Readers may remember Ask Bret Weinstein who, with his also-biologist wife Heather Heyng, was driven from Evergreen State in Washington during a campus war on science (a side-skirmish in a bigger culture war*). From Debra Soh at Quillette:
It’s been almost a year since violent student protests erupted at Evergreen State College—enough time for the “non-traditional” Olympia, WA university to draw useful lessons from a fracas that made it a byword for campus identity politics run amok. Unfortunately, a report from an Independent External Review Panel, tasked by college President George Bridges with finding ways to attain closure on the events of last Spring, provides scant hope this will happen.
The Evergreen admin is still placating people it must denounce if it is serious about having a quality science faculty.
Within the text of the Evergreen report, one finds muddled acknowledgment of the need to preserve “freedom of expression” and viewpoint diversity on campus. But there is no systematic effort to explain how this battle can be won in the face of increasingly intolerant student and faculty activists, who regard heterodox opinions as a form of violence. One of the prescribed changes is an “ethnically, intellectually, and ideologically diverse faculty, administration, and staff.” But if the mob could successfully target Weinstein, a liberal whose only sin was to protest a day celebrating the racial segregation of Evergreen’s campus, how could the school possibly attract a legitimately “ideologically diverse” academic staff?
Evergreen is emblematic of a larger intellectual disease plaguing college campuses everywhere. And Weinstein’s treatment is symptomatic of a social-justice ideology that, however well-intentioned in its original form, has mutated into an extremist creed that radicalizes students and university administration. This report presented an opportunity to authoritatively diagnose the problem, and perhaps even prescribe first steps for fighting it. Instead, it repeats old clichés, and offers no fresh ideas. The only question now is who will the Evergreen mob target next. More.
Ah! At last. A question that the UD News Timeless Truths Desk (the table to the right of the broom closet in the virtual coffee room) can answer promptly:
“The only question now is who will the Evergreen mob target next”? Well, the answer is pretty much the same as the answer to another recent question we fielded: Where can a 600 lb gorilla sit? Hint: Wherever he wants to, including on top of you.
*Note: If the people marchin’, marchin’ for Science were more authentic, they would have had plenty more to say about this kind of thing.
It would have been natural for them to do so. No one would need to tell them to. We would rather need to advise them not to let hot feelings dominate cold strategy. It’s the strategy that wins. What’s the strategy for keeping science out of the immensely destructive culture wars?
See also: Biology prof Bret Weinstein’s persecutors face sanctions from Evergreen State College