HANOVER — Dressed in black, a single-file line of about 20 protesters walked around the Dartmouth Green during the college’s annual first day of class cookout on Monday.
As thousands of students passed through between classes — basking in the midday sun with burgers, salads and ice-cold drinks — the group of community members and students carried empty pots and banners, painted with “Dartmouth Eats, Gaza Starves.”
“The contrast is stark,” said protest organizer Geoffrey Gardner, 82, from Bradford, Vt., who works with the Upper Valley Affinity Group, which advocates for environmental and social justice.
The protest largely aimed to show support for those arrested, suspended or otherwise affected by the Dartmouth administration’s disciplinary action against past campus demonstrators.
“We’re really here as community members who support the students, (…) faculty and staff, who take positions against the genocide in Gaza,” Gardner said, “and who have been under threat (and) made to suffer by Dartmouth College because of their politics and the positions they take.”
The protesters were also advocating for Dartmouth Divest for Palestine’s proposal, which calls for Dartmouth to divest from six “weapons manufacturers that materially enable the Israeli apartheid regime and occupation of Palestine,” the proposal states.
The six companies listed are Boeing, BAE Systems, L3 Harris Technologies, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and RTX Corp.
Monday’s protest was part of the continued response to the mass arrests of 89 students and community members on May 1, 2024. Those gathered were engaged in a peaceful protest on the Green when they were arrested for criminal trespassing by police in riot gear. President Sian Leah Beilock handling of the incident came under scrutiny.
Karen Bixler, 83, from Bethel, who was at the May 1, 2024 protest, mentioned her “disgust” with “Beilock’s continual refusal to negotiate with students over their demands.”
Beilock was present at Monday’s event, but deferred questions to her chief of staff, Zoya Chhabra. Chhabra deferred questions to an email address for Jana Barnello, a college spokeswoman, who declined to comment.
On Monday, the few participating Dartmouth students, one of which was suspended last spring, said they saw it as an opportunity to show incoming students the broader legacy of student movements on campus.
Last spring, Dartmouth’s Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility, which advises the college on its investments related to social issues, rejected the divestment proposal put forward by Dartmouth Divest for Palestine.
This rejection prompted a sit-in at Dartmouth administration’s Parkhurst Hall, in which about a dozen demonstrators with concealed faces wrote chalk messages in the building and flew two Palestinian flags from windows.
Two students who supported the proposal were suspended following the sit-in for their continued advocacy, said Roan Wade, one of the two suspended. (Wade also was arrested in October 2023 for trespassing on the lawn of Parkhurst Hall in an encampment and was sentenced to community service in February for that transgression.)
Now back on campus, Wade’s credits for last spring must be repeated without financial aid, including a previously-approved studio art honors thesis. Wade still intends to graduate after the upcoming academic year.
Wade said that Monday’s protest was focused on “educating students about the last two years of organizing — and decades before then — at Dartmouth.”
Of the first-year students in attendance Monday, some were more aware than other about the circumstances around the May 2024 arrests and the continued protests last year.
Micah Schlotec, a first-year student from Duluth, Minn., first learned about the May 1 protest during an admitted student visit in April when he saw chalk on the sidewalk that directed him to student newspaper articles about the 89 arrests.
“Most of what I’d heard about Dartmouth was, you know, good things,” Schlotec said. “It was a little bit of a reality check.”
Other first-year students said they supported Beilock’s actions over the past two years, especially her decision for Dartmouth to follow a policy of “institutional restraint” on hot-button political issues such as the war in Gaza.
“I think it’s great that the college is staying unbiased in the conflict,” said first-year student Jack Graham from Chicago. “I think the president is setting a good example for how to have calm public discourse.”
Many first-years were only vaguely aware of the situation around the May 2024 police response.
“I was pretty surprised to hear that there were arrests,” said Alice Zhang, a first-year student from Pensacola, Florida. Sitting on the grass next to her, her friend Chelsea Ferguson agreed and added, “Other than that, I’m not really informed about it.”
Zhang and Ferguson both said they supported the institutional restraint policy because a non-neutral institution would discourage those who disagree from speaking up.
However, some see more to the information given during the first few days on campus.
“It’s actually been really interesting to go through orientation,” said Trace Ribble, a first-year student from Oklahoma. “Because to my understanding, (…) there wasn’t such an emphasis on learning how to protest, and also on Dartmouth being such an apolitical institution. They’ve really pushed that on our orientation this year.”