A Radical College’s Public Meltdown

On a Sunday afternoon in June, George S. Bridges, president of Evergreen State College, received an email from his police chief informing him that the campus was no longer safe, and should shut down for the rest of the year.

“I know this would be an unprecedented move,” wrote Stacy Brown, the police chief. “These are unprecedented times.”

Unprecedented is a high bar at Evergreen State. The college was conceived, in the 1960s, as a place that would exist in a constant state of tension. People living and working there “must be willing sometimes to forgo, if necessary, the security and comfort of familiar structures,” wrote Evergreen State’s first president. The same goes for the public servants who oversee the college. The college was an experiment that would require constant trust.

By the end of this spring, that trust had evaporated. Students were hounding the president, mocking him, taping messages on the windows of his office: “Fuck you.” “Fix this now.” During an occupation of his office, they told him he could not go to the bathroom without an escort.

Mr. Bridges had tried not to take it personally. A sociologist, he had studied structural racism. He knew that most of the students at Evergreen State overcame poverty, neglect, and cultural biases in order to get here. The students wanted to make the president feel alienated, uncomfortable, powerless, he figured, because that’s exactly how people like him had made them feel.

He was a protester himself, once upon a revolution. In 1970, angry about the Vietnam War, he and a few thousand other University of Washington students had run out on Interstate 5 and shut it down. Seattle-area commuters weren’t the enemy, of course, but Richard Nixon was on the other side of the country, and the highway was within marching distance.

“It’s a performance,” says Mr. Bridges. “A way of demonstrating your frustration, your anger.”

So when students took over his office, he declined to involve the police. When a student yelled at him to “shut the fuck up,” he responded by calmly asking, “So you want me to leave?” When a student clowned him for talking with his hands, he offered to hold them behind his back when speaking.

His performance of patience failed to win people over. A member of his faculty trashed his weak leadership on national television. State legislators were talking about defunding the college. Scholars thousands of miles away had written to tell Mr. Bridges that he was a disgrace and that the whole world was laughing at him. Strangers had sent threatening letters to his home.

Colleges are relatively safe places, yet on many campuses in 2017 there’s a feeling of danger. The problem is that no one can agree on which threat is the most urgent: Political correctness? White fragility? Poorly mannered activists? Poorly disciplined police officers? Feeble minds? Frail egos?

All of these converged last spring on Evergreen State, a college of 4,000 students near the southern tip of Puget Sound. The onslaught left the president hemmed in on all sides by scared, angry people who wanted him to keep them safe — from discrimination, from bullying, from students and professors and cops and the media and the public. The protester had become the protested, and this time Mr. Bridges was alone on the highway. Everybody wanted him to shut it down on their behalf.

The president had been trying to listen, but what he heard now was the crescendo of oncoming traffic.

“This,” Mr. Bridges wrote to his cabinet, forwarding the note from the police chief, “does not bode well.”

Families dropping students off at Evergreen State will first pass through Olympia, the state capital, where it rains one minute, shines the next, and sometimes does both at the same time. The city’s export is weirdo geniuses, some of whom — the Simpsons creator Matt Groening, the medicinal-mushrooms pioneer Paul Stamets, the actor Michael Richards (aka Kramer on Seinfeld) — are grown at the experimental college in the woods up the road, where a narrow highway winds through a tunnel of trees. The campus appears like a Soviet treehouse: boxy and concrete with wood accents and tiered outdoor walkways.

Evergreen State was designed as a new order of college, unshackled from the history that had shaped older state institutions like Washington State University. The college embraces social activism. “Protests are to Evergreen,” Elissa Goss, a graduate, told trustees last summer, “what football is to WSU.”

The college also eschews hierarchies and traditional academic structures. There are no grades, majors, or academic departments. Students devise their own courses of study and then cut their own paths through the curriculum. “Students at Evergreen have an opportunity to get a much-better-than-average education,” says Glenn Landram, who teaches management science and statistics, “or a much-worse one.”

By the time Mr. Bridges became president, in 2015, the college was paying closer attention to the paths its students cut to get to Evergreen State. Over the last decade, the percentage of first-generation students has risen to 30 percent. This year, 49 percent of students come from families whose income put them below the federal poverty level. Thirty percent are nonwhite, up from 18 percent a decade ago. More than forty percent of last year’s freshmen identified as LGBTQ or “questioning.”

Mr. Bridges worried that the college’s choose-your-own-adventure curriculum was making too many students feel lost. Evergreen State was having trouble getting students to stay enrolled. Faculty members were there to guide them, of course, but it would take work to bridge the gaps in race, culture, and experience separating them from their students.

