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May 25, 2020 - Dark Horse - Weinstein & Heying

02:15:56

E17 - The Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying | Evergreen 3 Years Post Meltdown | DarkHorse Podcast

Special Evergreen episode! Bret and Heather discuss the meltdown at The Evergreen State College three years after the fact. Support the Show.

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	Hey folks, welcome to this special livestream edition of the Dark Horse Podcast.
	I am here with Dr. Heather Hying, who was, I kid you not, Evergreen's most popular professor, and for very good reason.
	We are going to talk today about what took place at Evergreen, both before and after the protests that turned so quickly into riots.
	This is a an anniversary for us.
	It's the third anniversary of the day that 50 students I had never met showed up at my classroom.
	Accusing me of racism and demanding that I either resign or be fired, I refused, and things descended from there into, certainly, chaos and, I would argue, anarchy, which was, in fact, the plan of many of the protesters.
	All right, where shall we begin?
	I think you wanted to start before we talked a little bit about what Evergreen had been in its past and how it was founded about the spectacular and public nature of the collapse.
	Just start there.
	That's what you had said to me.
	Yeah.
	The problem for us is that We were, for reasons that will surely come up in our discussion here, we were fully ensconced in a life in Olympia, Washington, and our teaching lives were the core of it.
	So we spent 14 years in my case, 15 years in yours, teaching in an environment that freed us to do remarkable things.
	When the collapse happened and suddenly the existence of Evergreen was on many people's minds who didn't know anything about it beforehand and our roles there was suddenly front and center, it gave people an impression of the place and inevitably that impression would be misleading.
	It couldn't help it because, you know, at best it was a vignette and it was a vignette at a moment that things were very abnormal.
	But it has been kind of a struggle since the thing occurred to try to correct the record so that people, you know, we don't want it to be recorded in people's minds as a cartoon.
	We want it to be recorded as the actual descent into madness that it was, but descent from what?
	That's really the tough part.
	The public nature of the descent overwrote the true nature of what was actually going on there, which wasn't all good.
	But nonetheless, there was nuance.
	Yeah, some, particularly on the political right would argue that this was the inevitable end of any place that had broken so many of the rules of the status quo model of higher ed as Evergreen did.
	And we have and will continue to push back quite firmly on that there was this this didn't have to happen.
	Certainly, Evergreen ended up being gameable, and thus, as anything that is gameable will happen, it got gamed.
	But there was nothing about the original nature of the school in its attempt to get rid of some of the top-down, generic, sit-in-rows, and ask-questions-speak-only-when-spoken-to sort of model of higher ed.
	That Evergreen was resisting and had broken that inherently led to this.
	And in fact, you know, it's some of the evidence for that is that none of our students, and indeed none of the students of the handful of other faculty there who were doing, and I'm sure there were more than a handful, but it wasn't everyone by any means.
	There were a handful of other faculty there whom we were close with None of our students, none of their students were part of this madness.
	They were there trying to engage their brains, their bodies, their minds in a pursuit of truth, beauty, compassion, any number of things.
	But they were not invested in or participating in the madness.
	Yeah, in fact, the thing that occurred to me this morning as I was reflecting on the anniversary was that at some level Evergreen, where it worked, was an attempt to instantiate the sort of Star Trek model of getting along, where basically one puts aside the superficial stuff and you team up for some sort of a larger goal.
	And, you know, so the aspect of the college that worked Really did manage to look past people's superficial characteristics and to very good effect.
	Okay, so it seems like we're kind of, we're kind of going someplace, right?
	I thought you wanted to start with something spectacular, talking about what the madness looked like.
	We're going to get there, but as long as we're doing this, let's say we want this to be amusing and cathartic and something that actually gets us someplace, someplace new.
	But let's just, can I just go into what I, what I had thought about us doing second, since we're sort of easing into it anyway.
	Um, so I'm just going to talk a little bit, uh, to begin about what the mission of the college was and, um, And in particular, a nearly founding faculty who died last month who was of particular note, and I think he really epitomized what Evergreen could be.
	So Evergreen was founded by visionaries and innovators, by people who in the late 1960s saw the status quo in higher ed as too nimble, I mean as too rigid, and not nimble enough, not interactive enough for the times or for the future that they imagined was coming.
	The founding faculty were an eclectic bunch, and you taught with a few of them, actually.
	And we were at Evergreen starting in 2002 and 2003, respectively, for the tail end of the tenure of the founding faculty.
	Just a few of them remained at the point that we showed up at that point.
	You taught with Tom Rainey and David Milne, and I think that was it in terms of the founding faculty who you talked with.
	And the faculty who weren't quite founding but got there really early included Steve Herman, who died last month.
	And Steve was a great man.
	He was a great educator and naturalist, a great mentor and a friend.
	He was also an ornithologist, and god did he know birds!
	I don't, I've never met anyone else who knew birds as well as he did, although his students caught up to him pretty, you know, worked to catch up with him.
	His students adored him.
	His colleagues did not, and I think that was telling.
	If I can interject one thing.
	So students very frequently bounced between your programs and my programs and into the programs that we taught together.
	Yeah.
	In general, the best of our students during the summer would go off and they would take Summer Ornithology with Steve.
	So although I barely knew him, He was like the third member of the team in some ways, because what they learned from us on campus during the year, they then put into practice in the field with birds.
	And so anyway, he was a very important figure in our community.
	That's right.
	And apparently, I didn't know this, but in looking back through some old emails in the last few days, I found that he actually used to talk about running his own separate college within Evergreen, as we did as well, right?
	So he also, not only did he know birds, he knew it was possible at Evergreen, and in the natural world, and in the hearts and minds of students, and in so much else too.
	So I was told that the position that I was hired to in a common tradition in academia was to replace someone, and that that someone in my case was Steve.
	And it was clearly impossible to actually replace him, but I was his academic doppelganger.
	You replaced him in the daytime curriculum.
	He continued to teach Summer Ornithology throughout the period that we were there.
	That's right.
	So I was told by many faculty at Evergreen during my tenure there that Steve was quarrelsome, and a curmudgeon, and cantankerous, and not worth engaging with.
	And I was then very grateful to become friends with him quickly.
	Once, I was even told by a faculty colleague, when I was being a thorn in this person's side, that I was just like Steve Herman.
	And I smiled and gave thanks for the unintended compliment, which further irked this guy.
	I think you were in the room when this happened.
	Steve Herman appreciated Honest and honorable feedback.
	He craved it and not many people gave it to him because they found him scary and they thought that it had to be his way or the highway but in fact it was quite the opposite.
	He He had no patience, though, for complacency, for sycophancy, for cowardice, or for laziness.
	He had no patience for these things, and he gave people the truth whether they wanted to hear it or not.
	And this is, of course, a big part of why he had a reputation for being cantankerous, because people didn't always like what he had to say to them.
	He was kind and wonderful and honorable, but he did not suffer fools lightly.
	I was just going to say he did not suffer administrator's light.
	Well, and this is, uh, so I did have a line here.
	Um, he was not cantankerous despite what some of his former colleagues have claimed.
	What he was was totally intolerant of bullshit.
	He had courage, wit and humor, depth of reason and compassion and love for all forms of life except perhaps For cowards and soulless bureaucrats, for which he had no love and no patience.
	So just two more things about Steve before we use this to embark on talking about what Evergreen was more broadly.
	One of my favorite memories of Steve is from sitting around a campfire, as so many deep and meaningful memories are, especially from Evergreen.
	It was 2012, and he and I were at Navapatya, a field station in Sonora, Mexico, on the Sea of Cortez.
	Steve had first taken students to this magical place.
	It was land and water together, birds and mangroves and cactus.
	Ten years earlier, and in the interim, his daughter and son-in-law, Sally and Adam, had turned it into a small, rustic, beautiful field station.
	Every year, every spring, I guess it was every winter quarter,
	Steve got some number of students, something between four and ten, to do fieldwork down at Navapatya and this year I was sponsoring the contracts of those students and I was able to go down there for ten days and I was visiting the students whose work I was overseeing and experiencing firsthand this place that I had heard so much about both from Steve and to some degree from Sally and Adam, who I didn't know well at that point, but also from the generations of students before.
	Steve had driven down with a friend, and Steve was already old, he was already retired, but he had driven down near the border of Sonora and Sinaloa in Mexico.
	And one night, after a full day of fieldwork that we all engaged in, under a nearly full moon, all of us sat around a campfire on this thin strip of shoreline on the Sea of Cortez, and passed around a bottle of Lechuguilla, which is the local agave liquor, and played guitar, Steve did, as well as a few of which is the local agave liquor, and played guitar, Steve did, as well as a
	And Steve's stories were always full of humor, and bashing of those who needed bashing, and honor for those who deserved honor.
	Tales of birds and people, mostly, and just stunning.
	So then, in early 2017, when Evergreen was blowing up, Steve and I had an interaction online Um, about the vandalism that had taken place at the Natural History Museum, because one of the things that happened during the protests that turned into riots at Evergreen, uh, was that some of the activists went after not all of campus,
	But specifically the science buildings in the library and a number of windows were smashed at the Natural History Museum and in the science labs and other vandalism happened at the library and also at the newly named Les Purce Hall, named for the former president who was an excellent president of the college.
	So he and I were going back and forth talking about what to do and how it wasn't actually even safe to go onto campus to do the cleanup, but that the specimens and the collections were at risk.
	And he said, with regard to the anarchy on campus, quote, I too am in disbelief.
	I've made some minor efforts to find colleagues to join me in supporting Brett.
	Silence is a usual result, but some express support but want to keep it secret.
	Who would have thought we at Evergreen were a bomb?
	Yeah, this is such an important part of the story of what happened, and actually it points rather exactly to what I think one of the major themes and lessons of the entire thing was for me and for us, which is that crisis reveals people's character for both better and worse, and we saw spectacular examples of both.
	Yes, we did.
	I will say we saw much less of it, much less courage amongst the faculty than I would have hoped.
	And expected.
	Hoped and expected.
	People that we would have counted as friends were absolutely silent.
	Or worse.
	Or worse.
	Yeah, some of them were far worse.
	And that's a very troubling thing to discover.
	Amongst the faculty, the ones who did stand up, some very surprising people came to our aid, but almost all of them retired.
	Yeah, they were almost all emeritus, which means that the college had no grasp on them anymore.
	Well, it did, but it also meant that they came from an era in which the college was really about something much more substantive, and Anyway, I know I got told, and I think you got told, that we were like founding faculty members in the wrong generation frequently.
	Which, you know, I take to have been a compliment.
	But anyway, the thing is, current faculty did not show up.
	A few of them did.
	A very, very tiny number.
	Mike Parris in particular is the one whose name most people will know if they know any of them, but there were a few others.
	There were a few.
	And some of the academic staff as well, and some of the non-academic staff.
	Staff were more likely to stand up, even though they were far less safe than the tenured faculty.
	Yep.
	And then the people who shined the brightest were students.
	Oh, 100%.
	A huge fraction of our students and I mean really a majority of our students we heard from and we're actively trying to fight this thing.
	And we've of course heard from many other students and you know many of you will be familiar with Benjamin Boyce who we came to know in the aftermath of this.
	And he has done stunning work documenting what happened in the year or two leading up to it and what happened afterwards.
	And, you know, that points to the student body that actually did exist at Evergreen.
	That Evergreen has gotten mocked, for instance, for having an acceptance policy that was like 99%, often 98, 99%.
	99%, often 98, 99%.
	And it always felt to us like this actually was a positive thing.
	That no, this was not a selective college.
	It wasn't a highly selective college or even really a selective college by most measures.
	But what it allowed, and you know sure there were people who came through the door that were not capable of actually doing any kind of work that was useful, and for the most part we didn't see those because over in the sciences students who really were not interested in doing any work or capable didn't even show up.
	But we had so many students who had been failed by school and they were many of them were told that they had failed school but I will say no they were failed by school and some of them came in to our classroom saying I know I'm dumb because I've been told I'm dumb all my life by teachers and not a single student who ever came to me and said that was dumb or incapable or lazy or incoherent or or incapable of developing
	You know, deep critical thinking on issues evolutionary and beyond.
	So I want to, there are a lot of things wrapped up in what you just said, and I want to highlight a few of them.
