Bret Weinstein’s Second Act: From Liberal Arts Professor to Public Intellectual

(Note: some facts were updated in September 2021.)

In May of 2017 an in-house conflict at The Evergreen State College was recorded on smart phones and posted on the internet. Videos of the events attracted journalists, politicians, FOX News, and domestic terrorists. Two professors who were at loggerheads with a third threatened to sue the College. All of them resigned and received settlements that total three quarters of a million dollars.

Bret Weinstein, one of the faculty who resigned, has started a second act as a public intellectual. As a left wing progressive he has found strange bedfellows in FOX News host Tucker Carlson, and in Joe Rogan and Dave Rubin who lean libertarian. These media personalities have helped generate Weinstein’s newfound fame. Before the events that led to his resignation from Evergreen his twitter page had few subscribers; now there are over half a million. His Patreon account has over three thousand supporters who pay between $2 and $250 each month for exclusive access to him. He speaks to international audiences. He testifies before Congress. He appears on the lecture circuit and is profiled in national publications. He has fans on the left and the right, and seems to have landed on his feet.

Clearly what happened to Bret Weinstein at Evergreen touched a cultural nerve that reaches across political differences. This is something of an accomplishment. In this divisive era, engagement of that kind is sorely needed. As Weinstein’s audience grows, it seems useful to consider just why he, an evolutionary biologist, claims to understand liberal education better than the college he used to love does, and puts himself forth as a champion for the free exchange of ideas.

Full disclosure: I am interested in Weinstein’s second act because I was part of his first one. I am an Evergreen professor and worked with him for nearly ten years, both teaching classes and participating in campus governance. I wish to acquaint interested parties with a different side of Bret Weinstein than he will show to his growing public.

For Weinstein what matters about liberal education is the “liber” part which, in Latin, can mean both “freedom” and “book.” He cared about the former meaning; about the latter, not so much. This is one reason why his predicament touched a nerve. Weinstein wanted his intellectual freedom, but he also wanted the freedom to teach how he wants to be absolute. This cartoonish view of both teaching and freedom is seductive and dangerous. For hundreds of years, political theorists have known that the most important aspect of freedom is its limits. One person’s freedom is not license to harm another. How does one know where to draw the line?

Here’s where education is supposed to help. At a liberal arts college, “liber” refers to education FOR freedom — that is, the kind of education people need in order to use their freedom responsibly, recognizing its limits. As a professor at Evergreen Weinstein was responsible, as we all are, for understanding and helping to create and sustain a liberal arts college by promoting discussion, engagement, and listening, as well as protecting the freedom such an education supports. The press has painted him as a beleaguered promoter of liberal arts education who was hounded out by a culture of intolerance. While Weinstein certainly is not to blame for all that took place at Evergreen, it’s worth asking if he shares some of it.

Long before the events of spring 2017, Weinstein did not use his freedom responsibly. His frequent claims about the successes he enjoyed as an Evergreen professor invite a closer look at his work on campus before he starting trying to galvanize the public.

The fact is that he had serious shortcomings as a professor and made some significant mistakes which contributed to what he dramatically calls his “exile.” Using that term to describe his resignation from Evergreen is an insult to the millions of people who have in fact been forced from their home countries due to circumstances beyond their control. Weinstein is nothing like a person who involuntarily starts a new life in a foreign land.

Chicago’s first black major league baseball player Minnie Minoso famously used to say, “Baseball’s been very, very good to me.” Well, Evergreen was very, very good to Bret Weinstein. In 2004, his wife was hired to a tenure-track position. He became an adjunct faculty, earned his Ph.D., and eventually became tenured himself.

At Evergreen faculty teach in teams. I taught with him twice. We liked each other fine, but I soon realized that he lacks important qualities that students expect professors at liberal arts colleges to have. He’s better off as a public intellectual and Evergreen is better off without him.

Weinstein lacks respect for all fields of study. He is convinced that evolutionary theory is the grand organizing principle for virtually everything, and that other fields are derivative. Liberal arts professors embrace complexity. We encourage students to see value in all disciplines. He did not.

Weinstein lacks curiosity. When I taught with him I read the books he assigned: Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene and Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. This is common practice in interdisciplinary teaching teams. But he wouldn’t read the books I assigned: Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Mintz’s Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood. He tried to fake it and fool me. He did not.

Weinstein lacks a commitment to students’ work. He flat out refused to read their writing because what he really cared about was students’ engagement with him. “That’s not the best use of my time,” he once told me. In fact, faculty time is what students are owed by their teachers. Students receive valuable attention when professors are alone with a pile of papers. There’s no glamour in it, and for many students it’s the first time someone takes their ideas seriously. This is the grunt work of teaching which all responsible teachers do. He did not.

Weinstein lacks the ability to meet differences with an open mind. Anyone who hears him knows he likes to talk. We had spirited debates, but he did not think carefully about challenges to his point of view. Indeed, it was extremely unusual for him to say, “You’re right,” to ask a question, to read something that a colleague recommended, or even to read all the texts assigned in the very programs he was teaching. He did not.

