Academics Under Fire: Bret Weinstein

Another Blasphemer, Another Mob

Feb 26, 2024

Bret Weinstein, 2022. Credit: Gage Skidmore

Bret Weinstein is an evolutionary theorist and former professor of biology at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. His doctoral thesis was Evolutionary Trade-Offs: Emergent Constraints and Their Adaptive Consequences (2009), the title of which provides insight into his evolutionary point of view.1 He supported Bernie Sanders, re-tweeted Glenn Greenwald whom he admired, and was outspoken in his support of the Occupy Wall Street movement.2 His liberal credentials were solid.

On May 23, 2017, a group of students “disrupted a class he was teaching, surrounded him, screamed at him, called him a racist, and called for him to resign or be fired.” Campus police told him they could not guarantee his safety on campus and that he should lay low for a few days.3 The chief of the college police department told him protesters were searching cars for an unnamed individual which Weinstein assumed was he. The college president, she said, had told her to “stand down” against her better judgment. He convened his upcoming class off-campus in a public park.4 Jonathan Haidt, an ethicist at New York University, has drawn a religious comparison, likening the students to witch hunters and their victim, Weinstein, to a blasphemer because he dared challenge an event organized around the intersectional, multicultural near-religious doctrine that white people are bad.5 Haight didn’t say it exactly like that.

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The precipitating event was a change to a tradition at Evergreen called “Day of Absence” which dates from the 1970s. The tradition was an outgrowth of a satirical play of the same name by Douglas Turner Ward. In the play, the black residents of a Southern town fail to show up thus demonstrating that black people are valuable to the town. According to tradition, students, staff, and faculty of color would leave campus for a day to discuss racism and related issues and engage in solidarity-building activities. The following day, called “Day of Presence,” they were back on campus where there were similar activities for the entire college community.

The change was instigated when Rashida Love, Director of First Peoples Multicultural Advising Services, sent an email announcing a flipping of the script. That year, on April 12, white students, staff, and faculty were asked to leave campus for the Day of Absence. White professors were asked not to teach their classes, and white students were asked not to attend them. According to the Cooper Point Journal, the student newspaper, Love reached the decision after talking with POC Greeners who said they felt uncomfortable on campus because Donald Trump won the presidency the previous year.6

Bret Weinstein objected in an email to Love. He wrote:

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 (the theme of the Douglas Turner Ward play . . . 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.7

He continued, “You may take this letter as a formal protest . . . and you may assume I will be on campus on the Day of Absence.”

The following May, Weinstein wrote an Opinion for the Wall Street Journal. Bearing the title, “The Campus Mob Came for Me—and You, Professor, Could Be Next: Whites were asked to leave for a ‘Day of Absence’: I objected. Then 50 yelling students crashed my class.” His “racist” offense, he noted with some irony, was that he had challenged “coercive segregation by race.” It is impossible to argue that he had not correctly analyzed the change.

Jonathan Haidt, the New York University professor who had aptly described the Weinstein case as a case of “blasphemy,” noted four takeaways for professors:8

Never object to a diversity policy publicly. It is no longer permitted.
Do not assume that being politically progressive will protect you.
If a mob comes for you, there is a good chance that the president of your university will side with the mob and validate its narrative.
If a mob comes for you, the great majority of its members will be non-violent. However, . . . you must assume that one or more of its members is willing to use violence against you, and . . . that many members of the mob believe that violence against you is morally justifiable.

Haidt was not wrong. While shouting obscenities, hundreds of students marched through campus demanding Weinstein’s resignation, and President George Bridges praised them for their “passion and courage,” and kowtowed to their demands they be allowed not to do homework during the time they were protesting.9 As if that were not enough, when students yelled at Bridges that using his hands while speaking was threatening, he meekly put his arms down to his side.10

In response, Republican State Representative, Matt Manweller led a group of lawmakers in Washington that proposed the Washington State Civil Rights Commission investigate potential civil rights violations surrounding the Day of Absence incident, considered revoking the $24 million in state annual funding, and discussed legislation privatizing the college. About the civil rights issue, Manweller said:

It is incredibly frightening that the administration at Evergreen would tacitly support Brown-shirt tactics we have not seen since 1930s Germany. That they [the administration] would allow students to threaten professors and other students based on their race is simply horrifying. . . . They hired professors who have elevated the pseudo-science of ‘social justice’ to a religious movement. Now all dissent is crushed by threats of violence or actual violence.

I’ll leave it to you to determine whether any or all of this was hyperbolic.

As for the ‘social justice’ movement, Manweller added:

. . . this movement is also starting to turn on itself and eat its own. Professor Weinstein is a liberal professor who teaches liberal values. Now those students have turned on him like they have on so many other professors around the country.

In her (now former) job as an opinion writer for the New York Times, Bari Weiss said it reminded her of a line from Allan Bloom’s book, The Closing of the American Mind (1987). “A few students discovered that pompous teachers who catechized them about academic freedom could, with a little shove, be made into dancing bears.”11

Weinstein, along with his wife, biology professor Heather Heying, filed suit against Evergreen. They asked for $3.85 million in damages. They alleged the college:

. . . permitted, cultivated, and perpetuated a racially hostile and retaliatory work environment. . . . Through a series of decisions made at the highest levels, including to officially support a day of racial segregation, the college has refused to protect its employees from repeated provocative and corrosive verbal and written hostility based on race, as well as threats of physical violence.

In September, Weinstein and Heying settled for $500,000. As part of the settlement, they resigned from their teaching positions.12 In late November, Rashida Love resigned, complaining of online harassment. The Day of Absence was permanently abandoned.13

Ellin Jimmerson

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