Michael Zimmerman was provost and vice-president for academic affairs of The Evergreen State College (TESC) from 2011-2016, but when the cowardly invertebrate George Bridges was hired as President, he summarily downgraded Zimmerman’s job, i.e., fired him from it. Zimmerman left TESC on July 1 of this year (2 days ago), and the very next day he posted a long essay about TESC on (of all places) HuffPo, “The Evergreen State College implosion: Are there lessons to be learned?” Zimmerman’s answer is a big “yes,” and he tells the story of the conflagration that’s consumed the college since November of last year, a fire whose nucleus is biology professor Bret Weinstein. It’s ironic that HuffPo published this, as they pander to the same kind of identity politics indicted by Zimmerman’s account.
I’ve posted quite a bit on Weinstein and TESC, so if you’re even a semi-regular here you’ll know that he gained infamy at the College by refusing to leave campus on the “Day of Departure,” when students of color asked white people to go away for a day (in the past students of color had themselves departed to hold seminars and events). Despite Weinstein’s stellar reputation as a teacher at the College and his long history of social and anti-racist activism, the email he sent got him called a racist, and the students became so agitated that Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying (also a biology prof at TESC) were forced to leave town with their children.
Zimmerman, now free to speak his mind, tells us that the demonization of Weinstein actually began last November, when Weinstein questioned a slapdash Strategic Equity Plan (see it here if you have the patience) that Bridges and a committee had put together. The plan apparently would have changed all future hires at Evergreen from not just requiring that “diversity” (i.e., race) be considered when hiring faculty (a normal procedure at all colleges), but that the position itself, be it physics, biology, art, and so on be required to teach “equity”. In other words, all positions would become social justice positions, a requirement that would kill off much of the humanities and all of the sciences. It would also enforce a stifling unanimity of viewpoint on the entire faculty (which is almost there anyway!). The plan hasn’t yet been adopted. Weinstein was demonized because he wanted to discuss the plan, which he thought would be bad for minorities and which statistical analysis said wouldn’t work anyway.
Zimmerman goes on about a few issues; I’ll quote him on them (indented):
The undiscussable Strategic Equity Plan.
[Weinstein] has played that role [the questioner and interlocutor] to a great extent and to the frustration of many this academic year, a year almost completely focused on the twin concepts of equity and inclusion on campus. Indeed, George Bridges, Evergreen’s relatively new president, reformulated a college-wide Equity Council and provided them with a very wide charge. The group consisted of 28 members, six of whom were current faculty members and they set to work to outline a strategic equity plan.
The Council created a plan without any public input and scheduled a meeting in the middle of November to present it to the campus community having announced that it had already received the blessing of President Bridges. The plan, as presented, was built on a statistical analysis of retention, achievement and graduation data and proposed to make significant changes to faculty hiring practices as well as to the structure of the curriculum. The meeting offered no opportunity for open discussion of the plan and was structured as an opportunity to celebrate the plan’s creation. Building on the region’s Salish culture, the meeting concluded with attendees being asked to metaphorically climb into a canoe to embark on a journey to equity. The implication was that if people failed to board the canoe, they would be left behind. Indeed, the sentiment was expressed by some that if you were unwilling to get on board, perhaps Evergreen was not the place you should be working.
Weinstein kept calling for the faculty to actually discuss the plan, something that apparently was not on. The College’s attitude was “here’s the plan; take it or shut up”. Read the Plan yourself if you don’t think it needed discussing. Well, a call for discussion of any sort was just what TESC didn’t want. (So much for what a college should be doing.) The results?
In response, [Weinstein] was branded a racist and an obstructionist. A faculty member who sat on the Equity Council explicitly called him a racist in two different faculty meetings. When Professor Weinstein asked for an opportunity to defend himself, he was told that a faculty meeting was not the appropriate venue for such a defense. When he asked what the appropriate venue was, he was told that no such venue existed because he was a racist. Neither the president nor the interim provost interceded to make it clear that leveling such charges against a fellow faculty member was unacceptable within the college community. When Professor Weinstein spoke privately with both of those administrators about these incidents, they both acknowledged the inappropriateness of the behavior but each said that it was the responsibility of the other to do something about it. Neither administrator took any public action in response.
What about the statistics that supposedly supported the plan but seemed wonky? Well, the faculty was supposed to shut up about that, too (my emphasis):
But even that tells only part of the story. As mentioned above, the Equity Strategic Plan was built on a statistical foundation. When the validity of that foundation was called into question, including by a robust analysis by an Evergreen alum currently in graduate school, the same faculty member who publicly called Professor Weinstein a racist began attacking scientists generally claiming that their reliance on data was dismissive of the concerns of students. President Bridges, upon being presented with the alum’s statistical critique, promised a response but none has been forthcoming.
This dismissal of data and analysis is of course characteristic of the postmodernism in which TESC is marinated.
Then there were the disruptions involving students:
A completely segregated course of study.