“We expect students to be college ready,” says the president. “But we have to ask ourselves: Are we really ready?”

He appointed an equity council to study how Evergreen State could better serve students who were liable to become alienated and drop out. Last November, the council issued a report, which included this recommendation: The college should be able to justify every new faculty hire in terms of how it would help bridge the “equity gap” — the difference in experiences and opportunities that made life at Evergreen State harder for students of color and their marginalized classmates than it was for white students.

For underrepresented students to thrive, the council said, they need to “see themselves reflected in the academic roles and interests of faculty.”

Bret Weinstein, a biology professor, found the report ominous. He considered himself politically progressive, but reordering the faculty hiring process around “equity” seemed like a bridge too far. Mr. Weinstein and his wife, Heather Heying, who taught anthropology at the college, worried that the preoccupation with social justice would come at the expense of key disciplines.

“How possibly could you hire an artist or chemist or writing faculty if the work didn’t engage ‘equity’?” Ms. Heying later asked The Chronicle. “It will be the end of the liberal-arts college.”

Over the next few months, the debate over race and equity led Evergreen State into civil war. Online skirmishes among faculty members and students would spill into its halls and public spaces. Outsiders would see the havoc on campus as an opportunity to attack when Evergreen State was vulnerable.

The quirky college in the woods outside Olympia would become famous for insecurity and chaos, leaving observers to wonder whether the Evergreen State experiment had failed, or succeeded too well for its own good.

It started with a canoe.

Last November, Evergreen State’s equity council introduced its plan with a somber ceremony in which faculty and staff members were asked to climb aboard an invisible “canoe.” Ocean sounds played through speakers as participants lined up at the front of the room to pledge their commitment to the plan and its goals. It was a week after the U.S. presidential election, and the work felt more important than ever. There were tears. Even Mr. Bridges got choked up. “This matters to me personally,” said the president.

Mr. Weinstein watched as his colleagues marched out of the meeting to a Native American drumbeat. He glanced around the room skeptically.

There was no chance he was climbing into that canoe.

Where the president and others saw balance and redemption, Mr. Weinstein saw pressure and locomotion. “This canoe metaphor felt like it was appropriated for the ironic purpose of cloaking an unstoppable train,” he warned in an email to colleagues. “You are either onboard, or you are not.”

He pressed the point in a series of email messages to the college’s faculty and staff Listserv, which went out to 1,600 people, including hundreds of student workers. In January, Mr. Weinstein wrote to the forum that he had been “baselessly targeted” by another faculty member who suggested at a faculty meeting that his broadsides against the equity plan were racist. Mr. Weinstein slammed Mr. Bridges for not publicly riding to his defense, saying that the president was sending a dangerous message by appearing indifferent to bullying in the name of racial justice.

The professor’s public airings seemed to annoy many of his colleagues. It was “unintentionally racist, but racist nonetheless” for a white person to question the wisdom of council members who “know the experiences of exclusion and oppression,” wrote a white member of the faculty. Another colleague suggested that Mr. Weinstein, rather than spamming the Listserv, should speak privately with whoever had called him out.

A student intern with the federal TRIO program for underserved students put it more bluntly: “You and your racist colleagues,” he wrote, “are the reason I won’t recruit future students.”

Racist? For raising doubts about whether an administrative strategy to combat racism would be effective? That didn’t seem right to Mr. Weinstein. He understood racism in biological terms: Evolution made people predisposed to prefer those who were related to them. When it came to talking to students about the perils of racism, he later said, the professor’s lesson was always the same, no matter what their race: “What your genes want cannot be defended. It is indefensible. Therefore it must be confronted.”

He was not a person who shrank from confrontation. In 1987 Mr. Weinstein, then a student at the University of Pennsylvania, publicly challenged the fraternity culture on campus after learning that a group of partygoers had “symbolically raped” a pair of black prostitutes in a display that involved cucumbers and ketchup. He came to see the university as abetting such behavior by failing to call it out. Frat guys called him constantly that year to tell him he was a “faggot” and an “asshole.” There were threats of violence, too. (Mr. Weinstein was vindicated when Penn, after initially brushing off his complaint, investigated and suspended the fraternity responsible for the party.)

Now the professor thought he saw something similar happening at Evergreen State: toxic groupthink enabled by feckless administrators. This time, it was the social-justice crusaders, not frat boys, who were the privileged group.

His warnings became more dire as the year went on. Mr. Weinstein became convinced that there was a silent majority that agreed with him but dared not speak up. Dissent was being rubbed out, he wrote, and free inquiry would be next. Evergreen State was at risk of changing from “an inclusive, diverse and horizontal college, to a lopsided, hierarchical, authoritarian one,” and reasonable faculty needed to do something to stop it.

