On a college campus in 2017 America, a professor said he would not participate in a campus event in which white students and professors were told to leave the school grounds.
In response, the professor was threatened by an angry mob and told he should be fired.
And rather than disciplining or expelling the students, the college president thanked the protesters and rewarded them with concessions.
It was in March that Professor Bert Weinstein of Evergreen State College protested a demand for all white people to leave campus for a "Day of Absence/Day of Penance."
In an email which was CC'd to all staff and faculty, he wrote:
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 underappreciated roles . . . and a group or coalition encouraging another group to go away. The first is a forceful call to consciousness which is, of course, crippling to the logic of oppression. The second is a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself.
You may take this letter as a formal protest of this year's structure, and you may assume I will be on campus on the Day of Absence. I would encourage others to put phenotype aside and reject this new formulation, whether they have "registered" for it already or not.
Weinstein, a biology professor, further offered to host a "public presentation and discussion of race through a scientific/evolutionary lens," as it was material he had spoken on before.
"Everyone would be equally welcome and encouraged to attend such a forum, irrespective of ethnicity, belief structure, native language, political leanings, or position at the college," he wrote. "My only requirement would be that people attend with an open mind, and a willingness to act in good faith."
See Scott Greer's column on this issue.
As a result, Weinstein was surrounded by a mob and threatened on May 23. He was also reportedly warned by campus police to hold his classes off campus because he might be attacked.
Three days later, the college president thanked the students leading the protests. His statement began with the words, "I'm George Bridges, I use he/him pronouns."
He then paid tribute to a group of Indians "whose land was stolen and on which the college stands" because of a commitment to the "Native Student Alliance" to opening every event with that acknowledgement.
He then expressed his gratitude for the protesters' "courageous" actions and promised more funding for affirmative action programs.
"We must increase our capacity to investigate instances of alleged discrimination," he vowed.
Scott Greer, author of "No Campus For White Men," only has contempt for such conduct.
"It's completely insane, but not surprising," said Greer. "We have a college president groveling and thanking the students who threw the campus into chaos. We have a college administration openly endorsing racial segregation. We have a college handing out more entitlements and financial gifts in what can only be regarded as something akin to paying off a ransom for a hostage. We have a college [president] thanking students for essentially threatening the physical safety of one of his own professors. The worst part is that this is probably not even the peak of campus madness, but only a harbinger of what's in store for other campuses."
Greer said the professor's hopes for an "open mind" or a "willingness to act in good faith" on a modern college campus is expecting the impossible.
"These kinds of incidents happen over and over again," said Greer. "We keep acting like this is some extraordinary event, or something which is unexpected or extreme. This is ordinary. This is banal. This is run of the mill. More importantly, this kind of conduct is exactly what these kinds of multicultural programs are specifically designed to encourage."
Evergreen College has long been known as a haven for left-wing extremism. In 2001, Professor Larry Mosqueda infamously declared:Â "If we multiply by 800-1,000 times the amount of pain, angst, and anger being currently felt by the American public, we might begin to understand how much the rest of the world feels as they are continually victimized [by the U.S.]. "
Greer noted the irony of how minority students are carefully trained to regard even what most Americans would consider a far-left campus a hotbed of ultra-conservatism and white nationalism.
"The average conservative experiences more oppression, threats of violence and official condemnation in a day than the average liberal could imagine during their entire time on campus," Greer said.
"This is what makes the college president praising the 'courage' of the protesters so outrageous. What were they risking? They already know they can break any laws or violate any rules they want to and be rewarded for it. As indeed they were."
Evergreen State College is not unique. Even the liberal CNN commentator Fareed Zakaria blasted the repressive policies of American colleges and universities on Sunday.
"American universities these days seem to be committed to every kind of diversity – except intellectual diversity," he said.
"Conservative voices and views, already a besieged minority, are being silenced entirely. The campus thought police have gone after serious conservative thinkers such as Heather MacDonald and Charles Murray as well as firebrands like Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter.
"It's strange this is happening on college campuses that promise to give their undergraduates a liberal education," Zakaria continued. "The word liberal in this context has nothing to do with today's partisan language, but refers instead to the Latin root, pertaining to liberty. And at the heart of the liberal tradition in the Western world has been freedom of speech. From the beginning, this meant protecting and listening to speech with which you disagree."
But Greer said college students today aren't there mostly to learn, but to achieve political ends. He warned the greatest danger is believing these students are simply acting like spoiled children or having an ineffective temper tantrum. On the contrary, he said, they are winning.
"A lot of conservatives like to imagine these 'snowflakes,' as they are called, are simply being babies," Greer observed. "But the fact is, they are handing defeat after defeat to conservatives on college campuses. They are building power. They decide where funding goes. They are able to get colleges and universities to provide huge salaries to their activists. They are able to get employees hired and fired. And as we see here, they are the ones who can get college presidents to bow to their demands. Conservatives can't do that.
"Ultimately, conservatives need to wake up. These activists are driven by a very raw, primal sense of anti-white hatred. They know they are violating free speech and that they are upholding double standards. They don't care. They think they are justified. So appealing to their sense of fair play or some kind of common belief system is doomed to failure."
Greer argues the only way colleges and universities can be restored to sanity is to "drain the swamp" in higher education.
"If you actually want to solve the problem, and not just complain about it, you have to abolish affirmative action," Greer said. "You have to abolish special benefits for minorities. You have to abolish racial and gender studies programs. You have to hold students accountable for assaulting speakers or breaking the law. And if you aren't willing to do these things, then get used to these kinds of stories. Because you'll be seeing them for a long time to come.
"And it is going to get much worse before it gets better."
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