‘A redefinition of civil disobedience’: Dartmouth’s crackdown with riot police was far worse than the protest
Jeff Sharlet, a Dartmouth professor, on how the college ‘swatted themselves’ sending in special response police unit to arrest pro-Palestinian protesters
A member of New Hampshire state riot police on campus at Dartmouth College May 1. Riot police, including the state’s Special Event Response Team, were called in to evict a pro-Palestinian encampment on campus. Photo by Jeff Sharlet
Deputy Opinion Editor Nora Berman May 8, 2024
Dartmouth College, with about 6,700 students, is the smallest of the eight schools in the Ivy League, and one of the most geographically remote. Growing up nearby, it was guaranteed I’d run into someone I knew crossing Dartmouth Green, the central campus lawn in Hanover, New Hampshire.
That’s why it was especially shocking to see armed police officers and armored police vehicles descend onto that green last week to remove an encampment of pro-Palestinian protesters at the request of Dartmouth’s president, Sian Leah Beilock. The response included officers from the Hanover Police Department and the state police Special Event Response Team, which — like the more familiar Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) units — carry special tactical gear and are generally called in to respond to high risk, volatile situations. Officers arrested 90 people on the Green, including students and a professor of Jewish studies, Annelise Orleck, who had joined the protest.
Dartmouth’s protesters did not occupy a building, as did their counterparts at Columbia. Nor were they attacked by pro-Israel counterprotesters, like the encampment at UCLA. But Dartmouth, which had won plaudits last fall for its nuanced response to the Oct. 7 attack and its aftermath, nonetheless drew sharp criticism for calling in the police so quickly within hours of protesters first setting up their tents.
Among those critics was Jeff Sharlet, an acclaimed author and journalist who teaches writing at Dartmouth and rushed to the protest site as the police descended. I spoke to Sharlet, who has written about the rise of fascism in America during the presidency of Donald J. Trump, about what the crackdown on protests at Dartmouth and other campuses portends for the future. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The impression from the outside is that it’s been relatively quiet at Dartmouth over the past seven months, and that they’ve handled the post Oct. 7 landscape relatively well compared to other colleges and universities.
I mean, Dartmouth has been relatively quiet for decades. It’s fair to say that it’s not the most engaged campus, and my impression is that apathy is stronger now.
There were, however, two Dartmouth students arrested back in October. They had set up a protest outside Beilock’s office, which, when I saw it, actually acknowledged both Palestinian and Israeli death. They were told to leave. And apparently, at one point, either in a document or somewhere else, a phrase was used by these two students that “If some responses are not forthcoming, further physical action will happen,” which the college then used as justification to have them arrested.
The college later acknowledged that construing this statement about further physical action from these students as a threat of violence was a real reach. Yet the charges and trial are still ongoing.
Can you walk me through a timeline of the day the encampment was set up and the riot police were called?
The student protesters had sent a press release to a local television station, WMUR, about the encampment. The college immediately sent out an email to everybody threatening expulsion and legal action if there was a protest.
Student protesters were told that there would be “no toleration of any encampment whatsoever.”
I think that the protest would have been so much tinier if the administration had not sent out that letter. A lot of students were really upset. They were saying “What the hell? We haven’t said anything. But if we do say something, we can be expelled.”
I asked Beilock when we spoke privately after the arrests what her response was to the students’ demands. She wouldn’t tell me. She would just keep telling them that the one thing that wasn’t acceptable was to make an encampment.
This isn’t really a dialogue. A dialogue is not: “We demand this.” Answer: “If you do an encampment, I’ll arrest you.”
Their demands were wanting transparency over Dartmouth’s financial investments related to Israel?
They were pretty broad. But they’re students. You learn as you go, you do a draft. That’s the dialogue.
What happened on campus is not how we run our classroom. If a student raises their hand, and even if I know that this student from previous experience is going to say something that is not going to be terribly constructive, I do not preemptively say “No.” I let them say their piece. With the university’s response to these protests, it’s like someone raises their hand and I tackle them.
That’s kind of a nice metaphor for this whole thing: Student protesters raising their hands and getting tackled.
My understanding is that this was the quickest response by a campus to arrest protesters. I fear that what will happen is that this will inadvertently become a precedent.
Pomona also had a pre-planned response: They knew the protests were coming, and they called the cops. But that was different because the students there were occupying a building, a totally different level of civil disobedience.
You have to understand the geography of the Dartmouth Green where this student encampment was. It took up less than the space of a frisbee game. If you drove by at night, you wouldn’t have noticed it.
I was driving by around 5:30 p.m., before the encampment tents were set up, when protesters were giving speeches. It was peaceful to the point of dull. The speaker was talking about tikkun olam.
How many people approximately would you say there were?
Maybe a couple hundred.
