Evergreen has been a joke for years and years, a radical far left-wing institution if ever there was one. The sad part is the students who emerge from this college so ignorant and naive.

We had a fellow where I work who had attended Evergreen. I swear he honstly could not comprehend why it was important for him to be at work on time every day and to put in a full day's work. We're not talking about a fast food joint here. He was a software developer.

But he was so screwed up in his world view from the brain washing he received at Evergreen that he simply couldn't cope with the requirements of a full-time job and the accompanying expectations. He was finally let go when it became apparent to management that there was no way to get him to understand, and commit to, his responsibilities.

Evergreen should really be cut off as a state institution and forced to survive as a private college. We don't need to throw our money away on such a useless facility.

Having some acquaintence with a few of Evergreen's grads of the 1970s, they don't all turn out bad. However, those I know weren't using TESC as a finishing school for lefty political activism; they were more towards the arts. It would be very useful to know more about the current emphases of the school on what's important for graduates to take with them on graduation.

And it would be particularly important to learn the distribution of political leanings of the faculty and Administration. Judging by the behavior of Corrie, and of the mob who selected a fashionable murderer as graduation speaker seem to indicate, it is skewed extremely left. If so, it's time to apply the principles of diversity to this taxpayer-supported school, and ensure some in the beliefs of the teaching elite. Or chop off half their funding, so the non-lefties of the taxpaying population aren't forced to contribute to their own political and economic downfall.

The budget figures are a bit misleading, because they ignore the tuition and fees receipts. If they budget up here the same way California does, all the fees collected by the colleges go into the General Fund, and then operating expenses are taken out of the Fund. So taxpayers aren't actually subsidizing ESC to the tune of $90M as your post suggests.

That being said, hippies need a place to educate their offspring, and ESC seems to fit that bill with just as much education as they can absorb and still remain true to the movement that gave us healing crystals, patchouli, and the Grateful Dead.

Mr. Bennett is mistaken. Tuition and fee receipts are deposited in local, non-appropriated accounts at each of the state's higher education institutions, not in the General Fund. (At one time those revenues went to the General Fund, but that hasn't been the case since about 1992.) Current budgeted funding to The Evergreen State College in the biennium is $46.9 million from the state general fund, $44.2 million in other funds (mostly from tuition and fee revenue), $90.6 million total funds.

Right, Mr. Archer, that what I was saying -- the taxpayer subsidy to Evergreen is $47M, not $91M as the post suggests.

Maybe this is an outrageous level of subsidy, but it's better than $91M, isn't it?

So my proposal to chop off half their funding will relieve the general taxpayer of having to support all of the taxpayer's half of the biased indoctrinations of TESC, and the school can keep the $44.2 million they extract from tuition and fees to fund operation and maintenance. The faculty should be glad to propagate their lefty religion at no salary, being the true believers and professional revolutionaries that they are.

I'm as appalled by Evergreen's lefty leanings as anyone, but I'm extremely queasy at pulling their public funding based on disagreement over political views or educational style. This is a pretty complicated issue but one that I believes boils down to how much the state should have a hand in determining education policy.

I totally sympathize with complaints about overwhelmingly liberal faculty, majors and programs that have utterly zero practical value, etc. But what's the alternative? Quotas now for ideology among staff members? Special bureaucracies set up to review classes offered by colleges, with the power to strike them from the curriculum if they are deemed "impractical" or politically incorrect? I thought libertarians and conservatives were against that sort of thing.

It is reminiscent of the attitude by some towards tobacco, alcohol and now junk food that says, "Well, since the government spends XX billions of dollars a year on health care, it should have the power to regulate behavior that increases those costs. Therefore, we need to ban tobacco (or booze, or Big Macs).

As with hateful or offensive speech, the best way to deal with this problem is not through regulation, but more free speech. Granted it will be a massively uphill battle to get more libertarians and conservatives on campuses, to retool curriculums towards disciplines that are actually useful, and to privatize more education, but I fear the alternative is simply more government meddling in our schools, and we all know how that turns out, right?

I completely agree with Stefan on this one. Read this newsstory from 2002:

In April, students from Evergreen State College in Washington State wanted to visit Chiapas during a two-month exchange program. Their professor steered some of them to Atenco instead.

Seventeen of the U.S. students, brandishing machetes and chanting revolutionary slogans in broken Spanish, joined Atenco farmers in a May 1 protest march, and were promptly expelled from Mexico for violating a ban on foreigners becoming involved in domestic politics.

Sure, those kids are a bunch of dorks, but so what? I'm sure students from the UW and many, many other publicly funded colleges have engaged in similar activities. Shall we yank their funding as well? Why stop at Evergreen?

Regardless of its funding,etc ESU is a cesspool of hate and incitement. There was an excellent piece wriien in the WSJ by a Isreali women whose daughter lost 2 classmates due to a homicidal bus bombing on what Rachel Corrie and her ilk at ESU really represent and support: violence,terror facism and hate

The situation at Evergreen College demands exposure and the accompanying ridicule that will surely come from a focus by the press and State Legislators.

Lets see the Seattle Times commit the resources devoted to crippling the ability of the Hutch to fund cancer research to expose the silliness that passes for education at Evergreen. Which organization do you think has a positive impact on society at large? Unfortunately, celebrating dim bulbs like Rachel Corrie and attacking the Hutch passes for journalism at the Times.

How about legislative hearings into this same silliness? Evergreen needs the light of day before any positive changes will ever occur or whether future students begin to rethink wasting their own money and time on this institution.

I agree that Evergreen is a nutty place whose workings need to be brought to the attention of the voters, much as the workings of just about all state universities do these days. That being said, it seems to me that all of us should be able to acknowledge that the crisis in American higher education is much broader than any one school, and ultimately has to be dealt with in a more pointed way that by cutting off the funding to one or two colleges.

Washington State voters are notoriously tight with their money, so any move to cut off funding to Evergreen just comes across as more of the stinginess that caused a Library Bond to go up in flames in Vancouver recently, and not anything specifically to do with the school's policies and personnel.

Well, Scott,the first amendment guarantees the right to free speech, not a public subsidy to practice it. My view is that this is a matter of property rights.
The property in question is the money of the taxpayers of Washington state. They are entitled to choose to spend it here or there, or nowhere at all.
The argument that needs winning is that the long term cost of paying for ideas that are demonstrably counter to the continuing success of the Republic outwiegh the short term benefit of presumably lower tuition.

No Fax Loans

I think that the comments made here are pretty sad. basing opinions of a school on one or two students. every school has different types of people come out of it. I think that Evergreen actually offers a lot of things that many other schools should. I know that at a generic school like mine (UW) we don't get the same opportunities to learn how to learn like a lot of students at Evergreen. Why should every school be the same? why shouldn't public schools have more to offer? enrollment at evergreen keeps going up. it's overfilling. the popularity of the AWARD WINNING school is incredible. obviously people in this state support the school. The most money in the state is spent on the University of Washington. if any funding is needed to be cut. stop funding our football team or something.