	Yeah.
	One thing is the lack of selectivity of the college produced two populations inside the college, and the two populations have everything to do with what unfolded.
	Yeah.
	So you had people who showed up there because it was the college of last resort.
	They could get in, they couldn't get in somewhere else, and many of them Largely through no fault of their own, through the failure of the schools that they had come from, didn't have the skills to do the work.
	And then there was a large population of misfits and oddballs and unusual people, people just who didn't have a taste for the elite colleges.
	And we saw them all.
	And because, you know, it's a strange thing to say, but because you and I were both very, very popular, our classes overflowed.
	We never didn't have a waitlist.
	Even with declining enrollment, when nearly everyone else was having a hard time filling classes, we had waitlists.
	What this meant, oddly, we weren't in most cases, except in the rare case of study abroad, in most cases we were not allowed to decide who came into our classes.
	But there was a backdoor mechanism and we used it.
	So there was this tradition, before any term began, There's a thing called Academic Fair, in which you could sit down with any professor you wanted to and talk to them about the program they were teaching.
	This is before registration happens, so this is a way for students to, I mean I hate the consumer metaphor here, but shop for the full-time program that they would be taking for a quarter or two quarters or three quarters, and this was a month or so before registration, or you know a day before registration, a month or more before classes started.
	So when students asked us for advice, we told them a lot of stuff.
	We would tell them whether the program they were considering taking was likely to be any good, but the key thing was it made all the difference in the world who was teaching.
	A good professor who was teaching something you maybe weren't that interested in would probably give you something of high value.
	A terrible professor who was teaching something that you were nominally interested in was very unlikely to teach you anything, and you were liable to feel, because these were full-time programs, you were liable to feel trapped.
	So anyway, the academic fair was like an opportunity to interview professors.
	But I also took it, and you took it, as an opportunity to interview students and figure out whether or not they were a good fit.
	And in my case in particular, often they weren't, because I wasn't a normal kind of professor, and so you sort of had to be ready for my deficits.
	And if you were prepared for them, there was a lot you could get out of it.
	But in any case, By discouraging students who wouldn't be a good fit for the program and encouraging those who would be a good fit, and in my case, I always let in a few extras, people who showed particular promise but didn't register in time or something, didn't make it into the class.
	I would let those in, and this would adjust the character of the room.
	The room would be really high quality, and my feeling was As long as you had one person in the room who was willing to volley with you, you could teach the others to do it and you could get a really great teaching environment up and running pretty quickly.
	Absolutely.
	So anyway, that created an opportunity for us to build a community of people who were super high caliber, even in a college that wasn't selected, right?
	We weren't allowed to be formally selective, but informally it happened.
	Students would often show up from past programs and sit in on one or more many weeks of classes, simply because they wanted to continue to be part of the conversation that we're having, the ongoing evolutionary conversation.
	And so having these Having these, basically, alums of our programs in the room very often also raised the level of discussion in the room.
	Oh, absolutely.
	They functioned like TAs, and they were there just because they were hungry to find the community that was still having the conversation that they had benefited from.
	I, late in the game, found out that there was a proper term for this, which I borrowed from Steve Jobs.
	Steve Jobs, who famously dropped out of, was it Reed?
	Yeah, I think.
	In any case, Steve Jobs dropped out of college, but he didn't stop going.
	He kept going.
	He was trying to save his parents their tuition money, but he wasn't interested in not learning, and so he went and just took what he wanted.
	So he called himself a drop-in, right?
	And these students who came back to our programs became drop-ins.
	In any case, it created a couple of things.
	One, It created a very delightful teaching environment for us, which I think made us a little bit less aware of just how bad things were descending into madness in the larger college.
	Because our community was healthy, the larger community's descent into madness was, I mean, we were aware of it, but I don't think we were as alarmed as we should have been, which meant that it, until the last year, it would have caught us off guard.
	Although I do remember conversations certainly between us and a few of our other colleagues who were saying, you know, students remain amazing.
	What we can do with the curriculum and with education with this model is amazing.
	But when I come onto campus, I just keep my head down and go from my classroom to my office and home.
	I don't want to increasingly, we were finding over the last several years that our our supposed peers were going off the rails.
	Our supposed peers were going off the rails going after each other and the good ones were keeping their head down.
	Actually, maybe as long as we're here, can we look at some of those pictures from our Sure, you got these up.
	I don't know what you've got in store for us.
	So let me just set this up a little bit.
	So Heather became excellent at creating study abroad programs at a price that was unheard of.
	And the price really shouldn't matter, except that what it meant was that a range of students could go on these study abroad programs who never would have been able to afford it At a normal college doing this at a normal rate.
	The price was incredibly low.
	It was incredibly low.
	And I worked with them too.
	The students who were eligible for Pell Grants, I worked with them to get them some funds, basically scholarships, that over half of my students who applied every time I did study abroad got these such that they actually went into debt very little for the experience of a six, eight, eleven week study abroad in Panama or Ecuador.
	Right.
	So these things were inexpensive, which meant they were more diverse than they would otherwise be.
	They were intensive.
	You got them help.
	You worked with them to be able to go.
	And they were also just much better than you would be able to source anywhere else.
	So the final one, the one I went on with you.
	That we did together, yes.
	We did together, and you know, I'm plenty good at showing up and teaching, but I was not responsible for making this happen.
	That was all Heather.
	But it was a totally different experience.
	I mean, all of my study abroads were amazing and flawed and glorious, but this last one that we did together, Was the two of us, our two children, 30 students.
	30 students.
	11 weeks in Ecuador.
	Who we'd been with all year.
	So we had learned.
	So again, Evergreen classes are full-time, or at least they were full-time, which meant a professor teaches one class, students take one class, you're with each other full-time.
	It's your job.
	So we'd already been in the field with them in the Pacific Northwest for a couple of weeks.
	We'd seen them and we'd selected them from all of the applicants to get to the 50 that we started with in the fall, and then we trimmed that number farther to travel with 30 students through Ecuador for 11 weeks in January through April of 2016.
	And for those of you who don't know, Ecuador is a Small country by some measures, but it is terrifically diverse.
	Not only does it contain the most diverse habitat on Earth, as far as we know, in the Amazon, one of the places that we visited, but it also has, you know, the Altiplano, High in the Andes, it's got Cloud Forest, it's got an amazing diversity of habitats and creatures and cultures and so anyway, it's a spectacular place and to spend, oh and the Galapagos of course, to spend 11 weeks touring with students that you know really well who are You know, because this was evergreen.
	We were biologists, but we were teaching about paleoanthropology.
	We were teaching about evolutionary ecology.
	We were teaching about evolutionary dynamics.
	We did cultural history and modern cultural norms and expectations in Ecuador as well.
	And so we got to basically use Ecuador as the test case for all of these things.
	We could go look at it.
	So anyway, this was happening the year before Evergreen came apart.
	Now we want you to see what Evergreen looked like when it was firing on all cylinders.
	So let's put up some photos.
	Alright, well I'm going to set this image up and then hopefully Zach will be able to put it on the screen for you.
	The image is a picture of 30 students plus Zach with a bus in kind of the distant background.
	And these students are experiencing something utterly remarkable.
	Now, what has just happened is these students have just encountered the headwaters of the Amazon.
	They have just crossed into the watershed that becomes, hundreds of miles away, the Amazon River.
	And where they are standing, it is but a trickle.
	Behind them, you can see the first Cecropia trees they've ever encountered.
	These will become a very common feature of our discussions because they're such an important feature of tropical forests.
	But in any case, they're up here in the clouds in this cold location watching, you know, essentially the process that creates the Amazon at its very beginning.
	And they're excited.
	You can see that these are students that are happy to be having this experience.
	They didn't expect it.
	But they're excited by what they're able to actually walk up to and touch.
	It's such an amazing picture.
	It really takes me back and we've heard from two of the people in this picture in the last couple of days with regard to this being An anniversary that's coming up and we've been in touch of course with another we work with on a regular basis so you know yeah three three three of the people in this photo we've we've been in touch with in the last week and you know probably another ten of them we're in regular contact with.
	So, in fact, for those of you who are watching and not just listening, the woman kneeling in the front row is Odette, who will come up here in a couple of other photos.
	She's a good friend of ours.
	We've seen her recently.
	But anyway, her story actually tells the story of what happened at Evergreen so well that, anyway, I think we just can't avoid exploring it.
	So let's go a little further here.
	So this image is of Heather and Zach and Toby, although Zach is barely recognizable in this photo, and a student of ours who we've run into.
	This is Carnival.
	This is the night before Carnival, which is the Night of the Grandfathers.
	And the tradition in Ecuador basically is for people to run around like madmen spraying each other with foam.
	And anyway, our students have taken to this and they're participating, and we're participating, and this is a great cultural lesson.
	And, you know, I don't know that the foam tradition is wonderful or absurd or whatever it might be, but it's the reality of what takes place in this beautiful colonial city in Ecuador.
	And, you know, here we are having run into a student who's obviously fully integrated himself into this tradition.
	Let's see, maybe the Hat Factory.
	All right, so here are our students.
	It's a day trip from Cuenca.
	A day trip out of Cuenca.
	These students are watching women make Panama hats in an all-female hat collective that exists in Ecuador.
	And so we saw the whole process of how they made hats.
	Again, Odette here is front and center.
	Let's see.
	This is going to be Cajas, another day trip from Cuenca.
	So this is a very surprising habitat that we are hiking through.
	This is Cajas National Park.
	You can see these peaks which are almost always enshrouded in clouds.
	It's ultra cold.
	Anyway, a really magical place.
	I think we have a picture of... let's see...
	Another Odette picture.
	Alright, so here's Odette discovering Cajas National Park.
	Now, I hate to do this because in some sense I don't want to sully Cajas National Park or The wonderful reality of Odette with the terrible thing that happened to her.
	In some sense, it's parallel to what happened to us.
	You know, we were teaching in a way that was extremely rewarding and then something monstrous came for us.
	But I think I should read something.
	Odette did not intend for this to be public, but I did ask her if it was okay if I read part of what she wrote.
	I will try to adjust it so that it makes sense.
	So she's discussing... When did she write this?
	She sent it to me out of the blue this morning.
	Oh, this is today?
	Yeah, she was realizing that it was the third anniversary of May 23rd, and that's important to her for the same reason it's important to us.
	So, you know, a year after she was here in Cajas National Park, she is discussing the meeting in which George Bridges, the president of the college, has ostensibly agreed to address the concerns that the students have advanced.
	And she says that some left the address with confidence and assurance, leaving the rest with even more confusion and questions.
	But as you know, there was no room for questions.
	These activists were acting as if they were bored.
	They wanted something to do.
	All in all, students were upset that they had failed at college and decided to get the institution to pay for their shortcomings.
	I was diligently on campus that week.
	This would be week nine and ten.
	She said the museum got vandalized.
	Okay, this is the same thing you were referencing that Steve had discussed.
	The CALS windows were broken and shattered.
	People were roaming around with bats.
	There were no police.
	Campus was covered in graffiti.
	Normal students, in quotes, would not make eye contact with me on campus.
	They were afraid of me.
	They were afraid of my skin color.
	I was followed and prevented from entering the Lab 1 building, surrounded by a group of activists who were screaming all sorts of nonsense, but were in fact shouting, I shouldn't be studying science.
	Their exact words were, a piece of shit for studying science.
	Crazy.
	Are people's lives so corrupt that they are going to actually take time to target and accost complete strangers?
	Do you know how much effort that takes?
	How exhausting it is?
	She says, I was able to leave the library, which was barricaded by the protesters, who were really rioters at that point.
	She says, I was able to leave the library solely based on the way I looked in comparison to the captors.
	I was confronted at Lab 1 for the same reason.
	The second resistance was displayed, proving myself not going along with the crowd.
	I was either deemed a lost soul, a traitor, or a white sympathizer.
	You're benefiting from white privilege, my captor said.
	I'll never forget that.
	By their own logic, so were they.
	One thing I will never understand is how people cannot think for themselves.
	No matter where you fall, you must be able to think.
	This is a college.
	There are supposed to be thousands of thinkers present.
	What happened to them?
	Where did they go?
	That's amazing.
