Evergreen State College excuses student protesters from homework
Student protestors clashing with administrators on an Olympia, Washington college campus appear to have had at least one of their demands met when the president agreed to officially excuse them from homework during their demonstrations.
"All of us are students and have homework and projects and things due," a student can be heard saying in new videos posted online that claim to show Evergreen State College students confronting both College President George Bridges and professor Bret Weinstein.
Demanding that participants be protected from penalization for missed assignments, a student asked Bridges, "have you sent an email out to your faculty letting them know?"
Tensions at the college began when the public liberal arts and sciences college reversed a decades-old campus tradition called "Day of Absence," in which minorities attend programs off campus for a day. The "Day of Absence" is a symbolic act based on a play by Douglas Turner Ward where black residents in a Southern fail to show up one morning, Weinstein wrote in the Wall Street Journal.
In April, the student newspaper The Cooper Point Journal reported that this year's "Day of Absence" would instead involve white students, staff and faculty leaving campus for the day.
In response, Weinstein, a biology professor at the college, wrote an email that was published in the campus paper, in which he objected to the change. He wrote that unlike the traditional "Day of Absence," which is meant to oppose oppression, asking a specific group to leave campus is a "show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself."
"On a college campus," Weinstein wrote, "one's right to speak–or to be–must never be based on skin color."