticulating with his hands, on account of the presumably aggressive nature of his hand gestures, he promptly did so. When they insisted that he have an escort to use the bathroom, he acquiesced. They hurled obscenities and insults at him and others.

That evening, the same faculty member who had been issuing peremptory commands outside the library wrote to the campus community to say how proud she was of the protesters, and to reinforce an earlier thought from one of the radicals. “They are doing exactly what we’ve taught them today,” she wrote. What do you suppose the response to this email was? Horror, shock, quiet distaste? In some circles, yes, but the only people who responded publicly wrote to thank her.

I believe that faculty member was Naima Lowe, a toxic Regressive Leftist who harassed and vilified her colleagues for not taking the part of the students. According to the local paper The Olympian and other sources, however, Lowe is leaving Evergreen:

Naima Lowe, a media arts professor, resigned Dec. 6, according to Evergreen spokesman Zach Powers. Lowe had been on personal leave since the beginning of the school yearbecause of “online attacks on her (that) have multiplied through the summer,” according to a letter to faculty in September.

Powers said the resignation was a condition of a settlement Lowe reached with the college. She will receive $240,000, which includes final wages and attorney fees, to settle a tort claim she filed claiming discrimination and a hostile work environment, according to Powers.

Here’s an infamous video of Naima Lowe haranguing her colleagues. She seems deeply unhinged, and note that she’s holding a small d*g:

There’s were two other resignations as well:

Last month, the college announced Rashida Love, director of the First Peoples Advising Services, had resigned. Emails between Love and professor Bret Weinstein about the college’s annual Day of Absence/Day of Presence fueled tensions last spring and pulled Evergreen into a national debate over free speech and institutional racism on college campuses.

Stacy Brown, Evergreen’s police services chief who also was a target of protesters, left in August to become a Tumwater police officer.

The Heying/Weinstein article continues with an explanation for the police chief’s resignation:

Protesters showed up at the swearing-in ceremony of the new campus police chief, Stacy Brown, and shut it down. Brown, an officer with impeccable credentials and a good heart, who is herself also an Evergreen graduate, was thus denied the honor she deserved. One faculty member added insult to injury by writing to her to say that police are not wanted on campus. . .

Brown, the police chief, resigned in August, telling us that she had been given all of the responsibility, but none of the authority, to keep people safe on campus. Zimmerman, the ousted provost, testified in a congressional hearing to both the value of a liberal arts education, and to the madness occurring on campuses. We were told, during mediation with the college at the very end of summer, that the college was quite pleased with the direction it was going, and that there would be no veering from the course that we continue to regard as disastrous. We suggested that we could help change Evergreen’s reputation as a laughingstock to that of a beacon of hope, of viewpoint diversity and actual civil rights, in an ever bleaker higher education landscape. The college wanted no part of it.

We asked for leave, and were denied it. The college made it clear that they wanted us gone permanently. And so, in shock, feeling betrayed, heartbroken and livid, we left. We settled with the college for half a million dollars — about two years’ joint salary after our legal fees — a small price for two tenured professorships. Grief takes many forms, and we feel it, but we also feel that we were paid to leave a burning building. Unfortunately, we can do nothing for our many friends — students, staff, and faculty — still stuck on the inside.

The story goes on and on and on. There are so many threads and subplots that it feels dishonest to tell any version without all of them, but we must.

Heying and Weinstein settled with TESC and will not return, but they got only about two years’ salary for both of them. They still haven’t settled on what they’ll do, but I’m hoping that some truly enlightened college hires the pair. Their teaching evalutations (go to Rate my Professors here and here) were both outstanding, and it’s a damn shame that science education has been eroded by Authoritarian Leftist ideology purity. So much the worse for biology students at TESC.

Oh, and be sure to read Heying and Weinstein’s tale of the “canoe meeting” of the Evergreen State faculty. It completely epitomizes the infantilization and intimidation of the professors by Authoritarian Leftist students and administration.