How a Campus Fight Drove 2 Left-Leaning Professors to Fox News

Fox News

The two professors were horrified, both at what they had seen at their college in the past year and at what they planned to do about it.

For months, Heather Heying and her husband, Bret Weinstein, had tried to convince their colleagues at Evergreen State College that the Washington campus was teetering on the brink of self-ruin. The administration seemed ready to adopt what they saw as an “authoritarian” policy aimed at increasing faculty diversity. Meanwhile, the couple thought, the president was indulging student protesters who seemed increasingly out of control.

Ms. Heying and Mr. Weinstein, both biology professors who consider themselves politically progressive, had tried to sound the alarm bells. Mr. Weinstein had made his case in emails to faculty members and administrators that were later printed by the student newspaper. The couple had even made a trip to the governor’s office to warn two staff members that the public college was risking a “tragedy.” Nothing had worked.

Now the couple weighed a new option. A producer for Tucker Carlson Tonight, a prime-time show on Fox News, had asked if Mr. Weinstein wanted to make his case to the conservative commentator and his millions of viewers.

It was a nauseating thought, says Ms. Heying. Theirs was an NPR family. Back in college, Mr. Weinstein had stood up to fraternities at the University of Pennsylvania over sexist and racist behavior at their parties. In an ideal world, says Ms. Heying, they would have talked to The New York Times or The Washington Post. But that’s not who had come calling.

“He was horrified, I was horrified,” Ms. Heying told The Chronicle. “Tucker Carlson is someone he mocks in his classes.”

But Mr. Weinstein had few allies on the campus. Some people were calling him racist for raising what he thought were reasonable concerns about how Evergreen State was dealing with issues of race and diversity. With their own colleagues seeming unreceptive, Mr. Weinstein and Ms. Heying were surprised to find themselves seriously considering Mr. Carlson’s offer.

A ‘Strategic Equity Plan’

For Mr. Weinstein and Ms. Heying, the road to Fox News began last year, when Evergreen State, a small, public liberal-arts college in Olympia, Wash., moved to reorganize its administration as part of a “paradigm shift” in dealing with racial concerns.

The “strategic equity plan” worried the two professors, specifically a portion that called for “an equity justification/explanation for each potential hire/position.” Mr. Weinstein and Ms. Heying took that language to mean that the college would limit its hiring to scholars whose research touched on issues of race and inclusion.

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

The authors of the plan referred to it not as a hiring mandate but as “a paradigm shift, grounded in the college’s longstanding diversity efforts,” that would help it better accommodate underserved students. And the chair of the Board of Trustees, Gretchen Sorensen, described the equity council that drafted the plan as part of the college’s commitment “to leveling the playing field in higher education for communities of color.”

Mr. Weinstein expressed reservations about the plan in emails and at faculty meetings, but felt that his colleagues were eager to dismiss his views as racist instead of arguing with him in good faith. (Sandra Kaiser, a spokeswoman for the college, said this week that Evergreen State still had not made a final decision about the plan.)

By this spring, Mr. Weinstein and Ms. Heying were not just concerned about the equity plan; they also felt an increasing sense of anxiety about what they saw as a streak of “authoritarianism” among campus liberals.

In March, Mr. Weinstein objected to what he considered a disturbing request from student protesters: that, in a twist on a college tradition called the “Day of Absence,” white people would voluntarily stay off campus for a day. Students criticized Mr. Weinstein’s opposition to the request. In May, after an incident in which police officers questioned two black students who had been accused of making threats, racial tensions on the campus reached a boil.

One day, to Mr. Weinstein’s surprise, a crowd of students interrupted his class to confront him. Some called him a racist; others called for his firing.

The professor stood in the hallway outside his classroom, surrounded by students, some of whom recorded the incident on their phones. Mr. Weinstein tried to establish ground rules for a conversation. “I listen to you, you listen to me,” he said.

But the exchange remained chaotic, with students talking over one another and demanding that the professor apologize. At one point, facing a cacophony of voices, Mr. Weinstein clasped his hands and turned his head with a look of exasperation.

“We don’t care what you want to speak on,” one student said.

‘Ya Think!?’

Later that month, a producer at Tucker Carlson Tonight asked Mr. Weinstein if he would appear on the show. He and his wife needed to make a decision quickly. They didn’t like the idea of aligning themselves with Fox News, but they also felt the future of their college and the values of liberal education, as they saw them, were at stake.

