We have followed as the administration and faculty at The Evergreen State College have undermined their institution through national controversies and a failure to defend academic values. This would lead to a sharp drop in applications. Under deterred by the costs to their institution, the faculty seems intent on confirming the worst stereotypes of their school. The latest is a resolution that the faculty has proposed to ban the word “covenant” from official documents. The faculty drafters insist that the term reflects “cultural genocide” and will ban its use despite most people who fail to see the common term in the same way.
The motion below states “[T]the word ‘covenant’ represents for many members of the Evergreen community the efforts at cultural genocide of Native Nations through the federal Indian boarding school system” and “needlessly using a word that institutionalizes the devastating colonization of Native Peoples.” Instead the faculty wants to require the use of the term “community agreement.”
Putting aside the continuing harm done by the Evergreen faculty to their own school which has seen huge drops in admission and layoffs, the basis for the resolution works too hard to find a reason for outrage against this noun. Covenant has conventional, religious, and legal uses as an agreement or contract based on an exchange of promises. It can be used to signify a moral covenant with God or a covenant tied to property. The word has been used at the college to reflect an agreement among students and the college for example. The school defines the term on its website:
“‘COVENANT’ (an agreement, a coming-together) Covenants at Evergreen serve as learning agreements between faculty and students in lieu of conventional grading arrangements. Covenants spell out program policies and expectations for earning credit. Good faith compliance with this covenant is an academic requirement.”
The effort to assign this one meaning is contrived and artificial. The effort to ban the use of a noun like covenant reflects an increasingly common desire by some to control the speech and even words of others.
benjaminǝɔʎoq@BenjaminABoyce
The @EvergreenStCol faculty, faced with plummeting enrollment and successive layoffs, have rallied their collective energies to… banish a word because it reminds someone, somewhere, of cultural genocide.
And on his YouTube page Monday, Boyce dissected the resolution phrase by phrase, calling the proposed motion “virtue signaling” and pointing out the term that faculty should be referencing regarding historic Native American alliances is actually “Covenant Chain.”
Here is a video essay of one man’s change of heart. It is very demonstrative of many who are interested in Professor Jordan Peterson’s teachings.
Thank you for posting the video, Darren!
the radical university left IS today’s Red Guard. Given enough rope they will hang YOU with it not themselves.
what was the Red Guard?
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Red-Guards
An aging Mao green lighted this phenomenon to try and regain control from the more bureacratically and saner minded communists. Eventually the phenom sputtered out and authorities put an end to the chaotic insane phenomenon of the Red Guard. Today in the USA the police need to reign in the Red Guard Antifa and the Lefist NGO hired lumpenprole footsoldiers and bring them to heel.
from Britannica:
Red Guards, …. in Chinese history, groups of militant university and high school students formed into paramilitary units as part of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). These young people often wore green jackets similar to the uniforms of the Chinese army at the time, with red armbands attached to one of the sleeves. They were formed under the auspices of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1966 in order to help party chairman Mao Zedong combat “revisionist” authorities—i.e., those party leaders Mao considered as being insufficiently revolutionary. Mao was thus making a bid to regain control of the CCP from his colleagues, but the Red Guards who responded in August 1966 to his summons fancied themselves as new revolutionary rebels pledged to eliminating all remnants of the old culture in China, as well as purging all supposedly bourgeois elements within the government. Several million Red Guards journeyed to Beijing to meet with Mao in eight massive demonstrations late in 1966, and the total number of Red Guards throughout the country may have reached 11 million at some point.
While engaging in marches, meetings, and frenzied propagandizing, Red Guard units attacked and persecuted local party leaders as well as schoolteachers and school officials, other intellectuals, and persons of traditional views. Several hundred thousand people died in the course of these persecutions. By early 1967 Red Guard units were overthrowing existing party authorities in towns, cities, and entire provinces. These units soon began fighting among themselves, however, as various factions vied for power amidst each one’s claims that it was the true representative of Maoist thought. The Red Guards’ increasing factionalism and their total disruption of industrial production and of Chinese urban life caused the government in 1967–68 to urge the Red Guards to retire into the countryside. The Chinese military was called in to restore order throughout the country, and from this point the Red Guard movement gradually subsided.
An interesting read, I thank you for sharing.
How often is it the case it seems when political types foster proxies to fight their battles and eventually the proxy becomes a problem. Intellect and reason do not often drive these proxies but emotion works well. The drawback to this is that reason can be used to renegotiate a change in direction but causes based upon emotion tend to fight on until the anger/fear subsides.