“Please stop sending these emails to everyone,” replied Gloria Gaetz, a staffer in Student Wellness Services. “It creates a contentious and stressful environment.”

Mr. Weinstein refused to back down. “I wish there was a better way,” he wrote. “Please know that I have tried every other mechanism I can think of.”

In March, he zeroed in on a new target: The Day of Absence, an annual event that Evergreen State had held in some form since the 1970s.

Every year, students and faculty members were offered the chance to discuss race in parallel workshops. White participants stayed on campus to talk among themselves about how to be allies, while people of color met off campus. In the demolition derby that is American racial politics, the Day of Absence was an experiment with guardrails. Since white people and people of color experience race differently, the thinking went, separate workshops might lead to better conversations.

This year, the organizers added a wrinkle: The workshop for people of color would be held on campus, and the programming for white people would be held off it, at a nearby Unitarian church.

Why? Well, it had been an especially demoralizing year for people of color. Police officers who were caught on camera shooting unarmed black men were acquitted. White supremacists traded dog whistles for megaphones. President Trump appointed Jeff Sessions, a longtime enemy of black leaders and civil-rights advocates, as the country’s top law-enforcement official.

The people planning the Day of Absence wanted to make it clear that the campus, if not the country, belonged to people of color, too. “In reversing the programming schedule,” wrote Rashida Love, a student-services staffer, “we are re-affirming the value of having POC in higher education and specifically at Evergreen.”

Mr. Weinstein wasn’t having it. Ms. Love had been asking faculty members to require that their students sign up for the program. It felt to him like white people who weren’t going to the off-campus workshop were being pressured to make themselves scarce anyway. He called the newly formatted Day of Absence a “show of force, and an act of oppression.”

This wasn’t a forced march, Ms. Love replied. “Participation is, and has always been, a choice.”

The Day of Absence came and went, but Mr. Weinstein’s reputation stuck: He was the stubborn white man who tried to thwart an effort by the college to make people of color feel at home.

Students of color didn’t think the administration was doing enough to make them feel at home, either. Their frustration had been building all year. At the fall convocation, two trans, disabled students of color had interrupted Mr. Bridges’s speech by holding a sign that read, “Evergreen cashes diversity checks, but doesn’t care about blacks,” according to the student newspaper.

Later, the same students were disciplined by the college after a separate incident, angering many of their fellow activists. Some of the activists also said the college’s Title IX officer was not equipped to protect trans and nonwhite sex-assault victims. In May, after a war of words among students on Facebook turned into a real-life confrontation, the campus police brought two black students into the station for questioning late at night. Student activists called that decision “traumatic” and unnecessary, and slammed college officials for their subsequent explanations. The president, they said, was trying to “put a Band-Aid on a much larger wound.”

Later that month, the wound opened. Several dozen students marched to Mr. Weinstein’s building and loudly interrupted his class. They had come to talk about racism — whether the professor wanted to or not.

Two of Mr. Weinstein’s students fled to the library. Shaken, they told an Evergreen State official that five dozen people had the professor “cornered.” Back in the academic building, Mr. Weinstein, wearing red shorts and hiking sandals, stood outside his classroom, facing the crowd. There was crosstalk and shouting. The students seemed upset by the professor’s attempt to claim the high ground.

“I live this shit every day,” said a black woman from the back of the crowd. “I don’t need to read a book to understand racism and oppression. You do.”

Mr. Weinstein denied saying anything racist in his emails. He said he was interested in listening to the students only if they were willing to listen to him.

“We don’t care what terms you want to speak on,” said a white woman. “We are not speaking on terms of white privilege.”

“I am talking about terms that serve the truth,” replied Mr. Weinstein.

“We’re telling the truth,” someone said softly.

Students told the professor to apologize. One person said he should resign.

The professor raised his hand. “I thought we were listening to each other, now we’re not.”

“You’re not listening to us,” a student replied.

“I am listening to you.”

“No, you’re not.”

“How could I not be listening to you?”

“You do not control this conversation.”

“I’m not trying to control it!”

Mr. Weinstein had been patient; now frustration leaked into his voice. The students were done with him anyway. They spilled out of the building and marched along the elevated walkways, their chants echoing off the concrete: “Hey hey, ho ho, Bret Weinstein has got to go!”

Back inside, Mr. Weinstein spoke calmly with a smaller group of students who had stayed behind, all of whom appeared to be white.

