As one of the community members who joined the “Dartmouth Eats, Gaza Starves” procession of mourning during the President Sian Beilock’s cookout on the Dartmouth Green last week, I was pleased to see the Valley News’s thorough report. But it was far less pleasing to learn from it that Dartmouth’s intellectually hollow and morally disabling policy of “neutrality” and “restraint” was pushed so hard on new students during their orientation, apparently with no mention of the school’s various levels of complicity in the destruction of Palestinian culture and lives under Israel’s relentless attack.
It seems students and the community are now to understand that Beilock has redefined “neutrality” to include: 1) calling out the riot police to arrest 89 peaceful protesters and their community supporters for acting on their first amendment right to assembly and free speech; 2) threatening and punishing students for speaking their minds against genocide; 3) long delaying and then summarily dismissing with next to no comment the detailed, thoughtful and reasonable student led proposal for Dartmouth to divest from weapons manufacturers that supply Israel’s military; 4) ignoring without comment the hunger strike of students protesting rejection of the divestment proposal. Neutrality, then, means punishing and squelching free speech and hiding the school’s complicity in the nightmare students have been protesting.
I suppose the following from the Valley News’s report exemplifies “restraint” under current campus policy: “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.” When hard pressed or in doubt, the Dartmouth policy on political speech and controversy — and on the issue of the ongoing genocide in Palestine in particular — seems to be “Shut up, keep your head down, do what the seeming authority tells you to do and hope it’ll all go away someday . . . maybe.”
Hardly good advice for the young from their mentors or for a country struggling to resist the onset of sickening authoritarianism.