Evergreen Professor: Protesters Forced Me to Hold Class in Park over Safety Concerns

Evergreen State College professor Bret Weinstein wrote in the Wall Street Journal that security concerns caused by student protesters have forced him to hold class off campus.

In the May 30 column, progressive biology professor Bret Weinstein described his experiences at Evergreen State College, where student protesters are demanding his resignation for his opposition to the annual “Day of Absence” event, which, this year, asked white community members to leave campus for the day.

Weinstein places the blame on campus postmodernists, who he suggests have been emboldened by the policies of Evergreen President George Bridges, who was hired at the college in 2015. Bridges, he argues, reduced professional autonomy and increased the role of the postmodernists that dominate the humanities.

Racially charged, anarchic protests have engulfed Evergreen State College, a small, public liberal-arts institution where I have taught since 2003. In a widely disseminated video of the first recent protest on May 23, an angry mob of about 50 students disrupted my class, called me a racist, and demanded that I resign. My “racist” offense? I had challenged coercive segregation by race. Specifically, I had objected to a planned “Day of Absence” in which white people were asked to leave campus on April 12.

 Day of Absence is a tradition at Evergreen. In previous years students and faculty of color organized a day on which they met off campus—a symbolic act based on the Douglas Turner Ward play in which all the black residents of a Southern town fail to show up one morning. This year, however, the formula was reversed. “White students, staff and faculty will be invited to leave the campus for the day’s activities,” the student newspaper reported, adding that the decision was reached after people of color “voiced concern over feeling as if they are unwelcome on campus, following the 2016 election.”

In March I objected in an email to all staff and faculty. “There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and under-appreciated roles . . . and a group or coalition encouraging another group to go away,” I wrote. “On a college campus, one’s right to speak—or to be—must never be based on skin color.”

You can read the entirety of Weinstein’s column here.

Tom Ciccotta is a libertarian who writes about economics and higher education for Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter @tciccotta or email him at tciccotta@breitbart.com