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…
Read more in The Chronicle of Higher Education.