By Patrick Hamilton
From 1987 until his retirement in Spring of 2020, Peter Bohmer worked as a professor of Political Economy at Evergreen. On a cloudless May afternoon, my friend Magnus Cain and I sat down with Peter on his porch here in West Olympia. We asked him to reflect on the many struggles for justice he’s participated in during his life and to share his perspective on the college: what makes it unique, its history, and the crisis it finds itself in. When we asked about his first impressions of Evergreen when he arrived in ‘87, Peter explained that, “Before I came here for my interview… I wasn’t entirely sure where the college was, I had thought it was between Tacoma and Seattle. But when I had my interviews here for the job, I remember I was amazed. I was in the CAB and I heard many different people talking to each other about the movement against apartheid in South Africa. Before that I had been teaching at a branch campus of Penn State… where people talked about dating, football, the cars they wanted. So it was very impressive to me when I came here.” Peter continued, saying, “Coming here, students seemed very engaged with wanting to change the world, and after I got hired I found my ideas interested most students.”
It is clear that the reason these conversations in the CAB resonated with Peter was because he himself had become a revolutionary student amidst the movement against the war in Vietnam. “During the summer of ‘67 I was an economics grad student at MIT… I was growing increasingly critical of mainstream economics and by the beginning of the summer it had been recommended to me on multiple occasions by members of a group I’d been organizing with called Vietnam Summer, that I read The Political Economy of Growth and Monopoly Capital. Both were by Paul Baran and the other one was also by Paul Sweezey. Both of those books had such a big influence on me, and they made so much more sense than what I was learning in grad school. Basically the idea was that the surplus being extracted from the third world was feeding the development of capital in the first world.” He continued to explain that through the group Vietnam Summer, in “both working class and middle class neighborhoods, we’d knock on the door. If people would let us in, we’d tell them that we’d like to show them a slideshow on Vietnam, and asked them to invite some neighbors over. At first I was very shy. I’d always have something to do, it could be a petition, a protest or a sit-in at a congress person’s office. Why it was so significant for me was, even though I’d been a very good student I had seen myself as pretty lazy in school, and definitely not that disciplined. All of a sudden I couldn’t believe the energy I had. I realized ‘this really is meaningful to me’.” Peter explained that what radicalized him “…was meeting people who were interested in change, seeing that I had some ability to make change, and frankly the Vietnam War. In ‘67 the war was really horrible.”
Peter continued to contextualize how this experience of realizing his own ability to make change led to greater shifts in his political perspective, especially as it pertained to the coinciding national movement against institutional racism. “My parents,” he explained, “had raised me to be very anti-racist, not so much critical of structural racism, but teaching us that all people were the same… so I think while all of this was going on it really affected me in my movement from guilt to solidarity; I don’t think guilt is bad, but I don’t think it’s a healthy end point. I began to identify with the Black struggle, the Black Power movement, and the liberation struggle of the Vietnamese. That’s when I decided I wasn’t just against the war, I was empowered.” We asked Peter to expand on the impact of the rest of the 1960s and 70s on his political vision to which he responded immediately, “Anti-racism. It just seemed so clear that it needed to be a part of any politics for revolutionary change and certainly after the militant global struggles I saw in ‘68 I believed in revolutionary change. Certain reforms are possible under capitalism, but alienation, environmental destruction, race and gender oppression, those are really baked into capitalism. Reforms had some value, but to me, anti-racism was always a very central part of anti-capitalism and organizing. I don’t think my perspective on that was too different from what most people on the left [had].”
He observed the centrality of anti-racism and the need to organize with communities off-campus in successful student movements which reshaped higher education in the US. “While I was most familiar with it in California, nationally there was a huge growing movement against racism, demanding open admissions and scholarships to first generation Black and Latino students. You often had, and this was certainly true at San Diego State, people in the community coming to MEChA, which was the main Chicano group. They were demanding opening up and of course opposition to racism. So it seems to me that when you can connect student movements to broader issues and when you can connect students to their community off campus that is really important. The movement around opening up the universities also went hand in hand with the movement demanding Chicano Studies, Black Studies, and Women’s Studies programs and I think both of those things are some of the real gains of the 60s.”
These movements which redefined who had access to, and what was being studied in American higher education, led us to ask Peter what the fundamental role of higher education was in a capitalist society. He explained that, “like a lot of things we have to look at it from the top and the bottom. From the top, there’s a capitalist motivation. I think originally it was really to train and socialize the future managers and professionals, there was this reality where it was almost entirely white and male of professional and upper class background.” He explained that after World War 2 higher education was opened up to white veterans through the GI Bill, and obviously opened up more during the 1960s. “From below you have this mass movement to make college more accessible for working class whites too, but of course for Black people, Latinos and Native Americans to get good jobs, but also just to learn about the world.” He added that in a more democratic society higher education would be more serious about “…setting someone up for lifelong learning as well as critical thinking…” and, moreover, its priorities would revolve around “…what people want to do…” and “…the needs of society.”
This made Magnus and I consider that Evergreen is unique insofar as it is a public liberal arts college. We asked Peter, in his view, how this makes Evergreen different from other colleges.
