That inchoate but pervasive ideology known as “Political Correctness,” a dogma that is enshrined in and enforced nowhere to the extent that it is in academia, truly is toxic. It is a poison that all decent people concerned with the future of Western civilization should resist with every fiber of their being.
If the latest happenings at Evergreen State College aren’t enough to convince any and every person who isn’t a leftist fanatic of this, then nothing else can.
Even before UC Berkeley, Evergreen should be extolled as the poster school for academic corruption, a picture worth the proverbial thousand words as to all that’s gone wrong with Higher Education. In the latest events at Evergreen we have on display the radical subversion of academia’s historical mission as the premiere civilizing cultural institution, for at Evergreen, it is now savagery that rules.
As it turns out, every year for the last several years, Evergreen would hold its annual “Day of Absence.” On this occasion, non-white students and faculty would stay home while white students and faculty would attend “anti-racism” seminars and the like. This year, however, someone decided to reverse the agenda by encouraging non-whites to come to campus and coercing whites to stay home.
Biology professor Bret Weinstein, himself a white leftist, protested the new arrangement through an email that he sent to a Rashida Love, the college administrator who organized this year’s “Day of Absence:”
“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 under-appreciated 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.”
Weinstein continued:
“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. On a college campus, one’s right to speak—or to be—must never be based on skin color.”
Weinstein even offered to come to campus to hold a discussion on race and evolution.
None of this, however, went over very well with those black students who were determined to keep whites off of campus. The militants videoed themselves harassing Weinstein, who calmly pleaded with them to engage in “dialectic,” not “debate” with him. In a debate, he noted, each party is “trying to win.” Dialectic, in contrast, transpires when each party listens to the other with the intention of trying to “discover what is true.” “I am only interested in dialectic,” Weinstein said, “which does mean I listen to you, and you listen to me.”