That’s fine. But this year the students decided instead to ask white faculty, staff, and students to leave the campus instead, with white professors and students urged not to go to their classes. And apparently those who didn’t comply with this forcible segregation were demonized.
One was professor Bret Weinstein, who teaches evolutionary biology (!). Weinstein wrote the following email to Rashida Love, Director of First Peoples Multicultural Advising Services, protesting the difference between a “forceful call to consciousness” (previous events) and “a show of force and an act of oppression in and of itself” (telling white people to leave campus). He said he’d refuse to leave campus, and that one’s right to speak on campus “must never be based on skin color.” Finally, he offered to give a talk on “race through a scientific/evolutionary lens” (that would have been another no-no!). Here’s his email, copied to the school’s faculty and staff:
You can guess what happened next. The students began harassing Weinstein and then demanded he be fired. The 15-minute video below show students confronting him after they marched to his class.
The authoritarianism of the students and their insistence that Weinstein is a racist are reminiscent of the Yale students confronting Nicholas Christakis after his wife questioned the students’ criticism of Halloween costumes. Like Christakis, Weinstein is calm and rational while the students get angrier and angrier, finally screaming and cursing at him. (That’s what they do when they can’t answer his arguments.) Shame upon these students! One even says, “You’re useless; get the fuck out of here. Fuck you!” They also call him an “asshole” and ask him to resign, finally lapsing into chanting. Most of the students appear to be white.
I urge you to watch this to see how immature and entitled Regressive Leftist students can (and these are highly qualified students—one might even call them “privileged”):
The students (apparently also upset by other cited instances of racism) then made a number of demands to the college, and college President George Bridges capitulated to most of them (vowing a “full investigation” of Weinstein and others) in a statement beginning this way:
I’m George Bridges, I use he/him pronouns.
That says about all you need to know.
In the meantime, The Olympian reported that “After Wednesday’s protest, Weinstein was told by Evergreen’s police chief that it was not safe for him to be on campus, according to a King 5 TV report. As a result, Weinstein held a class in a downtown Olympia park on Thursday.” I suspect his career at Evergreen is finished. Even if he’s not fired, he’ll be demonized and hated forever—for writing a passionate but reasoned email.
I am horrified not only by the students’ behavior, but by the racism that’s become acceptable when exercised by nonwhite students. I thank my lucky stars that my teaching career took place at a University that tries to stop this kind of nonsense, and not at a place like Evergreen State. It must be like teaching during the Cultural Revolution in China.
In the meantime, over at Heterodox Academy, Jon Haidt’s written an analysis of EvergreenGate, and concludes like this:
There are several lessons that American professors can draw from these three events:
1) Never object to a diversity policy publicly. It is no longer permitted. You may voice concerns in a private conversation, but if you do it in a public way, you are inviting a visit from a mob or punishment from an administrator.
2) Do not assume that being politically progressive will protect you (as Weinstein and the Christakises found out). Whatever your politics, you are eventually going to say or do something that will be interpreted incorrectly and ungenerously. Your intentions don’t matter (as Dean Spellman found out at CMC.) This is especially true if your university offers students training in the detection of microaggressions.
3) If a mob comes for you, there is a good chance that the president of your university will side with the mob and validate its narrative (as the presidents at Yale and Evergreen have done, although the presidents at Middlebury and Claremont McKenna did not).
4) If a mob comes for you, the great majority of its members will be non-violent. However, given the new standard operating procedure (which I described in a recent Chronicle article entitled “Intimidation is the New Normal”) you must assume that one or more of its members is willing to use violence against you, and you can assume that many members of the mob believe that violence against you is morally justifiable.
I still wonder what will happen when students like those shown above leave college. They’ll either have to come to terms with people who oppose them and can’t be shouted down, or they’ll wind up running the country, in which case we’ll all be screwed. (I, however, will probably be dead.)
h/t: Mizrob, Eli, and others
The many instances so often being reported here of this revolting behavior by students flaunting their arrogant ignorance makes me relieved no longer to have any connection with any US university.
As a Berkeley alum, I will never be so resigned. All but a tiny minority there now behave badly this way. Don’t demonize them all.
As a UCLA alum, I’m not demonizing them all, for I am well aware that the vast majority of students at US universities do not act like those whose actions are described in posts like today’s story about what is going on at Evergreen State College and far too many other institutes of higher learning.
However, the constant flow of stories like this and the ability of small minorities of grossly abusive and self-righteous students to have such a horrible effect on university life, even to the point of getting the presidents of universities to kowtow to them, is a shattering and profoundly depressing development
Hence, my comment — and with great regret I stand by it.
Agreed.
The danger is not the number of students, but the fact that the administration passively or actively supports them.
It doesn’t matter if 99% of the students are not involved, if that small number calls the shots, the damage is done.
Why do the administrators do nothing? These student are on video berating and harassing their professors, just like with Nicholas Kristakis at Yale. No punishment. According to the guidelines, they should probably be expelled. If a right-wing student did this to a leftists professor, would the results be the same? I think not. I know not.
It’s they’re fault, ultimately. They’ve allowed this BS to continue to go on, and they’ve even encourage it at times. Students will only become more emboldened when they know that the only consequences of their despicable actions are higher social status, virality on the internet, and huge amounts of praise from their fellow regressives, online and on campus.
I agree; it IS the administration’s fault if they don’t stand up to unreasonable student requests and defend professors who are simply disagreeing with the students on a social/political issue.
This one’s still a head-scratcher though, because the rational response is so obvious; if the students disagreed with Weinstein’s position and are in the midst of using abesnce as a form of protest, then be absent from his class that day.
