While sitting in on the trial of two Dartmouth College student activists in Lebanon District Court this week, I was reminded of a comment that Laura Ingraham made on her Fox News program in 2018 about LeBron James after he dared to criticize then-President Donald Trump.
“Shut up and dribble,” scoffed Ingraham, a 1985 Dartmouth graduate and former editor of The Dartmouth Review.
Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock’s testimony and Hanover police prosecutor Mariana Pastore’s closing argument at Monday’s trial were along similar demeaning lines.
Shut up and go to class.
Those weren’t their precise words. But the underlying message was the same: This isn’t the Vietnam War era — questioning authority is no longer acceptable. College students need to mind their p’s and q’s.
At today’s Dartmouth, social activism is grudgingly tolerated — until it makes the powers that be start to sweat. The truth hurts.
“I was annoyed that they kept violating our policies,” Beilock said in response to a question defense attorney Kira Kelley asked her about a text she sent to a top lieutenant. The president’s vexation stemmed from students walking around a bonfire shouting “Free Palestine” without a “permit for protest.”
The nerve of students not to ask for the college’s permission before exercising their constitutional rights to freedom of speech and assembly.
Beilock’s don’t-question-my-authority way of running a college campus was in full display last October.
To bring attention to the plight of civilian Palestinians in the Israel-Hamas war and how Dartmouth’s investment policies could be contributing to the carnage in Gaza, a small group of students began protesting outside Parkhurst Hall, where Beilock has her office.
The peaceful demonstration went on for a week. By the eighth day, Beilock literally had seen enough.
When Kevin Engel and Roan Wade refused to leave a camping tent they’d occupied for several hours on the lawn outside Beilock’s office, the college called Hanover police. Beilock and Co. let town cops know that the two students needed to be hauled away in handcuffs for criminal trespass.
“We had always been clear the tents were a red line and a security risk,” Beilock testified on Monday.
Her security risk claim was a red herring. Engel and Wade were unarmed. The college, albeit months later, acknowledged “after discussions with (Engel and Wade) we now understand that they are consistently nonviolent activists.”
The text messages and emails that Kelley questioned Beilock about were among roughly 1,000 pages of documents that Judge Michael C. Mace required Dartmouth to give the defense a couple days before Monday’s court proceedings.
The trial ended without Mace rendering a decision or announcing when one could be expected.
No matter the outcome, Dartmouth has gotten its message across that it won’t permit dissent. (At least, not without a permit.)
Meanwhile Pastore has shown throughout that she’s willing to do the college’s bidding. After declining to talk publicly about the case for a year, she let loose in the trial’s final minutes.
“Being a member of the Dartmouth community is an incredible privilege,” Pastore told the judge.
Dartmouth students, such as Engel, 20, and Wade, 21, are not the “all-powerful individuals that they seemingly believe that they are,” she continued.
As a prosecutor, Pastore said she deals with “unrepresented individuals, many of whom are lacking teeth, many of whom can barely read… some don’t have running water.”
“I try to resolve issues as righteously as possible and to respect those people’s rights. But the notion that I should have to treat those people differently from these people is offensive.”
While interviewing Engel and Wade after their arrests, I learned they didn’t come from wealthy backgrounds. Both experienced homelessness in their early lives. They aren’t among the nearly 50% of Dartmouth students who come from families who can write checks for $90,000 or so a year to cover the costs of attending an elite school.
Like many students from families who aren’t in a position to offer financial support, Engel and Wade have worked multiple jobs to cover their living expenses.
If Kelley, a 2011 Hanover High School graduate, hadn’t stepped forward to represent them pro bono, they would have fallen into the same hole as many of the other defendants that Pastore prosecutes. Without an attorney, they’d have had little choice but to plead guilty, pay a fine and leave with a criminal record.
In her closing argument, Pastore said she offered Engel and Wade the same plea deal that she put on the table for the 55 people charged with criminal trespass following the May 1 peaceful pro-Palestinian demonstration on the Dartmouth Green. (The crackdown was another example of Beilock ruling the campus with an iron fist.) Pastore would place their cases “on file without finding” if they stayed out of legal trouble for nine months — starting with the time of their arrest. After demonstrating “good behavior,” the criminal trespass charge would be “permanently dismissed.”
But if the deal that Pastore offered Engel and Wade mirrored the one she offered the 55 people charged following the May 1 protest, they’d still be acknowledging guilt. The agreement’s fine print says defendants must refrain from committing “further offenses.” I read that to mean they must acknowledge their actions last October were a criminal offense.
Engel and Wade couldn’t agree to that. “Taking a plea deal and admitting guilt sets a dangerous precedent,” Wade told me. “It normalizes arresting people on college campuses for protesting.”
With Election Day around the corner, we are reminded that we live in far from normal times. It’s not the time for student activists to shut up.
Jim Kenyon can be reached at jkenyon@vnews.com.
