Reporting by our colleague Frances Mize in last weekend’s edition of the Valley News strongly suggests that Dartmouth students returned to campus last week harboring a healthy distrust of the college’s administration — as well they might. That skepticism should extend also to the leaders of their temporary hometown, Hanover.
College officials still have offered no convincing explanation for their harsh repression of a peaceful pro-Palestinian demonstration on the Green on May 1, which resulted in the arrest on charges of criminal trespass of 89 people — including 63 Dartmouth students — who were carted off in handcuffs for doing not much of anything besides exercising their free speech rights.
For its part, the town of Hanover has advanced no explanation at all for the role played in this fiasco by its police department, whose massive overreaction resulted in the summoning to the Green of law enforcement from all over the state, including a state police Special Operations Unit outfitted in riot gear that engaged in some rough-house tactics.
When residents sought answers at Town Meeting last spring, they were told that the Selectboard would hold a separate forum at a later time to address the issue. But a funny thing happened on the way to the forum: It somehow turned into a “listening session” during which residents could voice their concerns but which provided no information that shed light on decision-making by town officials. The timing of this listening session — at the height of vacation season and well before Dartmouth students returned to campus for the fall term — suggested strongly not a good faith effort to hear people out but a contrivance to limit participation.
As for Dartmouth, Mize reported that the college’s top brass sent out a campus-wide letter before classes began “to highlight one of the fundamental aspects of living and working in an academic community: our shared commitment to Dartmouth’s core values of freedom of expression and the respectful exchange of ideas.”
This no doubt constituted a preemptive strike aimed at heading off a renewal of protests this fall. But it also states a fundamental value of the liberal university. It is the academic equivalent of the marketplace-of-ideas theory, which holds that as long as free speech is guaranteed by a neutral arbitrator such as the university, good ideas will prevail over bad ones in a fair competition, thus leading to meaningful dialogue, heightened understanding, and an approach to Truth, with a capital T. (It also serves to channel dissent in safe directions — that is, safe for college officials who might have to answer to headline-hunting politicians for any upheaval.)
What at least some students perceive, though, is that not all ideas begin this supposed competition on an equal basis; some are handicapped from the start with political, cultural and social disadvantages that can be difficult to overcome.
More than that, universities are asking students to put their faith in a process instead of a result. But what the dissenting kids want is not institutional neutrality but moral clarity. They reasonably ask why, if the best ideas ultimately prevail, American weapons and investments are contributing to the horrific slaughter of innocents in Gaza, or why catastrophic climate change is not being urgently addressed by governments or in university portfolios.
Universities, especially elite ones such as Dartmouth, are in no position to answer such questions because of their own internal contradictions and conflicts. The billionaire donors who write the checks that make possible those amazing new campus buildings; the government contracts and grants on which the university’s research depends; the investments by which rich endowments continue to grow handsomely all have pressing claims on the institution’s attention. The institution cannot afford to have these claims jeopardized by students espousing ideas that these monied interests find abhorrent.
Mize described efforts at reconciliation such as President Sian Leah Beilock hosting lunches for interested students at Pine, the Hanover Inn’s upscale restaurant, as reported by the student newspaper. We suspect such efforts will be largely ineffectual unless accompanied by candid acknowledgment that the administration erred grievously in its over-the-top response to the May day demonstration.
In any case, Dartmouth students, or at least some portion of them, may derive an important lesson from this whole affair. A couple of generations ago, during the Vietnam era, young people were warned not to trust anybody over 30. Given what’s transpired since then, maybe that’s not such a bad rule of thumb. And as that earlier generation now hurtles toward demographic oblivion, some number realize that they can’t even trust themselves anymore — which may constitute enlightenment of sorts.