I went to Evergreen and am very familiar with what is happening there right now. If you want to see what is happening as we speak follow this link:
https://youtu.be/bO1agIlLlhg
If anyone here is able and willing, we need help. It would be greatly appreciated if you could share this story widely. Local and National media has been largely unwilling to cover the story. Weinstein has absolutely zero support within the college.We need some more attention from the outside like this.
Thank you Jerry!
It is amazing to me that mainstream leftist and centrist news outlets will not cover this prominently. If these student thugs get their way, then …, well, comparisons to the Chinese cultural revolution seem apt.
Like they would ever cover a story that makes them look so bad.Remember: all media outlets have goals and narratives that are not truth; not just Fox News.
Stop right there. There is no symmetry between Fox News misinformation and the rest of the actually legitimate media. This is such an isolated event that probably doesn’t rise to the level of national news, unless your goal is to paint all “leftists” with a negative brush.
Oh yes, so isolated. Never seen anything like it before.
And where did I say there was equivalence between FN and the others? I didn’t. I said they all have agendas, and won’t report on things that make those agendas look bad.
Finally, kindly refrain from telling me what I am and am not allowed to post. Only one person gets that privilege here, and it’s the man who runs this blog.
Whoops – not a blog 🙂
hahaha I’m sorry I’m sorry!
Please accept this kitten as a token of my sincere apologies.
I just associate wordpress with blog.
Profoundly disturbing
I read that there were veiled threats against his students. One regressive posted a notice he had the names of Weinstein’s students and would provide them, with pictures and descriptions in some cases, to anyone who felt “threatened.” Nudge nudge.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/hunting-of-bret-weinstein-evergreen-state/
This seems to me to be evidence of a conspiracy to deprive people of their civil rights. That is a felony. All the conspirators should be charged, and if convicted, expelled. I think there are also grounds for simply expelling some of these bullies on the basis of threats made.
As I said above, the administrations of these schools continue to encourage this behavior by refusing to punish the students, whose identities can be clearly gained, for violating multiple and the most serious sections of their guidebooks. Its despicable, and wouldn’t be tolerated for one moment by the students from the other side of the political spectrum.
Agreed. But sometimes it goes beyond just behavior that contravenes the university guidelines. There were clear threats and intimidation.
Plus of course, the spineless administration won’t do anything. I think local prosecutors can. My hope is they will.
yes, not only actions against the school guide that (usually) automatically result in discipline, but serious illegal activity as well.
Damn, here comes the Red Guard. I wonder if what the students are doing feels wrong to them on some level.
I wonder what they’ll think of themselves 20-30 years or so from now.
(History shows that a non-negligible number of them will have crossed to the other side of the political spectrum.)
This is beyond depressing. These students seem to be learning nothing at all, except all the wrong lessons about how to form a bullying lynch mob and feel permanently victimized. Looking for ways to be an oppressed victim is no way to develop in life!
It has to be said explicitly. The most important guideline when dealing with exaggerated moral outrage is not to engage. Just walk away and deal with it in privately. The natural tendency is to assume the students or other faculty will be rational but this is obviously not the case.
Having said that, these are still isolated incidents. It is worthwhile to note and report them but certainly it shouldn’t make anyone conclude that right wingers that disingenuously clutch their pearls at situations like this offer any valid options, or care.
“Having said that, these are still isolated incidents. It is worthwhile to note and report them but certainly it shouldn’t make anyone conclude that right wingers that disingenuously clutch their pearls at situations like this offer any valid options, or care.”
I don’t see how you can support this statement in any way. How do you know what’s going through the heads of right-wingers who report on this stuff? Every one of them?
Maybe they are truly concerned? Or is that just not possible for someone who isn’t on the left? I mean, one of our resident commeters here, Craw, is not of the left. Is he just playing around, not really expressing anger and concern, but using these incidents to his own advantage? That’s an insulting statement.
Furthermore, I think we’ve had more than enough reports of these things happening over the last year or two to say it a trend now. Maybe not things like this specfic incident, but no-platforming, calling anyone who diaagrees a fascist/Nazi and shutting down their speech, not allowing free exchange of ideas, regressive indoctrination…I could go on, but you get the idea. These are no longer isolated incidents, but a wave that is growing and must be stopped.
Many protests are legitimate social disapproval of monsters like Anne Coulter and Milo. There’s a difference between those and this example.
Yeah, when they disrupted Milo’s speech at a pucliv university (therefore protected by the First Amendment), when he was invited by a student group, and one of them punched him in the face, that was just peachy. Do you have any responses to my point?
Protesting outside an event is free speech. Interrupting it, harassing those who go or participate, and making lists of enemies isn’t.
For anyone following this website (and others) its pretty obvious this kind of incident (as at Evergreen) is very much on the rise – and similar things happening in other Anglo countries if not usually so dramatic. Re Milo and Coulter – you don’t have to listen to them and if they’re not advocating direct violence don’t presume a right to shut them down by threat or violence.
I sometimes feel that the US periodically functions in extremes – extreme right wing feeding of irrational and extreme elements of the left. This kind of vile behaviour can only maintain political extremism. The participants in cases like this one at Evergreen deserve to be expelled. They are a product of decades of (escalating) denigration of rationalism and the idea of social progress without idealised anarchy or violent revolution as artefacts of western colonialism. In the 21st century this has sadly manifested in hostility to or critique of science and modern scientific method itself amongst the regressive elements of the left a la many articles cited on this website and indeed elements of the March for Science.
