The Campus Mob Came for Me—and You, Professor, Could Be Next
I was not expecting to hold my biology class in a public park last week. But then the chief of our college police department told me she could not protect me on campus. Protestors were searching cars for an unspecified individual—likely me—and her officers had been told to stand down, against her judgment, by the college president.
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."
My email was published by the student newspaper, and Day of Absence came and went almost without incident. The protest of my class emerged seemingly out of the blue more than a month later. Evergreen has slipped into madness. You don't need the news to tell you that—the protesters' own videos will do. But those clips reveal neither the path that led to this psychosis, nor the cautionary nature of the tale for other campuses. Evergreen is arguably the most radical college in the country—and while it does lean far to the left in a political sense, it is the school's pedagogical structure to which I refer. Rather than placing students in many separate classes, most of our curriculum is integrated into full-time programs that may run the entire academic year. This structure allows students and professors to come to know each other very well, such that Evergreen can deliver a deep, personally tailored education that would be impossible elsewhere. When it works well, it is unlike anything else.
Last week's breakdown of institutional order is far from an indictment of our founder's wisdom. Rather, the protests resulted from a tension that has existed throughout the entire American academy for decades: The button-down empirical and deductive fields, including all the hard sciences, have lived side by side with ”critical theory," postmodernism and its perception-based relatives. Since the creation in 1960s and '70s of novel, justice-oriented fields, these incompatible worldviews have repelled one another. The faculty from these opposing perspectives, like blue and red voters, rarely mix in any context where reality might have to be discussed. For decades, the uneasy separation held, with the factions enduring an unhappy marriage for the good of the (college) kids.
Things began to change at Evergreen in 2015, when the school hired a new president, George Bridges. His vision as an administrator involved reducing professorial autonomy, increasing the size of his administration, and breaking apart Evergreen's full-time programs. But the faculty, which plays a central role in the college's governance, would never have agreed to these changes. So Mr. Bridges tampered with the delicate balance between the sciences and humanities by, in effect, arming the postmoderns. The particular mechanism was arcane, but it involved an Equity Council established in 2016. The council advanced a plan that few seem to have read, even now—but that faculty were nonetheless told we must accept without discussion. It would shift the college ”from a diversity agenda" to an ”equity agenda" by, among other things, requiring an ”equity justification" for every faculty hire.
The plan and the way it is being forced on the college are both deeply authoritarian, and the attempt to mandate equality of outcome is unwise in the extreme. Equality of outcome is a discredited concept, failing on both logical and historical grounds, as anyone knows who has studied the misery of the 20th century. It wouldn't have withstood 20 minutes of reasoned discussion. This presented traditional independent academic minds with a choice: Accept the plan and let the intellectual descendants of Critical Race Theory dictate the bounds of permissible thought to the sciences and the rest of the college, or insist on discussing the plan's shortcomings and be branded as racists. Most of my colleagues chose the former, and the protesters are in the process of articulating the terms. I dissented and ended up teaching in the park.