	Yeah.
	It's the Odette I know.
	It's Odette.
	I had never heard though, I mean she and you and I have talked a lot, many many many hours in the three years since Evergreen blew up.
	And I'd never, the one thing in there I hadn't heard before was that other students who weren't part of the protests avoided her, were scared of her because of her color, because of her skin color.
	It's astounding.
	It's the most upsetting feature of this whole thing, because, I mean, I must tell you, I learned something about race from Odette, as I've mentioned elsewhere.
	I took Odette to be black, but in talking to her about it, and she was very open with us, You know, her family is, uh... Her mother was Afro-Caribbean.
	Her father's European.
	Her dad is of European descent.
	And the fact is, as one can easily imagine once somebody points you to it, in her case she doesn't feel black or not black.
	These are the two sides of her family and, you know, one does not default to mother or father or one way of thinking or the other.
	The point is that's the nature of the way human beings are.
	She's just an extraordinary human being who's a scientist and a ballerina and a writer and an artist.
	And brilliant at phylogenetic trees and at fieldwork.
	And she was actually one of the students who came to Evergreen entirely of her own volition.
	She could have gotten in nearly anywhere.
	She was an excellent student, and not because she was a follower or sheep, but because she was just An excellent student who is creative and hard-working and analytically beyond competent.
	She came to Evergreen because she loved the model and so you know she was not a misfit in any way arriving in our classroom and Boy, at this point, the point this picture was taken, she had been my student consistently for almost two full years, and yours for only one quarter less than that.
	I met her, as with so many of the students, including almost all the ones who were in that boat accident with me later in the same trip, as they entered college for the first time, freshman in college.
	This highlights one of the things.
	So Odette was simultaneously a student of ours and a friend of ours.
	Yeah.
	And these two things were not in conflict.
	She put her trust in us for good reason, I think, and it paid off for her.
	But this did not mean that we couldn't also be friends.
	And so she shows up all kinds of places.
	Those of us who've been following us carefully will know of the terrible boat accident that you were in.
	Odette was in the boat accident with you, was badly injured as you were.
	The day before that boat accident, she and I had walked down the face of this crater together.
	The class had been looking at this volcanic crater and we had spent, I don't know, Half an hour or an hour involved in conversation.
	I don't even remember what it was, but I do remember how fun it was walking down this crater with her and remarking on the biology that was there and talking about lives.
	I think she was talking to me.
	She loves live theater and she was talking to me about some of her favorites.
	But then also she shows up on the day of absence.
	I did not have class.
	Uh, it was a Wednesday and I did not have class scheduled, but I had said in the letter that became famous, I had said you should expect to find me on campus and I didn't want not to live up to it.
	So I went to campus and I ran into Odette.
	And we went and had a conversation for an hour.
	And I later asked her if she had arranged to find me to keep me out of trouble.
	And she said, no, it hadn't even occurred to her.
	And in fact, we didn't even talk about Day of Absence.
	Of course.
	It wasn't a worthwhile topic of conversation from our perspective.
	Yeah.
	So do you want to, Zach, to take this down?
	You want to show a few more pictures before we move on?
	Let's move to a couple more pictures.
	How about this one?
	Yeah, let's look at this one.
	All right, this is a picture of students involved in a mud fight in the Napo River.
	I love this one.
	I love this moment.
	So the Napo is a tributary of the Amazon, and later in the trip we will find ourselves in a different part of the Amazon in another tributary called the Shirapuno, a tributary of the Napo.
	But anyway, here these guys are... They're having a mud fight.
	They're having a mud fight.
	In a tributary of the Amazon, in the Amazon Basin, in Ecuador, and you know what they're learning.
	This is education.
	This is the picture when I wrote that New York Times op-ed on nature being risky and that's why students and everyone need it.
	This is the picture that I hoped could accompany it, but it turns out that if you're writing about college students, that they have college students do the art for the piece.
	Um, it wasn't an option, but this, this qualifies as some of the highly educational work that these students were doing.
	And of course they also did field work and they took data and they did analysis and they reported them out to us, often by candlelight while sweating at mosquitoes in remote places with, you know, no doors or screens or running water.
	Um, but this too, uh, they're having fun and learning.
	What else do we have here?
	Maybe that's... Oh, I guess... Let's see.
	Oh, what's this?
	That's a picture of... Oh, that's Cahas again.
	Yeah, that's Cahas again.
	I guess if we go...
	Yeah, there's one last picture of Cajas.
	This is interesting.
	It's Lucas leading a group of people.
	Lucas, who I also feel like could have gotten in anywhere but really appreciated the unusual model.
	And then maybe the last thing.
	That's a self-portrait that I took of you and me.
	The night after the boat accident in which you very nearly died and I spent 45 minutes sure that you had.
	So anyway, I don't know what that picture is doing here, but it means something important to me, so I figured I'd include it.
	Yeah, okay, maybe we can go back to non-photos now.
	So you, go for it.
	Well, the thing about You know, if we can just, I hate to take advantage of what Odette has supplied us here, but what happened to Odette being confronted by other students accused of basically being a race traitor for studying science?
	This so encapsulates the confusion that was at the heart of the Evergreen riots and meltdown.
	That I just think it makes sense to spend just a moment thinking about what it implies.
	Somebody without race on their mind at all has decided that they even, I mean, she didn't know that she was science-oriented until, you know, she encountered you in that first program and saw that there was just all of this amazing power to understand that was potentially at her disposal.
	Did brilliantly.
	And then here she is being confronted by violent thugs who are trying to shame her into abandoning what she's discovered that's so wonderful rather than what should have happened, which is that the whole college should have, you know, led people in the direction of ideas that actually empower you rather than turn you into
	And so something about it just strikes me as the confrontation between the civil rights movement's understanding of the objective and this new intersectional garbage that is its most dangerous foe.
	So that's a good segue, I think.
	I wanted to share something from one of the faculty, the Emeritus Faculty, who stood up in defense of you and us and truth and reason beginning in January of 2017.
	And it was totally unexpected and neither of us had any knowledge of him except that we imagined that he might fall on the other side of this, but he very much did not.
	So just an excerpt From Alan Nasser, who in his sign-off to this email reminds his readers that he is in fact not white.
	He says, I have been following the remarkable, truly remarkable posts on the alleged epinephic of racism rampant among Evergreen faculty.
	So this is in January of 2017.
	Let's be clear, he writes, that there are no traces whatever of racism at Evergreen is highly unlikely given the unmistakable force of racism in American society.
	But what is alleged by some very privileged people of color, I should add, must be thought by the complainants to be a virtual epidemic given the sweeping and sometimes vitriolic nature of the complaints issued on this thread.
	There is in fact no such epidemic on this campus.
	Later in the same email, he says, a small number of faculty and staff here have embarked upon a campaign and a series of posts that would look ludicrous and quasi-pathological to most decent readers outside of this campus.
	And the real white fragility here is to be found among the white folks dripping with guilt and liable to intimidation.
	Yeah, I did not imagine that Alan was going to show up in our defense, but I must say it was so heartening.
	And you know, it goes back to the theme that we started with, which is the crisis reveals everyone's character.
	That's exactly right.
	And, you know, for those of you who are potentially facing such things in the world, this is an important thing.
	You should expect it to happen, and you should expect people to disappoint you, and you should expect people to show up with strengths you didn't know they have, because both things happen.
	What you shouldn't do is assume that because somebody is decent enough on a day-to-day basis when there is no crisis that they're not going to flee or turn on you just because they're a nice person.
	The fact is cowardice is a very dangerous drug.
	Yeah, it sure is.
	Now you had mentioned some of the crazy happening behind the scenes that, for the most part, was not revealed to the world.
	I'd like to share just two examples of this.
	The first from February 15, 2017.
	So when it was good and clear that this was going off the rails to us on the inside, but the rest of the world didn't know, a student by the name of Mike Penhaligon, I'm probably mispronouncing his name, He writes, "Dear Brett, to be clear, this is to all staff and faculty, I think, and so some students were on this list because they were student employees.
	So he writes, "Dear Brett, to be clear, as a sciences student, you and your racist colleagues are the reason I won't recruit future students," which incidentally was his job to recruit future students.
	You and your racist colleagues are the reason I won't recruit future students.
	If the current reorganization that I support makes you uncomfortable, I have no question to lean in on supporting those plans.
	Thoughtfully, Mike Penhillingham.
	I was thoughtful.
	Oh, so thoughtful.
	And then, May 27th, so four days into the riots, Stephen Flusty, who signs off as Professor of Fortune, I have no idea what that means, begins a May 27th email this way.
	Thank you.
	And he names a bunch of people, including Zoltan and Naima, who some viewers will be familiar with.
	And my apologies for snipping your words, to which I now add far too many of my own.
	I'm just including this as an example of the kind of language that critical theory produces in academics.
	So this is an academic so, so in the grievance studies in critical theory that he thinks this makes sense.
	I am merely an adjunct, a temp with little real status here, and am thus in a particularly vulnerable position.
	As such, I have remained silent in public.
	I have remained while silent while supremacist evolutionary just-so stories, as Stephen Jay Gould rightly called them, with an entirely appropriate call-out to the flatulent poet laureate of white supremacy, Richard Kipling, have been promulgated.
	I have remained silent while privileged, uh, whinged and moaned interminably as it tried to usurp the status of a beleaguered minority, and I'm gonna just skip some of this, it's ridiculous, and now propagandizing steps of the most thoughtfully self-absorbed sort have been taken that invoke outside violence down upon a great many of my students, my partner, and myself, all of us truly vulnerable persons at Evergreen and in the larger region beyond, on numerous axes of identity, plainly visible, And otherwise.
	That's marvelous.
	It is so marvelous.
	Is Professor of Fortune like Soldier of Fortune?
	I think it's supposed to be, yes!
	Does he know what that means?
	I don't think so.
	He's a mercenary professor.
	I mean, that fits perfectly, actually.
	Oh, wait, there's one more from him.
	Later, in the same email, he said, Thanks, Brett.
	Please be aware that this, like all similar communications received previously and any that may be coming in the future, are also being forwarded under separate cover to legal counsel.
	You quicken your boots yet?
	Not quite.
	This is what caused us to look at each other over and over again and go, I can't believe that they keep on doubling down, that they keep on doing these ridiculous things, and isn't it a shame that the world will never know?
	As it turns out that the world did come to know, and yet still they kind of won.
	Oh, they clearly won something.
	They won the college and it's failing, but amazing.
	Well, look, I would love for people to get the full context of the marvelous thing that was going on at the same place that the terrible thing was going on and what that implies.
	It's really, it's a deep lesson and it's a difficult one.
	I have to say, my favorite email of all, I can't find it.
	I know, I couldn't find it either.
	So, my favorite email, and it may be Flusty, I'm not sure, but anyway, the idea was that he was describing a conflict, I think during the riots, and he said, the important question here is not who's right here, but who's white here.
	And I thought, A, What does that mean?
	And B, it does?
	I mean, how?
	That's the important thing?
	I mean, it just puts into such completely stark relief this dichotomy that Jonathan Haidt has pointed out many times, right?
	That you can maximize truth, the searching for truth, or you can maximize the quest for social justice, but you cannot maximize both simultaneously.
	And that quote Not who's right, but who's white here.
	Yeah.
	Just is the perfect synopsis of the choice.
	Well, it's almost like that was the secret behind the scenes thing that he wasn't supposed to reveal was really the core organizing principle of this thing.
	Like that right and wrong has been replaced by white and not white and it's like...
	At a college?
	At a college.
	That idea isn't good enough for the brainstorming session when somebody then shoots it down.
	You've built a movement around this?
	Yeah.
	We've got, I mean there's lots and lots from this one, but Naima Lowe posted to her Facebook page just before the canoe meeting, the famous canoe meeting.
	Proposed rule for the upcoming meeting now.
	It did not end up getting adopted But she proposed this rule for the upcoming faculty meet for the upcoming canoe meeting So wait wait in fairness this was I'm pretty sure tongue-in-cheek But I do think it I mean why is the joke funny to her is the question anyway What she says is only appointed or approved whites can speak and only when spoken to Yeah, I I I don't think that's a good rule.
	You don't?
	Does that surprise you?
