 No, coffee, milk, cream. Testing, testing, head of the table. What? Really? Yeah. How about that? The man at the center of the controversy. She's having milk right now. Yes, exactly. She's about to go, hey, hey, go, go, eat, drink, eat, drink. George, I don't want to hear about that damn thing you have to say. You've talked so much, you shut the fuck up. These white-eyed spots, they never seem to be holding him and him and all these people accountable. The counsel for the incredible plan you have put together. Please let's all give them a round of applause. So, is there a beginning to the story or not? Kind of. Sort of. Um, the beginning of the story is that Evergreen was the most experimental of experimental commentary. How do I describe this place? I find Evergreen is my home. It's a sense of a feeling that I can be comfortable for who I am. Love the trees. It's very outdoorsy, so it gives you that fresh feeling, you know? I like that. An Evergreen student is looking for something that isn't as common in the educational structure in America. They are searching for more independence, for a different cadence in life. And it's a place that survived long after the era of the founding of experimental colleges was over. The core elements of it were a couple things. One was the literal total freedom of faculty to teach what they want in whatever manner they want so long as students showed up to the classes. Sixteen credits a quarter, sometimes 48 quarters for the entire year. So you'd be with one group of students, 25 if you're teaching alone, 50 if you're teaching with someone else, for 16 hours a week on field trips, 24-7. The entire year, you're just developing community. It was actually an extraordinary place to be and to learn about the brains of other human beings and also to develop theory, which is part of what we were doing there. And when did things start to go awry? So things started to go awry. We don't exactly know why it happened, but a new president, George Bridges, was hired. Hey, welcome. We are going to have a great year ahead. At first, he hired a friend of his to interview a great many students, faculty, alumni, staff in order to get the lay of the land. And Evergreen, being as far left of college as exists in the country, was chronically suspicious the faculty were of administrators, right? Anything administration wanted to do, the faculty would, if anything, they were biased in favor of discussing it more than necessary and not letting anything pass, because basically it was labor versus management and everybody's mind. The job this president, who was clearly out to do something, had in front of him was, how am I going to convince this very left-leaning faculty to not only look the other way while I make radical changes to the college, but actually embrace my bloat of administration and my tearing down of the Evergreen model. How can I do that? I can do it by embracing equity. We have three major goals for today's forum. The first is to continue to learn about the perceptions and experiences of our students, faculty, and staff of color. The second is to create and establish a series of action items. And the third is to inspire every member of the Evergreen community as we move ahead to advance diversity here on our campus. I'd like to read a list of core tenants developed by a group of anti-racist educators who were on a panel at the Race and Pedagogy Conference in Tacoma last year. Here are the tenants. Racism exists today in both traditional and modern forms. Racism is an institutionalized, multi-layered, multi-level system that distributes unequal power and resources between white people and people of color as socially identified and disproportionately benefits whites. All members of society are socialized to participate in the system of racism, albeit within varied social locations. All white people benefit from racism, regardless of intentions. No one chose to be socialized into racism, so no one is quote-unquote bad, but no one is neutral to not act against racism is to support racism. Racism must be continually identified, analyzed, and challenged. No one is ever done. The question is not, did racism take place, but rather, how did racism manifest in that situation? The racial status quo is comfortable for most whites. Therefore, anything that maintains white comfort is suspect. The racially oppressed have a more intimate insight via experiential knowledge of the system of race than their racial impressors. However, white professors will be seen as having more legitimacy. Thus, positionality must be intentionally engaged. Resistance is a predictable reaction to anti-racist education and must be explicitly and strategically addressed. I believe these core tenets can be a guide for our work moving forward with actions to educate ourselves and our students. We galvanize white privilege in the form of curriculum, exalting white cannons of fine art, literature, theory, and scientific thinking. More so, we don't examine how those cannons are made. I believe we are capable of unlearning the habits of mind that perpetuate white privilege. What I am uncertain of is our collective will to examine those habits. This I believe. I believe evergreen can create a more vibrant community of anti-racist activists on our staff and faculty and among our students. If we break our 45-year pattern of occasionally turning toward these issues briefly with deep but short-run commitment that fades, fades, and fades. Our words of action disappearing into the background as we return to business as usual. Breaking this cycle will take sustained and stubborn leadership from our administration and at least a doubling of our staff and faculty of color. This I do believe. I believe deeply in the critical and audacious goal of eliminating racism and violence in our world. I believe we're all privileged to engage in that work in a learning community that wants to be better. And I believe we have the will to do so. Thank you for coming today. There was a faculty meeting with an unusual agenda. The agenda involved the faculty voting to require our union to ensure our union to insert into our contract a provision in which every faculty member would reflect on their own growth relative to their personal racism each and every year in their self-evaluation. There is something preposterous about the idea that we all have this internal racism. And if we had been asked to personally reflect on our own internal racism every year, I still would have been troubled by the fact of the assumption that it was present. But nonetheless, it would not have posed the danger in the institutional context of here. Could you write to us about your own racism every year in your self-evaluation, which then becomes fodder for promotion, for firing, for all sorts of proceedings. And so at the point that this faculty meeting occurred, I went to it. And I