Seattle Times warns of Evergreen State’s future–and more updates on the situation

I hadn’t realized that The Evergreen State College (ESC)  is “the only state four-year higher education institution to see enrollment drop steeply since 2011 despite wide-open admission standards.” (They accept about 98% of applicants, I believe). The statement in quotes comes from yesterday’s editorial in the Seattle Times, “The Evergreen State College: No safety, no learning, no future.”  The Times now joins many venues, including the New York Times and The Washington Post (see below) in publicizing and decrying what happened when Regressive Leftist inmates start running the asylum at Evergreen.

If Evergreen State’s enrollment has dropped steeply in the last 6 years, well, that’s nothing compared with what is to come. Students throwing rocks through windows, threats phoned in to shoot a lot of people, student “vigilantes” roaming the campus with baseball bats—what parent would want to send their kid to such a school, even if they did accept the po-mo and often ridiculous classes the students have to take? (Evolutionary biology seems to be a welcome exception.)

The fracas at ESC may not be, as I predicted, a turning point in the Left’s coddling of its regressive element, or of authoritarian students dominating the discourse on campuses, but it surely presages hard times for ESC—and that’s deserved. The trustees and President should apologize to Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, his wife who also teaches biology (and was also called a “racist”), and they should discipline the students who disrupted classes and carried baseball bats, fire the invertebrate President George Bridges, and get rid of its fluffy po-mo courses. I suspect that none of this will happen, but, as the Seattle Times editorial notes, if something isn’t done, the College is doomed:

Evergreen President George Bridges and his administration need to assure future students and their parents that academics come first — and not acquiesce to the 200-or-so student protesters at the expense of the 4,000-student campus. Without safety, there’s no learning, and without learning, Evergreen will wither into irrelevance.

. . . The situation at Evergreen is an amplified version of a story playing out at campuses across the state, including recently at Western Washington University, Seattle University and the University of Washington — and across the nation.

Since the corrosive 2016 presidential election, Americans increasingly comprise a nation with citizens sealed in ideological bubbles; college campuses are often the most hermetically sealed of bubbles. When Weinstein, the professor, asked a yelling mob of students if they wanted to hear his answer, they shouted “No!”

For Evergreen, the chaos of the 2016-17 school year should become a case study in the First Amendment and the aching need for better civil discourse. The funky, nontraditional college has a unique role in the state higher-education system. But for it to survive, Evergreen must impose consequences when a student protest hijacks other students’ learning.

Nobody has taken me up on my $50 bet that not a single student at ESC will be disciplined over what has happened in the last two weeks.

*******

The Washington Post has finally confirmed the rumors I’d heard about ESC; that bands of people (and I’m pretty sure they were students) were walking around campus with baseball bats  over the weekend:

Thurston County Sheriff John Snaza said school officials were responding to the threat from last week as well as an incident Sunday night. “They have had people walking around with sticks and baseball bats late at night causing property damage,” including graffiti and broken windows, he said Monday. “They asked us to come out and assist.”

He said campus police told him there was about $10,000 worth of property damage.

The Evergreen State College Police Department referred questions to a college spokesman, Zach Powers, who did not immediately have answers to questions about the property damage. [JAC: I suspect Powers is the Sean Spicer of Evergreen.]

This photo, from Instagram—provided by someone associated by ESC—purports to show ESC students wielding bats; I have no idea whether they were actually the vigilante mob or not. See here for a tw**t that gives another photo of this group and makes the claim that these are ESC students. They might just be posing theatrically. 

And a bit more from WaPo:

Student protest leaders did not respond to requests for comment.

An opinion piece in the student newspaper, the Cooper Point Journal, included these points: “Police are commissioned to maintain order, the current order of the world, and thus always inherently work in favor of the status quo. Police are peace keepers, but the kind of peace they keep is not peace as an end to structural violence, but a peace based in non disruption of the status quo. If you are a member of a group that the status quo does not favor, if you are among other things not white, not wealthy, not straight, or not cisgender, then the cops do not and can not work in your favor.

” … If the status quo at the Evergreen State College is institutional racism, and the police are here [to] protect the institution that shelters that form of institutional violence, they are a white supremacist threat.”

Snaza said he was concerned about the situation on campus. When 200 to 300 protesters confronted the president and other administrators last month, he said the people who were targeted did not feel they could leave. “When you barricade doors and windows so the staff can’t leave,” he said, “that’s not usually a good sign.”