 This is all security right now, students are taking furniture and putting it in front of the doors to block police from coming inside. The following day all hell broke loose on campus. When the rioters barricaded the library building, which is the big administration building, one of the biggest buildings on campus, barricaded a number of people inside, including faculty, including students, including administration. My concerns as a person that can't speak for everyone is that the work that needs to be done is happening today and that everyone's safety and health is concerned. So I'm working on making sure food and water is being brought to everyone and that this is happening on a tiny manner. So I don't need to hear anything else, but I want y'all to know and update about things. Do y'all need anything at all? The people who are in this room watching this happen, are y'all clear? Cool. Thank you. So the priority is that they stay in that room, if they aren't in that room, then we did something wrong. So y'all need to watch that door, watch all the doors, watch the windows, you need to keep eyes on them. And if somebody has to go in that room, we'll get to make sure that there's no way to get that room for them to leave. That's the number one priority, and so we get our demands to leave. The second priority is that I don't believe the cops are coming, but if they were to come, we need to know that information. So y'all can leave, and no harm will be done to you. I can guarantee that. But by leaving, it's sort of showing the school that you don't care about the black and brown lives here. And that's harmful to the environment here. And I don't think that's okay. If you want to leave, go ahead, but you should not, under any circumstances, leave this environment. It is y'all's job to stand up for the students, and it is y'all's job to be here and represent the students. And by representing the students, I mean all the black and brown students. And I think it is irresponsible for you guys to leave. My voice is ringing in the beach. My voice is ringing in the beach. Shot every day. Don't leave white people. There's like, totally nothing to see here. It's complete chaos. The protesters disrupt a faculty meeting which professors were being celebrated for being emeritus. The protesters literally disrupt the meeting, take the cake, the retirement cake, and march out of the room. It's full Lord of the Flies. Baby got a fancy meeting cake. I saw footage of that faculty meeting that I'm not sure I had seen previously, recently. And it is not the most dramatic footage that came out of the riots, but there is some part of it that must be seen to be believed. Why are you here? And how can we listen to you? What are you doing to address the crisis that is going on against black and brown bodies and has been going on for years? For those of you who've been here for 20 years, you know this is not medical. This is why you can sit in this room and eat cake to answer your questions. We're here to make sure that you're with us. And for you not to forget who's the reason that you're still doing your job. The rioters take over the static meeting and there is a race to the bottom amongst faculty members to virtue signal to these rioters so that they can join them. They're here. We need to listen to their voice. They are out there. Their bodies are on the line, right? Where is your body? Is it sitting in a chair eating cake? Come on. These students know where to go where the power is, which is why they're here. We are accountable. We've been sitting on our asses for 40 years. And this is the result. If we were doing what they asked of us, this wouldn't be happening. These people have better shit to do. This is my fucking day off. I don't come to faculty meeting anymore because of all the races out. You all decided to become educators to hold our futures in your hands. So why aren't you there supporting us? Like where have you been? Like as educators you're there holding our futures. You're there to like help us grow. Like many times we come to you looking for support and we're penalized and we lose credit. Because we're putting our bodies on the lines because we're taking control of our education. Y'all are educators and like we will work with you and stand with you. We also have to work with us. We love you. We love you. We love you. I would like to go now, but I also don't want to end anymore by walking out. So we're going to be okay if just one of us walk through there. Have I got to go? Yeah. So we're going to be okay if just one of us walk through there. If I could dream afraid of affiniting somebody by leaving and going to support the students in which you all are here to serve. It's laughable to me. It's embarrassing. It's sad. It's disgusting. It's what your job is to do. It's to educate us. Didn't you educate us on how to do like this? It was you that taught us that in class. You all right though? You learned it more helpful if we stayed and talked with you or more helpful if we go over to the library. I always find it a lot helpful on behalf of the student body if all of y'all got up together and walk over to support the students that support you and have done that. Even when you continuously hurt us, when you continuously take our credit away, even though we pay for them, when you don't show up guys, y'all need to rise up. Let's go. Back, back, back. There's a part of this that's very simple, which is this mob is wielding a credible threat. What is the way to, I mean basically, if you are willing to humiliate yourself by surrendering to the absurd portrayal that these people are delivering, can you get out of their way so that they will go attack somebody else? And so I must say I have become more and more frustrated with my faculty colleagues who initially, I understood their fears, but watching