By Lisa Pemberton

The Olympian

The recent student unrest and its aftermath at The Evergreen State College in Olympia is the subject of a piece in the most recent edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education.

“A Radical College’s Public Meltdown,” published Friday, goes behind the scenes of the protests, threats and claims of institutional racism that rocked the campus last school year.

The story states that Evergreen hired a crisis-management firm over the summer to help prepare for a major drop in student enrollment. It also talks about how college president George Bridges, who received harsh criticism from allover the country on the way he handled the events, is coping with everything.

Bridges, who has been at the college’s helm since Oct. 1, 2015, said during the summer he began feeling broken, and was having trouble thinking through problems, making decisions and staying upbeat.

“Something wasn’t working quite right,” Bridges said in the publication. “I just didn’t feel right.”

The story states that Bridges started talking to a psychologist, and is still working it out.

“It’s the exposure of your personal character to vilification that is perhaps the hardest piece,” Bridges said. “That’s where the trauma comes from — for me at least. It wasn’t the students. I really believe that.”