Epic

Colleen,

I appreciate the fact that as the director of government relations for Evergreen State College it is your job to put the best face on a Kafkaesque situation. I think you’ve done the best that you could do given the facts on the ground. But your email requires a frank and honest response.

1. Your students are an embarrassment. They are in no way “struggling with tension surrounding race, equity and inclusion.” They are struggling with an immeasurable sense of entitlement, self importance, and ignorance. These debates have nothing to do with equity and inclusion and everything to do with self-aggrandizing chest-thumping virtue signaling. Trust me when I tell you that no one is moved by their manufactured and insincere outrage.

2. Your faculty and administration are directly responsible for the brown shirt actions of your students. These students did not graduate from high school with ignorant, intolerant, and violent attitudes towards race and gender. They were taught those values by your faculty–a faculty obsessed with the pseudoscience of “social justice.”

Might I suggest that your administration consider refocusing Evergreen State College on the teaching of actual academics. Possibilities include, but are not limited to subjects such as: chemistry, physics, mathematics, literature, engineering, biology, accounting and business.

Unfortunately, as long as you are teaching your students that being offended is an accomplishment I suspect they won’t have many real accomplishments in their life.

3. The response to this crisis by your administration has been cowardly at best and complicit at worst. Your administration, by virtue of the professors they have hired, the policies they have adopted and the behavior that they have tolerated have created this sophomoric grievance culture on your campus. It is easy to blame the children for their behavior, but we should not lose sight of the fact that these children were molded by your institution.

Instead of dealing with the students swiftly and decisively you have chosen a path of appeasement. And in choosing appeasement you have lent credibility to the way they are behaving. This is an abject failure of leadership on all levels.

4. Finally, this is not what we are paying you for. You are a taxpayer funded school and the taxpayers expect you to provide an environment of education not a dystopia of indoctrination. If your goal is to create a modern-day version of a reeducation camp, then do it on your own dime.

I’m sorry to be so blunt, but my colleagues and I have had enough of this ridiculous behavior fostered at our public institutions.

Matt Manweller