This story by Frances Mize was first published by the Valley News on May 1. It was republished by VTDigger the following morning, and updated at 8:09 p.m.
HANOVER — Dartmouth College administrators acted swiftly on Wednesday night when faced with a protest encampment similar to those established on campuses around the country amid unrest over the Israel-Hamas war.
At some colleges, demonstrations have stretched for days and devolved into violence and vandalism. In Hanover, an aggressive law enforcement response quickly wiped out the efforts at activism that college officials say ran afoul of rules against demonstrations.
Within two hours of a handful of tents being erected on the Dartmouth Green, authorities began the long process of arresting scores of peaceful protesters who did not comply with repeated warnings to disperse.
“Once tents were erected, Dartmouth Safety & Security made multiple announcements to participants that they must disperse, and they refused,” Hanover Police Chief Charlie Dennis said in a brief statement on Thursday morning. “Hanover Police along with the New Hampshire State Police made multiple announcements to disperse and while some chose to leave, many stayed.”
Assorted Upper Valley law enforcement agencies as well as state troopers descended on campus as the sun set. They assembled along College Street, across from hundreds of demonstrators who had been clustered on the opposite side of the Green for three hours. The officers included a phalanx from the Central New Hampshire Special Operations Unit, who wore helmets with face shields and carried batons.
At 8:45 p.m., backdropped by the flashing blue lights of police cruisers, the collective law enforcement might began to march across the Green to confront the protesters. With hundreds of students looking on and chanting from the sidewalks surrounding the scene, police started to detain demonstrators who refused to leave the Green around 9 p.m.
Three hours later, 90 people — including faculty, staff, students and Upper Valley residents — had been arrested and the tents had been torn down.
In a message to the college on Thursday, Dartmouth President Sian Beilock noted that students had been warned prior to Wednesday’s protest that it would violate campus regulations and could lead to arrests.
“When policies like these have been ignored on other campuses, hate and violence have thrived — events, like commencement, are canceled, instruction is forced to go remote, and, worst of all, abhorrent antisemitism and Islamophobia reign,” Beilock wrote.
The college’s shared spaces, such as the Green, need to remain welcoming for all students, Beilock said.
“We cannot let differences of opinion become an excuse for disrupting our amazing sense of place and the lived experience of our campus,” she said.
As of Wednesday, the “lived experience” of many of those on the Dartmouth campus now includes witnessing the mobilization of police against themselves or their peers. On Thursday, stories began to emerge of the some the individuals detained.
Among those was longtime Dartmouth history professor Annelise Orleck, who had videos of her arrest widely shared on social media. Orleck, 65, was held on the ground by a number of officers after being pulled from the group of protesters surrounding the encampment.
Orleck, in the midst of teaching two classes, has been banned from campus for six months for her role in the demonstration by order of the bail commissioner.
“Dartmouth had no intention of seeking Prof. Orleck’s exclusion from campus, and we will promptly request that any errors be corrected,” college spokesperson Jana Barnello wrote in an email.
Former Hanover resident Andrew Tefft said he was in town from Massachusetts visiting his father and was standing on one of the diagonal gravel paths on the Green when he was arrested.
Tefft said the encounter with the police left him with a broken shoulder.
“They tied the cuffs on, they kicked my legs out from under me,” Tefft, 45, said. “I was by myself. I think that’s why they went for me first. I just happened to walk up there at the wrong time.”
He said he was on the Green for less than two minutes.
A message left with Hanover Police late in the evening on Thursday requesting comment on the details of Tefft’s arrest was not returned by deadline.
The Dartmouth, a student-run newspaper, reported that two of its journalists, Charlotte Hampton and Alesandra Gonzales, were also arrested. Gonzales, a freshman, had been filming Orleck’s arrest, standing with the group of media personnel on the Green to the side of the encampment when she herself was grabbed by police, she said in an interview with the Valley News.
“Then I said, ‘Don’t take her, she’s a member of the press,’” Hampton said.
Then she was arrested too.
“We both have charges of criminal trespassing on our record, and at this point we’re hoping the college has our charges dropped,” said Hampton, a junior, adding that neither she nor Gonzales are allowed to enter Parkhurst, the administrative building, or step onto the Green until Aug. 5.
They have both been called to appear in Lebanon District Court in July.
‘Expressing viewpoints’
Around 5 p.m. on Wednesday, demonstrators poured out onto the Green, where Dartmouth Safety and Security officers as well as Hanover Police were already stationed.
A series of speakers laid out the tenets of the protest, which included: a call for divestment, dropping the charges of two students arrested in October for peacefully protesting, and demanding a response from the administration to the contract requests of unionized graduate student-workers, who had announced that morning that they would be going on strike.
When tents were pitched around 7 p.m., yellow slips of paper were quickly distributed among demonstrators issuing a warning, written under an emblem of the Dartmouth “lone pine,” reading: “You are in violation of Dartmouth college policy. Please cease the disruption immediately and comply with college policy.”
The slip notated a list of three allowable activities: “speech,” “expressing viewpoints” and “holding signs in hands.”
Among the 13 “prohibited items and activities” were “amplified sound,” “tents of any kind,” “unattended signs,” “structures of any type” and “disruptive behavior.”
If found “engaging in prohibited activities,” consequences could include “arrest for criminal trespass.”
Some of the students off to the side observing the protest did not share its sentiments, particularly concerning Israel and Gaza.
“The ‘river to the sea’ stuff is pretty hateful,” said Jacob Parkman, a freshman. “There are legitimate reasons to criticize Israel, but on campus the atmosphere hasn’t been great. This doesn’t help. It’s making things more inflamed.”
