The College Fix

You remember The Evergreen State College, right? It became fodder for national headlines in 2017 as a result of the massive fallout over its Day of Absence observance in which white people were asked to stay off campus for a day.

Soon after, its enrollment began to take a nosedive. Two years later, it’s still tanking.

The latest figures posted on its website show that this school year, 2019-20, the college has enrolled 2,854 students — that’s down from 4,089 in 2016. (The graph was calculated by the college on October 28. The top line is the student headcount and the bottom line is the number of full time equivalent students).

So what has the college’s administrators done to right the course? Well, certainly not scaled back on anti-white programming.

In mid-November the college hosted the “Evergreen Equity Symposium” that featured a parade of workshops that blamed white people, white fragility, white supremacy, whiteness, racism, institutional racism and unconscious bias for most of the ills in America today.

The fact that the university has apparently learned nothing from its national spanking two years ago is not lost on Benjamin Boyce, an Evergreen alumnus who has chronicled the college’s ongoing trainwreck in a series of YouTube videos.

His latest offering, “Woker & Broker: An Evergreen Story,” summarized how Evergreen appears willfully ignorant of the problems it faces, and why.

“Evergreen’s enrollment is tanking,” Boyce said. “They are now at 40 percent less enrollment than they were when the protests happened. This year’s freshman enrollment is 260 students. It should be 1,000 students.”

Boyce, in his video, then goes painstakingly through the description of each symposium workshop and notes he “is sure several classes were required to attend these workshops.”

“These people have learned zero — zero — from what they instigated,” Boyce said. “These are the people who instigated the protests.”

The protesters were the aggressive, baseball-bat wielding students from 2017 who surrounded and threatened white biology Professor Bret Weinstein for refusing to leave campus on the Day of Absence, thus forcing his class to take place in a nearby park.

But Boyce said look behind the curtain.

“My entire work is to show that the protestors were just acting out the fanatical fantasies of the professoriate,” Boyce said. “…They’re still doing the same thing they used to be doing, it’s just a little more filled out.”

Making matters worse, the diversity official who organized the symposium took in a salary of $166,000 a year, Boyce pointed out. That administrator, Vice President for Inclusive Excellence and Student Success Chassity Holliman-Douglas, is taking another job in Texas and her last day at Evergreen is Nov. 29.

Perhaps some at Evergreen may see the writing on the wall. Early next month the Learning and Teaching Commons is hosting three “Blue Sky” conversations to harvest ideas for “big bets” that will attract new students to Evergreen, according to an email recently sent to the campus community.

Boyce, in a second video, offered a suggestion: get back to basics — focus on academics.

“Return to the primary focus of a liberal arts education,” he said, “which is not to promote an ideologically centered, diversity, inclusive, excellence, student success model — but actual competence with regard to reading, writing and arithmetic.”

MORE: Evergreen State settles claim with embattled professors for $500K

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