Finally, in the run-up to the protest at Evergreen which ultimately led to Weinstein’s resignation, colleagues listened to his critiques in faculty meetings and read his emails. When his critiques didn’t garner the support he thought they deserved, he kept making them anyway. Even though people responded and invited him to engage with them, he just kept talking without listening. Professors should listen to others and know when to shut up. He did not.

Weinstein explains away any deficits of his own by claiming that faculty have almost complete autonomy at Evergreen, and that he was a very popular professor. Let’s look at these claims as well.

Evergreen faculty do not have the autonomy Weinstein describes. We are held to a union contract that spells out our obligations and duties. One of them, for example, is to help students learn how to communicate well. When his email messages went public on campus, they revealed that he does not respect other fields, express curiosity about what he doesn’t understand, listen to students, know how to productively navigate differences of opinion, and know when to shut up. In short, he does not know how to communicate well, at least not in the context of a public liberal arts college. And he didn’t care about fostering that skill in students. While he is not a racist as the students claimed (and at the time I told him that he certainly didn’t deserve the treatment he was getting), I think students saw what I’d seen when I taught with him. Weinstein wanted everyone to listen to him and think that he was right. Far from being a champion of liberal arts education, his continued condemnation of Evergreen shows that he doesn’t really care about public institutions like Evergreen or understand their value to underserved students. When Weinstein was employed, he used the College for his own ends and he’s using the College now.

Weinstein was indeed a popular professor, and his classes tended to be full with waiting lists. He is a bright and entertaining person. He’s witty, funny, and a creative thinker. But his classes were also popular because he successfully cultivated a campus persona as something of a celebrity. He was fond of claiming that college, in general, was largely a sham but that the knowledge students would gain in HIS classes was so profound, so life-changing, so unusual, so startling, that something completely unique and almost impossible to describe would happen to them when they studied with him. The character of these claims echos those of the 19th century figure P.T. Barnum, who promised to surprise his audiences by creating conditions for them to think hard about what the truth is and ultimately to trust their own judgments. For Barnum, this was a successful business tactic that attracted a public highly skeptical of expert knowledge. But this tactic is not what liberal arts professors are trusted to do. A sizeable number of students flocked to his classes precisely because they were long on histrionics and short on homework. I don’t doubt that students had a great time with him — ours did when we taught together — but under the surface was dire neglect of the everyday duties and responsibilities that can frankly be boring and yield no attention or accolades, but that make of teaching the hard and generous work that changes lives.

All this is to say that Weinstein was not an effective liberal arts professor. Rather than admit that the job was not his cup of tea, he blames Evergreen for acting like a college: thoughtfully changing to educate students in today’s world. His speaking and writing gigs reveal that he takes no responsibility for what happened in spring of 2017. He hasn’t shown any evidence of asking himself, “Did I make any mistakes? Should I rethink the way I handled that situation?”

Now Bret Weinstein has a much larger audience than he ever could have had at a small public liberal arts college. This is probably very satisfying for him, although he may find that his deficits are more difficult to hide under the hot lights of public scrutiny. He certainly makes a lot of bold claims but rarely cites any scholarship. He condemns postmodernism, for example; let him provide citations. He won’t, because he won’t take the time to read that which he condemns. This is not a message that liberal arts professors should send to students.

Evergreen did not create the cultural tensions that manifest in higher education today. Faculty and staff navigate them day by day and help to influence them while maintaining their institutions. This is something that Bret Weinstein was not willing or able to do. To borrow from his evolutionary playbook, perhaps he simply failed to adapt to his environment. He could stop blaming Evergreen for the consequences of his own words — words that Evergreen gave him the platform to say. He might take some responsibility for what took place in spring of 2017.

Those of us who work and teach at Evergreen continue to offer an innovative and nationally acclaimed liberal arts education to the public. For Washington state residents, tuition is about $7,000; private colleges tend to cost seven times that amount. Students from all walks of life, including thousands who could not otherwise afford it, have pursued their studies here and gone on to become responsible and thoughtful citizens, and to have fascinating, creative, and unusual careers in every field of endeavor. Our graduates include two Oscar winners, nationally recognized public school teachers, politicians, public servants, business owners, actors, musicians, professors, therapists, cartoonists, artists, authors, poets, researchers, environmentalists, and people serving in the clergy. About eight hundred new ones proudly earned their degrees last year.

Earlier this year a national consortium composed of one third of the institutions of higher education in the United States (including Evergreen) issued a statement about the importance of liberal education. Many of the values expressed therein are foreign to Weinstein because he did not share them with the college that employed him. He fancies himself now as some sort of standard bearer for liberal arts education, but he refused to deliver such an education to his students. I hope he’ll fully embrace his second act and let Evergreen alone.

Evergreen was very, very good to Bret Weinstein. Now as a public intellectual, Weinstein does what he did in his classroom. He says what he thinks. He rarely refers to books. And he attracts followers who want to listen to him. Perhaps he could use the attention he now receives to shed light on the costs of failing to read, listen, say “I don’t know,” and know when to shut up. He claims to champion risk; he took serious risks when he ignored the requirements of his job. He ultimately lost that job and now he wants Evergreen to pay the price. If this kind of conduct is what’s wanted from public intellectuals, he is glad to provide. It’s certainly not what’s wanted from professors at public liberal arts colleges.