“I am very much in favor of true, deep, permanent equity — that is what I want,” said Mr. Weinstein. “I do not believe that this movement, in its current configuration, is going to produce that. What it’s going to produce is a temporary reversal of fortune that is then going to come back to haunt them.”

Outside the building, the student protesters ran into Timothy O’Dell, a campus police officer who was responding to the tip that Mr. Weinstein had been trapped.

The white students stood at the front of the crowd, with nonwhite students some distance behind them on the walkway. Mr. O’Dell yelled at the students to move, and tried to push through the front line. The protesters later said that by doing so the officer was trying to “target” students of color. Mr. O’Dell said he was just trying to get past them to check on the professor. “Ascertaining Weinstein’s health and safety was my top concern,” Mr. O’Dell wrote in an incident report.

The students refused to make way. The officer unholstered his pepper spray.

Then Ms. Brown, the police chief, grabbed Mr. O’Dell’s arm. They would need to find another way in.

The bridge between students and the police was on fire long before Ms. Brown came to campus.

In 1999 the college picked Mumia Abu-Jamal, a convicted cop killer turned prison-reform advocate, to be its commencement speaker. But the college also attracts law-enforcement officers seeking degrees in criminal justice. When the college played a recorded talk that Mr. Abu-Jamal had sent from death row, at least one student who was a police officer turned his back to the stage in protest.

Policing the Evergreen State campus is an unusual job. Ms. Brown, a 2006 graduate of the college, knew it would require finesse. When she returned as police chief, in 2016, she painted a quote from Maya Angelou on the baby-blue wall behind her desk: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did,” it read, “but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

The new chief quickly learned that how she made students feel was not entirely within her control. At a ceremony welcoming her to the job, students took over the dais and blew air horns. According to a report in the student newspaper, they shouted “Death to pigs!” Ms. Brown’s children were in attendance. Mr. Bridges was there, too. He yielded the stage to the protesters.

The perception of safety depends on whom you’ve learned to feel safe around. “I am a woman of color; I’ve had experiences with police in the past, not just at Evergreen, that don’t necessarily make me feel safe around them,” says Jacqueline Littleton, a senior studying math and the Middle East. “And it prevents me from going to them when I need help, even if they might be helpful to me in that situation.”

Ms. Littleton is a petite 21-year-old with braids and a puffy pink coat with a patch that says “So Broke” inside of a heart. She grew up in a suburb of Philadelphia — “not the safest place for people of color” — and worked as a cocktail waitress at the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City. (She has stories, but says she signed a nondisclosure agreement.) Ms. Littleton says she spent enough time with a friend’s parents, fund raisers for the Tea Party, to bluff her way into getting scholarship money from a Republican organization.

During her first year at Evergreen State, a white Olympia city police officer shot two black men accused of trying to steal beer from a Safeway, paralyzing one of them. The officer justified the shooting by saying the young men were trying to attack him with a skateboard. A county prosecutor sided with the officer.

Evergreen State often calls in nearby police departments to help with campus law enforcement. As a result, the college has limited control over the officers who respond to calls here. “I have no way of knowing if the police officer I interact with is going to be the one that shot those two men,” says Ms. Littleton, “or one who’s going to be helpful and friendly.”

She wasn’t alone. “How are we supposed to be safe on campus when we can’t even get help from, like, people who are supposed to protect us?” another student asked Mr. Bridges. The student was among a group of protesters who buttonholed the president in a hallway near his office on the day of the confrontation with Mr. Weinstein and Mr. O’Dell. “They fear from us — trying to mace us in the eyes and shit. For what? For us saying, ‘Hey, Bret, you need to apologize’? For one fucking white guy?”

The activists made themselves unavoidable. After blocking Ms. Brown and Mr. O’Dell from checking on Mr. Weinstein — who later said he was fine and never felt physically threatened during the exchange in the hallway — protesters tried to block the officers from returning to the campus police station. A small group of students stood in front of their patrol car, moving like basketball defenders when the officers tried to steer around them.

Later, about 30 students gathered around the station, shouting and “acting in an aggressive manner,” according to Mr. O’Dell. Ms. Brown put the building on lockdown. Callers flooded the phone lines. Some made false reports, said Mr. O’Dell, trying to draw the officers out of the building. Chalked messages found on campus walkways that night called for Mr. O’Dell to be fired.

“I don’t want police on campus,” read one message scrawled on brick. “The police make me nervous and afraid.”

The protests continued over the next few days, by turns unruly and insightful. Student activists forced Mr. Bridges and the deans of the college into raw, sometimes bruising exchanges about how Evergreen State had failed them and what the college could do about it.