There was an on-going, mostly on-line discussion among students about limiting a program to be taught the following fall to students of color. One student objected asking how it would appear if the reverse were ever to be the case; if a program were to be limited to white students. (The program in question was to be taught by the faculty member who publicly called Professor Weinstein a racist.) The student raising the objection received a good deal of abuse and then, he claimed, he was physically confronted in the cafeteria. This student, himself a student of color, went to the campus police department to file a complaint against the two students he said assaulted him. The police began an investigation later that evening and one of the students interrogated was the leader of the protest that soon followed.
Student disruptions of speakers and ceremonies. I tell you, these students are entitled crybabies, a persona that, says Zimmerman, was cultivated and promoted by President Bridges and the faculty (Weinstein agrees, ultimately blaming most of the student unrest on the faculty). My emphasis here:
Fast forward to the day following the 2016 presidential election. Two campus events were scheduled for that day: a board of trustees meeting; and the dedication of the newly remodeled and renamed Purce Hall. Students upset by the election surrounded the trustees and berated them for their racist attitudes. The meeting was cancelled and hours later the building dedication was similarly disrupted – despite the fact that Purce Hall was named for Evergreen’s immediately preceding president, an African American who served as president for 15 years. Despite the chaos associated with both events, no students were brought up on disciplinary charges.
And this, in which Bridges behaved as the reprehensible and sleazy man that he is:
. . . we need to go back to the beginning of the 2016-17 academic year. Evergreen’s academic year begins with an all-campus convocation. That event includes a talk by the author of a book all in-coming students read over the summer. This year a number of students attempted to take over convocation and refused to permit the speaker to address the campus community. President Bridges managed to convince the students that they’d have a chance to be heard after the College’s invited guest spoke. Afterwards, the president sent out a note to the full campus community apologizing for his actions saying that he should have let the students speak when they wanted – that their voices were every bit as important as that of the author of the common read.
Can you believe that the President apologized for not letting the students disrupt the talk of a speaker whose book had been assigned reading for new students? And of course the students felt entitled to disrupt that talk. They and Bridges are cut from the whole cloth. They are the thugs, and Bridges the capo di tutt’i capi.
Faculty responsibility for enabling bad behavior. I’ll give one example here. You may already know that the TESC faculty called for Weinstein to be investigated after he went on Fox News, and that only one professor has spoken up in his defense despite others (including, now, Zimmerman) who have agreed with Weinstein but remained silent. Get a load of this:
On 14 November, two days prior to the meeting at which the Equity Council’s strategic plan was released, she [JAC: an unnamed faculty member that I name below] made the following post on Facebook: “SERIOUSLY JUST BE QUIET. ONLY APPOINTED/APPROVED WHITES CAN SPEAK (AND ONLY WHEN SPOKEN TO). When that post, a post by a member of the Equity Council, was brought to the attention of President Bridges, he opted to do nothing publicly.
An even more disturbing Facebook post by this faculty member generated no response from the administration but actually gained defenders from the faculty ranks. The post was in response to a note written by Professor Weinstein’s wife, Heather Heying, also a faculty member at Evergreen. After Professor Weinstein was warned by Evergreen’s police chief to stay away from campus because his safety couldn’t be guaranteed, and after administrators were held hostage in their offices by a student group, the interim provost wrote a note saying that if anyone felt unsafe, they should come and speak with him or one of the deans. Professor Heying thought this note was both insensitive and disingenuous since obviously her husband was unsafe in the eyes of the police chief and he was advised against setting foot on campus. The faculty member responded to this note by posting this on Facebook: “Oh lord, Could some white women at Evergreen come and collect Heather Heying’s racist ass. Jesus”
Zimmerman doesn’t identify the professor, but her name is Naima Lowe, a professor of media, and we’ve seen her before. Here’s her tweet (she also uses the Twitter name “Naima Niambi”:
That’s from a professor, and could be interpreted as a call to harassment or violence. Whatever it means, it’s unseemly, but in character with TESC’s ridiculously Authoritarian faculty.
The upshot. Zimmerman answers his title question with “yes”; the fracas at TESC has wider implications for American higher education. It’s what happens when Authoritarian Leftist students gain control of a school, egged on by faculty members who indoctrinated them with that brand of Leftism as well as postmodernism. I’m really surprised that most media outlets have ignored what’s going on at TESC. It’s a small and largely unknown school, but what happened there could happen at other places, for many schools—some of them good ones—are showing signs of Evergreen Disease. Chronicle of Higher Education, are you listening? Here’s Zimmerman’s conclusion:
The Evergreen campus has become a place where identity politics takes precedence over every other aspect of social intercourse. It has become a place where it is acceptable for colleagues to levy personal attacks on colleagues in response to differences of opinion and even in response to calls for dialogue. It has become a place where it is acceptable to shout down those with whom you disagree. And it has become a place where the administration watches from the sidelines, apparently fearful of antagonizing anyone.
But that is not what leadership is about. Leadership means treating all members of a community with respect and demanding that others do the same. It also means publicly holding community members responsible for their behavior. Finally, it means having and upholding a set of principles, even when doing so might be uncomfortable.
Evergreen is not alone in the constellation of institutions of higher education facing these problems. It is, however, a place that has allowed extremists to dominate and discussion to die. Others will do well to learn from the mistakes made on this campus.
Amen. The termites have gone very far, and dined very well.
