some guy on the internet sets the stage (i'd say he's pretty spot on with the summary):
"Once a year, Evergreen State University (located just outside of Seattle), allows the students of colour to take a day of absence, so that their importance and contribution is felt at the University. Bret Weinstein, as a progressive, was and has been on board for this for a long time.
A year ago, they flipped the logic. Rather than telling people of colour to stay away for the day, they told white people that they are not welcome on campus for a day. Absence wasn’t compulsory, but highly recommended."
from: https://medium.com/@jakubferencik/t...-explained-the-evergreen-scandal-f3dfe07b1d70
then this is weinstein's email message in response to the "event" change:
I’m aware of all that. I just suspect there has to be more too it, maybe as the Huff Post article suggested, heightened racist tension in the outside culture etc. I maintain a large body of students don’t flip from ‘normal’ to ‘riot’ as a binary state, this will have built-up over a far, far longer period than that, but as the black student voices involved are now either being silenced or have given up in despair we just don’t know. I find it both interesting and quite telling you seemingly have zero interest in this aspect of the case.
Lets now take the issue of Weinstein’s sacking:
The student body clearly did not do this as they do not have the power to do it. A college/university is like all other business entities, it has a hierarchical structure, HR processes, employment contracts, unions etc. The people above Weinstein in the college establishment clearly thought he had done something that made his continued presence at the college untenable. It is they who ultimately made the choice. They were the only people with the power to act.
Weinstein appears to have received a half million dollar pay-off. This maybe suggests his dismissal wasn’t a simple matter of ‘gross misconduct’ or whatever, possibly that he had the potential to drag them through the courts should he wish, but it also suggests they viewed his continued presence at the college so toxic that stumping up such a huge amount of money to get shut of him was a good business decision.
This is clearly not as simplistic or one-sided as you are desperately trying to paint it.
For clarity; I actually have little interest in the specific event, as Matthew said ‘students gonna student’ (though I remain certain there is more to this than I currently know). I’m far more interested in the way ugly elements of the far-right weaponise this sort of event under the ‘false flag’ of free speech, and do it so successfully even self-professed ‘leftists’ can get suckered in. As a forum owner this is very interesting to me!
PS Regarding accusations of ‘ageism’ upthread: student life and radical politics is a young person’s thing and it almost always involves railing against elderly white elites. As a 57 year old white straight male I am thankfully sufficiently self-aware to grasp this. I fondly remember being young, sharp and radical, and I’d far prefer to listen and learn from what is happening right now. I certainly refuse to judge and sneer at young people who are in their own way doing all the things I did at their age. Some of the most powerful arguments and voices today are from this generation, as they have been throughout history. There is nothing more depressing to me than a political field of Trump, Putin, Biden, Sanders, Corbyn etc. Is this really the best we have?! I want nothing more than to hand the baton to a much younger generation. We’ve had our go and we ballsed it right up.
