A former biology professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, whose challenge of a day of reverse racial segregation drew a firestorm of protests that forced his classes off campus and closed the school for three days, will speak Monday (Oct. 15) during University of Wisconsin-Stout’s Free Speech Week.
Bret Weinstein, now an independent scholar, will headline the week’s opening panel discussion from 4 to 5:30 p.m. in Ballroom C of the university’s Memorial Student Center. Chancellor Bob Meyer will moderate the “Free Speech and Anti-Orthodoxy” discussion.
Two UW-Madison faculty members will respond to Weinstein’s talk. They are Damon Sajnani, African Cultural Studies, and John Sharpless, co-director of the Center for the Study of Liberal Democracy.
Free Speech Week will continue through Thursday, Oct. 18. There will be a total of six panel discussions, all of them free and open to the public. The full schedule is available here.
Among the other topics to be covered are student free speech in the UW-System, important First Amendment cases and hate speech and the First Amendment.
Weinstein questioned ‘Day of Absence’ reversal
Weinstein provoked strong backlash after questioning Evergreen’s annual “Day of Absence” in 2017. In prior years, students and faculty of color had organized a day when they met off of the campus, a symbolic act based on Douglas Turner Ward’s play in which all black residents of a southern town failed to show up one morning.
In 2017, the approach was flipped and white students, faculty and staff who were participating were invited to leave the campus for the day. Weinstein challenged that approach in a letter to the school’s Director of First Peoples Multicultural Advising Services.
“There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and underappreciated roles,” he wrote, “and a group or coalition encouraging another group to go away.”
The first instance, he argued, “is a forceful call to consciousness.” The second “is a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself,” he added.
What purported to be a request for white students and professors to leave campus was, rather, an act of moral bullying — to stay on campus as a white person would mean to be tarred as a racist, according to a report in The New York Times.
Protests led to three-day campus closing
One result of Weinstein’s letter was that his classes were moved off campus, because university police were unable to guarantee his safety. The incident escalated into allegations of racism and intolerance, and protests and threats led to the campus being closed for three days, according to an article in The News Tribune in Tacoma, WA.
Weinstein and his wife, who taught anthropology at Evergreen, sued the college for $3.85 million, alleging that it failed to protect its employees from repeated “verbal and written hostility based on race, as well as threats of physical violence,” the paper reported.
Weinstein and his wife resigned their positions on the same day it was announced that their suit had been settled for $500,000.
Tim Shiell, director of UW-Stout’s Center for the Study of Institutions and Innovation, said he believes some aspects of the story that will come up in the session have not been aired in the mainstream media and will provide a greater perspective about what happened at Evergreen.
The center, which is hosting the week, is nonpartisan and organizes events that offer differing points of view.
Other panels scheduled
A panel discussion of student free speech is scheduled from 4 to 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday (Oct. 16), also in Ballroom C of the Student Center. The UW-System Board of Regents last fall adopted a policy that created penalties for students who repeatedly disrupt campus speakers whose views they oppose.
Panelists will include Jim Manley, senior fellow at the Goldwater Institute and co-author of a model policy used by the Regents; Coltan Schoenike, a UW-Stout master’s degree student in marriage and family therapy who opposed the policy’s adoption; and Casey Mattox, senior fellow at the Charles Koch Institute, who influences free speech policy and practice at the think tank. Doug Mell, UW-Stout executive director of University Communications and External Relations, will moderate the session.
Also on Tuesday, Shiell will moderate a discussion of landmark cases that contributed to the development of rights protected by the First Amendment. It is scheduled from 2:30 to 3:30 p.m., also in Ballroom C.
Part of a ‘national effort’
“This is part of a national effort to educate people about free speech,” Shiell said. “It’s our goal to bring speakers and panels together to educate about the issues and the Constitution so people understand what’s important and to keep an open mind and understand their neighbor better.
“We are fortunate we live in a society (where) we can have these debates in a civil, rational way. I think we take that for granted,” he added.
The idea for a Free Speech Week came from a survey that found limited knowledge about the First Amendment’s meaning along with a desire to know more about it.
“I don’t think people realize how many of our freedoms are impacted by free speech,” Shiell said. “It is integral to every other right we have. It is the core of a free democracy.”
Note: Norman Rockwell’s iconic 1943 oil painting, “Freedom of Speech,” is shown on the home page.
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