The encampment tents went up around 6:45 p.m. And the earliest I can pin it is a student, by 7 p.m., told me that she saw one of the two militarized units that ultimately came to campus staging nearby.
Some of my campus colleagues have been saying, “They didn’t have to do that,” i.e. bringing in guns on campus. No. Once you call in SWAT, that’s what you’re getting. They’re there because they’re called in for a violent situation, and they don’t come to a violent situation without guns. That’s why they shouldn’t be there. Dartmouth swatted itself.
I arrived around 8 p.m. and stood with the press and watched. My colleague Annelise Orleck had just been arrested. The line was already in place of what was identified to me by a state trooper as the New Hampshire Special Event Response Team. There were fully armored riot cops carrying long guns and batons. They had told the press I’d spoken to that if the press approached the line, they would be arrested.
The state police had completely displaced the local police. We also don’t know what happened to Dartmouth’s Safety and Security officers.
Can you describe the encampment layout?
There was a small encampment, and then there was a ring of students surrounding it. And then behind that on the Green sort of an arc of maybe a few hundred students, and then beyond that on the sidewalks and across the street, more of them. They were cheering, some had brought Keystone Light beer while they watched.
I heard a little bit of chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which I don’t find inclusive, but in general, the chants were not out of control.
You didn’t hear “Globalize the intifada” or anything like that?
The most militant chant you heard with any regularity was “Free Palestine.” I didn’t hear anything like, you know, “F*** Zionists” or anything like that. Then the riot police started going three or four at a time and arresting people. In total they arrested 90 people.
No students crossed the line, no students antagonized the riot police. There was one empty water bottle that was thrown, although I’m not sure if it was thrown or simply tossed in the air as a student was getting grabbed.
Before the Dartmouth encampment, you had written on X (formerly Twitter) about the broader situation, saying, “The massive police escalation is another stage of what could become full collapse of U.S. democracy.” How do you see this connected to the rise of fascism in America that you’ve written so extensively about?
This Dartmouth protest was the protest that college presidents said they could abide. The students here said, “We can’t do obstruction, we can’t do disruption. We can’t do hate speech.” All of which were not definitive of, but have been present, at other protests.
It was the nerdiest Dartmouth protest you can imagine. And the fact that the students met, basically, a paramilitary force, is just unbelievable.
Now the precedent is: You find out there’s a protest, you call the cops in ahead of time. This is a redefinition of civil disobedience. It’s in keeping with the very Trumpish mood of the time. There used to be a political paradigm of what government could do and how it could do it, and how you could tell stories about it. The paradigm now is Trumpism.
I read Beilock’s statement, where she essentially was saying, “I just called the police and I didn’t know that they were going to come with all of this riot gear and stuff.”
I think the response to Beilock saying, “We didn’t do this” is: You responded immediately with law enforcement to speech, to non-threatening speech.
And if you then say we’re not responsible for what happens after that, what if it had escalated to the National Guard? Once you call the cops, you don’t get to decide what happens after that.
When the police were called in at Columbia the second time, it was because protesters had occupied a building. They had temporarily held facility workers hostage. Now, the university has canceled commencement and said the police will be on campus through May 17. How do you see the situations at Columbia and Dartmouth as different?
For both presidents, if you can’t morally afford to take a hit to your endowment and say, “Hey, we need to remain true to our educational institutions, but No. 1 priority is that we’ve got to keep our students safe,” then what are you doing? Instead, they called the SWAT team on their students: They called up armored police vehicles and guys with guns and batons, and raised the threat level to everybody.
I want fellow Jews to understand that being scared is one thing. But supporting the militarization of our campuses makes it dangerous, because once you bring those guys with guns on campus, who knows where that goes? When they told everyone on the green that if they stayed, they could be arrested, they weren’t saying, “Only pro-Palestinian protesters will be arrested.”
Do you think this would have happened in a pre-Trump era?
No, I don’t.
Before Trump, I don’t think campuses would react this way. I’d like to think there would have been a broad protest movement, but I do not think it would include nearly as much of the consciously antisemitic and or even the unwittingly antisemitic stuff.
We’re in an illiberal moment around the world. There’s the growing grief and panic in the world over things like the climate crisis, and people are starting to realize that liberalism is not up to the task.
If you go back before Trump, that was a time when far more people thought like Barack Obama. Even if people didn’t like Barack Obama, you still thought maybe the system could work. Maybe we had seen one thing that we thought was impossible happen. Maybe we could keep doing that. And I think what Trumpism has done is has flattened us into a presentism, a binary.
You also said something on X recently to the effect of: “I thought these protests didn’t matter. But maybe they actually do now.”
I think there is something significant about seeing these Palestinians in Gaza, saying thank you to these college kids for their support. That breaks my heart. I think if all you did was that, you have done a great deed in the world, if you gave that person even a little second of solace. But politically, no, they’re not doing much.
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