Video: Scenes From a Season of Protest at Evergreen State

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Evergreen State Spring 2017

They drew up demands: that the campus police sell their weapons; that Mr. Weinstein and Mr. O’Dell be fired; that Evergreen State professors undergo mandatory sensitivity and cultural-competency training.

Kenneth Tabbutt, the interim provost, tried to explain why it was important that the college not be able to dictate to the faculty. “The one thing that is most important for faculty and schools is that there’s academic freedom,” said Mr. Tabbutt. “And academic freedom isn’t something you can support when it suits you, it’s something that you have to support all the time.”

The students groaned. If academic freedom meant people like Mr. Weinstein got to keep their jobs, maybe it should not be so sacred.

“There’s no doubt that you make things accessible and good for white students,” a black student said. “But that’s the issue. You’re leaving out too many of us that deserve it, too.”

That comment drew applause. Mr. Tabbutt, who had symbolically boarded the “canoe” six months earlier, waited for the sound to die down. He clasped his hands.

“Institutional change,” he said, “is slow here.”

People booed and hissed. “That’s your excuse?” the student shot back.

Mr. Tabbutt went on to explain that the college’s contract with the faculty union limits how professors can be disciplined in response to students’ complaints. “How is that prioritizing my education,” a black student asked, “when I have literal panic attacks, sometimes, because of this institution?”

The provost tilted his head to the left. “Um,” he started. “I think that we’ve had a concerted effort this year to try and get …"

“No, no,” said another student. “This is not a PR conference.”

“If there was an effort we wouldn’t be here right now,” a third student cut in. “So let’s be real.”

The next day, at a faculty meeting, students stood shoulder to shoulder and made an emotional plea to the professors for support.

“You taught us to go change the world,” said one student. “Ain’t that what y’all sell on the Evergreen State College page?”

They also marched on the administrative offices. They barricaded some of the entrances to the building with furniture. They resolved to keep Mr. Bridges and other administrators in the room until they got the answers they wanted.

“Students of color have to work in threatening environments every day,” one student told the president. “Welcome. Get to work.”

If protesters are performing, so are the people who hear them out.

Mr. Bridges was a good fit for his role. The president is an aging white man out of central casting: bald, bespectacled, bow-tied. His voice is a shallower version of Garrison Keillor’s weary baritone, suitable for folk wisdom and bedtime stories. He makes eye contact. He compliments your question and thanks you for asking it. Sometimes he calls you “dude.”

Mr. Bridges pledged to respond to the students’ political demands, but he was sensitive to a subtler set of expectations, too. The president could not afford to lose his temper. He did not want to interrupt or talk too much. He needed to watch his body language.

Those rules are familiar to people of color, and Mr. Bridges knew it. As a sociologist, he had studied how ungenerous people could be when interpreting the behavior of young black people especially. Still, some students had accused him of striking a “Clintonesque” pose. Sure, he defended trigger warnings and safe spaces and talked about serving the underserved. But did he really feel their pain?

Students tried him. “If you’re the management of operations,” one of them asked, “why is it that you never know what the fuck is going on?”

Mr. Bridges threw his head back and laughed. Levity was good.

“It’s not funny,” said another student. “Be serious when you’re talking to us.”

The president quickly adjusted. “I’m being very serious.”

“Don’t laugh then. Don’t smirk. Because you’ve been doing that a lot.”

“I’ll try,” said Mr. Bridges.

“You just did it,” the student continued. “You just fucking did it!”

The canoe was ready to tip over. Even small missteps could upset the balance.

So when students took over the administrative offices, the president told the police to stay away. The students had taken an aggressive tone, and their tactics — blocking doorways and windows — were somewhat ominous, but Mr. Bridges still thought the situation was safe. Add police officers to the mix, and that might change.

“If law enforcement were to come in,” the president later told state lawmakers, “there would be perhaps violence, perhaps damage to property, damage to the students.”

The relationship between Ms. Brown and Mr. Bridges was becoming tense. The campus police officers were supposed to be a source of order and comfort, but the president seemed to see them as a liability.

Mr. Bridges did ask the police chief to come talk to the students shortly after Mr. O’Dell’s clash outside Mr. Weinstein’s building — unarmed and out of uniform. She tried to explain the response to reports that Mr. Weinstein had been cornered in his classroom. Students mocked her, interrupted her, and called her a liar.

A student took video of Ms. Brown standing behind a lectern, stone-faced, her blonde hair in a ponytail. The president stood next to her. He said nothing.

