Weinstein: Lawsuit was 'last resort' after 'surreal' protests
Professor of evolutionary biology Bret Weinstein said that filing a $3.8 million claim against Evergreen State College was “a last resort” effort to combat injustice.
In an interview with an NBC affiliate KING 5, Weinstein asserted that the decision to pursue legal action came only after multiple failed attempts to call the college’s attention “to what was wrong” with its handling of the student protests that drove him from campus earlier this year.
[RELATED: Weinstein files $3.8M claim against Evergreen State]
“Moving in the direction of legal action was a last resort…It has only happened because the college has refused to wake up in the face of every previous attempt we have made to call their attention to what was wrong,” he told the publication.
“It's been surreal,” he added. “This has turned our lives absolutely upside down.”
Weinstein also reflected on his experiences on and off campus, including an “alarming” phone conversation with the chief of police Stacy Brown concerning his personal safety.
“She said are you on campus? I said no. She said please don’t come to campus. And I said what’s going on? She said protesters are searching car-to-car looking for an individual and we believe it's you,” he revealed, saying, “That was obviously a very alarming call to receive.”
The professor also indicated that he and his wife, who is also a professor at Evergreen State, would like to return to campus, but only if the college is “made safe” for people with a diverse set of viewpoints.
[RELATED: Evergreen prof publicly berated peers on ‘Equity Council’]
“It became very clearly criminal at the point that they were barricading administrators and the president’s office and controlling their movements and stalking people on the campus openly,” he told the news outlet, referencing the protests sparked by his criticism of a segregated campus event that asked white students and faculty to leave the college for a day.
“We would love to return,” he said. “We can not return if the college is not made safe. And it has to be made safe for people to express points of view that are at odds with the conventional wisdom at the moment.”
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