Years of self righteous victimology ideology where ever new and smaller groups demand rights to the point that it is often at the expense of viability, larger humane causes or available resources. With so many examples where the most studiously aggrieved have seen a spreading legitimation of their precedence over the majority, I suspect administrators are afraid of the consequences of taking action even if in the end, legally they are likely to win.
Alric has argued in the past against free speech for people who he personally, “objectively” feels are hateful, yes?
Or am I thinking of someone else?
They are no more ‘isolated incidents’ than the monthly Islamist killing sprees occurring throughout Europe.
A lack of co-ordination doesn’t mean there is no shared ideology behind these events.
Bridges’ letter is the most pathetic piece of groveling tripe yet.
I saw a cell-phone video of what was the same encounter taken from the back of the room. Several non-white students had been pushed to the back of the crowd but were present and yelling loudly.
Forgot to give a cheer this level-headed evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein.
I wrote him an email saying that I support him, that I hope he doesn’t resign, and pointing him to my post.
His email is in the link to his name.
I was just thinking – is there something more that we can do besides writing emails and letters of support as well as messages deriding such behaviors and administrative reactions? How about teams of educators who are willing to travel to places like Evergreen to support folks like Weinstein, both with a physical presence but also an intellectual response to the regressive left? Some of are retired, and would be willing to actively participate in standing up to such nonsense. Can you imagine the impact of folks like JAC and others at this site making such a stand!
I don’t know the laws up there, so if someone can help out….
Can we file harassment charges on his behalf (I know of no state where this is possible, but…) or perhaps lawsuits or restraining orders?
I like the legal approach. If I was being harassed like this, I’d probably start with the campus police and legal counsel and then go to the local police and courts.
Don’t you think you should ask him first?
But seriously, you (all of us except him) have no standing.
yeah,, i figured we had no standing. Is there any legal action we can take on his behalf (assuming he agrees)?
What about the ACLU? Has anyone heard of them weighing in on this sort of thing?
Have not heard of such, and could not find anything online.
There are some instances in which the teacher has sued the school district for not responding to student bullying.
I have also emailed him. I hope it helps.
Only if he’s the kind of pretentious dick who talks about himself in the third person.
Everyone else uses the first person pronouns ‘I’ and ‘me’.
He probably means he answers to the pronouns ‘he’ and ‘him’ but like most adults trying to be down wid the kids he just makes himself sound like an idiot.
That’s what has always puzzled me about the pronouns thing. It’s all about the third-person singular, which is how others refer to you. If other people are talking about me, I’d be more concerned with the adjectives they use than the pronouns.
You though are not making a power play.
IMO he’s not saying he’s going to refer to himself in the third person. He’s saying “in case you were wondering which pronouns to use when addressing me…”
So IMO its more craven and brown-nosey than it is pretentious.
I thought that he uses he/him instead of
he or she/him or her.
http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/he_1?q=he
“(becoming old-fashioned) a person, male or female, whose sex is not stated or known, especially when referring to somebody mentioned earlier or to a group in general
Every child needs to know that he is loved.
(saying) He who (= anyone who) hesitates is lost.”
http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/questions-and-quandaries/grammar/pronoun-problems-heshe-he-or-she-or-just-plain-he
“Both male and female pro-nouns are acceptable to use when the sex isn’t specified. Therefore it’s OK to write “he/she,” “he or she” or declare one gender to use throughout an article. Many writers will stick with their own biological genes—men tend to use the pronoun “he” while women generally use “she.” Both ways are perfectly fine. The preference lies in the hands of the writer. “
Looks like the Inmates have taken over the Asylum. I agree this should not be dealt with collectively as a group but only individually. It the College Administration does not know this, they do not belong there. And individually, the student would either shut up a fly right as they say or be gone.
I wonder what will happen when those people leave college, too? There can’t be enough new administration jobs in education to support all of them. I would love to know the employment rates for graduates who have degrees in one of the concentrations most heavily influenced by gender/race theory. From what I’ve seen, they seem to be almost content free. Have we reached peak higher ed? I would seriously consider hiring high school graduates.
They’ll either live off trust funds, find regressive non-profits who think their actions were “brave” and “apperopriate,” find social work, or, scariest of all, become HR department heads.
At the rate my alma mater is adding administrative positions, there might be space for all of them. Sigh. The structure of the university is beginning to resemble a mushroom cloud, with academics in the stalk and administration in the cloud above it.
I wonder how much of it just goes away when they join the job market.
Sort of analogous to how a college kid can behave completely idiotically on spring break, but then go back and behave like an adult in regular life. But now, all of college is the spring break and they don’t start behaving normally until they leave it.
Who would employ these assholes? They are, at best, a lawsuit waiting to happen. Not all of them can expect their parents to support them for the rest of their lives.
I don’t see how they would graduate from any decent school, let alone get a job. But hey, I did not think we would end up with a jerk for a president either.
thats the worry
These leftist university students are all for diversity except when it’s diversity of opinion. Here, being ideologues, the left fails over and over again.
According to the message from President Bridges, the most.. unusual Demands are not being met at this point (firing various people, disarming campus police, tossing out their student code of conduct). But in truth those people might in fact be forced to leave. But other Demands are being met, and it is incredible that they are deeply and thoroughly “investigating” people who did nothing more than speak their minds, or even discussing with students what is an acceptable code of conduct for mobs of protesting students. Among the listed Demands being met, I did not at this point see a problem with any of them. Expanding support for minorities and LGBT students, and sensitivity training is desirable. And I am not just saying that because the walls have ears. And let me just add Long Live the Peoples’ March for Social Justice!!