	Yeah, no, it doesn't.
	I mean, I could go on, but maybe the point is made, really, that inside the school, it was a pressure cooker for the last year, right?
	And there were many there Many students, some on staff, fewer on faculty, fewer on admin, although there were a few brave people on admin, who were watching the thing and could not figure out how to stop it.
	Admin had some power, should have, but you were doing more than anyone.
	You were, you were trying everything possible and it was unstoppable.
	And they said so!
	In as many words, in as many ways, there began to be a cabal of first a couple and ultimately a good 10 or 14 faculty members who every time you wrote any email to the staff faculty thread, the all-staff faculty,
	thread they would respond almost as a unit and just pile on and accuse you of all the things we've now become familiar with you having been accused of with of course no evidence because there can be no evidence for something that isn't true Yeah, and you know, the hard part to understand is that this energy existed on the campus and, you know, not unique to Evergreen, but it was catalyzed.
	The nucleating event was the hiring of George Bridges, who, you know, there's a debate amongst those of us who follow the story closely.
	About whether or not he is diabolical or just inept.
	And really the answer is, well, he's clearly inept, but that's not, you know, you can be both.
	And what he did was he partnered with this madness in order to advance his own agenda.
	And, you know, it unleashed this on campus, which I don't think he expected, but Less purse the previous president had been holding it at bay and frankly less purse because he happened to be a black man Could more easily dismiss out of hand without giving any time to these people at all any such complaints that came his way I presume he was doing it.
	You know, we basically never saw it until he stepped down and We got bridges.
	Well, we did see it and It's one of the pieces of video, no not during his tenure, but famously as one of the main buildings on the campus was remodeled and then renamed in his honor, he came back from retirement for the dedication.
	And the very same people who show up again and again and again in the protests of you and me, the student activists, those same students confronted him.
	And this is the place where they reveal, you know, he invokes Martin Luther King, you know, he reasons with them.
	And he says, look, I'm not deaf to your concerns, but there's a right There's a way, and there's a right objective, and what you all are doing is dangerous to this.
	And, you know, they shut him down, and he invokes Martin Luther King, and one of the protesters says, yes, but Dr. King is dead, as if that's an indictment of what he advocated.
	But anyway, so yes, ultimately, even less purse.
	You know, frankly.
	Can't make headway against them.
	On the other hand, he can't make headway against them coming back to campus for an afternoon, having ceded power, having stepped down after a long tenure 18 months or so before.
	So I don't, I don't think that though that group of activists could have done that in the middle of Les Perce's term as president.
	No, I can't, I can't imagine that they would have, nor would he have done any of the foolish things that George did that empowered the the mobs so that they had such great leverage.
	So where do we point our fingers?
	There are many types of players, and there are many individual players, and some of them are awful, but most of them aren't simply awful.
	There's admin level, George Bridges being the most famous, There's faculty and staff and there are students and as it happened, because the video that went viral that the students themselves took and posted and then someone unknown to us took that video off of someone's Facebook page or something and put it on YouTube, it was easy to point a finger at the students and say they're entitled, they're ridiculous, they, you know, belong and this is Maoist and they're at the base of this.
	Neither you nor I Find them to be central in the story actually the activist students, right?
	I mean, I think one of them clearly is yeah, but This actually goes to a discussion I've been having on a number of fronts of the number of different people where I hear people give advice And the advice is of this nature.
	You will be better if you imagine that everyone is acting in good faith.
	And my feeling about this is when people, even if somebody is advocating something terrible, Very often they don't understand that that's what they're doing, and assuming that they are acting in good faith relative to what they internally believe actually works, it's helpful.
	But if you just make this a universal approach, you are signing up to make yourself vulnerable to every truly bad actor.
	And these truly bad actors exist, not in large numbers, in small numbers, but they do prey on those who use a heuristic like that and make themselves incapable of fending off an attack.
	And so I think one of the things that I believe happened is that a place like Evergreen accumulates people who are Basically cowards.
	I mean, academia in general seems to, but Evergreen maybe even worse.
	And an assumption like that is basically a neon sign advertising for people who are really just in it for themselves.
	And, you know, I saw something.
	Benjamin Boyce put up an interview that he had done with a student of mine, who was a student at the time the protests broke out.
	Actually, Zach, could you put up the video of George talking and then put up the...
	All right, we will see if this works.
	It's not working, that's unfortunate.
	So in any case, this is a student of mine who says that she had worked as a waitress at a restaurant near the college, and that George would come in frequently and she would end up serving him.
	And she describes that there is A moment at which he realizes that he has met her before, and that she is an Evergreen student.
	And she describes that he puts on this smile, and he asks her how her studies are going, and he inquires about whether or not she is liking Evergreen.
	And her comment is, I just had the sense that that is the moment at which he decided to care, to seem like he gave a damn.
	This reminds me of so many of our former colleagues.
	Probably you're going someplace else with this, but I was marveling reading through some of the past emails at the kind of thinking that we now, everyone now, is sort of immersed in, like believe all women, right, with the Me Too movement.
	But back in the year leading up to the Evergreen protests, we had a lot of believe all students and believe all people of color.
	And it's the same horrifying, gameable idea that any demographic should be inherently believable because any demographic is inherently truth-seeking and lovely in every regard is obviously simply going to be false.
	But the audio just messed up in another way.
	It's now doing that stuttery thing that you've seen before.
	What are you telling me, Zach?
	I don't know.
	I mean, people can hear you, but there's a million problems that weren't there before.
	All right, folks.
	We are going to continue to forge ahead.
	We are hearing in the chat that people are having trouble with the audio.
	If it becomes intolerable, come back when we've uploaded the video.
	We're recording it locally so we can do a fine version and put it up quickly.
	We apologize for this.
	It is downstream of us that much we know.
	All right, that's unfortunate.
	So I was talking about this believe-all students logic that was showing up a lot in conversations and emails in the 2016-2017 academic year, and I will say that I tended to see this from exactly the people who, you know, will talk about, you know, we need to be student-centered, and we need to be student-focused, and almost always, when I knew anything about these faculty, and in some cases I had taught with some of them,
	I know that as soon as the doors were closed and there wasn't any possibility that students were listening in, these were exactly the faculty who were dehumanizing students, refusing to learn their names, much less anything about them.
	And this is one of the things that was absolutely possible and necessary to use Evergreen in the maximally best way possible, which was to take the opportunity of having a full-time program for 10 weeks or 20 weeks or 30 weeks.
	And not just learn everyone's names within a couple of days, obviously, but learn something about them so that you actually had an ongoing sense of who they were as people.
	They're not brains in jars.
	And I developed this rubric late in the game at Evergreen at the point that I had grown quite tired of most of our colleagues precisely because of this and said, God, there should be just a, I have a low bar for what it should take to be a successful faculty at Evergreen.
	And it's two things.
	You should actually believe in the fundamental humanity of your students, and you should have something real that you know that you're capable of communicating.
	And so many faculty failed one or both of those one or both of those rubrics and This thing that you say about your student who was waiting tables at a place where George Bridges came in, that she saw the mask go up.
	Yeah.
	Which means the mask sometimes comes down.
	And this is certainly the sense that we had of him throughout.
	That he was not who he appeared.
	That, you know, hapless or evil genius.
	Who knows?
	But, you know, some kind of combination of the two, and certainly the evil genius trope would use haplessness as a thing to hide behind.
	Yeah.
	The irony, of course, though, is that many of the people who were leading the charge would tell you that the enemy was old white men, and from the outside it really looks to me like the college They've now announced that George will retire at the end of his contract.
	They're going to give him the right to teach at the college after he's retired, which is very unusual.
	The college is now selling a false story that it's, you know, the pandemic that has caused the failure, and before that they were selling the false story that the decline in enrollment was going before Bridges arrived, and of course, it's not that there wasn't an enrollment issue, but it's quite obvious from the graph that there's a precipitous catastrophe surrounding George and, you know, his plan for the place.
	And somehow, as he's brought the place to its knees, and they can't bear to have a conversation with him, in which they say, actually, George, you've done a rotten job.
	You know, don't let the doorknob hit you on the way out.
	No, they're still talking about him having used wisdom throughout difficult times.
	They're praising the man.
	And so, they've liquidated a college.
	And what did that college do?
	That college served underserved people.
	Who did they liquidate it for?
	So as not to embarrass George Bridges?
	What kind of upside-down world are we living in?
	How did they not notice that they were, in some sense, doing exactly the thing that they declared the world was guilty of?
	That's right.
	All right.
	It's an hour-ish.
	It's an hour-ish.
	There's a ton more that we can talk about, of course.
	We were planning to take a break at some point and take Super Chat questions, but only those relating to Evergreen in the second hour, and to choose as we see fit.
	We may see one or two that we end up talking about for the entire time, or we may go through many of them.
	I feel like There's so much more to say.
	Oh, let me just say this.
	So the the thing about crisis revealing everyone's character.
	Yeah.
	We've talked a little bit about the expected places where we found support.
	Um, mostly in students, uh, and, uh, a little bit also about the unexpected, um, including from, uh, Alan Nasser.
	And, uh, let me just say one more of those and then mention, uh, some previously unknown to us, uh, that the public records officer at the college, um, I had, I had, I had done a Freedom of Information, uh, Act request after there was an assault on campus by protesters of a student.
	Which Stacey Brown, who we heard from today, who was the police chief at the time, who was amazing, she had told me about this and said, you need to do a FOIA request.
	And then someone there was blocking access for a long time.
	And Wendy Morris got it to me and she sent me a CD and included a handwritten note, notably, that could not be tracked via other FOIA requests.
	In which she said that she really hoped that we were doing well and that she was so sorry for what we were going through and that we were all part of a community.
	This is from a staff person who we had never met, who actually turns out is a woman of color, a black woman, who took time out and frankly probably some risk to make a point of reaching out.
	And there were many emails like that from people as well, people we'd never heard from before, never heard of before.
	But let me just say that, of course, the reason we can do this now and have an audience is in part because so many people that we had not previously known but were known to the world reached out to us right away.
	Nicholas Christakis, Jonathan Haidt, Jerry Coyne, Michael Shermer, you went on, Dave Rubin and Tucker
	Carlson and Sam Harris and Joe Rogan and you know all you know and more and more and more and more right now And all of those people and many more that I'm forgetting to list here and wouldn't have time to Oh Bob Woodson one of one of the original civil rights leaders who actually Wanted to come and get some of the original civil rights leaders with him and come to campus and march on campus with us During the protests and we were ready to say yes, and then it descended into into actual violence.
	Well, it was actually Yes, it descended into that.
	He was still ready to go.
	The problem was it was week 10.
	And so there was no way to get him here in time.
	The students were about to scatter.
	Week 10 being the last week of the quarter.
	So people were going to scatter to the winds.
	Yeah.
	So let me just end with one more.
	This is someone we don't know.
	We never met.
	Who wrote to the all-staff faculty email.
	And I'll just read the email.
	He says, Dear Mr. Bridges, And Evergreen faculty and staff.
	I am one of Evergreen's earlier graduates.
	I entered as a junior the day the college's doors opened and graduated in 1973.
	I later got my doctorate in zoology at UC Davis.
	I remain in close contact with Dr. Steve Herman and many of his students.
	I am very proud to be a geoduck, that's the mascot of Evergreen, especially as a product of the tremendous tradition of field biology that Dr. Herman and other faculty have maintained over the years, a tradition virtually unique in the nation.
	Thus it is with a sense of shame that I witness the treatment of Brett Weinstein by a mob of closed-minded students who seem to mistake the purpose of a liberal arts education.
	You, sir, must take a more forceful role in support of Dr. Weinstein.
	I imagine I am one of many thousands of geoduck alums waiting anxiously to see that Dr. Weinstein keeps his job.
	Further, I suspect that many other alums, like I, question the wisdom of the college's new equality of outcome agenda described in Dr. Weinstein's Wall Street Journal commentary.
	In closing, please get a grip, people.
	This is my college you're messing with.
	Sincerely, David F. Whitaker, Class of 1973.
	Class of 73 so that's like it's like the second year that it was up and running yeah yeah and you know we you ended up receiving thousands of emails and I went through most of them and uh there were I think two really heinous death threat level anti-semitic things and a couple of other mildly negative things.
