It's 1984 at Evergreen State College

A large fraction of the faculty at THE Evergreen State College apparently believe the year is 1984, and that night is day, up is down, black is white, and freedom of speech is only for people who agree with them. That’s my conclusion after reading that many Evergreen faculty have signed a letter saying that evolutionary biology professor Brett Weinstein “has endangered faculty, staff, and students, making them targets of white supremacist backlash”. They want to punish a fellow faculty member for expressing an opinion, and to reward students for disrupting campus, harassing and threatening Weinstein and school administrators, yelling insults at police sent to campus to protect them, and making the college an object of nationwide scorn in many publications, including the New York Times.

Weinstein’s sin was that he expressed his opinion that “On a college campus, one’s right to speak — or to be — must never be based on skin color.” He has actually supported Evergreen’s traditional “Day of Absence,” but expressed his opinion that there’s an important difference between a group of people voluntarily leaving campus for a day, and for that group to demand that all people outside their group leave for the day. As a former student protester myself, I am deeply saddened by this perversion of the fight for social justice in America.

This story was originally published June 16, 2017 at 6:20 PM with the headline "It's 1984 at Evergreen State College."