On my campus there is no sign of this sort of thing from students that I have noticed. If I worked at the above college, the note that I have written above could get me ‘investigated’, and I might be hounded from my job. Amazing to realize that!
They should be “investigating” the students engaged in clear harassment and other violations of the student guide.
“… disarming campus police …”. They have a campus police??? And armed?
Sadly, many [most?] universities have armed campus police. From small privates to large publics, university police have a significant presence on campus. Rarely are they needed, but occasionally they are called into action, sometimes by an on-campus threat and sometimes by an off-campus incident. A University of Colorado – Colorado Springs officer was killed a while back when he responded to a shooter at a Planned Parenthood facility.
I don’t know why they’d want them disarmed. They’re clearly not there to detain or stop students harassing and threateaning professors and students in the name of regressive justice.
Right on. However, they are probably thinking that if they show up to harass folks like Milo and Ann Coulter, they won’t have to worry about armed police. But, unarmed police would have to worry about armed students since some states allow students to pack heat on campus.
Well, they didn’t have to worry about the armed police force that the Milo and the group that invited him to UoC was at when they disrupted the talk, harassed the attendees, and even physically assaulted Milo. It came out later that the police were explicitly told by the administration not to do anything about any of this if it (inevitably) happened.
Carnegie Mellon (for example) has armed police because when it was founded (as Carnegie Tech) it was out a ways from Pittsburgh and before the “rich suburbs” or the like. So it is something of a tradition. Also, up until 2005 or so, it was home to a rather unique scholar – Preston Covey, a Stanford PhD philosopher, sheriff and certified firearms instructor whose specialties were in the ethics of the use of lethal force (and conflict resolution in general) and in multimedia for philosophy education, which is how I got to know him. Curious fellow, but it was a bit weird being in the lab next to an office with a gun holder – he was the only one the campus police (other than themselves) let bring a firearm to campus.
(If I recall, he was also a one-off-handed shot, having lost his original good hand to polio!)
Dr. Coyne’s remark “… like teaching during the Cultural Revolution in China.” is very apt to this situation. It is entirely analogous to the attitudes of the Stalinists in the 1960s and 70s who refused to allow any criticism of Stalin’s or Mao’s regime even while they were murdering millions through miss-management and purges because “capitalism is worse”.
I am realizing right now that as problematical as these events are, they are not exactly like Stalinist Russia or the cultural revolution of China. Yes, there is an analogy to be made with the group thinking and strong repression of any hint of dissent and so on, but no one is being murdered.
Yet.
But how long before it happens? We have already been told that “punching Nazis in the face” is morally justified, so how long before some mortally-offended snowflake goes too far? Even one punch can unintentionally kill.
And yet, this is how Mao’s Cultural Revolution started: the “struggle sessions” and then purging of teachers who showed any sign of wrongthink in universities.
That’s a pretty low bar. People are being threatened, they are being harassed. We have seen people punched and beaten.
lol good point. “well, tens of millions haven’t been killed, so it’s not that bad” is less an argument and more of a statement of how much worse it could get if it goes unchecked for too many years.
Nobody is ever murdered until the murdering starts.
?? All I am saying is that there is an analogy, sure, but these things are not literally ‘like’ each other. Nor will they be. I will bet …
one million dollars.
I bet the people in Moscow and Beijing fifteen years before their revolution would have made that bet (well, maybe not Russia. No matter what, things were going down the drain; it was just a question of which way).
By the way , Ullrich’s comments said the students’ attitudes were analogous, not the entire situation, so the whole argument you’re having is built on a faulty premise.
As Claire Leymann pointed out too many people conflate morality with truth – as Plato did. It is up to us to find out and do more to over come constraints in nature to allow a more humane order with more opportunities, less subordination or exploitation, freedom from severe want, reduction of illness etc. Just pretending the world is inherently good and then blaming everyone with any position of authority doesnt solve anything. In my book we will never have a perfect world – but a better world. Some things are fiendishly difficult to solve e.g as we improve health of a society we have other problems – It is now thought there are likely hundreds of types of cancers and as we age our bodies have more side effects to many drugs – people surviving with terrible illnesses they would not have been born with or survived past infancy before there was advanced health care – ever larger costs to fix more and more complex conditions.
Just another face of “positive discrimination”. Have Americans forgotten they had eight years of a mixed-race president who insisted – despite having a Caucasian mother – that he is “black”? And the news media went along with the lie. By this lie, Obama managed to disenfranchise how many million mixed-race Americans?
Are you serious?
Yes – Rita – I am. And it is the truth. If you are American and you do not know Obama is at least half Caucasian, what else do you not know? He never was, is not and never will be “black”. The USA is still waiting for its first “black” president.
So unless you hae 100%, untouched pure black blood, you’ll never be black?
What?!?
No, the claim was made that Obama is 50% caucasian not just short of being a pure blood.
Read his other comments. He wants to discredit him as our first black President because his blood isn’t pure black. Nobody’s blood is pure anything and, regardless, he presents as black. He is most definitely the US’s first black President.
Obvious troll is obvious.
Obama was brought up by his black parent, so he is culturally African-American.
Also his skin colour puts him in the category of being black in the eyes of most people who do not know his parentage i.e. most people who he interacted with on a daily basis. So his experience of how the World treats him is the black experience. Hailing taxis in Chicago is the famous example.
Obama was raised by his white mother and then her parents.
I agree that he definitely experienced life as a black man.
I stand corrected. For some reason I had the idea that his father brought him up.
