As the president argues here, a critical aspect of becoming an adult is accepting that we are bound by the rules of our community and that breaking those rules has consequences. However, rules are not written in stone; they are agreed-upon constructs that are subject to revision and reinterpretation, particularly when they fail to serve the common good or the cause of justice. Further, we always have a choice in how we enforce rules and punish those who break them. Here, and elsewhere in the president’s statement, rules and policies are given such a supreme and incontestable status that they appear beyond question, as if part of the nature of things: break rule, get consequences. Such rhetorical gestures to rules are often used to immunize the enforcers of rules from criticism: stating “you knew this was against the rules” serves only to underscore the rule itself, not explain why it is necessary, whether it is just, or if the punishment performed in its name was appropriate and wise. While rules must be enforced if they are to have power and influence, there are also important questions to consider about the purpose of punishment and the measure of its application. Certainly what happened to the protesters provides an opportunity to confront these questions as a community. To my mind, the president’s actions were a hysterical overreaction to the situation, and many people seem to share this view. ↩︎ ↩︎

When she states that she will “limit the time, place, and manner where protests can occur,” the president uses language that echoes landmark Supreme Court cases dealing with reasonable limits to free speech and assembly (for a local example, see Cox v. New Hampshire). However, if First Amendment case law is not a shared text with our student body (it isn’t), then the president’s words will likely be interpreted to mean that acts of protest and dissent on campus are things that must unconditionally conform to her authority. Further intensifying this interpretive possibility is that the president circulated these words in the hours after the appearance of riot police and mass arrests on our campus. These facts conspire to create a chilling atmosphere of intimidation and threat, where students fear speaking out on the events of the 1st (and perhaps others that are dear to them). In an era of creeping authoritarianism, militarized policing, and political violence, we think the president’s words and actions provide students with a wholly inappropriate lesson about the relationship between authority and political expression. A college dedicated to the liberal arts—the “practice of freedom”—must embody a much different message about the role of free speech, the right to assembly, and the nature of authority in a democracy. ↩︎

The president here conjures a parade of horribles that might occur or have occurred elsewhere. But policy and decisions can’t be made on the basis of phantoms and fears and slippery slopes. Because a thing happened elsewhere does not mean it will happen here; because something might occur, doesn’t mean it will. We have heard no reports of violence or threats on the part of the protesters, only their repeated commitment to avoid it. The only agents of violence that night were the police. Significantly, the president here offers a window into her thinking as she prepared a response to the protest in the days and hours before it occurred. When linked to the previous arrests in October, we think this demonstrates a disqualifying pattern of injudicious and fear-based thinking. Wise leaders prepare for many contingencies; Beilock, it seems, was unprepared for a peaceful one. ↩︎

The president claims that the right to free speech and assembly are important, but only if they do not disrupt “our amazing sense of place” or “the lived experience of our campus.” But lived experience and our sense of what is amazing are utterly subjective and impossibly vague terms, ones that cannot reasonably function as tests for determining whether a protest is, or is not, “disruptive.” The very ambiguity of these terms allows for a completely arbitrary regime of judgment by the administration on such matters. Furthermore, and this is key, peaceful disruption is precisely the point of civil disobedience: it produces a rupture within the everyday that suddenly wakens us from our dreamlike state to the division, inequality, and suffering that was all around us, but that we could not see. It poses the question: Is our sense that this place is amazing actually wrong? The recent protest asks us all to wake up and consider a number of critical issues: the role of policing and civil disobedience, the felt alienation of various groups in our community, the role Dartmouth’s investments play in global suffering, the justice of war, the corrosive effects of memory, the dangers of identity based reasoning, the wisdom of our leaders. These are difficult and complicated issues that, sadly, many of us would rather repress or ignore. The risks the protesters took to present us with this opportunity for reflection and dialogue were great; they were met with punitive force designed to return us all to the status quo—back to our beautiful dream. But removing a few tents does not nullify these problems and concerns; all it did was return us to a Potemkin campus safe for selfies, the bucolic backdrop for the return of well-healed students of yore who flew in on first class for one last Green Key. We fear that this is the “amazing sense of place” that the president tried to preserve on the 1st. ↩︎

We witnessed only one group “taking over Dartmouth’s shared spaces” through “exclusionary” and “intimidat[ing]” tactics: the heavily armed, specialized police forces in riot gear, pushing everyone into the street. In Beilock’s telling, the actions of the police were a restoration of equal access to a common space, resulting in a return of the necessary conditions for dialogue. But one may instead view this action as a disruption of our shared space—the violent preemption of one group’s voices because their “ideology” was deemed inconvenient. We are alarmed that the administration’s rationale for violent intervention and arrest amounts to an accusation of “precrime”: “I must end your protest because you may become violent or your message may possibly be viewed as hateful.” Hateful speech, threats, intimidation, and violence are unacceptable to our community, but so are flimsy arguments and the suppression of speech without actual incitement. We think it shameful that trustee and sitting governor Chris Sununu had already made up his mind that the protests were “pure hatred” and the result of “uneducated prejudice” before they even occurred; we find this especially troubling since he was almost certainly directly involved in the coordination of the police action on our campus. He further insults the intelligence of students and faculty by claiming that their considered views are based in false consciousness rooted in exposure to social media. Based on these remarks, we think it is unwise that he continue to serve in the role of trustee as he shares the same pattern of objectionable thinking and viewpoint discrimination expressed in the president’s message. ↩︎

The endowment, the college’s investments, donors, and trustees are not exempt from politics (indeed, one of our trustees is a politician). The categorical claim that they are, and must forever be so, merely states the administration’s wish to place these matters off limits, outside the arena of debate. But Dartmouth’s endowment is already a political statement: our investments reflect our values and preferences; they reveal what we will tolerate or ignore; they indicate who we support and oppose. We must acknowledge that financial instruments and relationships contain deep complexity; however, the administration’s warning that any conversation about the endowment will “silence debate” attempts to do precisely that. ↩︎

Those who advocate for “civil discussion” are frequently those who stand to gain the most from the preservation of the status quo. The president and her allies’ central value is comity, respect, dialogue. Calls for dialogue are often the way those in power insist that the ideas of the opposition not have any real consequences in the world. To this mindset, the college is just a convenient staging area for the polite sharing of discourse, not a crucible where reactions may occur that may have actual, kinetic effects in the real world. In short: pablum, not praxis. To those calling for civility, the ideas of others are of no consequence; they only pretend to take these ideas seriously and respectfully so that they may don the robes of democracy and respect; and if these ideas and values are kept from mattering or inciting action then nothing on campus will change, and the status quo will continue, and those who control things will maintain that control, which is their ultimate goal. The calls for civility are just polite warnings not to make trouble, not to disturb things. It is the voice of the highly educated conservative who is too skilled in euphemism to say something like: don’t make trouble or you’re asking for it. ↩︎