The faculty at Evergreen State College has voted to ban the word “covenant,” which allegedly has ties to “cultural genocide.”
The Evergreen State College faculty has voted to ban the word “covenant” as the college struggles to enroll students. The decision is a reflection of the backwards priorities at Evergreen State College, which desperately needs to reverse its course to prevent the 50-year-old college from facing a potential shutdown.
No campus protest in recent memory has caught the media’s attention quite like the spring 2017 protests at Evergreen State College. The saga, which centered around progressive biology Professor Bret Weinstein’s refusal to participate in an illiberal “diversity” activism event, involved student protesters roaming campus with baseball bats, an intentional disarming of campus police, and the university president being held hostage by students.
In notes from the faculty meeting in which the word was banned, the faculty argues that “covenant” represents the cultural genocide of Native Nations.
Whereas the word “covenant” represents for many members of the Evergreen community the efforts at cultural genocide of Native Nations through the federal Indian boarding school system; and
Whereas the word “covenant” is a term used in many official Evergreen documents, including the Faculty Handbook, to refer to documents that faculty are required to submit; and
Whereas there exist adequate alternatives, such as “community agreement,” to the use of the word “covenant”; and
Whereas needlessly using a word that institutionalizes the devastating colonization of Native Peoples is inconsistent with Evergreen’s stated commitment to social justice and to honoring Evergreen’s Nation-to-Nation Agreement with Tribes of Washington;
We move that the word “covenant” in the Faculty Handbook and other official Evergreen documents be replaced by the term “community agreement.”
The story was originally reported on by a YouTuber named Benjamin A. Boyce, who regularly talks about things happening at Evergreen State College. In a tweet, he mocked the college for focusing on such a bizarre initiative.
“The @EvergreenStCol faculty, faced with plummeting enrollment and successive layoffs, have rallied their collective energies to… banish a word because it reminds someone, somewhere, of cultural genocide,” Boyce wrote.