by Sako Chapman

A Historical Perspective on the Evergreen State College 2017 Protests

ORIGINS: 

In 1972, Dr. Maxine Mimms, one of the first Black women hired at the Evergreen State College, began the grassroots outreach that would become Evergreen’s Tacoma Campus. Mimm’s program was designed to meet the needs of Black working-class students in the Hilltop area who felt that Evergreen and higher education at large was not serving their intellectual, social, or material needs. Classes were first hosted at Mimms’ own kitchen table with the help of community leaders and her Evergreen colleagues, all on top of their regular teaching responsibilities. As enrollment outgrew Mimm’s house, the program sought spaces that could strengthen relationships with surrounding organizations and community. Evergreen-Tacoma was independently financed through the community for the first 15 years, ensuring the program’s self-sufficiency and reciprocal community relationship. While financially burdensome, the independence from Evergreen’s influence was a protective measure against the co-options that the faculty and students of color had experienced at Olympia. By the time Evergreen-Tacoma gained official recognition from Washington State in 1982, its identity, pedagogy, and political visions had been cemented.

Named after the Douglas Turner Ward play of the same name, Maxine Mimms initiated Day of Absence (DOA) for staff, students, and faculty of color on both campuses to retreat from the regular dynamics of the college and allow their white peers to reflect on the loss of their presence. Reportedly beginning in 1975, attendees would gather in Tacoma to identify the changes that would advance their intellectual, social, and material positions within Evergreen. Little documentation of the “original” first 12 years of DOA exist in the Evergreen Archives. To some degree, this can be read as intentional. The first Cooper Point Journal article to cover DOA on October 29, 1987 detailed the discussions of affirmative action versus equal opportunity, the demands of a dedicated Dean of Color to protect positions for faculty of color, and the necessary leveraging of hiring committees to gain influence for people of color (POC) within the college. The author released a letter of apology in the following issue after being approached with concerns of public circulation of “off the record” comments and minority-only discussions. 

DOA was revived as an annual tradition in 1992 after a 5-year pause, organized by iterations of the First Peoples Coalition at the Olympia campus. Day of Presence (DOP) was added as a second day to the DOA agenda some close years later as an opportunity for the whole student body to come together. The two-day annual tradition would invite Evergreen’s POC to an off-campus location for a variety of community building and workshop opportunities. At the same time, another selection of workshops would be provided on campus, aimed at white “allied” students and faculty. DOP would happen on a following day, hosting a continued variety of workshops and exercises for any community member to participate in. Mimms and Evergreen Tacoma were often not far-removed from DOA/DOP, but the switch to Olympia campus’s planning marked a change in intention and evolving institutionality of the event. 

THE LAST DAY OF ABSENCE:

With acknowledgement to the uncertainty of POC affairs following the election of Donald Trump, program planners symbolically decided to reverse the pattern of previous DOA’s– inviting a maximum of 200 allied participants to an off-campus location and keeping their POC programming on campus. On April 12, 2017 the DOA themed “Revolution is Not a One‐Time Event; Your Silence Will Not Protect You” concluded with little issue whatsoever. According to the POC talk column from the April 26, 2017 CPJ, students ranged from unbothered to mildly confused over the reversal. While some criticized the loss of an intentional, independent caucusing space for POC, the students widely reported enjoyment of the community aspects, movie screenings, and student-led workshops. 

Months before, the request to hold DOA on campus in empty lecture halls rather than as a retreat was narratively twisted into a ban of white people from campus by former biology faculty Bret Weinstein. The “reply-all” emails in which these comments were made came to light in the student body in late May, retrieved from student workers on the staff and faculty email list. 

The three and a half weeks of protest initiated by students on May 23, 2017 was framed as Evergreen’s “Day of Absence Controversy” in the media. Seven years later, it is still occasionally understood as such. While it was the confrontation of Weinstein over his emails that would then spark the wave of protests and media blowout, it becomes essential to examine the complexities of Evergreen’s 2017 beyond the scope of DOA. Or at least, it is valuable to understand the end of Day of Absence as one part of many institutional rearrangements to follow the protests of 2017. 