stood up and I said, I've never been afraid to stand before this faculty before, but I have real trepidations about what I'm about to say. I then said, look, I believe my record is strong enough that I can afford the accusation that I expect to come back. But this is a terrible idea for us. We must not vote for this proposal. And then we held the vote. I think it was 70 to 2. Anonymous vote. No, not anonymous. I think it would have been very different if it had been anonymous. As I was leaving the room, within 15 minutes, I had three conversations where other faculty members told me, these are tenured faculty members, only one of whom was a straight white guy, told me they agreed with me but could not vote their conscience in that room. And I thought, this is insane. These are tenured faculty members. There's actually nothing that can happen to them here. They're safe. Why can't they vote their conscience? My goal, one of my goals is to have diversity, equity, race be a part of everything. It's not what you do at 10 o'clock on the agenda and then you move on to something else. So my question, we started talking about attention that I feel a lot as someone who's trying to work on these issues. There is white fragility. People do, and I'm thinking of faculty, choose not to or choose to engage in this. They make that choice. How do I acknowledge the horror of racism and know that if I speak at that level, people will leave or not engage? The way that you keep them in is the, oh, I'm so glad you brought that up. I've heard that before. Can you tell me more? Here's how, so that kind of welcoming them to bring it to you so that you can kind of look at it. Sometimes just a question can be really powerful or, yeah, I used to see that that way too. And then somebody shared this and I, so you're just kind of diplomatically. But the non-coddling is that you're not letting it stop you, right? And that's the call. You're not giving up or going away. You're just trying to figure out how to diplomatically keep them in. And keeping them in is an interruption to what they really want to have happen. The line about not being able to fire somebody over what they believe struck me as really poignant. And for this institution relevant in so far as we have this libertarian ethos where faculty autonomy is really privileged. I can't make you agree or disagree. I hate to even use that language of agree or disagree, but nonetheless. But when you're here, you are required by your job to create an atmosphere in which all children can learn. That idea that this is trying to control people's thinking, no. But not addressing these kinds of attitudes does affect people's abilities to learn. And that is part of your job. It's a theoretical framework, just like any other theoretical framework. But that's the one that where this institution stands behind and that you're going to have to grapple with, right? So that might be a great note to end on, right? So thank you so much. At some point I confronted the president and I've said, you're remaking the college, you haven't left enough time in faculty meetings, you're burning up all the time in faculty meetings on these announcements, you have to let us discuss these things. And so he arranged something like six meetings that were supposed to solve this problem where 20 people at a time could sign up to have a discussion with the president. So the email list was the only place left at which we could access every other member of the faculty and have a discussion, which is why I repeatedly went to the email list and said, look, we've got a problem, we've got authoritarianism taking over the college, this intersectional stuff is dangerous and being deployed in a way that's a hazard to the core values of the institution. And one of the other things that you said, I believe, was we keep on hearing that we are at an incredibly racist institution and we have yet to hear any credible evidence for racism here on campus. We have a problem with racism here on campus and we have a problem with other folks not being treated the way that they should be treated and this is going to continue on my watch. But Phyllis is saying we're asking for a paradigm shift. We're at the Evergreen State College. We do diversity well. We're leading the nation in diversity, but one thing we're not leading the nation in is equity. And what that means is that some of y'all sitting in these seats and some of y'all sitting in these seats have had experiences but they ain't been right. The cost is too high and the implications are too much. And at some point in time, if this campus is going to stand up for what it exposes to be, needs to say enough is enough. I established and charged this equity council, this incredible equity council with developing a plan for institutional change, systemic change that would enable Evergreen to acknowledge and address the equity gaps that are pervasive on our campus. And I want to thank with immense gratitude the council for the work you've invested, the heartbreaking effort you have gone through and for the incredible plan you have put together. Please let's all give them a round of applause. The canoe meeting was not called the canoe meeting. We were asked to go to it. It was called the forum. It was not a forum. It was a celebration of the equity plan, which had supposedly been distributed to the faculty, but was actually not available to them until I emailed the faculty with this document, you know, irony of ironies. I'm the one sending out this plan and saying, actually, yeah, y'all should read this. So the meeting occurs. It is a celebration at the celebration. Architects of the plan essentially say this plan is going to happen because it is no longer acceptable that our mission and vision only applies to a few. So as we think about this plan, we should be thinking about how are we unscrewing the screws, and it will take many hands to do this to unscrew the structure of institutional racism. We have a beginning to do this, and our hope is that we're inviting you to come along. We're going to do it. Don't get it twisted, but we would like for you to join us on this road, on this journey. So we invite you. We want more conversation, and we know there's much more work to be done. We invite that conversation. But if you want to be an obstructionist, work on your own. So the charge for them was to do something relatively small from the president, and they go into how we're going to start hiring in the future, and how, you know, just they go way beyond what it is. And just mission leap. And some of the things that they argue, some of the things that this plan, which we know that no one has seen because it literally has not been made available, even though the claim was that it was available, are things like from now on, not just individuals hired to positions need to have an equity justification, but every