But you’re still right about him experiencing life as a black man. He looks like a black man, so he presents as a black man, and people see him as being black. Your ultimate point is correct.
I’m not much for right wing claims about the “liberal media”, but I can’t find one story about this on CNN. What the hell?
As I said above, remember: each outlet has its own agenda and narratives. Anything that would damage them will not be reported unless they absolutely must report it (because it’s that big, like, say, a BLM mass terror attack). No outlet is objective. Fox News is just more open about their bias.
How do you think, are these universities saveable, or the right thing to do is to evacuate the sane teachers and students and leave the inmates have their party?
Is there any precedent of a college sunk to this level and then recovered?
German ones.
You don’t get much more Left than Evergreen, where, last I heard, they don’t even give grades but rather “evaluation letters”, presumably because it’s unfair to fail anyone or even give out a mediocre grade. And yet the place is still not clean enough for these snowflakes? They really live in an alternate universe, and will be wholly unprepared for the real world.
According to this report, Evergreen had an acceptance rate of 98% in 2015:
https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/evergreen-state-college-8155
Apparently they’re afraid of their students before they’re even students.
And what a great letter Dr. Weinstein wrote. Especially how he ends it: by inviting students to listen to a talk on evolution and race. How could any sane person be aggressively against the good doctor’s wishes?
That would not end well, though. In fact, I would worry about teaching human evolution at that place.
Surely all the professor had to do was utter the magic, uncontestable words “I identify as Black” and there could have been no objection to his presence on campus on ‘No Whites’ day? Problem solved!
That would have been awesome.
Yeah but then the SJWs among professional philosophers would come after him:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypatia_transracialism_controversy
Jesus. Fucking children.
If you have video Christianity is finished.
lol
Actually, I doubt it. There’s nothing they won’t rationalize.
So these are all the kids nobody else would take. Things are starting to fall into place, lol
Meanwhile the Yale student whose rabid attacks led to the Christakis firing/resignation has been awarded the Nakanishi prize for outstanding contribution to race relations.
The future looks very grim.
Unsurprisingly this was covered on Fox with an interview with Dr. Weinstein
Search for this on Youtube (didn’t want to embed the video): Tucker Carlson : Professor objects to no-whites on campus ‘Day of Absence’ demand : 5/26/2017
They’re kids who’ve found to their amazement that the parents are actually tolerating outrageous behavior. Now they’re seeing just how far they can push it, waiting for someone to say No.
The kids are not the problem. The parental figures are the problem. They could make all the demands they want if no one took them seriously.
Due to a misspent youth reading war books I ended up very curious as to how the Nazis undermined the university system in Germany.
The key was the student unions at first the Nazis had little luck but they persisted and as the majority of the students were apathetic voters they managed to get to control the students union governing bodies leaving only various specialised student bodies and the duelling societies to oppose them.The Nazis were well organised and with a young fanatic by the name of Baldur Von Schirach put in charge eventually triumphed not only over student opposition but also the University authorities. The main point is that Nazis students were never the majority in the Universities
Consequently recalcitrant Professors were replaced by either Nazis or fellow travellers or even those who really didn’t care.
Obviously history is not exactly repeating itself but the ground rules were laid in the Reich and many have followed since.
There was no need to “undermine.” The nazis did very well with university students, and campus towns voted more heavily for nazis than did the rest of Germany. Nazism was respected on campus (incredible as that sounds).
The Nazi students were supported by some of their professors, too – Heidegger, for example.
(Of course there was also opposition.)
It doesn’t sound incredible at all.
Young people are idealistic, unexperienced in many ways and hence easy prey to agitators and ideological “world formulas”.
That goes equally for Nationalsocialism, Fascism, Communism, Islamism and other forms of extremism.
In many respects Nationalsocialism can be described as a youth movement of sorts in the wake of Lebensreform etc. More on this aspect:
https://www.amazon.de/Bausatz-Dritten-Reiches-deutsche-Kulturrevolution-ebook/dp/B00V65NM6M/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1496181308&sr=8-2&keywords=Prabel
First faculties (or rather the respective executive committees of the student union) to be taken over by the Nazis at the end of the 20s at various universites were Law and Protestant Theology.
Public support of Nationalsocialism wasn’t extremely high on average when Hitler took over: 25.8% of the electorate.
Same thing in Mao’s Cultural Revolution, although the students there did it with much more zeal….like these
Evergreen is a public school. I hope the WA State legislature is paying attention.
I think PCC(E) is correct about Bridges capitulating to the demands of the protesting students, even if that culminates in firing Weinstein. Many of the videos now available online indicate that Bridges will submit to the students’ demands, no matter how unreasonable and childish they are. Perhaps he hopes to keep his job … most university presidents make good money, and often receive housing and travel perks as well. We can’t expect him to give up those nice things!
Here’s an example of Bridges groveling in the face of student demands to release them from homework deadlines. Note that they even tell him to stop gesturing while he speaks (link modified so video doesn’t embed).
https://www.youtube.com/REMOVE_THIS_PARTwatch?v=yo-BGLoCDZU
That video is amazing. Bridges has no backbone, and commands no respect from the students. He should just quit. I’ll embed the vodeo!
“Hold me accountable by Friday.”
Poltroonish. It is the regents and the legislature who should hold him accountable, for that performance.
They seem to have a problem with involuntary hand gestures. Is there anything they don’t find offensive?
They should just tell the students that they are going to take a field trip to visit oppressed coloured people on the other side of the world and then dump them all into Syria!
“I’m George Bridges, I use he/him pronouns.
