A year ago the small Washington school Evergreen State College was embroiled in racial chaos, after a student mob ganged up on a professor who refused to leave the school for an anti-white “Day of Absence” and the school’s president capitulated to the demands of that mob. Unrest continued for weeks, with student mobs patrolling the campus armed with weapons and assaulting students who didn’t agree with them.
Now, a year later, Evergreen has received an “‘F’ in lessons learned,” writes John Leo at Minding the Campus.
The school, “having failed to protect two white professors last year when radicals ordered all whites off campus for a ‘Day of Absence,’ is paying the price for its folly, including president George Bridges’ unwillingness to handle increasingly aggressive protests,” Leo writes.
Bridges could have simply told the school that “No one will be banned from this campus, for even one day, because of the color of his skin,” Leo points out. But he didn’t—and the apparent consequences are devastating:
Jillian Kay Melchior reports in The Wall St. Journal today that applications to Evergreen this fall are down 20 percent, and current students are fleeing. Only 60% of first-time, first-year students who enrolled last fall stayed through the end of the school year, a full 8 percentage points below the prior year,” said a report commissioned by Evergreen and released in April.
Based on fall 2018 enrollment projections, Melchior reports, nearly 25 full-time adjuncts will lose their jobs, as provost Jennifer Drake wrote in a Feb. 15 email. The college has had to tap its emergency reserve fund for $1.3 million so far to cover the costs of the “events of spring 2017,” including legal settlements. Evergreen has delayed the construction of a $42 million, 375-bed dorm and has cut its operating budget by nearly $6 million.
“Melchior predicts things will get worse for Evergreen, which, she says, would be rough social justice,” Leo points out.
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