Evergreen: The College Without Grades

In nineteen sixty-seven, the Washington State Legislature authorized a new public four-year college in Thurston County. The enabling legislation required a campus of at least six hundred acres, making it then the largest college campus in the state. Classes began in the fall of nineteen seventy-one. The Evergreen State College opened with no academic departments, no letter grades, and no required majors. It has operated that way ever since.

At Evergreen, faculty and students design interdisciplinary programs together. Instead of a transcript full of course grades, students receive written evaluations from their instructors, and write self-assessments in return. The curriculum is organized around team-taught programs that cross disciplinary lines. A student might spend an entire year studying environmental science, literature, and political economy together because a group of faculty and students decided those subjects were genuinely connected and worth exploring in combination.

This was a deliberate choice, not an oversight. Evergreen was designed to be different. Its founding faculty drew on progressive education traditions and on the educational experiments of the nineteen sixties to build an institution that trusted students to shape their own intellectual lives rather than fitting them into predetermined tracks.

The practical effects were sometimes unexpected. The college attracted students who wanted to make things outside existing structures, students who were already questioning what institutions were for. It produced, among other things, a remarkable number of musicians, writers, and organizers. Calvin Johnson, who founded K Records, attended Evergreen. The riot grrrl movement had its roots there. Kurt Cobain crossed paths with musicians from Evergreen during the years he lived in Olympia.

What Evergreen built, deliberately, was a place where something new could start.