That says about all you need to know.”
I can’t speak to the rest of all that about Evergreen State and race, but “that’s all you need to know” speaks more to JC’s lack of understanding of gender/sexuality issues today. It’s not weird, it’s normal and quite logical, polite even. It makes JC appear as a less than reliable evaluator of what actually is “regressive” and what’s not on the left.
it is not normal or logical and it is weird. Nor is it English. That’s why it is so risable. You can call yourself anything you’d like and to be polite and respectful I would honor your wishes but don’t mistake that for thinking you’re not ridiculous.
It is a genuflection. Genuflection reveals attitude. Coyne is right to perceive the attitude, and right to think it tells us all we need to know here about Mr Bridges. He bows and scrapes and tugs his forelock even as he arrives.
Agreed. It’s the kowtowing to this imposed language use that makes it so deplorable.
Btw, I’m dargndorp and I use zorgblad/zorgbladsne pronouns.
Can you give me an example of a sentence in which Bridges might *use* the pronouns ‘he’ or ‘him’ when referring to himself?
Indeed. This is part of the cant. When people say they “use” the pronouns they really mean that they demand that *you* use the pronouns.
It’s not about how he addresses himself. People say that to indicate how they would like to be referred to by others so that the other people don’t have to guess or assume what sex/gender the person is. Every class I teach starts with myself and all the students doing this, they expect it. It takes some getting used to, but the logic is clear.
I am pretty sure no one would have to guess which sex or gender he was, anymore than it would be a guess to say he was not a teenager.
Yes, and I’m surprised so many here are unaware of this convention. (Not that I can stomach some of the stranger requests…how on earth is one to remember which non traditional pronouns go with which person? I’d be tempted to just use “it”…)
I’m Jeremy, please use the obvious pronouns that you would infer from my given name.
I’m the first commenter on WEIT ever to do that.
It’s not normal.
Couple of people have expressed surprise that Evergreen is not getting more national attention. That should not be a surprise at all.
News outlet, and especially the big ones, like the New York Times and Fox, have meta-narrative that they push, in the case of the Times, it’s a subtle pushing, unlike Fox.
At the Times, the meta-narrative overwhelms what happens when reporting on race/sex/gender/police/Muslims, etc. More subdued when reporting on science and business.
As example, for about the last 2 days+, the New York Times has had on its home page an article on the men who went to defend a woman wearing a hijab. (I couldn’t help noticing that the only time race enters the picture, is in calling the perpretator a “white supremacist”, the race of the men who helped is absent. This is the exact opposite if the event involved a white police officer shooting.)
On the other hand, it has paid scant attention to the 8 people murdered in Mississippi, including a sherifu, in a domestic dispute. And I do wonder if race is a factor, and the story makes the media and certain people look bad. So, it’s not highlighted.
Exactly what I tried to explain to Alric. Just because everyone isn’t Fox News doesn’t mean they won’t protect their agendas and narratives at all costs. In a way, it’s more insidious than Fox News: at least they wear their bias on their sleeves. Places line CNN and NYT act as if they are “objective” arbiters of news.
I cancelled my subscription to NYT about one year ago, as I noticed more and more of their weasel words when it came to race, gender, and other regressive issues.
OTOH, the less attention paid to these idiots, the better. Attention is exactly what they want!
So, a campus GOP group acts the same way. Your response would be “pay them no attention”?
Yeah, that makes no sense. This and the incidents like them, if they were actually being widely reported, would cause outrage. But it would be outrage against the radical left, and apparently that’s bad.
Absolutely.
Even if they were happening constantly over the course of years, and only by them and not by any left-wing groups?
People need to know about these things; otherwise, they fester and people only become aware once it becomes too late to stop.
Remember, the way Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao all made their revolutions happen was starting with the students at universities.
On your Cultural Revolution remark – seeing this kind of stuff happen in the present day at least helps me better *understand* the Cultural Revolution (which can’t be easy to understand if you haven’t experienced it).
UnF#^$@*%believable. Evergreen State is completely out of control. They need to dismantle it and start over from scratch. Do diplomas from this place have any standing? Are all state schools in this state like this?
No.
Your nation is in decline, and if your nation is in decline, we are headed for a very dark time. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.” (Yeats). I feel very low these days when I read such stories, and about Trump and the decline of civil society, the intolerance of the left and the right.
At the commuter school where I got my MS in geology a few years ago, I had to take a lot of undergraduate classes, since my BS was in computer engineering. I had classmates who were fighting tooth and nail to go to class. Moving heaven and earth to adjust their work schedules or find child care. Commuting two hours by train each way, because Silicon Valley is such an exorbitantly expensive place to live.
To tell a professor, “Don’t show your white ass on campus, and f*** your students”–pardon the language–would float like lead with the professors who taught me. They were all too aware of student difficulties, and bent over backwards to accommodate their students. I remember several lectures where Very Young Geologists colored and drew pictures in the back of the classroom, or even younger ones snoozed in their carriers, because child care arrangements fell through.
Cheating their students out of a lecture (there are only so many, and so much material to cover) would be anathema to my professors.
Students like these live in privilege. That’s why they never talk about class privilege, and why it’s not part of their hierarchy — even though every study shows that how much money your family has and region you were born into has significantly more impact on your chances of success in life than anything on their hierarchy of oppression.
By the way, love you screen name! Do the rocks whisper back? what do they say? I’ve always been curious what they think of me. Have they ever mentioned me?
