> "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.
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.