QUICKLY: WHAT WERE THE PROTESTS..?

It is this archival researcher’s opinion that to explain the full events of the protests and its timeline would become its own book. The mixed-consciousness and activist orientation of the Evergreen 2017 protests create difficulty in parsing out Right-Wing Revisionism and Administration’s “trauma” from the actual failures in strategy. It is to this end that the article in the 2023 Disorientation Manual decides to skip over the protests entirely and diagnose the central causes as “1) WORKER STRUGGLE AMONG THE STUDENTS,” “2) RISE OF RIGHT WING GANG VIOLENCE IN THE PNW,” and “3) EVERGREEN COP SURVEILLANCE, HARASSMENT, AND RACISM.” These long-standing causes emerge clearly in the demand lists made by students during the first week of protests (as recorded in the May 31, 2017 CPJ) and the demands made by striking RA’s as the non-union group RAFT. Still, several of these demands concerned the immediate suspension of Bret Weinstein over his DOA comments, and it is important to define institutional racism as a core concern of the protests. 

A mixture of office occupations, administrative confrontation, and Red Square pickets were employed during the protests. It is valuable to note that these actions were rather commonplace as far as Evergreen student protests. In fact, a glance over the entire Evergreen timeline implies a pattern of protest occurring every 4 to 6 or so years concerning administration’s responsiveness to student voice and systems of shared decision making. Of further value is to recognize that multiple student protests had occurred even within the same 2016-2017 academic year. Convocation had kicked off in September with two student protesters taking the stage holding a sign that said: “Evergreen cashes diversity checks but doesn’t care about Blacks;” a Photoland gallery show had raised student criticism through its imagery featuring Donald Trump; walk-outs followed the election of Donald Trump (in particular solidarity with undocumented/DACAmented students); and Evergreen Police Services Chief of Police Stacy Brown’s swearing-in ceremony that had been disrupted with noisemakers and the claiming of a microphone.

What is truly unique about the protests in May of 2017 is the national media attention. As students organized to demand changes in the institution, viral footage turned Evergreen into a target for right-wing hate groups and media. For every news article about the ‘wokest college in America violating free speech,’ Evergreen community members were fending off harassment. Staff, students, and faculty– particularly Black professors and staff of the First Peoples Support Services–  were filmed, targeted, and doxxed while advocating for themselves. Opposition to the protests climaxed with the arrival of Patriot Prayer on June 15^th and the deployment of Washington State Troopers in riot gear to “keep peace” between the fascists and the counter protesters. 

AFTER THE PROTESTS:

Evergreen’s leadership opted for a strategy of avoidance around 2017 in the aftermath and began to initiate its consolidation around public relations. Over the course of the protests and moving into the following academic year, the Public Records office became overwhelmed with requests from journalists, right-wing extremists (with the intention of doxxing), and students/community members concerned with what communication was happening behind the scenes. Evergreen became hyper aware of its internal email servers as public information and as the subject of ongoing scrutiny. A $450,000 legal settlement was reached with Weinstein and his wife, while zero institutional support was provided to the faculty and staff who were targeted by the doxxing. 80 student protesters were sanctioned via the student code of conduct. Revisions were made to the code during the 2017-2018 year, extending and clarifying its influence. Students, faculty and staff continued to face visits and online harassment from trolls trying to gather content from what was now a stalling news story. After an initial wave of resignation, the people most affected began to slowly exit the college, taking their testimonies and firsthand experiences with them. 2017 continues to be a fraught topic of discussion even to this day: for marketing reasons, for sustained trauma, and for the conflicting perspectives on the protest’s causes/effectiveness. 

