Time for Evergreen to show leadership

The Evergreen State College is in turmoil again. This time the four-year liberal arts college needs to get beyond such unsettling events as an anonymous caller’s threat last week to commit mass murder on the west Olympia campus.

Classes were canceled for a few days but resumed late Monday.

“Going beyond recent events” does not mean going back to how things were before. “How things were” was simply not working — especially for students of color.

The death threat came only after campus civility broke down over free speech and diversity issues at the state-funded school. Suddenly the inward-looking campus was dragged into a polarized national discussion about race, political correctness and campus freedom of speech.

Evergreen has serious cleanup work to do — from clarifying the importance of free speech and protest on campus to defining the limits of conduct by students or faculty that can be tolerated.

Revising policies and building trust on campus is going to take time. Evergreen’s future as a public institution surely depends on it.

Evergreen president George Bridges sounds sincere in wanting to find a way forward that recognizes black students and others on campus who have long-standing complaints over diversity, inclusion and campus police. Complaints reported by the campus newspaper need investigating. Bridges clearly recognizes this.

Bridges must show leadership to hold his institution accountable. He acknowledges that accountability has been weak for faculty and students.

Clearly the student protests on May 23-24 got out of hand. Some on the receiving end were intimidated but no one was injured.

But there’s more to the story than what national reports have captured. Some accounts were influenced by clearly misleading statements made by biology professor Bret Weinstein about the yearly campus ritual known as Day of Absence/Day of Presence.

This event is entirely voluntary and based on a play about a Southern town in which all the black people fail to show up one morning. This forces the community to ponder its life without all of its inhabitants.

Traditionally, minorities left campus to discuss race and cultural diversity in a retreat setting. The Day of Presence follows when students, staff and faculty return to campus and share what each has learned.

This year, the roles were reversed by event planners who included faculty, students and staff. Space was arranged at a local church for the roughly 200 white faculty, staff and students expected to join the retreat April 12 while minorities stayed on campus.

Weinstein, a biology professor, initially criticized the plan in a March campus email, which was his right to send. He also questioned a move to weigh the “equity” or diversity value in every academic hiring decision, which also was his right.

But a group of students took Weinstein’s actions unkindly. A group of students stormed his classroom on May 23. Some unhelpfully labeled him a racist. The next day, a group thronged the president’s office.

The agitated crowd’s loud and intimidating protests were captured on video that soon shot around the Internet. Some saw it as students learning how to protest; political conservatives and many others saw it as a textbook case of free speech being stymied on campuses.

Weinstein spoke to conservative media outlets to talk about his academic freedom being under attack. He wrote an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal and appeared on a conservative FOX News show. In his opinion column, he spoke of “coercive segregation” — falsely suggesting whites were pressured to leave campus during Day of Absence events.

A storm blew back toward the college. The death threat followed. This week the white leader of a self-styled patriots group threatened to come to the college. The situation is still very fluid. Bridges moved the June 16 graduation ceremony to Cheney Stadium in Tacoma for security reasons.

Indeed, at this point, the biggest safety threat to the college is from outsiders. But longer term, the college must confront its challenges around race on a predominantly white campus. So does our nation.

Evergreen’s community also must clarify the limits of conduct for faculty as well as staff. Bridges had begun a process for the student conduct some time ago.

Evergreen also must verify and not look away from concerns aired by students of color about police, about the treatment of transgender people, and about diversity hiring and inclusion.

College campuses can be places where the frontiers of social comfort are often explored. At their best, colleges are where more nuanced conversations can occur. Race is far more complicated than a binary “racist” or “not racist” labeling.

This is where the real Evergreen needs to step up and show what it’s made of.

This story was originally published June 8, 2017 at 9:17 PM with the headline "Time for Evergreen to show leadership."