It’s a silly name, but I am trained as a geologist, and we’re all rock whisperers, sort of. Rocks obviously don’t actually talk, but where they are, what they’re made of, what’s around them… the earth tells such wonderful stories about what has happened in her history, if you know how to ask the right questions… and the methods of asking are things like mapping, observation of layers and fossils, looking at things under a microscope, and chemical analysis. I became disabled before I could work in the field. I still love it dearly. The evolution of the planet fascinates me.
Hehe I know. I was just joking around with you, as it was obvious from your first comment that you worked in geology 🙂
‘I’m George Bridges, I use he/him pronouns.’
Even when talking about women?
Just wanted to add that I too am appalled by all of this. I can’t imagine what it must be like to try to teach at a place like Evergreen State.
I wonder how many of these self-righteous blowhards have half a clue about what’s going on in that other Washington…
Oh, to have campus protests over Trump!
Trump was “democratically” elected, just as was Obama. Did you protest over Obama’s false prospectus when running for US president?
To me, “democratically” elected should mean that whomever got the most votes from the demos won. So Obama did just fine. As did Hillary. And, ironically, the Electoral College was instituted precisely to prevent poseurs like Trump from triumphing.
I have no idea what you mean by “Obama’s false prospectus,” and also no interest in hearing any more about it.
You don’t get to decide what democratically elected means. The rules were there before the election was held. Clinton should have familiarised herself with them.
Indeed, and what her comment misses is that the EC was also created so the cities couldn’t dominate everyone else in the country politically, and it worked perfectly in that sense here.
If your president was elected by who got the most votes the idea of cities dominating would be a nonsense since it would be people voting not states. Everybody’s vote would count exactly the same no matter where they lived.
Exactly.
If the EC didn’t favor the red, rural states you can bet the GOP would be clamoring for its dissolution. (You’d think the red-rural states would be content just to have the same senatorial representation despite having such low populations compared to the blue states.)
So what you want is not an election but a referendum – with simply the total number of votes deciding who is to be president?
@ Eric
“,,,simply the total number of votes deciding who is to be president?”
How is that not an election?
Merely a matter of words.
@Eric
I think the defining difference between a referendum and an election is that elections are used to select people and referendums are used to select ideas not the exact voting mechanism.
Even, if your distinction were correct, how is “person who most people voted for is the winner” not the best way to select a president (at least in a two horse race)?
“You don’t get to decide …”
Neither do you. I can point you to several editorials that support my contention; I’m sure you have others you can point to as well, so there’s no use continuing this discussion. Our personal politics obviously differ.
“Our personal politics obviously differ.” It is not a matter of personal politics, but deliberate lying to get into a position of power.
Obama was always perfectly open about his mother’s being white and that he lived with his white grandparents.
You may not wish to hear the truth, but Obama has consistently called himself “black” – and he got elected on the premise that he would be the first “black” US president. Had he told the truth – and had the news media published the truth – that he is fifty per cent Caucasian and the remainder a mixture of negroid African and Asian (most likely Arab from his father’s and his middle name)- I doubt if he would have got elected. But, as was said in the film The Man who shot Liberty Valance: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” And that is how Obama got into the White House. The US electorate was conned – and no one likes being conned. Do/did you?
That’s not how race works in the U.S. There is nothing illegitimate about Obama calling himself black.
Most (all?) American black people are mixed-race. It is well known that Barak Obama’s mother was Caucasian.
“Most (all?) American black people are mixed-race. It is well known that Barak Obama’s mother was Caucasian.”
Then it is a deceit to call a mixed race person “black”. Do you go into a shop and get given grey paint when you ask for bloack paint?
You are unfamiliar with American usage in this respect. “Black” means mixed race and any skin color from dark brown to a much lighter color. The old, now discarded, terms like “Negro” or “colored”, or even “mulatto” all described this appearance. They are not precise terms.
“You are unfamiliar with American usage in this respect. “Black” means mixed race and any skin color from dark brown to a much lighter color.”
I am very familiar with the way “black” is used in America, and it is an almost always total misuse of the word. For some reason Americans have trouble with words that reflect the truth – think of the silly use of “bathroom” to mean a place where you urinate or defecate – but certainly not where you take a bath.
If you are right about the American definition of “black”, then scrap the term and say “mixed race”. But where would that leave the pure-blood negroid Africans or their progeny?
“That’s not how race works in the U.S. There is nothing illegitimate about Obama calling himself black.” So an American animal breeder can “legitimately” advertise a mule as a horse or a donkey and he cannot be prosecuted for that lie?
I have seen repeatedly the childish statement that any American can say he or she is of any genetic make-up he or she chooses and no one can do anything about it. No matter how untrue it is. And that is how Obama got elected. And the rest of the world is supposed to treat the USA as a mature country?
You have no idea what you’re talking about.
BJ – I know exactly what I am talking about: the lie spread world-wide that Barack Obama was the US’s first “black” president.
So Eric, what is your definition of being black?
First the terms “black” and “white” are lazy misnomers. Most “blacks” are brown, and the only “whites” are albinos.
I myself do not use the terms “black” and “white”. The latter I call Caucasians or Europeans. The former I call negroid Africans or negroids.
So, for me, a “black” has pure-blood negroid African ancestry.
Racial terms are always going to be imprecise and changeable since race itself is such a dubious category.
“Racial terms are always going to be imprecise and changeable since race itself is such a dubious category.”
Most of life is imprecise and changeable, but that does not mean words coined to describe certain things should be deliberately misused.
