A few days before staging an “active shooter drill” with Hanover police on a Friday afternoon in mid-July, Dartmouth sent out a campuswide email to assure people that they had nothing to fear.
The sharp cracking of gunfire emanating from Carpenter Hall, next to Baker-Berry Library, wouldn’t be real — only simulated to “help replicate real-time emergency response conditions.”
Dartmouth’s email, however, failed to mention the drill’s “storyline,” which begins with a “Trans-National Terrorist (TNT) representative” calling the president’s office during the night and leaving a threatening message.
“Jihad is imminent; no one including Dartmouth is safe from our reach,” the caller warned. “Today people will die.”
The explosive script (i.e. the acronym TNT) continues with “later that afternoon, a solo gunman will enter Carpenter Hall and begin shooting random people he encounters inside.”
Melodrama aside, the storyline raises a much larger question: Why did Dartmouth decide its “hostile intruder” needed to be Muslim. Why not a white male?
That would have been more accurate. (The average mass shooter in the U.S. is a white man around 30 years old, research shows.)
Instead Dartmouth chose a storyline that was thoroughly Islamophobic. The meaning of “Jihad” is already misunderstood by many people, arousing “images of sword- or gun-waving individuals or suicide bombers, bent on killing or getting killed,” argues the Council on American-Islamic Relations on its website.
Bringing Jihad into an active shooter drill only serves to fuel racism stoked by 9/11 that Muslims in the U.S. are confronted with constantly.
The Carpenter Hall scenario was spelled out in the “exercise plan” to be implemented by Dartmouth safety and security officers, along with 14 Hanover cops and other first-responders from the Upper Valley.
The plan — and its storyline — was distributed in advance to drill organizers and some participants, totaling about two dozen people in all.
An hour before the exercise was set to launch on July 18, Abdul Rahman Latif, the college’s Muslim chaplain, heard from distressed students who were privy to the scenario about to play out. Latif immediately contacted the safety and security department.
Apparently, he made a persuasive argument.
The “Jihad” plot was scrapped just before the 4½-hour drill got under way. (Latif wasn’t at his office when I stopped by this week, but others on campus confirmed the role he played in calmly bringing the drill’s leaders to their senses.)
If Dartmouth officials assumed they could escape their blunder unscathed, they were sadly mistaken.
Carpenter Hall is home to the college’s Art History Department. As department chairwoman at the time the drill was in its planning stages, Katie Hornstein was asked to sign off on the use of Carpenter Hall.
Hornstein and other art history professors didn’t participate in the drill, and it was only two days later that she learned about the original storyline. After I reached out to her this week, Hornstein shared an email that she sent to the college’s Office of Emergency Management, which was in charge of the drill, on July 21.
Hornstein didn’t mince words. The storyline is a “highly offensive and completely unnecessary fantasy that harms the Dartmouth community,” she wrote. “I am disgusted and ashamed that I was personally responsible for green lighting this exercise to occur in the spaces of the Art History Department.”
“We allowed you to use our spaces out of sense of collegiality and responsibility to campus safety; we wanted to contribute to that mission… Your decision to cast the shooter as a specifically Islamic terrorist contributes to negative stereotypes about Islam and is deeply offensive to our campus community, and especially to our Muslim students, faculty and staff.”
Along with Hornstein, I found two Dartmouth associate professors who were unafraid to talk about the harm created by the drill’s premise.
Golnar Nikpour and Anjuli Raza Kolb teach in the history and English departments, respectively. After hearing from students about what had happened, they co-authored a letter that they submitted to The Dartmouth, the college’s student newspaper, late this week.
The professors praised the students who spoke up and the Tucker Center for Spiritual and Ethical Life (Latif, the college’s Muslim chaplain, is the center’s associate director) for understanding the “gravity of the situation and push(ing) to change the script.”
Still, they “worry about the further erosion of trust that this latest episode engenders with those who already feel so unsafe.”
I met over coffee this week with Nikpour, who moved to the U.S. from Iran with her parents when she was 3-years-old. She told me students have come to her with questions about their student visas or with fears of federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, coming onto campus.
“I’m worried the most recent incident, in demonizing Muslims, will further erode the trust of those rendered vulnerable by this recent wave of xenophobia,” Nikpour said.
Dartmouth is now working to overcome its unforced error. Keysi Montas, director of safety and security and emergency operations, responded swiftly to Hornstein, offering his department’s “deepest apologies for this most regrettable mistake; that premise should not have been even part of our planning but was, unfortunately, copied and pasted from a third-party resource.”
Who was third party? The college hasn’t said.
Hanover Police Chief Jim Martin told me via email that his department was “not involved in developing the exercise storyline or scenario content.”
Montas is following up on Hornstein’s suggestion that the college try to learn from its mistake. In his email, Montas said Latif had agreed to provide his staff with “anti-Islamophobia training.”
It’s a start, but changing minds and beliefs in stereotypes is not as simple as hitting copy and paste.