On May 24, the same day students tearfully asked faculty members to join their protest and Mr. Bridges told the police to keep their distance, a pair of white students accosted Nancy Koppelman, a history professor, and asked her why she didn’t care about black and brown people.

“The two students following me asserted that nothing I could possibly be doing was more important than following their orders,” Ms. Koppelman later wrote, “and that if I did have something important to do, I should tell them what it is so that they could decide whether my decision to leave was valid.” She was left shaking.

Evergreen State had slipped from an experiment in radical democracy to an exercise in mob rule. At least that’s how it felt to Mr. Weinstein. He heard that his students were getting harassed for being associated with him. Ms. Brown advised him to stay away from campus, so he arranged to teach his class at a park in downtown Olympia. Riding his bike near campus, he noticed a group of students who seemed to recognize him and then get on their phones. He wondered if he had imagined it. Ms. Brown told him he probably hadn’t. Mr. Weinstein says the police chief told him it was unsafe for him to travel by bike. “I can’t protect you,” he remembers her saying.

He felt hunted.

The next morning, an email arrived from a booker at Fox News.

Tucker Carlson, the conservative television host, wanted to hear his side of the story.

It was a moment of dissonance for Mr. Weinstein, who had mocked Mr. Carlson in his classes, according to his wife. “He was horrified,” said Ms. Heying. “I was horrified.”

But the couple’s hierarchy of horrors was being reordered. The attacks from fellow liberals at Evergreen State had become more personal than anything on Fox News. Ms. Heying, frustrated that her husband was being treated like a pariah, had written an open letter to college officials, comparing the “oppressive, rageful” tactics of the student protesters to those of right-wing trolls.

“A reversal of fortune,” she wrote, “in which those who were in power are powerless, and those who were powerless have all the power, ought not be the goal.”

Naima Lowe, a media and film professor, responded on Facebook by asking white women at the college to “come and collect Heather Heying’s racist ass.”

Ms. Lowe was a member of the council that had written the equity report. She was one of the few black faculty members at Evergreen State, and shared the protesters’ sense of alienation. She also understood their fear of the police. Her father, a newspaper reporter, had been beaten by officers while he was covering civil-rights protests in Trenton, N.J., in 1967. During the Evergreen State protests, Ms. Lowe scolded her colleagues for prizing their own sense of security over students’ pain.

She and others later explained to Mr. Weinstein that “collect” was a vernacular term meaning something like, Help her understand why she’s wrong. But the professor and his wife took the Facebook post as threatening in its ambiguity.

They decided that the college did not have their backs. Fox News seemed like the lesser of two evils.

Ms. Koppelman remembers watching the video of students upbraiding Mr. Weinstein. She felt for her colleague. They had taught together once, and she knew him as a gifted teacher and a thoughtful friend. Now they shared the experience of having been harangued on campus by social-justice activists.

She still thought of them as students, and saw their behavior as a cry for help — not for a vindictive reversal of racial roles, but for a better education.

The equity report that had started this war was far from perfect, she says, but it gave voice to real problems the faculty was loath to talk about. Ms. Koppelman knew Evergreen. She had been a student here in the 1980s, and a faculty member for 20 years. She knew that the college used to administer reading and writing tests to all incoming students to see who needed the most help, and didn’t anymore. She knew that her colleagues could be inattentive to student work.

“I have met many students of color,” she wrote, “for whom I was the first Evergreen faculty member to actually notice their reading and writing deficits and work to help them address them.”

She also says she knew Mr. Weinstein’s stubborn side, and how it could take over when he felt threatened. “Exaggerating the importance of that report,” she says, “and exaggerating the importance of his own critique, is very consistent with the person I knew.”

Mr. Weinstein appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight that evening. The professor described the scene outside his classroom, while videos of the confrontation played. Mr. Carlson listened with a look of concern. Then the host asked him about Evergreen State’s president.

“Dr. Bridges,” said Mr. Weinstein, “is allowing this mob to effectively control this campus.”

Mr. Weinstein’s appearance on Fox News inspired a deluge of criticism about how poorly the president had managed the protesters. That made the situation even harder to manage.

A group of conservative activists called Patriot Prayer resolved to hold a First-Amendment rally at Evergreen State. Somebody else threatened to come to the college with a gun, prompting a brief shutdown of the campus while Ms. Brown coordinated with state and federal authorities to size up the threat.

Ms. Lowe found herself in the cross hairs of online trolls. Ms. Littleton, who published an essay in support of the activists, woke up one morning with dozens of text messages after somebody posted her number online. Fearing vigilantes and unwilling to turn to the police, some students started carrying baseball bats.