I guess that I don’t see too much difference between calling someone white or Caucasian and black or negroids. 23 and Me has provided a lot of data about the genetic constitution of those who identify as black, hispanic or white. As expected, there is hardly any such thing as “pure-blooded” anything. Those who identify as black have an average of about 73% African genes with 24% European and the remainder American Indian. For those identifying as white, the cut-off for calling oneself white was at about 28% African genes, but the average for those was about 98% European genes. Thus even the white folks are no “pure-blooded.” You might remember John Howard Griffin, a white fellow who made himself up so that he would be perceived as black – his book Black Like Me tells about the 1960’s but is also relevant today. While Obama is clearly of mixed heritage and thus likely nearly equally African and European genetically, I really don’t think that anyone would consider him to be a white person.
I honestly can’t figure out at this point whether you’re a brilliant troll or a pretentious commenter with bad Dunnning-Kruger effect symptoms.
It seems as if you actually believe that crap. You must not have been paying attention but Obama’s heritage, including the white part of it, was aired and discussed ad nauseam during his campaign, throughout his presidency and apparently is still being masticated by people like you. This is a bullshit rationalization used to conceal some other reason(s) for disliking Obama. It is also ridiculous and just plain false.
Yeah, you’d think people would be more concerned that he continued the plutocracy and the war-mongering, not the above.
Well said, darrelle. I couldn’t make myself be polite enough to address such bullshit.
I know just how you feel. When it doesn’t piss me off it makes me cry.
Weinstein: Would you like to hear my answer?
Students: No!
Of course the depressing thing is that even if some of their demands are/were reasonable (I mean, disarming the campus police sounds like a good idea, for example) it will set a terrible precedent to accept them after protests like this. Of course, that precedent has already been set by many colleges but one could hope that some college would try to set the reverse precedent.
Even disarming the police doesn’t make sense. It’s not like they’re there to protect students and professors being harassed by regressives. It’s just a BLM talking point. Clearly the armed police are only there to protect the left from the right.
Several countries have non-armed police. (The UK, Ireland, Norway, I know of.) If the London police can be unarmed I am pretty sure a campus police can be unarmed.
Johan – the key phrase you used is “other countries.” 🙂 You have to consider the gun culture in the USA, and while indeed your proposal is feasible [and reasonable in the big picture] it is likely not currently practical. Many campuses have a stratified public safety department with a few officers equivalent to local and state police, other unarmed public safety officers for large events and general campus patrol, and some student employees to hand out parking tickets!
Those are countries with far, far stricter gun laws. It’s extremely hard for a criminal to find a gun in the UK.
Given the lax gun restrictions we have in the United States, there’s no way in hell I’d even go on traffic patrol without being armed. In the U.K. police can be unarmed,and often are, however there are units somewhere in the vicinity that are armed if the need arises.
With somewhere around 1/3 of Americans owning firearms, would you really want to approach a vehicle at a traffic stop while unarmed and then finding out in the most terrifying way imaginable that the driver is armed? Now, imagine the drivers of these vehicles know police are unarmed…
I’d love for the permeation of guns in our society to be reduced, but as reality exists in the present moment, de-arming law enforcement here would likely end incredibly badly.
While the ordinary UK mainland policeman is unarmed, he can call on armed back-up at very short notice if need be. Incidents are often attended by armed police. And the weapons are used on occasion. UK airports are now patrolled by police with machine guns ready for use.
In Britain, if you are even seen carrying a gun in public, you’ll find yourself on the wrong end of an armed response pretty sharpish. Even most of the criminals don’t carry gun because the risk of arrest is too high.
You couldn’t possibly have unarmed police in the USA.
I posted a similarly themed article on FB from Fareed Zakaria about liberals who actually aren’t tolerant.
Boy, did that ever blow up. A few of my coworkers and friends who are staunch SJWs have had the conversation spiral into discussions of transphobia and gender pronouns. It’s strikingly similar to Evergreen’s Presdient’s decision to include his preferred gender pronoun in his statement. What, precisely, does this have to do with anything at all? While the (as Jerry points out) dare I say privileged students at these institutions of lower learning get triggered at anything and everything they perceive to be the fault of white cis-gendered males, even those of us who are actually progressive and appropriately disturbed by the right wing populism that has taken over the country, the world marches on with legitimate problems, including the encroachment of fascism from both left and right wing groups. Jerry, you might be dead by the time the lunatics are running the asylum, but Ceiling Cat help those who are still around for it and I’m not convinced it won’t be sooner than you think. Hopefully you have a solid couple of decades left at minimum to act as a voice of sanity!
Re: “a good liberal arts college”
According to stats circulating around the internet, and its Wikipedia entry, Evergreen has an acceptance rate of, get this, 98%.
If true, that is quite damning. It is impossible for an institution that accepts 98 percent of applicants to be good.
Such a high acceptance rate usually means that the institution is hurting for enrollment – low numbers of applicants per spot available. Also, acceptance and yield are always different with more students being accepted knowing that many accepted students will go elsewhere.
I know that many readers here aren’t big fans of Dave Rubin, but he sat down with Bret Weinstein on his show. 1 hour interview where I think they do a good job of describing what happened to Bret and another hour of Q&A with submitted questions.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/opinion/when-the-left-turns-on-its-own.html?em_pos=small&emc=edit_ty_20170602&nl=opinion-today&nl_art=7&nlid=31300551&ref=headline&te=1&_r=0
In today’s NYT
Good article. Wonder how long it will take Ctrl Left students to go after the author…
“I’m George Bridges, I use he/him pronouns.”
If he were Russian, he would be forced to say “Я использую он/его/ему/его/им/о нём местоимения.”
(“I use he/of him/to him/him/by him/about him pronouns.”)