The professor appeared on a segment of Mr. Carlson’s show titled “Campus Craziness.” He said that Evergreen State’s president, George S. Bridges, was “allowing this mob to control the campus.” (Mr. Bridges has told The Chronicle that he didn’t feel he had capitulated to student protesters.)

“I am troubled by what this implies about the current state of the left,” Mr. Weinstein said.

Mr. Carlson scoffed with mock surprise. “Ya think!?”

After the segment aired, other national news outlets started to amplify the story. The Wall Street Journal ran an essay by Mr. Weinstein in which he described being driven from his classroom by student protesters. Breitbart, the alt-right news hub, published a story about the essay. Mr. Weinstein was invited to repeat his account on the Rubin Report, a political talk show whose host, Dave Rubin, chronicles the excesses of what he calls “the regressive left.” Next was an appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, a popular podcast headed by the comedian who used to be a co-host of Comedy Central’s The Man Show.

But it wasn’t just conservative commentators and defenders of campus speech who took up the banner for Mr. Weinstein. His exposure also put him on the radar of the traditional news outlets that the professor and his wife had hoped to attract in the first place.

“These campus inquisitions must stop,” wrote Frank Bruni, a New York Times columnist. The Washington Post finally rang. “It turns out,” Mr. Weinstein told a reporter there, “that one thing that does seem to unite people is the sense that there is something abhorrent about shouting people down.”

Their decision had paid off. The national spotlight had fallen on Evergreen State, and Mr. Weinstein’s case could no longer be ignored.

But the professor’s appeal to the broader public also unleashed forces that he and his wife could not easily control.

The Backlash

In the aftermath of Mr. Weinstein’s press tour, Evergreen State received threats. One person called the local police dispatcher to say that he planned to show up at the college and shoot as many people as he could. The institution was forced to close for three days. When college leaders invited students to return to the campus, some decided to stay away.

Unknown vandals destroyed campus property and tagged buildings with graffiti. Due to safety concerns, the college decided to move its June 16 graduation ceremony to a stadium about 35 miles away.

Many people blame Mr. Weinstein for the fallout. Peter Dorman, an economics professor, told The Chronicle that he doesn’t understand why his colleague would reach out to “people who don’t wish us well and don’t want to see us succeed in any event.” Fifty-eight professors, about a quarter of the faculty, signed a letter asking the college to investigate Mr. Weinstein, saying that his actions had made them, along with students and staff member, “targets of white-supremacist backlash.”

Others rose to their colleague’s defense. Mike Paros, a professor of biology and agriculture, said he sympathized with the dilemma that drove Mr. Weinstein into the arms of the conservative media. “Weinstein reluctantly went on Fox News because no other news source would pick up his story,” wrote Mr. Paros in a letter to colleagues that was also posted online.

“This was the first time that I found out that those who watch Tucker Carlson are the ‘alt-right,’” he added sarcastically. “I should probably tell my family.”

A group of 17 students sent a letter to reporters saying they, like Mr. Weinstein, believed Evergreen State’s leaders had showed too much deference to student protesters. The campus activists, they said, don’t speak for everybody.

Warm Messages

With graduation a week away, Evergreen State remains consumed by a sense of unease. A group self-identifying as Nazis recently posted a video that appeared to show hooded figures posting racist fliers on windows and buildings at the college.

The forces unleashed by Mr. Weinstein’s media appearances have also created some discomfort for him and Ms. Heying.

They recently discovered a Facebook page where someone had posted aggressive political messages while posing as Mr. Weinstein. One of the posts featured a picture of a pistol.

“So sick of all these whiny SJW at Evergreen,” read another, using a disparaging shorthand for “social-justice warriors.” “I’m going to make sure there’s none of them left on campus very soon, though.”

Mr. Weinstein and Ms. Heying reported the page to Facebook. It took about 24 hours to remove it.

Still, the two professors feel as if they made the right decision to take their concerns to Fox News. In the weeks since Mr. Weinstein appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight, Ms. Heying, who has been monitoring her husband’s email, said he had received “hundreds and hundreds” of warm messages from people whom he and his wife might never have considered allies.

“Before May 26 I had the same knee-jerk reaction to Fox News that all of my liberal colleagues do,” said Ms. Heying. “I don’t feel that way anymore.”

Clarification (June 10, 2017, 5:51 p.m.): An earlier version of this article referred to The Rubin Report as a conservative talk show. The host, Dave Rubin, identifies as a liberal. The article has been updated to reflect the program’s political focus.

Chris Quintana is a breaking-news reporter. Follow him on Twitter @cquintanadc or email him at chris.quintana@chronicle.com.