	And otherwise, it was from all demographics, from all parts of the world, ages, sex, races, everything, educational level, career interests, political spectrum, to say thank you and please keep fighting the good fight.
	Yeah, it was it was like a thousand to one.
	Yeah, it was amazing.
	All right.
	Shall we take a break and then come back and answer some questions?
	Let's do it.
	All right.
	Sorry for the technical difficulties.
	It's downstream of us.
	I wish we are trying to switch ISPs in an effort to get away from this.
	But anyway, for now, it is what it is.
	We will see you in a few minutes.
	The link to the next stream will be in the description of this one.
	Like, subscribe, notify, comment, and we'll see you shortly.
	Hey folks, welcome back to the Dark Horse Technopocalypse.
	I'm here with Dr. Heather Hying, and if anything goes right, we will answer your questions regarding the evergreen meltdown that occurred May 23rd, 2017 at somewhere between 9 and 10 in the morning, or began then.
	It began then.
	The public part of it began then.
	Yes.
	Yes, okay.
	So, without further ado, we are having trouble on pretty much every channel, but we are going to read those questions that those Super Chat questions that came in that have something to do with evergreen only today.
	This first one that came in is evergreen adjacent, but we're going to start there.
	Based on tutoring experience, I think I'd be a good teacher, but I see K-12 getting infected with the same SJW virus as higher ed.
	Is there a way to teach in the U.S.
	without either having to lie or ending up in your situation?
	That's a really good question.
	This is from our friend Holly Math Nerd.
	I think the answer is no, except if you broaden your definition of teaching.
	I think at some level the legacy system of teaching has followed bad assumptions straight into the ground.
	Something is going to take its place.
	So the question is, can you hold out long enough for the new system, whatever it might be, to alert us to its existence?
	In the meantime, you know, Heather frequently makes the point that most human societies don't involve formal instruction.
	There's plenty of learning.
	Of course, learning is the core of what a human being is.
	But formal instruction is novel.
	It's necessary for some topics, but In general, it's not the way humans learn.
	So figuring out how to teach in a way that might not be labeled, that would be a wise thing to do in the meantime.
	And when the educational apparatus or whatever replaces it shows itself, then you'll be already practiced.
	This is indeed part of why I look at that picture of our students flinging mud at each other in the Amazon and say that's educational.
	That it doesn't look like top-down, authoritarian, sage-on-the-stage style education, but that doesn't mean that those people weren't learning, and that we didn't get them there through a variety of different means, and help them understand why there was value in it, and All of that is educational, even if it's not direct learning.
	No one, I assume, directly instructed any of those young men to throw mud at one another.
	I did.
	But direct observation and leaving room for serendipity, these are some of the most educational openings available.
	So when somebody looks down their nose at you and says, guys, if you're laughing, you're not learning.
	You have to listen for the emoji.
	If there's an emoji, maybe they're okay.
	If there's no emoji, you just run the other direction.
	Yeah.
	So just one more thing in answer to this question.
	Holly asks, is there a way to teach in the U.S.
	without having either to lie or ending up in your situation?
	And, you know, lying, you know, isn't something you want to have to do anyway, but I don't think it's sufficient.
	You know, we have, we know plenty of good teachers who are still trying to do it.
	Students and teachers in both public and private schools in the K-12 system And they can successfully obscure their true feelings for administrators, but they're just being constrained on all sides.
	And some of them are trying to fight back within their institutions and some of them are feeling it too strongly and are looking for other things to do.
	So if I can just add one more thing, I think it's so important.
	During the Evergreen riots, a student of mine, a current student at the time, called my attention to the story Harrison Bergeron, which many of you will have read.
	Kurt Vonnegut's story that takes the intersectional point at some level to its logical extreme.
	It's about equality of outcome.
	Yeah, it's about equality of outcome through handicaps.
	Anyway, she said, you've got to read this.
	And I was like, oh, OK.
	And I didn't read it.
	She's like, no, no, no, you have to read this.
	And anyway, this is one of the students, a student of color, who actually went with me to the 4 o'clock meeting to defend me from my newly discovered enemies.
	But anyway, she was right about the story.
	We had a teacher assign the story to Toby in his class.
	It occurred to me that if I was stuck in the system, I would probably engage in subversive behavior like that.
	He also got assigned by the same teacher.
	To listen, not watch, but listen to the entire album of Pink Floyd's The Wall.
	Pink Floyd's?
	This was a section that this teacher had created within the public school system on dystopias.
	Yeah.
	And there were other amazing things, but those are the two that I remember, too.
	The Wall and Harrison Bergeron.
	Yeah, and for older students, I mean, there's no shortage of subversive literature.
	Catch-22 is a favorite of mine.
	But anyway, yeah, figure out alternative ways of teaching the lesson.
	Okay.
	Congratulations on your birth by fire from your evergreen experience.
	You showed the world the dark side of an ideology that ran away from its core good purpose and descended into madness.
	I'm glad your new life includes us.
	Thanks.
	Very well said and thank you.
	Get Benjamin a martini!
	Yeah, we should do that.
	Next time we see him.
	Last time we saw him we were enjoying Chinese food together and there weren't any martinis available, but next time we'll make sure martinis are on the menu.
	Or we could just send him a freeze-dried one.
	Freeze-dried martini.
	Okay, next question.
	Brett, in a previous podcast with Eric, he robustly stated that he advised you to leave Evergreen several times before the meltdown.
	What was Eric's main issue with Tusk, the Evergreen State College, and what was your counter-argument?
	This is good.
	It's a good question.
	It's a fair question.
	Eric never liked my teaching or our teaching at Evergreen.
	He didn't dislike your teaching.
	He didn't like that you or we were there.
	Right.
	He thought it was a waste of our time.
	And there's one way in which you could make that argument.
	You can't get anywhere from Evergreen.
	It's a cul-de-sac.
	On the other hand, you know, Eric took a while to find a path through the world, and you have to do something in the meantime, and Eric did several somethings in the meantime.
	They were of a different nature, but I don't regret teaching at Evergreen because it was a marvelous environment if you had the right students in the room, and it wasn't that hard to work things out so that you did.
	I learned a tremendous amount.
	I kept active in My field of interest, because Evergreen allowed me to teach evolution all the time, and it allowed me to teach it in whatever way I wanted, and it never asked anything other than, are your students showing up?
	Are your classes full?
	I was able to keep my research life alive without having to have a job at an R1 university, which would have been a death sentence anyway.
	So my basic feeling is, given Given the choices available, it provided an income, it provided a place to raise children that was pretty healthy, it provided something to do every day that was rewarding almost all the time, It created healthy relationships, albeit, you know, not necessarily with faculty colleagues.
	There were some friendships, but we had lots of great exposure to people.
	So I guess the point is, what was the alternative?
	It's not, you know, Eric didn't have some job to offer, so I had to go somewhere and I don't regret it.
	I guess I would add to that, and maybe modify a little bit, because that makes it sound like we were just at some generic third-tier liberal arts college, or it could have been a university, right?
	And that's not what it was.
	Evergreen is unique among institutions of higher ed on this planet, as far as I can tell, and we've done a lot of thinking about this.
	So, you know, there are other schools that have full-time classes, but they last for three weeks.
	The block system that Colorado College, among others, has.
	And there are other schools that do team teaching.
	And there are other schools that banish requirements so that students can really delve into whatever it is that they want to do.
	Evergreen is the only school that does both those latter things and does full-time programs that last for up to a full year so that you really can build community with students in a way that is that is unknown in any other environment.
	So it's not that we found ourselves at some third-rate institution and just stayed there because it was in a nice place and we could have children and raise them there and earned a salary that was never quite enough but was fine.
	It was that actually and you know we we were lucky um you know I we're lucky to be able to choose it like I you know I got to choose between the job at Evergreen and another academic job and we actively we looked at the two options the other one was a much more prestigious school with a much higher salary with you know much greater ability to do research and such And we chose Evergreen.
	We chose to go to Evergreen because of what it seemed to offer and because not only of the educational environment, but because you would not just be teaching rich kids.
	That this socio-economic diversity was actually so critical to coming into your own as an educator and actually understanding what modern humans are doing and how they're thinking and what they are.
	That this was not a cul-de-sac with regard to education and it could easily have been a cul-de-sac with regard to science and science and research but whether if you if you care about education if you care about how to teach people how to think and how to educate people across a wild wide swath then I can't imagine a better place to have been.
	Yeah, I agree.
	I mean, it isn't that place now at all, but the other thing is, you know, Eric and I have some stuff we've got to work out, I guess, but we did a tremendous amount of good for lots of people who deserved it.
	And what's more, we did a tremendous amount of good in a way that Eric actually Aspires to Eric the portal is about the story that rescues people who need rescuing and transports them into a world that facilitates their discovery of their own talents and so anyway, I think the thing is You know, Eric didn't really see it up close.
	It wasn't really an environment you couldn't, you know, watch us teach.
	So he heard what we had to say, I guess.
	But from the point of view of all of the people who are doing interesting things, who came through our class and had their understanding of the universe altered, that was, you know, it was very valuable.
	And there are lots of places that we could have found safe harbor for that period of time in which we would have done a lot less good.
	A lot less good.
	Transformed many fewer lives.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	All right um next question oops oh gosh this is going so fast um.
	Untimely passing of cabbie mitchell on may 4th 2017 seemed related to the disproportionate and inconsolable emotional energy directed at Brett.
	Grief has power in the body and displacement is real.
	Do you have thoughts?
	This is this is an interesting question so most people won't know what um what is being referred to here.
	Cabbie Mitchell was a longtime faculty member at Evergreen who died suddenly, as far as most of us were concerned.
	It turns out he had been battling a disease for some time and had kept it to himself.
	He was on the dance faculty.
	He did not look like a dancer.
	He was a black man who was-- He was a big bear of a guy.
	He was a big bear of a black man who was also wonderful.
	Both Brett and I were friendly with him.
	I don't think, you know, we never sat down to a meal together, but we sat down to many conversations together.
	Really liked him, had almost nothing in common, but always pleasant to talk to him.
	Yeah, he was absolutely wonderful, and he hated what was going on on campus, actually.
	And so, I mean, let me just say this before we'll actually get to the heart of the question, that I actually did run into in the last couple days as I was going through old emails, After Cabby died and it was announced and people were overcome with grief, I think that you said something to the listserv about what a generous and welcoming human being he had been.
	And this sent some people into conniption fits.
	The idea that Cabby had fondness for you and that you had fondness for him just put all sorts of holes in the story that they were trying to create.
	Um but the fact was like I had actually had a fairly long conversation with him the previous summer it would have been it would have been right when Brexit was happening because I remember it was it was it was like June of 2016 and we were in a summer institute together uh for the day and I had mentioned this Barbara Ehrenreich book called Dancing in the Streets a collective of history of history of collective joy I think it is wonderful book
	And he sat down with me afterwards, wanted to talk about, we talked for a couple of hours, just the two of us.
	And during that time, he mentioned a couple of the strange events that had begun to happen on campus the previous year, which was the first year of George Bridges tenure.
	And he said, I just, I just don't know what is wrong with these people.
	You know, this is, this is insane.
	We live in such a bubble of, you know, delightful relations between all people.
	And I cannot actually fathom what is happening.
	And so when he died and some part of the activist faculty tried to take his death as a banner for their, for their active activism, it was awful.
	And, um, They co-opted it.
	They co-opted it, and so I think, you know, this, I'm just looking back at the question, um, the untimely passing of Cabby seemed related to the disproportionate inconsolable emotional energy directed at Brett.
	I think, I think the fact that you dared speak of him, yeah, with fondness and dared say that, you know, you and he had been friendly, and I, whatever you said, it was maybe two lines long, it wasn't a soliloquy, it wasn't, you weren't claiming deep, you know, knowledge of the man, just that He was a good man and what you didn't say there, but which was true, which maybe people could read the subtext was He wouldn't have tolerated what was going on.
	No, he wouldn't and if he hadn't been sick, I think he would have been a voice of reason yeah, so I don't know that you and I have ever talked about this actually, but after the There was a moment at which I became public enemy number one, and Benjamin Boyce has now covered it.
