Rough Social Justice at Evergreen State

Mr. Bridges has himself to blame. Nationwide, after administrators have capitulated to disruptive student activists, colleges have lost the support of donors, alumni, parents and prospective students. If there was one school you’d expect to defy this trend, it would be Evergreen, in Olympia, Wash. Founded in 1967, the college is proudly to the left of Berkeley and Middlebury. Its motto is literally “let it all hang out”—omnia extares—and radical activism has always been part of the pitch. But new records show that Evergreen hasn’t been spared the backlash that has plagued schools like the University of Missouri. This time, it’s coming from the left.

Evergreen’s public controversy began with the “Day of Absence” last April. In earlier years, minority students and faculty held an annual one-day walkout, but in 2017 organizers instructed all whites to stay off campus. Biology professor Bret Weinstein declined, and in an email called the decree “a show of force, and an act of oppression itself.” After the email circulated on campus, enraged students disrupted his class on May 23.

Police tried to respond, but protesters blocked them from the classroom. Later that day, Mr. Bridges ordered campus police chief Stacy Brown to accompany him to a meeting with student activists—but to leave behind her uniform and badge. Mr. Bridges stood passively as students interrupted Ms. Brown’s speech with laughter, vulgar language and boos. The next day students occupied the library, using furniture to barricade the doors.

The protests grew so aggressive that many on campus feared for their physical safety. Mr. Bridges ordered the police to stay away. “If law enforcement were to come in,” he said later, “there would be perhaps violence, perhaps damage to property, damage to students.” Ms. Brown ultimately resigned, and this week plans to file a tort claim alleging a hostile work environment. Mr. Weinstein and his wife, who also taught at Evergreen, filed a similar lawsuit last fall. The college demanded their resignation as a condition of its $500,000 settlement.

As the protests raged, Kirsten Shockey of Oregon gave administrators a warning. She and her husband lean left. Their son Jakob attended Evergreen, and they assumed their daughter would, too. But they were alarmed by what she called the “witch hunt” atmosphere and “erosion of free speech” on campus. As decision time approached, Ms. Shockey told Mr. Bridges in an email, “we are watching closely.”

They didn’t like what they saw. Ms. Shockey’s daughter crossed Evergreen off her list, following the advice of her brother. “The way identity politics played out looked to us like a university going from a place of learning to a new type of anti-intellectualism,” Ms. Shockey later told me. “Free speech and good discourse was lost—and then good teachers,” she added. “This is about where the alt-left seems to be taking us.”

PHOTO: ISTOCK/GETTY IMAGES

Others joined the movement against Evergreen. Applications for fall 2018 are down 20%. Sandra Kaiser, Evergreen’s vice president for college relations, claims the low application and enrollment numbers may not be as bad as they look because many students commit to Evergreen “at the last moment.” She added that “we normally expect enrollment to decline in a full-employment economy,” given that working adults, veterans and community-college transfers account for about half the student body.

At least someone is sick of all the winning. But an independent report on the protests, commissioned by Evergreen last October, reached a different conclusion. Published in April, it said that the declines in applications and enrollment were indeed “understood to be at least in part the result of the disruptions of last spring.” Moreover, current students were fleeing. Retention rates had long been “relatively stable,” the report said, but after the protests, undergraduate retention “reached its lowest performance in over a decade.” 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,” the report said.

Among those who remain, many resent how the administration catered to the most radical students. “I feel like the rest of us are getting dragged through the mud for what’s essentially a Marxist outburst,” said James Stewart, who will graduate from Evergreen this spring.

Last fall, Mr. Stewart conducted an in-depth survey of some 50 students for his statistics class. Almost all called themselves progressive, but Mr. Stewart found “enormous internal backlash, especially from those who are approaching graduation or have a finger on the pulse of what’s happening outside of Evergreen.” More than one-third of the students said “academic mobbing” was a top concern, Mr. Stewart said. “They now feel like they can’t speak their mind without getting attacked.”

These findings bode ill for the college Mr. Stewart still loves. “Here’s what I know about identity politics: The most important color in the country is, was, and always will be green,” he said. Half of Evergreen’s funding comes from tuition. The external review found an impact on operational revenue so significant that it “will potentially generate another sense of ‘trauma’ on the campus.”

Based on fall 2018 enrollment projections, nearly 25 full-time adjuncts will lose their jobs, 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.

In response to the growing crisis, Evergreen administrators have refused to accept responsibility. The external review gives them cover here, commending their “responsive and appropriate” actions amid the protests. It blames the media for having “imposed its own narrative on the events and transformed them into an example of ‘a campus in meltdown.’ ” And it faults Mr. Weinstein for taking “advantage of this situation to make a national news story” and “make a political point.”

Administrators have since doubled down on identity politics. Evergreen advertises a “bias response team” to handle perceived slights. It has increased funding for new social-justice administrators and support staffers. Evergreen employees now go through “cultural competency, sensitivity and antibias training.” And in a May 14, 2018, email on “leaner leadership at Evergreen,” Mr. Bridges outlined an administrative reorganization plan heavy on “equity and inclusion.”

All this suggests things are going to get worse for Evergreen. Which would be rough social justice.

Ms. Melchior is an editorial page writer at the Journal.