single position itself needs to have an equity justification. Which means, how do you hire a chemist? Does chemistry have an equity justification? How do you hire an artist who doesn't happen to be engaged in social justice issues? That is the end of the liberal arts college. That is the end of the liberal arts college right there. So that is one of many things in this document. I have my, we printed it out and I have my hand scrawled like every single page. What are they doing? Oh my god. So we're going to do something for you today that we did as a group in August. And we're going to ask for key stakeholders that are on this campus to get on board our journey to equity. So what I'm going to do first is ask, this is the council. Our council is large, expansive, and we're going to, and we're going to get on a canoe. Okay. And we're going to get on a canoe that's going to sometimes have fierce waves, unbearable headwinds, and sometimes intentional or unintentional extra rocking of the boat because we're not on the same page or on the same heartbeat. The canoe was a metaphor for the journey to this magical land of what they were calling equity. And so the idea, I mean the whole thing is almost too preposterous to believe, but with distinctly non-hospitable to canoe shots of a rocky coastline on which waves are breaking heavily and the sound of those waves breaking. So if we can bring this canoe forward so we can make sure it's a straight canoe, if we need to have our canoe and John let me know if this is not okay, can it be three wide? Two wide, okay? So we got to make this happen. I mean the whole thing didn't hang together visually, auditorily, conceptually, mathematically. Really the canoe was not well thought out. Conceptually it seems good. We're sending the college down the river. Well, I mean, you know, I did, and I must say this is very uncomfortable for me because I think if there are two populations that really have an extremely strong claim in the U.S. to consistent structural oppression, it's Indians and Africans, people of African origin. You know, emotionally I'm on board with the idea of, you know, a canoe journey to somewhere, but this looked like they had cloaked a freight train in the imagery of a canoe. Oh, hold on one second. Hold on. The senior administrators, you have to ask for permission and commit some things before boarding the canoe. So can we step back out? So I would like to board because I'm committed to enhancing and furthering inclusion and equity in our campus community among both students and staff, faculty, and to do that with compassion and kindness. Personally, I am committed to making Evergreen a more student-ready campus. And as a provost, I am committing resources to help train our faculty to be able to promote equity and inclusion in the classroom and outside the classroom. I carry with me the legacy of boarding schools and I carry with me the legacy of adoption, forced adoption. And I'm here because I refuse to continue to be assimilated. I refuse and I refuse to let whiteness consume me. And I'm going to say that word explicitly whiteness. I refuse. I refuse for my mother. I refuse for her mother, for my grandfather, for my ancestors, for my brothers and sisters, my relatives today. I refuse. I'm here and I commit the position of privilege and power I occupy as the president of this college to invest in this council, its initiatives, and its cause. I'm sitting there in this room with several hundred other people and I can, in my mind, almost count the people in the room who understand that something terrible is afoot, who understand that, A, this is a bizarre way to do this, B, it's duplicitous. They've told us that they're sharing this document. They've told us that we're going to be able to discuss it and then they've threatened us for daring to think about questioning it. And so there's a way in which sitting in that room, you know, I knew that Heather was a couple blocks away and that she would understand this exactly as I did. I knew that there was, I hesitate to say it, but there was a dean in the room who I knew wasn't going to say anything, but he knew how wrong this was. And so there's a way in which you just, there's a sea of people engaged in a shared delusion. And then there's a few people witnessing the delusion and isolated, unable to exchange words or anything, that sense of being alone in a crowd is profound. And that really was how that meeting felt. And in a crowd of people who are supposed to be your colleagues. Yeah. Who are sleepwalking. Structural institutionalized inequality or racism, right? So an anti-racist frame understands racism as a system. While individual players partake in it, it's not dependent on individual players, right? It's embedded in the fabric of the society in all the institutions, the norms, the practices, the policies, the way that history is told, and it functions to ensure an unequal distribution of basically everything between people of color as a whole and white people as a whole. I had started attending every faculty meeting and going to every presentation because there were bomb shells dropped every time and nobody appeared to be tracking all of it. If you can just take a moment to look at this image and look at the two different realities that these students face at the same place. So for folks that are younger, don't think this is some distance in memory of far, far long ago, okay? It's about us as faculty and staff, but you know what? It's also not about you. Most of the people who had their mental faculties about them were learning to avoid these things because every single one of them put you in a bind. I can't emphasize this enough. This is not useful. Just get rid of it. It is not possible to avoid being socialized into a racist worldview if you're white. It's not possible. It's coming out as 24-7. The only way to resist it is to be able to see it and think it through so to deny it is not going to help you. I encourage you to look them up as well. Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, their actions were initially to throw a heavy weight in a bottle at cops. So I offer three very different strategies, right? One is political organizing. Another one is non-traditional, maybe, you know, more resistance, more violent kind of action, and also prayer. Three different political strategies. Through education, and tired of waiting for change to happen, they forcefully took the island back. And I tell this story because of first-generation students, first-generation students of color, we all share similar struggles. The students are taken to stand. They're not powerless. They're not objects in this sense. They're subjects in this sense. They're powerful. They said, we're going to have these conversations one way or another. And the administration still said no. And then now that administration ain't there anymore.