Meanwhile, Calvin George, a protest organizer, was engaged in deliberations with Vice President for Government and Community Relations Emma Wolfe and Associate Dean for Student Life Eric Ramsey, who were making a final-hour plea for the students to abstain from establishing an encampment. “They’re trying to tie us in bureaucratic knots,” George said Wednesday night.
“We would like a vote (on divestment) by the board of trustees, regardless of what the president thinks,” George added.
Between protesters and onlookers, there were an estimated 1,500 people congregated on the roads around the Green, though only those physically on the Green faced arrest.
As the process of detaining the protesters dragged on Wednesday night, the college allowed vans belonging to the Dartmouth Outing Club to be used to haul off those that were arrested. They were processed at police stations in Hanover, Lebanon, Haverhill and even Manchester, and had to pay a $40 bail charge to be released.
In a statement on Thursday morning, the Hanover Police Department confirmed the 90 arrests, adding that the event required a multi-agency response, as well as assistance from the special operations unit, “to ensure community safety.”
‘Choking under pressure’
Wednesday’s demonstration comes in the wake of larger campus protests across the country. But Dartmouth has its own particular history.
More than five months before students were being arrested en masse across the country, two at the college were detained by Hanover Police and charged with misdemeanor criminal trespassing. The arrests of Kevin Engel, a freshman, and Roan Wade, a junior — who were in a tent for about six hours in front of the main administrative building asking the college to answer to a list of demands known as the Dartmouth New Deal — drew pointed criticism from students, faculty, staff and community members.
Calls to Dartmouth to signal to the prosecutors to drop the charges led to a 10-day hunger strike in February, and has kept an attitude of dissent on simmer for months.
Engel and Wade’s names were hanging in the air during Wednesday’s protests, with demonstrators chanting a refrain familiar to those who have been attending the gatherings in the wake of their arrests: “Kevin, Kevin don’t back down. Drop the goddamn charges now,” and “Roan, Roan, don’t arrest her. Beilock’s choking under pressure.”
On Monday, Dartmouth postponed a lecture entitled “The maternal-child health impact of the war on Gaza,” to be delivered by Dr. Alice Rothchild later in May. Rothchild was invited to campus by faculty from the college and the Geisel School of Medicine.
“The messaging wasn’t really clear,” Rothchild said of the postponement. “It was more that this was a time they didn’t want someone like me on their campus, but that wasn’t exactly their wording.”
In an email, Barnello, the college spokesperson, wrote that the delay was due to “scheduling changes on the speaker’s East Coast tour.”
“That’s not true,” Rothchild said in a phone interview. “They asked to postpone it.”
In advance of the encampment, Provost David Kotz sent out an email to campus on Wednesday morning: “As the number of protests and related encampments has increased at colleges and universities across the country, Dartmouth remains deeply committed to dialogue across difference and open and willing to engage in conversation on difficult topics.”
“At the same time,” the message continued, citing campus policy, “we ‘may place limitations on the time, place, and manner of any speaker event, protest, or demonstration’ if it interferes with core educational or administrative functions of the institution.”
“At Dartmouth, we are cultivating and building on a culture of respect, dialogue, and understanding,” Kotz wrote, adding that the college intends to “preserve in-person classes, access to Dartmouth spaces, and traditional spring events,” unlike the disruption caused by similar encampments in recent weeks across the country.
The morning after
As the dust settled on the night’s events, a group of about 100 faculty, staff and students gathered in a circle on the Green once more on Thursday in solidarity with those arrested.
“Hands off our students,” some shouted, as a petition circulated in an effort to gather enough signatures to call an emergency faculty meeting on Monday.
The goals of the meeting, the petition notes, would be to address the administration’s “use of excessive force” on Wednesday and “demand the immediate lifting of any total or partial campus bans, unjust academic consequences, and legal charges” for any arrested students, faculty and staff.
The “overreaction to the peaceful protest,” it reads, “represents an alarming escalation in administrative and police aggression.”
Additionally, according to an email shared with the Valley News from the college’s Dean of Faculty Elizabeth Smith, Beilock requested a “Zoom meeting of all department, program, and committee chairs (Thursday) at 3 p.m. to discuss last night’s events, answer questions, and consider how we can support our community.”
Josh Paul, a former bureau director for the U.S. Department of State, was scheduled to hold a panel discussion entitled “Descent and Diplomacy” at Dartmouth on Thursday. Paul canceled the event following Dartmouth’s response to the demonstration. He wrote on Facebook that he arrived to find “a peaceful group of students faced off by a line of riot police.”
“As I have watched tonight, I have seen a police snatch squad” grab demonstrators “one-by-one, and haul them off, as the riot police close the line behind them,” Paul wrote. “In these circumstances, it seems I gravely misjudged Dartmouth’s commitment to free and constructive dialogue, and it would not be appropriate to proceed with a panel tomorrow on democratic dissent.”
Following Thursday’s gathering, Udi Greenberg, a Dartmouth history professor, recalled an extended protest during the Occupy Wall Street movement in the early 2010s. Back then, he said, students camped out for months in front of college buildings.
“The administration was able to accommodate it, contain it,” Greenberg said. “They recognized the importance of free speech and engagement. No one even considered calling the police.”
The arrests of Wednesday night are “a radical deviation from decades of policy,” Greenberg said. “It’s scandalous.”
From inside the circle, Zeynep Bayirtepe, a sophomore from Turkey, described to her professors and her peers that the past 24 hours had been some of her most isolating at Dartmouth — as well as some of her proudest.
“This is to show that Dartmouth can be much more than their ‘amazing campus experience,’” Bayirtepe said.
“This is our campus, our Green, and our time to talk.”
