The Evergreen State College will pay approximately $100,000 to rent a nearby minor league baseball stadium for its commencement ceremony this week.
The taxpayer-funded school is paying the six-figure sum to rent the stadium for its graduation festivities as a safety precaution following several weeks of racial protests and threats that shut down classes for three days and forced a professor from campus.
Evergreen State’s $100,000 2017 commencement will take place on Friday at Cheney Stadium in Tacoma, Washington, reports The Olympian, an area newspaper.
Cheney Stadium is the 6,500-seat baseball home of the Tacoma Rainiers, the Triple-A affiliate of the Seattle Mariners. (The Rainiers will be playing in El Paso on Friday.)
Evergreen State has traditionally held its spring graduation ceremony on a brick-laden campus quad that is actually called Red Square.
Evergreen State Red Square YouTube screenshot/aFrogKzr
About 1,000 Evergreen State students will receive their diplomas at ceremony. Thus, the relocation of the ceremony works out to a cost of roughly $100 per graduate.
“There is flexibility in the regular college budget to absorb the cost of the stadium rental,” Evergreen State spokesman Zach Powers told The Olympian.
Evergreen State graduation ceremony attendees will need to obtain tickets. Security guards will search all bags and backpacks. Spectators will also be required to pass through metal detectors to enter the stadium.
The Evergreen State campus has been the site of a continuous stream of high-profile protests led largely by radical black students in recent weeks. The protesters have centered much of their fury on Bret Weinstein, a biology professor who criticized an organized event “inviting” every white student, professor and administrator to leave campus for a day.
School officials cancelled classes for three days at the beginning of June after they said they received threats including a phone call promising mass murder on campus.
In the wake of the cancelled classes, Evergreen State administrators sent an email kindly asking students to stop making vigilante patrols of the campus with bats, batons or other weapons. (RELATED: Evergreen State Officials Ask Student Vigilantes To Stop Patrolling Campus With Baseball Bats)
The World Socialist Web Site, a hard-left news outlet which promotes “revolutionary opposition to the capitalist market system” has published a scathing editorial denouncing the student protesters at Evergreen State College as race-baiting loons who fail to address any actual issues affecting “working class people of all races and genders.” (RELATED: Now Even Socialists Are Bashing The Loony Race Protesters At Evergreen State)
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