Evergreen’s Police Services was able to acquire seven AR-15s without public notification during the summer of 2017. The rifles were purchased under former President George Bridges with the protests cited as a main contributor for approval. This disregarded the explicit student demand for the “disarming of the police’s lethal and less than lethal weapons.” The protests had called for cops off campus, both to confront the oppression inherent in maintaining a police force and for the Evergreen Police’s history of harassment towards Black, Transgender, and community members of color. Instances in the 2017 school year had included the detainment of two Black students based on facebook memes on May 14th, the refusal to investigate and notify students and faculty about hate crimes on campus, as well as the investigation and prosecution of the students who had disrupted Stacy Brown’s swearing-in. Included in the RAFT demand list, RA’s had requested to “be provided with specific information on what the officers have been trained on for accountability purposes.” Community awareness around the rifles did not break until October of 2018 in the CPJ, a full year after.

The AR-15 decision blindsided the Police Community Review Board (PCRB), the once commonplace rotating task force of Evergreen community members who had prevented such rifle requests annually, with community input, since 2008. Protests on Red Square, street theater, information handbills, and the interception of news vans had been popular and high-profile tools used by student protesters against rifle armament in years prior, and particularly in 2011-12. The rifles were purchased for a total of $10,897.76 and cost the college a projected $5000 upkeep per year. The original email request made by Stacy Brown, which was not brought in front of the PCRB, had only asked for 5 rifles. This request was made on August 1, 2017, just days before Brown’s resignation from Evergreen Police Services. 

The purchase of the AR-15s following 2017 is a helpful example of the deterioration of reciprocal systems for student input and shared decision making that once had been foundational to the vision of Evergreen as an alternative college. 

THE END OF DAY OF ABSENCE:

Due to protests, race relations at the college had become an issue to contain rather than address. Many of the students’ demands of 2017 would not be fulfilled, and overwhelmingly students continued to feel that in their moment of need, the institution had turned its back and placed distance between them. Evergreen maneuvered its diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives into impossible corners of the college under tiny teams of often women of color to solve the outward iterations of the college’s institutional racism. These teams and positions continued to lack protection and support from external scrutiny, acting as lightning rods away from administration. With the media backlash to DOA, it became difficult to hold any discussions of racial caucusing within the college. This particularly affected the institutional support for student of color groups, who would now face marketing concern over any event or club meeting that could be marked as a closed space to whites. Similarly, the First Peoples office that had once been dedicated to helping students of color at Evergreen was tasked with addressing the vacuum of support named for LGBTQ+ students in the protest demands, cementing it as an overarching ‘diversity’ office rather than advancing the needs of POC. 

DOA/DOP was deemed “too controversial” to hold again for its association with the media blowout. Following an exiled effort of students to revive Day of Absence, Evergreen returned in 2019 with its plans for Equity Symposium. The newly renamed First Peoples Multicultural Trans and Queer Support Services was given central planning tasks for Equity Symposium. Symbolically, this new identity for First Peoples would mirror the evolution of DOA: POC-centered spaces once focused on securing material demands, over time changing in vision, and finally co-opted into a vaguely progressive form that could not guarantee dedicated resources to POC—and all under a vague “celebration” of equity. The office would maintain this planning responsibility through its frequent student and full-time staff turnovers, haunting it even into its new identity as BLISS (BIPOC & LGBTQ+ INTERSECTIONAL SUPPORT SERVICES). 

Many students won’t even see Equity Symposium once in their years here, but perhaps understanding it as the departure of a 25-year tradition due to the college’s recoil from 2017 and its attempts to preserve reputation will mean something to someone else. For all the retreats of information sharing, antagonism against the students, and erasure of systems of advocacy to come from it, the fact that there is not a shared narrative amongst the internal Evergreen community around 2017 is significant. Just as the story of Day of Absence is more intricate than the protests, the protests themselves should be understood for the outcomes that echo into our moment today– A closed off administration and decision-making process; a student body dramatically removed from institutional knowledge; an absent campus culture that notably lacks the presence of multicultural student groups; and a disproportionately sized and armed police force. 

Images:

1. Poster for the 2016-2017 Day of Absence x Day of Presence. Accessed through the Evergreen State College Archives.

2. Photo of student protesters by Ricky Osborne published in the May 31, 2017 CPJ with the article “Students Demand Change” by Georgie Hicks. Accessed through the Evergreen State College Archives Digital Collection.