As the police arrested student protesters at Dartmouth College this month, a 65-year-old professor ended up on the ground. Two student journalists, reporting that night, ended up being arrested themselves. A bystander, visiting his father who lives near Dartmouth, found himself with a fractured shoulder. That was some of the collateral damage after Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock moved quickly to authorized the police action on May 1 to clear an encampment that students had, just two hours earlier, pitched on the college green, the New York Times reports. Beilock, a cognitive scientist who studies why people choke under pressure, has been facing a campus uproar ever since. Presidents have faced a platter of unappealing choices in handling the student encampments, which have popped up all over the country to protest Israel’s war in Gaza. Dartmouth has stood out for its almost instantaneous response to a nonviolent protest.
Dartmouth students erected the tents at about 6:45 p.m., protectively surrounded by more than a hundred supporters, linking arms. After warning students to leave, campus safety officials deferred to the Hanover Police Department, the New Hampshire State Police, and other local agencies. Arrests began around 8:50 p.m. In an email the day after the arrests, Beilock said that allowing the university’s shared spaces to be taken over for ideological reasons is “exclusionary at best and, at its worst, as we have seen on other campuses in recent days, can turn quickly into hateful intimidation where Jewish students feel unsafe.” “We’re supposed to be a living example for how we manage divisive topics, and the most important thing in this process is that we don’t engage each other as enemies,” said history Prof. Udi Greenberg. “Sending the police on protesters is the exact opposite of engaging each other in good faith.”