	It's the faculty meeting in which I took my colleagues to task for their very first official move, which was to get our union to negotiate into our contract a requirement that we investigate our own racism in our annual self-evaluation, which would then be Fodder for hiring, firing, promotion, all of these things.
	This would have been at the end of the 2016 year, right?
	Rather the 2015-2016.
	So like May or June of 2016.
	After we got back from the Ecuador trip.
	Right.
	So I stood up at that meeting and I took my colleagues to task and I knew roughly what was going to happen.
	I didn't know how far it would go but I knew that I was gonna be public enemy number one and I said my piece and And after the meeting, I went over to one of the people on the other side of the argument, and I attempted to reason with her.
	And Cabby made a point of coming up to me, right?
	So this is a meeting in which I've alerted the intersectionals that I'm not going to put up with their stuff, and Cabby comes over to me, unconcerned, And he starts talking to me about his confusion at what was unfolding on the campus.
	And the thing he pointed to, actually, was what I would call Flyergate, which was the initial public foray into this madness in which Naima Lowe had portrayed herself as at the, you know, the height of exhaustion from having consoled students who were holding vigils.
	It was like a black wellness rally, but it involved some black power symbolism and it claimed to fight white supremacy.
	And I actually remember seeing the flyer on the campus and thinking, white supremacy?
	What are they even talking about?
	But anyway, this flyer had been apparently torn down By some people.
	Now, I don't think we ever got to the bottom of it.
	We don't know if it was torn down by people who said, white supremacy, what are they talking about, and tore it down.
	Or if they replaced some places that there weren't allowed to be flyers and the janitors took them down, which happened all the time.
	Right.
	Or the story was fictional.
	Or the story was fictional.
	Don't know.
	And actually, I must tell you, there was, so Naima showed the flyer a picture of herself holding the flyer broadcasted on email and the most insane stuff erupted right so suddenly the campus was falling all over itself her bravery her courage her courage and to declare endless work on behalf of all of us right but even worse was the um the escalating language surrounding the uh atrocity
	i believe actually even came up of these of tearing these flyers down and there was i kid you not i am not exaggerating and i am not making this up but before this thing was over all the administrators were posting this flyer for an event i think that had already passed at this point maybe they were posting it on their doors and the children's center
	This daycare center for students was printing out the flyers.
	It was incredible.
	After this meeting where I had gotten up and spoken, Cabby comes over to me and he says, I don't know what's going on around here.
	He said, you know, I started looking at this email thread about the Flyers.
	I couldn't figure out what was going on.
	I thought somebody must have been shot.
	Those are his exact words.
	I thought somebody must have been shot.
	And it really, you know, it may be that there was some emotional outpouring that came from the loss of Cabby that got directed at me, but that is not how Cabby would have wanted it.
	Yeah, right.
	This was not who he was.
	He was a good man, an honest man, and he held no truck with this intersectional bullshit.
	Yeah, so anyway, it's very sad that he was lost, and I must say we felt it personally.
	Absolutely.
	I didn't know him all that well.
	I guess you knew him a little better, but it's terrible to take somebody's memory and the grief over their loss and co-opt it to your own purposes, which, you know, at best that's what happened here.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I'm gonna come back to this one, which is sort of tangentially related to evergreen, if we have time.
	Sorry, I'm still scrolling through here.
	Do do do.
	As an Evergreen grad in 1992 and a student of Pete Sinclair and Mark Levensky, it saddens me that these events weren't able to be handled by the Evergreen community itself.
	What do you think the future of Evergreen will be?
	What were the dulances for your institution, and what was our institution?
	Yeah, I mean, I think, unfortunately, Evergreen had opportunities to change course.
	And even after the riots had unfolded, I believe if they had fired George and they had basically alerted the world that they understood that they had taken a wrong turn, that they could have recovered.
	And they so thoroughly refused to do that, and to this day refuse to do that.
	And, you know, the only move they seem to have Is to double down and insist that they were right all along and so at some level the evergreen you knew and the evergreen we knew it's gone and I won't be sorry to see it fail at this point at some level.
	It's just Dragging out the misery.
	Yeah, it's a shell.
	It's beyond a shell of its former self and Yeah, it saddens us so much that Evergreen couldn't fix this inside of itself and Brett was trying harder than anyone and I was trying and a handful of other people were trying and even up until, it must have been the last, our last formal day when we were in mediation with the college We began by saying, you know, we want to come back.
	We want to keep doing the work that we've been able to do there, which they, the administration of the college, had been celebrating.
	They would put these study abroad programs that I was running and that we were running on their front page and, you know, they loved what we were doing because it shone the right kind of light on Evergreen.
	And we said, look, one of the One of the things that has happened in the last at that point three months since Evergreen blew up is that we now know so many of the people in both the civil rights movement and the free speech movement and we could bring them together.
	We could we could likely make a conference at Evergreen happen that combines these two ideas and we could bring people together like Bob Woodson and Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff and you know so many other people and actually have a Real conversation.
	Difficult.
	Not always in agreement at all about what the future of free speech and civil rights on campuses should be.
	And wouldn't that be amazing?
	And they said, no thanks.
	We're pretty pleased with how things are going.
	Yeah.
	This was in September of 2017, right before classes were due to start up again.
	No thank you.
	We're pretty pleased with how things are going.
	So I will say, you know, that moment in the hallway, which I obviously was not expecting, or I would have dressed better.
	You know, I said history could pivot in the direction of the values you're standing here for, if only we could hear each other, or worse to that effect.
	And this is kind of what I was talking about now at that time.
	Nobody never heard of me.
	We certainly couldn't have staged such a conference, but at the point that they thumbed their nose at us in negotiations, we certainly could have.
	And imagine for a second That that's what had happened with the Evergreen story, was the madness had broken out, the world had seen it, people had realized this is not reasonable, and then we could have had a discussion about, well, what grievances do make sense, and what remedies didn't work, and what remedies might work, and, you know, what does another model look like?
	And, you know, I mean, you saw it.
	You saw it with those images of our class.
	Learning about all the features of biology, culture, anthropology together.
	That's kind of what it looks like when it works.
	So there is some place to go, but unfortunately this simplistic nonsense derailed the entire conversation and the people who allowed it to happen were either too foolish or too cowardly to change course, which tells you how we got to where we are.
	That's right.
	Um, thanks for this, guys.
	How painful it must have been to have the students and careers you loved ripped from you.
	My question is, where's the redemption?
	The podcast is lovely, but it's light fare.
	What will you teach?
	What will you really teach the world?
	That's a lovely question.
	Yeah, that's a good question.
	I mean, there's one part of it that I take some exception to.
	The podcast is light fare.
	It can be, in the sense that any individual podcast can only be so deep and people are only paying attention at such and such a level.
	But we believe in something that we call collective consciousness.
	And collective consciousness, we know from the classroom, is something that gets built over time.
	So concepts get introduced, they're clumsy at first, you get better at understanding how they work, and then sooner or later you have a toolkit of things that is actually capable of doing something new.
	And so the podcast is one facet of an attempt to generate conversations that are actually capable of fixing problems that just simply stalemate us in their present form.
	So, anyway, yeah, the podcast is not the end of anything, but we are interested in, I wouldn't say teaching the world because I don't think we know, but we're interested in discovering how it is that we might function better.
	Right?
	And actually, if I can say one more thing.
	There has long been this voice that says, you're progressives, you brought this on yourselves, and then it turned on you, then that's the point at which you woke up or something.
	And it's always been nonsense, but it does point to a confusion that's important.
	How is it that we are progressives and yet we claim no ownership of that madness?
	Well, we are progressives by virtue of the fact that we believe progress is necessary.
	In my case, I will say I believe that if we do not make an extreme kind of progress that our tenure here on the planet is about to come to an end.
	So this is a requirement.
	Progress is necessary.
	It doesn't mean I believe in progress that's been spelled out by others.
	I'm not signing up for any program of progress that is formulated that I don't Except much less all programs for progress, which I guess if you have this idea of what progressivism is, then you just embrace all progress.
	No, most progress is not going to work and it's going to have bad consequences.
	There are things we could do that would make us much better off.
	We don't even know what most of them are, but I'm interested.
	We're interested in that exploration.
	And so that's what makes us progressives.
	And that's why we don't own any of the garbage proposals, because we never signed on for them.
	We never said we were for them.
	Those things are their own kind of delusion.
	And we're interested in going, you know, threading the needle and getting to something that isn't a delusion, but does make us better and more important, more importantly, safer.
	To add to that the question, what will you really teach the world?
	You know, the book that we're working on, which is a collaboration, and each chapter could be and I hope many of them we each one of us individually will ultimately turn into books of their own.
	Is effectively a kind of redemption book, and that wasn't how the publisher approached us to see if we were interested in writing it or the agent who approached you first after everything was blowing up to see if you had anything that you wanted to write.
	I was thinking of it, but I think it is that it effectively it brings together so many of the threads of evolutionary thinking that we were developing ourselves and teaching students and sharing in creative form with learning communities that were themselves evolving as well.
	Um, over, you know, 14-15 years, this Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century really does introduce some new ideas, fixes some of the errors of the thinking in, um, in Darwinism to date, and addresses how it is from, you know, from individual, you know,
	Food and sleep choices through relationship with, you know, with pair-bonded partner, to children, to friends, through to society level choices of how it is that we are going to move forward.
	You know, how is it, to speak to your point, how is it that we are going to make the kinds of changes that we need in order to allow more human beings to actually enjoy this planet hundreds of years in the future?
	That book will be a kind of redemption, and from there then I think each of us will start moving into our own projects that often directly follow from the work in that book.
	And I assume most of the people listening to the Q&A will have listened to the first hour of the podcast.
	The students who dropped in on our classes, who kept coming back even after they had graduated in some cases just to participate in the conversation, the book is a continuation of that conversation.
	So if you're interested in getting in on what it was that brought them back, this is the way in.
	Yeah.
	And it should be noted that our research assistant on the book is, in fact, one of those students.
	He was one of our students fairly early on in our time there and became a friend and has worked with us on physical projects and now on intellectual projects.
	Yeah.
	We've worked with him from evolution to construction.
	And he's somebody who was, like me, Very bad fit for school or school was a very bad fit for us and he's somebody who I mean by his own telling Didn't really feel like he had a lot of capacity in that regard until he landed in our class and you know took off so anyway yeah, the story sort of is ongoing even if the Locale has changed.
	Yeah Do, this one I think is evergreen related-ish, so I'll go with it.
	Due to COVID-19, due to COVID-19 brought changes in college ed, it being not in person etc, could now be a good time to separate the two goals of higher ed, research and teaching.
	Would that make things better?
	This is, this is a tough one.
	So the question is basically um about exactly is the As the question writer points out, that there really are two things that higher ed is trying to do, and research and teaching are not the same thing.
	People who are good at one are often not good at the other.
	Research is privileged, and if you are only good at teaching and not at research, it's very hard to get a job anywhere, you know, with tenure or especially anywhere elite.
	And because many researchers are either not good at educating to begin with, or because the priorities do not line up to encourage them to become good at educating, they end up dismissing it as something that only people who can't do research do.
	And so you get the sort of separation of classes.
	And mostly researchers, people who are primarily researchers with hard money academic positions have to teach some, but that's how they feel about it.
	I have to teach as opposed to, oh, and I get to teach these things.
	So given all that, it might seem like, okay, let's just separate them and honor the researchers for what they do and honor the teachers for what they do.
	But our experience was certainly that our understanding was honed and refined and driven by knowing that we had to be in front of students and by the conversations with students in the classroom, in the field, around campfires, otherwise.
	And that my sense is that teaching will become even less good if it has no direct interface with research.
	And researchers will become even more arrogant and less tuned in to the real world if they have less interface with teachers.
	And let me just, before you go, say one more thing, an anecdote, that when we were looking to go to grad school, our undergraduate advisor Bob Trivers, an extraordinary evolutionary biologist, gave us the following advice.
	He said, go someplace... well, two pieces of advice, really.
	Oh no!
	This is two different things.
	He gave us advice to go someplace to the museum, first of all, but then he also said when you end up deciding where to go after you graduate, go someplace where you have regular interactions with undergraduates.
	Why?
