Evergreen State's safe space doesn't seem very safe anymore.
Several faculty members at The Evergreen State College in Olympia plan to wrap up the last two weeks of the school year teaching classes and meeting with students off campus, because of safety concerns.
Some students have refused to return to the campus, which has been coping with racial tension and outside threats in recent weeks. In response, several faculty members are using coffee shops, churches — even a community theater — as emergency classrooms and offices, Eltantawi said.
Over the weekend, Evergreen’s nearly 1,000-acre campus was targeted with vandalism, graffiti and property damage.
Thurston County Sheriff John Snaza said his department sent about five deputies to the campus on Sunday night to assist campus police. The Washington State Patrol is now on the campus full-time and assisting campus police, college officials say.
Snaza said county deputies made contact with a group of students who were carrying bats and sticks on campus over the weekend. Deputies couldn’t tie the group to broken windows on campus, and no arrests were made, Snaza said. He estimates that about $10,000 in damage was done on the campus.
The leftist faculty is predictably defending this thuggery.
Elizabeth Williamson said there were only a couple of students who “chose to act out.”
“They’re feeling so scared and they don’t know how else to act,” she said.
Once faculty members intervened, the students stopped carrying bats and sticks around campus, Williamson said.
Just like the Hitler Youth and the Red Guards were scared. They just needed a "safe space" in which to intimidate and then destroy their enemies.
Snaza said he disagrees with the way Bridges has handled the racial tension and unrest on campus. He said students have been allowed to curse, act disrespectful, make demands and hold faculty members against their will. He compared the students’ actions to a hostage negotiation.
“They weren’t free to go,” Snaza said about faculty members who were yelled at by student protesters in some videos that have been posted on the Internet. “It irritated me because why is that OK? … I get where people want to be heard. We don’t always get what we want — especially when we treat people like crap.”
Snaza said he believes Evergreen Police Services could have handled the situation better if Bridges would have given them the power to do so.
Evergreen State clearly can't police itself. Bridges has failed miserably. And the faculty and students who don't want to burn the place down have been mostly staying silent out of fear. Because when you're marching around with a bat, you're not the one who's afraid.
Your targets are.
A biology and agriculture professor says he’s the first — and so far the only — faculty member at The Evergreen State College to publicly come out in support of Bret Weinstein, the professor whose comments enflamed tensions over racism at the Olympia campus.
Paros has taught at Evergreen for about a decade.
In his letter, he described the controversy on campus as being complicated by “a collection of professors that are so blinded by their advocacy, that they cannot fathom different viewpoints.” He wrote that “the college is now contributing to the vilification, paranoia and irrational rhetoric that fuels hatred and violence.”
Paros also indicated that other people on campus support Weinstein, but they’re afraid of being labeled bigots.
But that's okay. Evergreen State's blighted existence might be coming to an end.
But Evergreen faces a deeper, and more long-term threat. It is the only state four-year higher education institution to see enrollment drop steeply since 2011 despite wide-open admission standards. At about 4,080 students, it is about 300 students short of the Legislature’s funded enrollment target.
And then once it's shut down, the social justice thugs can roam the abandoned campus smashing windows at will. And whining how scared they are of the rats and squirrels that are all that remains.