Mr. Weinstein, buoyed by a raft of positive messages from strangers from across the political spectrum, continued to press his case in the national media. Mr. Bridges asked Aileen Miller, a state assistant attorney general who was advising the college, to look into potential legal fallout from the professor’s public comments.

Evergreen State’s Board of Trustees tried to assess the damage. Anne Proffitt, a trustee, suggested that they prepare for student enrollment to drop by 20 to 50 percent in the fall. They agreed to hire a crisis-management firm.

“I feel this situation is going to impact our campus and students — current, future and alums — for years to come,” Ms. Proffitt wrote to her fellow board members.

Mr. Bridges did what he could to hold the campus together in the meantime.

Everybody wanted the president to act decisively on their behalf. A Native-American student urged him to condemn Mr. Weinstein (“If you are truly standing with students of color …"). A Native-American parent asked for reassurance that his son would be safe from Black Lives Matter protesters (“He has had bouts of severe depression …"). Mr. Bridges’s advisers pressed him to edit and approve formal statements (“Students need to know that we are past the ‘no sanctions to protesters’ stage …"). His government-affairs liaison urged him to visit with upset lawmakers (“He needs to hear directly from you …"). His police chief asked him to close the campus before someone got seriously hurt (“We are unable to conduct basic functions of our job …").

Managing conversations about race was hard enough on a small, liberal campus. Now thousands of strangers from around the country had joined the fray. Hardly any of them seemed interested in discussing the complexities of race and power.

Not the websites warning of “unhinged black power” and “liberal lunacy cannibalism.”

Not the public servants who saw the campus unrest as reason to defund the college.

Not the man who called 911 and told a dispatcher that he was headed to campus to shoot as many people as possible.

Instead they seemed determined to remind the college that it was part of the rest of the country, after all. And if the public didn’t feel safe from what was happening at the college, then the college wouldn’t get to feel safe, either.

That summer, three weeks after Ms. Brown told Mr. Bridges that the campus was out of control, the police chief and the president sat next to each other behind a witness table. They had been called before a different group of questioners: the Washington State Senate’s Law and Justice Committee.

Evergreen State had not closed for the semester. It had hobbled across the finish line, moving the graduation ceremony to a stadium 35 miles away. Renting the stadium cost $100,000. The college also reported $10,000 worth of damage to the campus during the protests. The expenditures had not escaped the notice of the state Legislature. Nor did the media chatter suggesting that Evergreen State was an incubator for violent radicals.

Mathew Manweller, a Republican state representative and professor of political science at Central Washington University, had already introduced a bill that would gradually strip the college of public funding. He testified to the committee, too. It was the Evergreen State students, he said, who were guilty of intolerance: They had attacked Mr. Weinstein’s freedom of speech, and the college had let it happen.

The tension between Mr. Bridges and Ms. Brown was palpable. One of the senators asked the police chief if college officials had prevented her from doing her job. She sighed. The national news coverage had focused on the rowdiest scenes from the protests: chanting crowds, screaming students, furniture piled in front of doorways. It reflected badly on the woman who was in charge of law and order.

“Heartbroken and frustrated that my integrity has never been questioned once in 26 years, and now my leadership and integrity is being questioned nationwide,” she had written to the president after receiving an especially hurtful note from someone claiming to be a former police officer. “I would appreciate some public support for me and police services.”

Now, at the witness table, her public support for Mr. Bridges was tepid. Ms. Brown, who declined to be interviewed for this article, told the senators that she had been doing police work for two decades. “In the last nine months,” she said, “I’ve learned that, in higher ed, things are handled differently.”

Six weeks later, she resigned.

Mr. Weinstein and Ms. Heying filed a $3.85-million tort claim against Evergreen State, saying the college had created a hostile work environment. The couple settled for $500,000, and left the college. Ms. Lowe took a leave of absence for the fall. She declined to be interviewed. Mr. O’Dell stayed on with the campus police.

Ms. Koppelman, alongside members of the faculty and staff, started working with some of the students involved in the protests to revise Evergreen State’s student-conduct code, under the supervision of the assistant attorney general. She had been caught off-guard by the protests, and now the students surprised her again. They were standoffish at the beginning, she says, but the process has been educational for everyone. “These students are extremely bright, they’re very close readers, very dedicated, they put in a lot of extra time,” she says. “I wasn’t expecting that. I didn’t know what to expect.”

Mr. Bridges was left to figure out exactly what had happened, and what, if anything, he might have done differently. The sociologist had tried to square his authority as president with his empathy for those who rebelled against it. He was sure that Evergreen State was a force for good. But there were more powerful forces at work, too..