	I said, because undergraduates don't know what they're doing yet, and they will ask questions that the people in the field who know what they're doing wouldn't dare to ask.
	And therefore, if you only talk to the people who are already in your field, you are likely to get stuck in intellectual dead ends.
	Whereas if you really engage with undergraduates, as he had done with us, you know, he had taken us under his wing.
	We were like graduate students working very closely with him for a couple of years at UC Santa Cruz.
	We both threw lots of stuff at him that he hadn't thought in those ways, and we didn't know that we were being disrespectful to the field because he didn't know the field yet.
	So that advice has struck me as very wise and is a counterpoint to the idea that research and teaching could be profitably separated.
	Yeah, I take all that to be accurate.
	I think both research and teaching are broken, and so it's a little hard to know what the net effect would be of separating them.
	I do think there's something, as much of the work that flies under the banner research becomes more technological and therefore more specialized, the relevance to what it is that we need to teach undergraduates
	And so I do think there's something absurd about somebody who has, you know, gotten a degree by studying some very narrow question and then suddenly they're teaching Bio 101 and it's like, well what do they even know about it?
	Right.
	You know, what they know about it is what they learned in Bio 101, you know, many years before.
	And the received wisdom from the textbook that they've been encouraged to use by the publishers, which is its own cabal.
	Yeah.
	So it turns to garbage.
	Really, I think the problem is if you start tugging at the sweater, you find the whole thing is going to unravel and really we need a new model that's A lot more enlightened about what it's trying to accomplish and even knows what it's trying to accomplish so it then can figure out whether it's succeeding rather than a model who defaults to kind of a self-preservation mode where it is its own defense.
	So anyway, not clear to me.
	I did have one other thought though.
	I think there's an argument to separate research from teaching, although not so much Theoretical work is a good companion for teaching, whereas lab work might not be.
	But there's a place where I see something else that goes the other direction, which is medicine.
	And I was thinking about the fact that doctors do not autopsy their patients in general.
	Am I correct about that?
	I assume so.
	I think medical examiners are a different crew.
	Right.
	So anyway, the thought, and if I'm wrong about this, if doctors do do their own autopsies then somebody will surely alert me and I will deliver an apology, but to the extent that they don't, the problem is this breaks an ability to test hypotheses.
	When a doctor Imagine something is going on inside the body of a patient and they act accordingly and then the patient dies.
	The ability to go in and see what actually is going on inside that body means that they will become a better doctor.
	It makes the process educational in a way that if you just get a report of what was in there, it would be, you know, I'm not a doctor so I don't know for sure, but my guess as a biologist would be it would be a dim shadow Next question.
	How do you imagine Evergreen would look today if you had not resisted the mob?
	What attention did the mob pay to the admissions process and policies?
	For example, if a group of prospective white students visited campus?
	You guys rock.
	Next question.
	How do you imagine Evergreen would look today if you had not resisted the mob?
	What attention did the mob pay to the admissions process and policies?
	For example, if a group of prospective white students visited campus.
	You guys rock, thanks.
	Don't totally follow the end of it, but what would have happened And you know what?
	There are so many points that you could have stopped.
	You know, you could have just stopped sending emails at some point.
	Yeah.
	But imagine that it gets to May 23rd, 2017 and they show up.
	I don't even know how you you know many many people have said how did you do that?
	How did you stay so calm and cool and reasonable in the face of a mob?
	And that is a question that I would love to to hear you answer but um I mean I've heard you answer but I'd love to hear you answer here uh but also There was nothing.
	You couldn't have just laid down and let them.
	I'd be like, what would any other response have looked like, especially given that all of your students were there backing you up?
	Yeah, actually, I spent a lot of time thinking about this.
	On the one hand, yes, it's very nice to have people say, I'm so glad you did that and you didn't do the other thing.
	And it's like, well, how would the other thing even?
	It's a non-starter.
	Right?
	A, you have to sleep.
	You do have to sleep.
	And, you know, had I caved in the face of this nonsense, which I knew was nonsense, it would have been a betrayal, certainly, of all the students who were standing there.
	And then all of the students who were... You mean all of your students who were standing there?
	All of my students, yeah.
	Well, also the students It's not what I meant to say, but also the students who were there confronting me, some of whom were perfectly reachable and were in thrall to some crazy idea, as many of us have been in thrall to some crazy idea at some point.
	So I owed it to them to try to compel them that there was a better way of seeing this puzzle and that it wasn't impossible to get there.
	And in fact, I know that I made some progress on a couple of those fronts and that the problem was I was up against something.
	That when I made progress it would go unravel that progress right afterwards and so that was an unwinnable puzzle at that point.
	There are a lot of things I'm not good at.
	I do feel like I was kind of born for that sort of thing.
	I think you were.
	Knowing what to do in that sort of situation, that's not difficult.
	And, you know, it's weird as it unfolds, you know.
	The conscious mind sort of becomes a spectator and it watches the whole thing happen and it hears you say what you say just as everyone else hears it.
	But that's because it's done a lot of preparing.
	Yeah, this is true.
	This is something that you do.
	I mean, you really are best at the world in several things.
	And when people see you do extraordinary things like what you did that day and over the next several days and even weeks, but especially initially that day in the hallway, Um, people see that and I remember often our students, especially our male students, would see you and be like, yeah, that's what I am.
	Like I can I can be like that.
	And they thought that what they were seeing was all of it.
	But the fact is that you spend so much of your time When you're not on, as it were, working through alternative scenarios, figuring out and, you know, both in terms of action, but in terms of idea space, especially like this, this is what makes you the theoretician that you are, right?
	That, that you go through and say, well, if, you know, if this prediction holds, what else, what else, what else, what else?
	I'm gonna go through this and you do this over and over and over again and you redo them to you iterate it and I don't think there's one of our students actually who I just heard from who really actually did think that something was coming down the pike like this Frankie but I didn't you'd like the idea of a confrontation in real time in a hallway never occurred to me and I don't think to you I I don't know.
	But still, you prepared in so many ways over the year.
	when the anger that was coming back at you was increasingly vitriolic and filled with bile and insane and more and more people were jumping on the bandwagon, in some ways you got calmer and calmer and more and more resolved, not more certain.
	You questioned yourself and your conclusions and the conclusions of others all the time.
	And that is the thing, that you were there, they could not call your intentions into question in either your head or the heads of any of your students, because these are students who you'd been with.
	This was like week seven, I think, of the quarter.
	It was only a one-quarter program, but you had known some of these students for years.
	At the least, though, you'd known these students for seven weeks, and not a single one of those students thought, Maybe these protesters are right about Brett.
	No, not a single one.
	They couldn't possibly have been misled into that.
	And it's because every single day in the classroom and in life, you demonstrate this just this constant reassessment of what if I was wrong?
	What if I was wrong?
	Okay, if I am right, what does that mean?
	Okay, what if I'm wrong about this thing?
	You're doing it all the time.
	And you just can't ever stop.
	This is what science is supposed to look like.
	This is what good life is supposed to look like.
	And this is what you do to a degree that I've actually never seen anyone else do.
	Wow.
	Yeah, there's a lot in there and it's very gratifying to hear it described that way.
	I will say that the A, as I said to Mike Nayna when I interviewed him early on in the Dark Horse podcast, There was something I learned from his film, even though I had seen all of the clips and I'd seen all the interviews, but the way he juxtaposed things revealed something to me about what the students thought they were accomplishing on that day or expected to accomplish.
	They were expecting my students to jump ship because this accusation of racism is so powerful that, you know, people, people naturally, you know, figure out which way the wind is blowing and they position themselves accordingly.
	because most students at Evergreen and everywhere else don't have a deep relationship with their professors, and certainly no reason for loyalty, then they expected people to flee.
	And what a different situation that would have been.
	But it never occurred to me that that was going to happen.
	Because for one thing, not only, you know, these were my students, and in many cases our students, and, you know, I knew them all well.
	But I had been processing this with them, even though that was not the explicit topic.
	So somebody mentioned recently that I had a diagram on the board I think the day before the whole thing happened of the basically a hypothesis that I was advancing for the way witch hunts function.
	Now why were witch hunts on my mind?
	I can't imagine.
	But they were on my mind and so I was processing with the students and in fact at one point I remember, it might have been in the week prior, I came into class and I was, you know, I typically rode straight from home, rode my bike and leaned it up against the wall and just started teaching, you know, hence the way I was dressed in the hallway.
	Because you always arrived with, like, negative 30 seconds to spare.
	No, it was about... Was it 30 seconds?
	No, it was 13 seconds was the average.
	But anyway, I arrived And I had just read an email, one of these terrible emails from one of these awful people, you know, telling me how awful I am.
	I think it may actually have been one of the guys who wrote one of those emails.
	And in that email, he had alleged that there was a calculation that we could be doing about how much the value that we would assign to the damage that I was doing students every hour of my teaching by teaching them in this obviously racist modality.
	And so, you know, it was thousands of dollars, you know, per student per quarter.
	And anyway, you know, I, so I read this and I.
	Someone you would become familiar with over email, but like couldn't recognize in a lineup.
	Like don't have any idea what the guy looks like.
	Yeah.
	But anyway, I came into class having just read that and some of my students noted that something was, you know, running behind my eyes and they were like, what's up?
	And I was like, OK, I'm going to tell you.
	I just read this email.
	Did you share it with them?
	I don't think I read it to them, but I explained the premise of it.
	And they were angry.
	This is the day of?
	No, no.
	I think it was in the couple of days prior.
	I can't place it for sure.
	We could figure it out.
	But anyway, my students, I did not actually predict.
	I thought they would see the humor in it the way I did.
	They were angry because somebody was basically accusing them of whatever the opposite of learning is, of, you know, having ignorance cultivated in them.
	They're educational grifters.
	Right.
	Something.
	Or they're too dumb to recognize that the person in front of the room is making them stupider.
	I don't know what but anyway they were angry about this and you know as soon as I saw their anger it made a lot of sense to me I didn't predict it but nonetheless that was the context of the hallway and you know Never occurred to me that they were gonna reject that, or even not live up to the need to be courageous in the face of that.
	And so, anyway, I was heartened to see that it, on that front, unfolded exactly as I would have expected, and not at all as the protesters expected.
	That's as it should have been.
	Can Evergreen survive a post-COVID-19 higher ed crisis?
	Probably not.
	Can evergreen survive a post-COVID-19 higher ed crisis?
	No.
	Here's the problem, though.
	I think that what they're actually thinking is that they are going to shift blame for the collapse of Evergreen to COVID-19.
	And this makes me livid.
	The fact is, the history is clear.
	Yes, there was some deficit of students before George arrived.
	George arrived, catastrophic things happened.
	We all know what they were.
	We all saw them on YouTube.
	They've been dissected ad infinitum.
	There's no mystery about it.
	And then the COVID-19 pandemic happens.
	And yes, of course, they've drained the coffers to deal with the results of the evergreen riots.
	They never admitted they were wrong.
	They didn't change course.
	So, of course, they were going to, you know, plow into the earth at hundreds of miles an hour.
	And to blame COVID-19 is just too unright history.
	And so anyway, I would appreciate it if we did not allow that to happen, because what happened to Evergreen is George and his foolish partners drove the college into the ground in a very short period of time.
	Next question.
	If the right opportunity arose, would you jump at the chance to be in and out of the classroom again?
	Um, I think this one's pretty easy.
	The problem is, think about what we've said, and I promise it won't land on you the way it needs to.
	Professor teaches full-time, one class.
	Students take one class full-time.
	It can go on for a full year, right?
	You know everybody in that room well.
	If the course is one that has any field component, you've gone out camping with them or, you know, you've broken bread, all of this.
	It's a very different environment.
	So when I hear, do you want to go back into the classroom?
	I think, what classroom?
	Four credits at a time?
	I barely know who my students are.
	I stand at the front of the room.
	And I lecture at them and I don't really know if they've gotten it.
	That does not sound like fun to me.
	Yeah.
	So the questioner does say if the right opportunity arose.
	And so there's a lot of possible wiggle room in that.
	And, you know, we were working for a year or so on trying to figure out what a possible alternative to the current higher ed system might look like and, you know, may end up back on that project at some point.
