https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60w0DZX5-SM

This sort of thing seems to surface every month or so now. The field of evolutionary biology seems to be targeted in particular. Many of the targeted professors report that many of their colleagues offer them support in private, but dare not speak up in public for fear of also being targeted -- even tenured ones. In some cases, it looks like unverifiable accusations of sexual misconduct are being weaponized for this purpose. Trigger warnings and microaggressions and the like seem to be a favorite weapon to be used against professors.

During the Evergreen protests, students were marauding campus with baseball bats, looking for professor Bret Weinstein. More disturbingly, he was frozen out by most of the mainstream press, who only began covering him when their silence became deafening.

In particular, there was lots of press coverage on the Evergreen event and any observer can go and read a variety of perspectives on it. It's also worth noting that Evergreen was an extremely unusual style of university, and as such already had a lot of interesting customs. Suggesting that Prof. Weinstein's protesting of white people also having a venue to participate in a longstanding tradition of a black student walkout is somehow relevant to conversation about biological gender differences is chilling, because it raises the question if in this poster's mind there are relevant biological racial differences. Is this poster asking us to take a careless leap between questioning biological differences of the sexes to biological differences between races? If not, why are nearly all examples given in reference to an issue about race relations?

Similarly, one can investigate the claim that conservative professors and students are unfairly targeted. The numbers there are interesting, but don't tell a convincing story. You can also investigate the implication that conservative and traditionalist students are treated unfairly is not well supported by the numbers.

Finally, one need only look towards the career advancements and growing department sizes of evolutionary biology to see that they're actually doing fine. Evolutionary Psychologists are having a hard time, but they're also facing many challenges actually demonstrating consistently testable predictions (as is the larger field, as statistical expertise becomes more normalized in the field).

You shouldn't trust links provided in threads like this, particularly on this website. They're often carefully selected (and I say this in a non-partisan fashion; everyone does it). You're much better off investigating these things organically.

This is typical of this sort of namecalling and sinister association. A demonstration against racial exclusion which itself uses racial exclusion is obviously problematic. What I've seen time and time again, is that the purpose of such comments is to get as many people to "move along" and not look further. People of good conscience who are passionate about the truth need to look into these things, be forthright, and not be cowed. If tenured professors effectively no longer have freedom of speech, there is something going dramatically wrong in our society.

Similarly, one can investigate the claim that conservative professors and students are unfairly targeted. The numbers there are interesting, but don't tell a convincing story

The fact that tenured professors feel trepidation about speaking out should raise serious concerns in our society. The fact that the mainstream press basically buries this stuff should raise serious concern.

Finally, one need only look towards the career advancements and growing department sizes of evolutionary biology to see that they're actually doing fine.

Bret Weinstein focuses on evolutionary biology.

You shouldn't trust links provided in threads like this, particularly on this website. They're often carefully selected (and I say this in a non-partisan fashion; everyone does it). You're much better off investigating these things organically.

Sure. Please investigate this yourself, past the facade presented to us by the mainstream media. Just investigate with this fact in mind: These events are alarming if you look into them, and they are buried by the mainstream media. This is the most significant meta-level fact, and it's an alarming one to think about.

Never heard of the controversy and the link went to a low quality video blog, which was also rather loud, so I did what you suggested and went and checked other sources since I wanted to know what the evergreen + Weinstein controversy was all about.

"Once a year, Evergreen State University (located just outside of Seattle), allows the students of colour to take a day of absence, so that their importance and contribution is felt at the University. Bret Weinstein, as a progressive, was and has been on board for this for a long time.

A year ago, they flipped the logic. Rather than telling people of colour to stay away for the day, they told white people that they are not welcome on campus for a day. Absence wasn’t compulsory, but highly recommended."

Those two paragraph tells me everything I need to know. stcredzero is commenting on the political climate in academia. Not a comment about racial differences, nor race relations, but about the politics in academia.

If this was gender politics it would look like this:

Experiment 1: A day that allows women and only women to take day of absence from daycare, so that their importance and contribution is felt.

Experiment 2: A day that declare that men are not welcome at daycare.

Could anyone imagine either of those experiment going well? Imagine for completeness if we also did the same for a male dominated profession. I could not even imagine such social experiment getting a pass of approval from an ethical board, and I can't find any reference that evergreen requested one.

There is a jarring and confusing change in character between the paragraph above and below this comment. You went from a "this is optional" clause to a "you should stay away." Your narration injected this, and did so clumsily. Is this because you're citing two sources?

> A year ago, they flipped the logic. Rather than telling people of colour to stay away for the day, they told white people that they are not welcome on campus for a day. Absence wasn’t compulsory, but highly recommended."

Firstly: nothing about this practice was compulsory and nothing about this practice was universal. Professors knew about the original walkout tradition and scheduled around it, but that was the extent of it. Not all students who were people of color participated. They were not "told to stay away."

Nor were white students told to "stay away." What actually happened was some white people asked how they could participate, and so a group of students set up a separate group of workshops. This was very small scale, but the folks involved liked it. So the next year, it was proposed that there was a possible track for this to be supported by the school. It was not a "not welcome" declaration, it was a proposal to change a tradition. Brett Weinstein took exception to it.

What followed subsequently was a series of predictable escalations by the usual extremist subjects, with non-students from alt-right groups showing up in "support" and antifa showing up to "counter" them. Because Evergreen is essentially a small non-traditional state university, they were just not prepared for this scale of action and national attention. Even with this, these were nothing like the Berkeley demonstrations. Injuries were limited, property damage was low, and actually all groups were moderated by the student body.