their fears drive them to externalize this harm onto other people who don't deserve it. It's hard to respect how self-serving their position is. And yet you come to a faculty member of color and charge her for not protecting your needs. So I refuse to listen to you grandstand and calling. That's what I have to say. The people that they're driving those externalities to, sure, they include us, and they include other faculty and staff, but most of who they include are the vast majority of students who are not interested in having these things happen. And these are the very same faculty who speak a really good game about putting students first and caring about students. Listen to these people talk shit to you for seven fucking years. So no, I don't want to hear about it. So what I'm saying is when I said at the start, you can go inside and you can listen to the students and what they're trying to say, or you can take your ass home. That is it. Try to come up with a way to not listen. Two options. Go inside. Go home. This shit is literally going to kill me. Do you have time for an apology? This movement is about student empowerment. It's attempting to center the voices of people who are not often heard to make sure that their needs are addressed so that everyone's needs can be addressed. I think people think that we're being difficult or snowflake-ish, if you will. At least that's the main claim to dismiss us. But this institution was built to serve us, correct? That's what we're paying for. So it must serve us. And we must demand it. And we must beg for it, fight for it, ask for it, plead for it. And you need to make reparations for how you've harmed all of us in this specific instant. I think everybody here would like a refund and additional meals through the end of the quarter. We must pull out every stops we have to make sure that our needs are being met by not only this institution, by not only academia, by not only the country, but from everyone around us who engages with us. So they need to be told that these the time is multiple hot-pot and we don't need to penalize for that. It's hard. It really, really is. But we need support. And the best way that you can support us is to make the country realize and acknowledge that this is not just here at the Evergreen State College. It's every academic institution. It's every student and young person in the country. It's everyone who needs their voice to be heard. We are powerful. We have social media at our hands. We have connections. We are bright. We are beautiful. And the labor can't fall and only those who are most marginalized. So please, make sure everyone's story is being heard and use whatever power you have to scream the truth to the rooftops. I got a call from the police chief and she said, are you on campus? And I said, no, I don't have class today. She said, good, don't come to campus. And I said, what's going on? And she said, well, the protesters are hunting for someone car to car. And we think it's you. They were going car to car. They were stopping traffic. And this is now documented. You can hear there's a recording from the switchboard. We're having civil unrest on campus. Major protests. There are shopping vehicles coming on and leaving campus. We're stopping them. Isn't it our guys? It's our students that are stopping people. Oh, our students that are stopping people. We're stopping them from stopping people. Because the president has told Stacey to stand down. We're not to do anything. We're not. She says, don't come to campus. They're hunting for somebody. We think it's you. And we can't protect you because the president has told us to stand down. Now mind you, we live literally across the street from campus. So this is a very uncomfortable phone call to receive. The next day, I decided to meet my class off campus because of what Stacey has told me about them being unable to protect me. And I pack up my bike to go ride downtown and meet my students. And I ride past the place where I would usually enter the forest to ride up to campus. And I watch students who I think I recognized from the protests the day before or two days before and they see me and they react and they go for their phones. And I think, what the hell am I watching? And so I keep riding and I divert. I ride around where they are and I ride into campus and directly to the police station where I find the police station is locked from the inside and I knock and the police chief is there and I go in and her main deputy is there too. And I say, look, I'm probably imagining this, but I think I just saw people waiting for me at the place that I'm known to go into campus. And she said, oh, I don't think you're imagining that. And I said, okay. And she said, what's more, you're not safe on your bicycle. You're not safe on campus, but you're also not safe off campus. I don't know what we could do for you if they caught up to you on your bicycle. I want you to take your bicycle home and I want you to get in the car. And I say, okay. So I ride home and I show up and I don't remember it this way, but Heather reports that I show up at the door more shaken than she's seen me. And I know him since he was 16. In teaching my course this year, I had looked up the mathematician Mandelbrot, the guy who innovated the study of fractals. And anyway, I learned some things about him I didn't know. One is that he had fled from the Nazis and he described the experience of being a hunted civilian. And as I found myself in the sights of this mob actually being told that I wasn't safe anywhere in town on my bicycle because they were looking for me and I couldn't be protected. That phrase kept reoccurrence. Like, is this really happening in the United States in 2017 that I'm a hunted civilian? Is that actually being allowed to happen? Welcome to Evergreen. AC, stop filming. AC, stop