	As Brett said, not in any current instantiation, but are there possible ways, you know, might we, for instance, start running workshops for people, you know, college student age and otherwise, in evolutionary thinking?
	We've thought about that.
	In fact, we were making some progress on thinking through that before COVID-19 hit, and it's totally stalled at the moment.
	Yeah, that maybe.
	Yeah, I would say if you take the right opportunity broadly, then sure, the right opportunity sounds delightful, but it doesn't have a lot of detail associated with it.
	But there are a lot of wrong opportunities that wouldn't be that appealing.
	Mostly I'm not reading the names, but Duck McMuffin asks, if you could turn back time, do you think you could prevent the catastrophe?
	If yes, how?
	God, you just did everything and you were being maligned for everything that you did do.
	And you started out gentle, so gentle, and then you got less gentle, but were always respectful.
	And, you know, what else could have been done?
	What else could have been done?
	I mean, I guess if we could turn back time a long ways and not hire George Bridges in the first place, you know, we knew people who were on the hiring committee.
	I know one of them very, very well.
	And he was not sure about this guy.
	But the chair of the committee, basically the college, got consultants to come in.
	They basically outsourced a lot of the work to educational consultants, and who knows what their incentives are.
	And together with the chair not being fully present, we ended up with George Bridges.
	And I think at the point that Bridges shows up, It's true that we were gone.
	His first year there included the 11 weeks that we were in Ecuador, so we were gone for a lot of his laying of his plans, but what else could he have done?
	You read that question.
	Yes.
	And I understood it incorrectly.
	I thought, if you could turn back time, could you prevent the COVID-19 pandemic?
	And I thought, maybe.
	And then it turned out it was about Evergreen.
	I was like, oh no, there's nothing I could have done there.
	Well, you know, Duck McMuffin here is ambiguous.
	He says, the catastrophe.
	The catastrophe.
	So COVID-19, maybe.
	Probably not, but maybe.
	But Evergreen, no.
	There's too much momentum in that system.
	All headed in the wrong direction.
	Post-Evergreen, what helped you most to deal with the loss you must have felt?
	I'm going to be honest about this one.
	Loss, there was loss, but it was not net loss and that changes a lot.
	So there was something very traumatic about a having colleagues and in some cases friends turn on us.
	There was something very reassuring about seeing people who we barely knew in some cases rise to the occasion.
	And the consequence of being so publicly threatened in our workplace Resulted in all kinds of things becoming possible in our lives that just weren't before.
	And so, you know, is there loss?
	Yes, very definitely.
	If we limit it to what we had at Evergreen in our teaching environment, we lost that.
	But we gained a tremendous amount in this process also.
	And the other thing is I think We were living on borrowed time for a year or possibly two.
	This was bubbling up.
	It was going to come for us sooner or later.
	And we got out intact after a couple of very dangerous years.
	And, um, so in some sense, there's a sense of, you know, relief.
	We made it to the beach and, um, loss.
	It's not, it's not a simple feeling of loss for me.
	Yeah I think I agree with all of that.
	I think I felt to some degree still do feel but certainly felt uh especially after the just the horror of mediation and the way the college treated us just horrifying.
	I felt that acutely.
	I felt the loss and I felt it um as a kind of disloyalty that I had not imagined possible and it was one of many moments when I really wished my dad had been alive He was born in 1938 and he came of age when you gave your heart and soul to an organization that you thought was valuable and it treated you right in exchange.
	And he had almost always, not always, but almost always found that to be true in his work with even these big corporations, you know, Xerox and Honeywell and such.
	And I had come to recognize many years earlier that loyalty was really one of my my highest values.
	That once I have really done my assessment and figured out whether or not someone or something is worthy of my loyalty, I am loyal.
	And Evergreen had
	Had appeared to be responding in kind by, you know, advertising my and our work on its front page and celebrating us and, you know, the, you know, never through anything that we could take to the bank, literally, but through recognition from all the people who seem to matter on the inside that this was actually that we were really doing what what the founding faculty had intended to be done and having people like Steve Herman Recognize that.
	Recognize that I and we were doing that was so important.
	So the really grotesque way that they treated us in the end, I still feel.
	And I, you know, most weeks I don't think about it.
	Most months I probably don't think about it.
	But in the last few days, going back to these emails, you've seen me.
	I've been just dragged right back there.
	I'm just, I still have the ability to be stunned by, you know, having had 15 years of true, unique, creative, analytical, educational success at a place and being told at midnight after, what would it have been, 16 hours straight of mediation?
	Okay, we're done.
	You'll have your keys to us within 48 hours.
	You'll be out of your offices by then. - They would have perp walked us if they could have. - Yeah, yeah, they would have.
	After, you know, trying all sorts of other things on us in that mediation, including getting us to sign non-disclosure agreements and, you know, all sorts of stuff.
	It was stunning.
	And I spent, you know, I spent my, you know, nights, I spent overnights for two days and we got an extension of one day.
	So it ended up being 72 hours before I had to walk the keys over to the key office.
	I'm like, I'm done.
	Um, you had never been fully in your office, um, in the way that I was fully in this.
	I mean, you'd had to move a couple times, but I was fully in this, this, um, pretty extensive office, and I was finding throughout all of these notes from students, um, things that they'd made for me, artwork, little dolls, um, arts and crafts, like just so many things that students had given me over the years, and I wrote them.
	I wrote everyone who I could find.
	Before I got cut off from evergreen email, the night before we got cut off, I went in and just so, you know, blast emailed all of the old classes knowing that the farther back it was, the more likely those emails were to have gone Out.
	They wouldn't have been good anymore.
	And said, you know, this, this is it.
	And our programs were flawed, but they were, they were great.
	And Evergreen cannot take that away.
	And I, you know, I still feel that that's what we did there.
	Yeah.
	Was actually amazing.
	And we have generations of students who know that.
	And what the current administration and many of the faculty at Evergreen are now Apparently even teaching the current students exactly the contrary does not make it true.
	Yeah.
	The fact that they are lying does not make it true.
	Quite.
	Okay.
	You're about an hour.
	About an hour.
	Okay.
	I'm going to go through one or two more here.
	What could have been done to avoid the evergreen situation escalating as it did?
	Or was it an unstoppable runaway canoe that once set in motion could only spin out of control?
	How do we stop this happening where it arises?
	That depends what position you hold.
	Somebody who had the proper position could have prevented this.
	It was not possible for a tenured faculty member to derail it.
	I believe the Provost could have, which is why George took about firing him right away.
	Whatever else may be true of George, George played a pretty savvy game from the point of view of reorganizing the administration, and the purpose of that game was to protect George, and it worked.
	I mean, this is why George has, you know, left with laudatory reports, even though he's wrecked the place, is that he He elevated some people, which made them very, very loyal.
	He fired some people who were going to be trouble, because they wouldn't have put up with his bullshit any more than we did.
	And it was effective, so pay attention.
	Yeah, one of his first moves, right?
	One of his first moves was to fire Michael Zimmerman, who was the provost, because he needed him gone if he was going to do what he was going to do.
	He wasn't going to be able to bulldoze his way into the nightmare if he didn't get rid of Michael.
	So how do we stop this happening where it arises?
	You got it.
	It depends on what your position is.
	If you are not administration, you need to know that the administration will have your back.
	And at a higher ed level, the Chicago principles, the principles put out by University of Chicago a few years back, I want to add one other thing.
	but they don't probably go far enough and they don't appear to be binding.
	Even those universities that have adopted the Chicago principles don't necessarily stand up to the, I don't know, the wokesters, the intersectional crowd when it comes.
	I want to add one other thing.
	When we got back from Ecuador, I had, during Ecuador, I had tried to capture a photo of every student that actually got who they were.
	And there were a few students who were very, very difficult to capture and a couple I'm not even sure I got there.
	But I spent a lot of time on the project.
	And we had thousands of other photos from places we had been and things we had done and all of that.
	And we had offered to put together a gallery exhibit.
	I put together, there was so much to this.
	I had this whole formal proposal and I met with the gallery person and she loved it.
	It was beautiful.
	Beautiful, because we had done what it is that Evergreen had tried from the beginning to do.
	So you had assignments that these students had written, reflections that were really deep.
	These weren't things people just turned in because, you know, they were going to be read by you and they put their heart and soul into it.
	We had the photos.
	We had this extraordinary trip.
	It's an itinerary that went all over.
	Went all over.
	And it was going to be a great show.
	And it was going to highlight what could be done at Evergreen.
	It was exactly about the richness of what was possible at Evergreen.
	And it could have even gone to other liberal arts colleges to highlight what was possible.
	Because there are always people who are saying at other schools, what you're doing at Evergreen is amazing.
	How can we do that here?
	Right.
	So anyway, my point is, at the point of the administration, And in fact, certain people who were gunning for us already decided, no, no, we can't do that.
	Even after I'd gotten an informal yes, enthusiastic yes, from the gallery director.
	Right.
	And you know, in this gallery, well, I won't go into the fight over whether or not the gallery should continue, but This would have been an excellent use of the gallery, and it would have brought a lot of people into it, and it would have allowed people to see what was possible at Evergreen, which, frankly, many faculty come in, and with this weird model, nobody ever tells them what's possible, and they default into the first thing they see, and they never get over it.
	So this would have been valuable.
	The fact of it being effectively erased from the history by blocking it at the level that we would have displayed it, that was a move.
	And that was a move that made what happened possible.
	Because frankly, I mean, you all watch the podcast have seen some of the photos.
	The photos put the lie to the idea that this, you know, that we were some sort of, you know, backwards racists who We're teaching this stuff in our classroom, so it would have been inconsistent with it.
	Now, I don't think the people who shut down the idea of the gallery show knew what they were doing, but there was an instinctive thing, which is that anything that shines a light on what's possible, what we were doing, is bad for whatever they were up to.
	There was a lot of that.
	So, in some sense, displaying the possible makes it impossible to tell fairy tales that are incompatible with reality.
	That would have been useful.
	One more question and then we'll stop.
	Okay.
	You guys had me crying with that letter from the student.
	Me too.
	Yeah, I was almost there.
	Thoughts on whether things like that were, are, or will be a main catalyst for stopping the spread of this bigotry?
	Um, I hope so.
	I really... I think it's very difficult to convey the level of tragedy.
	I mean, at one level, all the people that we knew, I think every student we knew, is now gone from Evergreen.
	Is that right?
	I think that's right at this point, yeah, as of this last graduation.
	Right, so at the level of... Yeah, the last one a while ago now, yeah.
	So, in some sense, we don't even know the population of students anymore, you know?
	We are now gone, but the recognition that the biggest betrayal here, as bad as the betrayal of us was, There were an indefinitely large number of students going forward into the future who needed a college that would treat them very individually because they weren't built for a college that expected them to just simply hit the ground and perform.
	Those people have now lost that college because there aren't others.
	Those who did it, did it for their own reasons.
	Most of the students who led these protests, they're gone.
	Naima, she's gone.
	So, these people have moved on, they're doing whatever they are doing with their lives, but the people who really got hurt most were the people who needed this, and now it's not going to be there for them, and they're never even going to know it.
	So, hopefully, if you can recognize that somebody like Odette, you know, is a measure of what's possible in such a system, you know, and she didn't need the place, but she certainly benefited from it.
	And you can imagine what it would be like to be confronted by people who, you know, they talk about black bodies, right?
	And I know where that phrase comes from.
	And I actually think that there's a meaning to it that is deep.
	But the meaning that they were applying to it was just total de-individuation.
	They were just totally removing the individual identity of everybody.
	You know, Odette was either going to become a tool, just another black body, or she was nothing to them or worse.
	And you know, that is the opposite of enlightenment.
	It just is.
	And so anyway, yes, I, I also find the The grotesqueness of the confrontation that she faced stops me in my tracks every time.
	I've never gotten over it, and I hope it does change people.
	I hope they see how this madness hurts people who don't deserve to be hurt, and maybe it will bring us to a better place.
	I think we're there.
	All right.
	Well, again, sorry for the technical difficulties.
	We will continue to try to figure out from where they emerge.
	YouTube, if this is you, fix it.
	Fix it.
	Fix it.
	All right.
	Until next time, which is scheduled for this coming Tuesday at 3.30, we are signing off the Dark Horse Podcast.
	Be well.

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