The Evergreen State College is facing a $2.1 million budget shortfall and a five percent plunge in enrollment in the wake of this spring’s continuous stream of high-profile protests led largely by radical black students.
Officials at the taxpayer-funded campus in Olympia, Washington broke the bad news to the school community in an Aug. 28 memo obtained by The College Fix.
Student registration for the fall quarter at Evergreen State has decreased from 3,922 students to 3,713 students. Critically, most of the missing students are nonresidents who would pay substantially higher out-of-state tuition — $24,138 per year versus just $6,678 for Washington residents.
The missing tuition dollars aren’t the only problem for the public school. There’s also an ongoing state budget crisis, an unavoidable cost-of-living increase for employees and an expected increase in operating costs.
The cumulative financial effect for Evergreen State is a $2.1 million budget deficit for the current fiscal year (which began July 1).
“This creates the need for significant budget cuts in the immediate future,” the Aug. 28 memo dryly explains.
School officials have already temporarily laid off 17 maintenance workers.
More pink slips are looming.
Additional layoffs “will become impossible to avoid” “if the capital budget crisis at the state level continues indefinitely,” the memo states.
“In a college where 89 percent of the operating budget is in salaries and benefits, it is impossible to reduce the budget by substantial amounts without giving up positions. In anticipation of this, we will soon be announcing a hiring freeze,” the memo also says, according to The College Fix.
Students should not be alarmed about funding for diversity initiatives, though. “Our work in equity and inclusion is an important step in this process,” the memo assures.
The protests which engulfed Evergreen State in May and June involved a “Day of Absence” event “inviting” every white student, professor and administrator to leave campus for a day.
Intense protests occurred after Bret Weinstein, an Evergreen State biology professor, criticized the racially segregated school event. Weinstein was driven into hiding by student radicals for expressing his opinion.
Video footage of a confrontation involving malcontent students and school president George Bridges shows student protests shows students going berserk, obscenely screaming about “racist white teachers” and “white-assed administrators.” There are the obligatory “black power” slogans. (RELATED: Students Furious Over Release Of Video Depicting Them Going Berserk At College)
The video contains many memorable moments of the students’ interacting with their school administrators. They shout “fuck you, and fuck the police” repeatedly while maintaining that “whiteness is the most violent fuckin’ system to ever breathe!”
Protesters also accused various administrators of racism during a bizarrely combative campus meeting at which some protesters asked white students to remain in the back of the room.
In early June, Evergreen State administrators at responded to an anonymously-made threat of violence on campus by asking students to evacuate and canceling classes for three days.
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)
In July, police in suburban New Jersey arrested a 53-year-old man, Robert Kerekes Jr., for allegedly phoning in a threat to go on a shooting spree at Evergreen State and in the surrounding “communist scumbag town.” (RELATED: Some Old White Guy Made The Terror Threat That Shut Down Evergreen State, Cops Say)
Administrators at Evergreen State paid approximately $100,000 to rent a nearby minor league baseball stadium for its commencement ceremony in the wake of the threats. (RELATED: Evergreen State Pays $100,000 To Rent Far-Flung Stadium For Commencement After Loony Race Protests)
Evergreen State has traditionally held its spring graduation ceremony on a brick-laden campus quad that is actually called Red Square.
The actions by student radicals and the multitude of school employees who abetted them were almost universally condemned.
The World Socialist Web Site, a hard-left news outlet which promotes “revolutionary opposition to the capitalist market system” published a scathing editorial denouncing the student protesters at Evergreen State 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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