The attempt to tie this to "suppression" of Weinstein's academic work is absurd, because nothing about any of this relates to that body of work. He took a political and ethical position completely unrelated to his work and then got involved in a controversy about it. Being a scientist with political opinions doesn't mean your political opinions are necessarily right or immune to scrutiny. If he wants to stick to science, he should have (and could have) done that. He didn't like an optional white walkout day that was done in solidarity with PoC, and he said so, and that had consequences.

No. The character of the protest did explicitly change in this way.

What followed subsequently was a series of predictable escalations by the usual extremist subjects, with non-students from alt-right groups showing up in "support" and antifa showing up to "counter" them. Because Evergreen is essentially a small non-traditional state university, they were just not prepared for this scale of action and national attention.

It's easy to find the videos of the students holding the administration captive. Especially telling are the idiotic things they're yelling. It's easy to find the videos of the students confronting Bret Weinstein. Especially telling are the idiotic things those students are yelling.

The attempt to tie this to "suppression" of Weinstein's academic work is absurd

You're being needlessly specific, or not reading carefully. I mentioned "communicating with the public." In Weinstein's case, he started out communicating with colleagues. Effectively, he was "un-personed" with the protesting students used as muscle to make him and his wife feel unsafe. In Weinstein's case, there isn't suppression of academic work. In this case, it's the suppression of an academic.

There's one kind of person in history who goes around intimidating academics for holding reasonable opinions. (Or even correct ones, as in this case.) Those are the villains.

The whole thing however looks like a terrible idea from the start and the "change" even worse. A school should not give day of absence to people based on gender, race or skin color, nor should a school support the idea to encourage people to stay away if that was what the "group of students" suggested. A school should do everything they can do in order to make students feel like they want to be at school, and doing social experiments where they encourage/permit students to not go to school (if that was what the original concept behind the walkout tradition) is a terrible idea. This is, as I mentioned earlier, why board of ethics exist.

The thing Evergreen State University should have done is do a public statement that all students regardless of race is welcome and wanted every single day, every week of the year. End of story, end of controversy, just a plain explicit message. No walk out, no white students opting to not go to school, just plain school where everyone is welcome. Then they would not have different political media platforms giving different narratives of what did or did not happen.

Look, I don't know what was in the poster's mind. However, it seems the common theme you picked out (biological differences of the sexes and a dangerous leap to racial differences) is one common theme. If you hadn't said anything, I was assuming the poster's comparison here was to show that we're targeting academics with dissenting opinions. Whether that's correct or incorrect is worthy of debate, fine, but your interpretation was particularly ominous.

Edit: and perhaps manipulatively so. If something is ambiguous, why not ask rather than assume? There's an unfortunate epidemic of people who know other people better than other people know themselves.

This is the typical strategy. Bret Weinstein, who is Jewish and who made a potentially career-risking stand for civil rights many years back was castigated as a "sellout" and even as a "white supremacist." The truth is, that Bret Weinstein is, as far as I know, a progressive.

I was a lifelong Democratic party voter. I'm non-white. I've advocated for awareness of racism and bigotry since before there was a world wide web. If you try to tell a mob that using the word "oriental" doesn't warrant a rural middle school teacher losing her job, and suggest she's a human being who should be given the benefit of the doubt and try talking to her instead, this is enough to get you called a "white supremacist." And that is just one example among many for me, personally.

The fringe Far Left has hijacked the agenda of the political left as a whole, and is using these ominous authoritarian name-calling and scare tactics to silence dissent. On campus and in the street, this has even manifested as assault and violence -- on behalf of the left. Something is very wrong there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bz0oxIZ3xIg

We people of good conscience who have seen it need to start speaking up and calling this out. For those of you for whom this is new, then just try an experiment. Ask some reasonable but hard questions. Push boundaries, but only in an intellectual sense. See what reaction you get. See if you recognize the spoor of authoritarianism.

I am simply aware of the larger context. The reason I made that leap was because Weinstein himself has said things to this effect. But also, because of the particular framing of the Evergreen Protests (which saw arguments across the political and social spectrum) as a dangerous pack of leftists wielding baseball bats stalking the campus (which is a hotly contested claim). Faculty who were there and had their offices occupied as part of the specificallu leftist protests do not consistently report

And quite frankly? It doesn't stand out in American politics at all. We've been rioting as part of political discourse since before the Constitution's ink was dry.

But presenting the event in that way leads an informed reader to wonder if there is are other inaccuracies.

Look at the poster's responses closely for a clear and logical refutation. I think the absence of anything other than "it's name calling and that's what they do" is not a very powerful way to dismiss these concerns. Someone genuinely interested in setting the record straight would probably do it differently

Am I "the far left?" I don't know. I'm a successful fintech founder postexit, so it's pretty tough for me to look credible to that crowd. If I were, would simply naming me as such actually be a valid answer to the concern I raised?

Because the mainstream press wants the public to move along and not pay too much attention.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pf5fAiXYr08

But presenting the event in that way leads an informed reader to wonder if there is are other inaccuracies.

I'm sincerely hoping that people will look into different coverage of Evergreen. Really, it speaks for itself. Your description of "Antifa blocking" speaks to your bias. I know from personal experience that not all Antifa are toxic thugs who lack any philosophical basis apart from "might makes right." I also know from personal experience that many are, and it's very telling how those who wear those colors who know better don't call them out. I have no idea how an informed person could support them. The only thing they have going for them is that Nazis are worse than they are. As I mention above, many of them will even outright tell you that it's their guiding philosophy.

History has many examples of people trying to intimidate others politically. Some wear masks. Others think their special status shields them. Over time, we all know them as villains.