Sometime over the summer, Mr. Bridges started to feel broken. He had trouble thinking through problems, making decisions, staying upbeat. “Something wasn’t working quite right,” he says. “I just didn’t feel right.”

He started talking to a psychologist. He’s still working it out.

“It’s the exposure of your personal character to vilification that is perhaps the hardest piece,” says Mr. Bridges. “That’s where the trauma comes from — for me at least. It wasn’t the students. I really believe that.”

On a cool September morning, families pulled up to a cluster of gray dorms. A cadre of smiling students in green shirts pushed red shopping carts filled with lamps and coffeemakers and other dorm-room stuff. A balding man in glasses and a light-gray suit hopped off the curb and offered to lend a hand to the new arrivals.

“Hi!” said the man, “I’m George, the president.”

It was move-in day, and Mr. Bridges had a new role to perform: The hands-on leader of a stable institution that would give the new kids a good education while keeping them safe.

“Hi! I’m Serena, the mom,” replied a white, middle-aged woman with short hair and a trunk full of her daughter’s earthly possessions.

“Oh my gosh, let me carry something,” said the president, grabbing a gray plastic bin. Serena told him her daughter’s room number. He repeated the number back to her. “Thank you,” said Mr. Bridges. “Welcome to Evergreen!”

Students are mocked for requiring “safe spaces,” but often it’s the parents who need to be reassured. Several new Evergreen State parents were eager to hear Mr. Bridges say that the chaos they saw on the news would not be an issue again.

One of them was Aron Laub, a lawyer from Los Angeles, whose son was transferring into the college as a junior. Like Mr. Bridges, Mr. Laub was an activist in his younger days. As a high-school student in Berkeley, Calif., he participated in a protest of a supermarket that had refused to hire black workers. Mr. Laub and a group of other incognito activists filled up their shopping carts, let the checkout clerks ring up the items, then walked out, leaving the full carts behind.

Still, Mr. Laub was worried about the videos he had seen of students shouting at Mr. Weinstein. His son has acute sensitivity to sound. Angry chants and classroom interruptions might confuse him and make him upset. The father understood being angry at racial injustice, but from the videos it wasn’t totally clear to him what Mr. Weinstein had done to deserve that kind of treatment.

“I think the issues were valid, I thought the means of expression was not,” Mr. Laub told the president at a Q&A session. “I would not want my son to be confronted by a recurrence of that, because I see him as being sensitive enough that that would be difficult for him to manage.”

The president nodded. “I’m with you,” he said. “I was saddened and disappointed by that display by those students toward that professor.”

He explained that the college would be making it clear that conduct like that wouldn’t be tolerated. Ed Sorger, a former police chief at the college, says the president made a similar pledge to him. Mr. Sorger agreed to return on an interim basis as long as students would be held accountable if they crossed the line. (Evergreen State has since punished students for violating the student-conduct code during the spring protests, though the college declined to state how many.)

At the end of the session, Mr. Bridges gave the parents his cellphone number and told them to call him anytime.

The bill to strip Evergreen State of taxpayer money has gone nowhere. Still, the college has taken steps to protect itself from the public. Contact information for faculty members has been removed from the website. More significantly, the college has created a policy that would restrict activists in their use of the campus as a staging ground for protests.

The drop in enrollment wasn’t nearly as bad as the trustees had feared: 4.5 percent. The college’s wounds have been dressed. Evergreen State still faces threats to its long-term health. In this way the experimental institution in the woods outside Olympia is no different than any other college: It needed to persuade students to come. Then it needed to persuade them to stay.

Helping the freshmen move in seemed like a good place to start.

Mr. Bridges carried the gray bin into the crowded lobby of the dorm, where Rusted Root’s “Send Me on My Way” blasted from a boombox. The president felt better than he had during the summer. He greeted parents in the corridor and struck up conversations with students he didn’t know yet. He did not know the name of the student whose belongings he was holding, either, but there would be time for that.

As he stepped into the elevator, he realized he had forgotten her room number.

The helpful gesture had gone awry. A public-relations manager dashed to go find the mom while Mr. Bridges remained in the lobby, holding the bin, trying not to be awkward. The exterior of the bin offered no clues. The president set it on the floor and peeled open the lid, revealing an equally mystifying layer of turquoise fabric.

He snapped the bin closed. He was still being watched, and a crowded public area was a risky place for a college president to go digging for answers.

Chris Quintana contributed to this article.

Steve Kolowich writes about writes about ordinary people in extraordinary times, and extraordinary people in ordinary times. Follow him on Twitter @stevekolowich, or write to him at steve.kolowich@chronicle.com.