Give National Public Radio some credit: In an All Things Considered feature, reporter Martin Kaste actually interviewed some anti-leftist protesters and did not present them as crazy people. Also to NPR’s credit, the story, “Trump Supporters Accuse Liberal Communities of Hostility Toward Free Speech,” didn’t neglect ugly evidence of bullying perpetrated by the left on campus: Kaste included audio of Evergreen State College students menacing Professor Bret Weinstein. But that’s where the credit for NPR comes to an abrupt halt, as All Things Considered turned to opaque euphemisms to describe just what got everyone all worked up at Evergreen State.
(See Charlotte Allen’s report in this issue for a full account of the madness at Evergreen State.)
Here’s how Kaste described the confrontation caught on video (the audio of which was played on NPR): “It shows a group of students confronting a biology professor named Bret Weinstein because he questions certain diversity policies on campus.” After rolling the tape of the undergraduate Jacobins screaming abuse at Weinstein, Kaste explains again: “Now, this professor considers himself a liberal, and he objected only to some aspects of the diversity policies. But the students were still outraged, and they wanted him punished or fired.”
What’s all the fuss about, one might ask? Weinstein “questions certain diversity policies.” What policies? It can’t be that he has committed the grave apostasy of opposing affirmative action, because he “objected only to some aspects of the diversity policies.” What aspects? What are we talking about here?
Helpfully, Prof. Weinstein has himself described what sparked all the outrage. “I had objected to a planned ‘Day of Absence’ in which white people were asked to leave campus,” the professor wrote in the Wall Street Journal. Weinstein explained that the Day of Absence has been a tradition in which “students and faculty of color organized a day on which they met off campus,” to express symbolically their “vital and under-appreciated roles.” This year organizers had a different idea: People of color would come to campus and whites would be expected to go elsewhere. Weinstein made his objection to this public in an email to everyone at the school. “There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space,” he wrote, “and a group or coalition encouraging another group to go away.”
The fracas got its start when Weinstein objected to being told, as he saw it, to leave campus for a day because he is white. That’s not just a matter of questioning “certain diversity policies,” that’s standing up against an act of ugly and institutional racial exclusion.