filming. AC, stop filming. Kai, Kai, Kai, Kai. If they won't wait. No, leave it running. Phone down. Hey. Thank you. Who is the common campus safe for? For you or white cis man? Well, to be fair, there's an angry mob right here that's been assaulting me repeatedly. Assaulting? Assault? Yes. Do you want the definition of the soul? What's the definition of the soul? That's good. AC, stop. AC, stop. AC, stop. AC, stop. AC, stop. AC, stop. AC, don't do that. Come on. Hey, one of them has a baton. I'm going. You guys are following me. And starting to fuck me up. Why don't you guys wait a second instead of following me like that? You just said you were going to fuck me up. Being chased by a mob of angry people. Should I like... What's going on? Call the police or... What's going on? They're chasing me and threatening me. Did you do something? To fuck me up. I'm just filming for my protection. Well, then stay out here. Stay out here. Oh, do you want to... Your friend just hit Naomi and Ellie? Do you want to... Do you want to film that? Let's talk about what's up. Oh, film me. No. Did your friend hit somebody? Yeah. Here, come outside. I was filming the whole time. Naomi, I was going to beat the shit out of you. He doesn't go. He should leave, obviously. I didn't hit anyone. Do you live on campus? No. I'm good. Did you hit someone? Yeah. Did you hit somebody? Yeah. Did you hit someone? He took somebody's phone. Someone... I had it on film the whole time. Someone lunged at me. And I pushed her off. Why were you filming? Um, maybe I... So what happened is him and Naomi were writing a speech. And we confronted them. They started filming us. We confronted them first. Nothing. And they started putting us on. No one touched Naomi and Ellie at your times. Okay. Delete the film. And they were taping us and they need to delete it. Okay. Nothing or... None of us can send us being filmed. It's a public campus. It doesn't fucking matter. You need consent to film people. People aren't... The president spent all of July after this happened on vacation. We were waiting for anything from the college. We were waiting to figure out what is going to happen. How does this college go back together? How are we going to teach in the fall? What's happening? Finally they sit down with us very end of August. They make it utterly clear that they don't want us back. And they, you know, they're insulting to us. They tell us that they would, you know, they would like to solve the problem by giving us panic buttons as if the problem is that we are panicky rather than that they let a mob run roughshod over the campus. We did... We said we love this college and we are interested in having it turn around. Because it is now a laughing stock. It is now a complete laughing stock and the opposite of what a liberal arts college should look like. But one of the things that's happened as a result of all of this is that we now know lots of good people in the civil rights movement and in the free speech movement. Both, right? People from the original civil rights movement who actually marched with Martin Luther King and people who are contemporary now in the free speech movement. And we could bring these people to campus and have a conference on what campus life should look like Good luck with that. And they said, no thanks. We are actually really pleased with how things are going. So we did the best we could in negotiations. Washington State is one of 11 states that doesn't have punitive damages. So there was a... We were in a bind that's not worth going into. But we were limited to suing for compensatory damages and there was no good option for us but to accept this. So hang on. The strange thing to me is that the university turned its back on you and doubled down on the equity which just melted the whole place down. Is that a correct way to look at it? That is a correct way to look at it. And not just that but the Attorney General's office and specifically the Assistant Attorney General that was working on this case on behalf of the college that clearly accepted and internalized the whole equity argument. And basically it seemed that she thought she was dealing with a couple of no good brasists who the college would be better off without. You're kidding me. So there's institutions and even right up to government that threw you guys under the bus. Oh, absolutely. And I think, you know, that's... I have to say I keep being invited to talk about free speech on college campuses and every time I'm invited I make the same point which is this isn't about free speech and this is only tangentially about college campuses. This is about a breakdown in the basic logic of civilization and its spreading and college campuses may be the first dramatic battle but of course this is going to find its way into the courts. It's already found its way into the tech sector. It's going to find its way to the highest levels of governance if we're not careful and it actually does jeopardize the ability of civilization to continue to function. How has it gotten to this point? In part it has gotten to this point because we let it fester. These ideas were wrong when they first took hold in the Academy and instead of shutting them down we created phony fields that act as a kind of analytical affirmative action where ideas that do not deserve to survive are given sustenance. These ideas are so toxic and so ill-conceived that to the extent that they are allowed to hold sway as if one truth is equal to every other truth, right? My truth is as good as your truth to the extent that that idea is allowed to pervade other institutions on which civilization depends civilization will come apart. So we have to fight this and don't get the sense that it is just about college campuses or kids overreacting because that ain't what this is. This is far more important than that.