“First, a school that’s public is one where there really is access for people whose families might not have been to college before. Secondly, we think of the liberal arts as these private elite colleges, so making liberal arts accessible is positive. To me, liberal arts education has the goal… of developing three dimensional human beings, not just people who can make money and fit into the capitalist slots. Liberal arts schools have unfortunately been in decline, and at Evergreen specifically it does seem [to be] caused by the ideology that school is merely to train people for careers. People feel that with all the loans you’ll be taking on you need to get an education that will get you a high paying career. Plus, neoliberalism has been privatizing education as a whole. This has also increased the cost of education. To me, tuition paying for more of your education represents a form of privatization. When I got here tuition paid for around a third of your education, and now it’s well over half.”
After explaining this reality where the cost of tuition was rising, and thus forcing more students to develop a different economic relationship with their education, Peter further explained a history of the last time students across the state attempted to build a coalition against the legislature’s funding priorities. “In the last major recession around 2007-09, state revenue was in decline across the whole country.” He emphasized that he was most aware of the impact this had in California, Washington and Oregon, in which there was a major decline in public support of higher education. This forced campuses up and down the West Coast to adjust for their lack of funding by raising college tuition. “You had many other social programs being cut as well… a lot of the time organizations which lobby the state government for social spending, anti-poverty groups for instance, are happy to lobby for their concerns in the budget even at the expense of other programs… The goal was to build a united Coalition for a Fair Budget across the state, while obviously I was most active in our local campaign, Olympia Coalition for a Fair Budget.” Peter in his “History of Student Movements and Activism at The Evergreen State College” describes the movement as being made up of “students of color, anarchists, and members of a national organization known as Socialist Alternative.” He described the campaign’s spirited rallies on campus admirable. Organizers went door to door in the dorms to educate students, which culminated in March 2010 when a rally “…on campus carpooled to the State Capital, led by a hearse, symbolizing the proposed State budget as a funeral for higher education. We filled the State Capital legislature, interrupting a Senate hearing by singing and demanding more Washington State funding of higher education.” Bohmer notes that while “there was some media coverage, the movement didn’t have much staying power or any substantial victories.”
Reflecting on the campaign, Peter explained some of its shortcomings, in terms of not “…going into classes to discuss the issues involved and our demands for freezing tuition.” He continued, “There is a need to build alliances, not only with student groups on other campuses, but also with unions and workers, on and off campus, and with community groups demanding a
comprehensive fair budget that furthers economic and social justice, paid for by higher taxes on
the wealthy. One difficulty has been the necessity to make demands simultaneously on Washington State and also on the campus administration and the Board of Trustees. Student movements have tended to focus only on demanding changes in campus spending and have deferred too much to the administration for lobbying the State government.”
While the list of social movements Evergreen students have been involved in is long, and includes more successful campaigns than this one, nearly all of them have the same thing in common. “I think the issue of building power is often absent. That’s what I was talking about earlier regarding mass movements, actually having power to change things. You’d think there’d be more power and movements with so many anti-capitalist students. There’s almost never been a strong student movement here. The administration co-opts and pretends to listen to movements until they lose steam.” Often missing has been building campaigns that have staying power. He contrasted this to his experience at “UMass Amherst… [It] was supposed to be a radical department, but it was so far short from what it claimed to be in terms of supporting on the ground activism. When I was at Penn State, the idea of changing the college would have never occurred to me. It was such a bureaucratic and pro-corporate school, but at Evergreen the way the liberal arts are taught, the openness, the way I can say my ideas publicly, it’s so much better than most places, but so far from what it claims to be, in terms of an anti-racist, equitable, school for liberation. Both of those truths are important to remember, better than most places but also so far short”.
Despite the deepening crisis the college has found itself in, Peter acknowledged that it’s crucial to not “romanticize Evergreen or its past.” While there is a tradition of students here not just “…going to school for their careers…” but instead, “…trying to become better human beings… It was more white than it is today, students were disproportionately wealthier than today,” and when the college was founded the faculty “was almost entirely white and male.” There is no great past for Evergreen to return to.
As we concluded our conversation, Peter made one thing abundantly clear, that “we are in a time of crisis. Of course there’s COVID, and the environmental crisis is clear. There’s constantly worsening inequality of income and wealth. Not to mention economic instability, I could go on and on. At Evergreen of course there’s an enrollment crisis… this began after the state budget cuts and rising tuition in 2009… but of course has gotten considerably worse since 2017… To me, morally and strategically, we have to push Evergreen as a school to understand these major crises in our time. This will allow us to teach about these crises historically and scientifically. By teaching about it, learning about it, discussing it and recruiting on this basis we have a path forward.” In his final thoughts, Peter added that what the college is going through is what Naomi Klien would call “the shock doctrine” wherein at Evergreen “the crisis of enrollment” is being seized for neoliberal ends. The problem is where administrators “don’t effectively explain the college.” The way forward to this goal “to me is seeing an effective student newspaper again, seeing effective student movements again to challenge and learn about these crises, to study and propose solutions to the many crises we face, to hire faculty on this vision and to recruit students on this basis. After all, how would Evergreen ever be more conventional or business- friendly than a school like Western?” Isn’t Evergreen for students and potential students that want to change the world? There are many students like that out there.