In a lesser manner ANTIFA is similar to this except in the sense that they are not officially controlled as directly and quite honestly they are more like grabasstic idiots who couldn’t fight their way out of a paper bag if confronted with actual force. Revolutionaries do not usually live in their parent’s basement or hide behind their mother’s apron.
University students of the type you describe only have the audience they do because the faculty and others allow them to act out. We have to remember these are the crybaby snowflakes of today’s America–Baby adults who whine when their toy is taken from them and grew up wanting everything “safe” and as smooth and silky as possible. Let them scream and shut the door behind them. Do the opposite of what they demand and give them no opportunities or handouts until they get their act together. They will either learn a hard lesson when they graduate and arrive in the real world or they won’t and will continue to be angry at the world and unemployable. If many go with the latter choice it’s no skin off my nose. I don’t care either way.
that’s a nice story from the young lad who is learning to think independently.
however, globalist socialism and its human rights radicals and just one horn of the global minotaur. the other is a global capitalism that is equally unkind to social differences including nation states and sovereignty and expressions of those which hinder business, namely, border restricting free movement of labor and borders which manifest in trade restrictions and wars.
the globalist left comes at it from human rights, that is to say, anti-white, anti-west, anti-christian, anti-heterosexual, anti-male propaganda; and the global right comes at it from the investment banker’s bureaucratic and academic cadres which tell us that unilateral free trade is always good (not a joke this was a U of Chicago pretense of the Friedman variety going back at least 30 years or so) and similar “policy initiatives.”
Trump represents anti-globalism in many ways, and that is what has earned him hate from both horns of the globalist minotaur. pardon the mixed metaphor but he gored the leftist ox by going after migrants and he gored the rightist ox by starting the “trade war” in these things he earned few friends among the truly powerful.
Jordan Peterson is good and he talks good sense about some of the initiative-killing aspects of communism and socialism, but much of what passed for socialism and communism 150 years ago is already fait accompli in the west so the diametric in favor of some kind of virtuous capitalism, well, I don’t see it.
basically i see a 4th political theory as arising now as synthesis, where fascism was defeated; communism was defeated; and yet victorious individualistic liberal capitalism has synthetically adopted negative soul killing aspects of both; that is what i call globalism.
is it the end of history as Fukuyama said? oh i think not. A fourth theory arises to suggest alternatives. Call it what you will. Maybe it as yet has not name. But Trump is a manifestation of that emerging from the very belly of victorious liberal capitalist crade of individualism, America, which yet speaks to the interests of the community, that is to say, the people, by its “populism.” Some call it “Resurgent nationalism” and some will just call it “fascism” etc. I have heard a lot of Republican-liberterian types use this “fascist” misnomer and they should be careful about that. An interest in the well being of the nation as a political norm does not per se equal “Fascism” even if the university cadres like to pretend so.
I’m as left as one can be and I find this absurd, perhaps even crazy. WTF is wrong with people who think like this? Their logic seems to be that because word A was at one time used in documents to implement policies and other actions I revile then the usage of the word in any official document ought to be banned because it reminds me that the word was used in the documents and policies I recall were used in the past. Now that’s just stupid. How can an intelligent person support anything of this kind? What the hell are these people doing with their time? Surely there are far more significant and consequential things for them to do rather than to spend their time looking for reasons to demonstrate their own self assessed righteousness. I would suggest that anyone that would take such a resolution seriously needs therapeutic help.
Evergreen doesn’t even qualify as a bad joke.
Acromion – I think Evergreen is an adjunct campus to Benson’s WSU.
No. WSU has subsidiary campuses, but Evergreen is not one. IIRC, there’s one in Richland and one in Vancouver.
Also now in Everett.
But please do not forget the burgeoning Spokane campus which now includes the new WSU medical school.
Why are academic politics so nasty? Because the stakes are so low.
My friends and I have a scholarship foundation. We have a n itShay List. Any college or university on that list cannot be considered for any of our students who receive our money. If they want to go to one of those places then they won’t get any funding from us.
Many employers have the same type list. Evergreen grads are near or at the top of most of these lists.
This is the same mentality exhibited by the people in the bunker with Hitler who discussed the glories their victory would bring just as soon as the miracle Hitler promised he would perform took place.
Yep, people like this still exist and still need to be prevented from holding any form of real power over Citizens lives by any means possible.