When controversial scholar Daniel Pipes recently addressed the Dartmouth community, Hanover Police and Safety and Security officials not only had to prepare to deal with protesters, but they also faced rumor of a possible terrorist activity.
The Search for International Terrorist Entities Institute, a terrorism watchdog group, uncovered the threats to Pipes' lecture and sent a memo to the event's organizers. The memo pointed to a troubling series of messages on tibyanpubs.com, an Islamist web-forum.
At Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., a similar danger prompted the Feb. 1 cancellation of a lecture by University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill. Churchill is notorious for having once referred to Sept. 11 victims as "little Eichmanns," likening them to the infamous Nazi official Adolf Eichmann who planned the logistics of the Holocaust.
According to Vige Barrie, Hamilton's director of media relations, the school received over 100 threats, which prompted safety concerns.
"Parents called and asked if we could guarantee protection," Barrie said, "and we couldn't."
At Dartmouth, the College works closely with Hanover Police officials when an event like the Pipes lecture is threatened, according to Daniel Nelson, the senior associate dean of the College.
"Any time there is a controversial speaker, we'd try to accommodate [security] as much as staffing will allow," Hanover Police Chief Nicholas Giaccone said.
According to Giaccone, there have been similar threats against guest speakers in the past.
Any decision to cancel a speaker rests on the number and kinds of threats, Giaccone said.
"Everything is circumstantially driven," Giaconne said.
"The director of the institute told us we should be moderately worried," Ilya Feoktistov '06, one of the event's organizers, said.
According to the memo, a tibyanpubs.com participant known as "Brother Mujadin" posted the time and place of the lecture and wrote: "This is a 40-minute drive from where I live and a 10 minute drive from where I work, the thoughts running through my head right now [sic]."
"Don't hesitate," another poster replied, "and don't spread your thoughts like this ... publish your wasiyya [Islamic will] here first."
Brother Mujadin responded, "I wasn't going to do anything violent, just disruptive."
Feoktistov said he contacted the Hanover Police, Safety and Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation upon receiving the memo.
Feoktistov is a staff columnist for The Dartmouth.
Although the Pipes lecture went on as scheduled, Hamilton cancelled Churchill's speech amid media scrutiny and worries about safety, a move that has provoked national debate on how terrorist threats impede freedom of speech on college campuses.
Jonathan Boyarin, a visiting professor in the Jewish studies program, expressed sympathy toward Dartmouth's safety officials but felt that freedom of expression should trump security concerns.
"In the long run, there is clearly a broader communal responsibility to increase rather than decrease safe space for the expression of difficult views, because shutting those views down is in no one's real long-term interest," Boyarin said.
Government professor Lucas Swaine said Dartmouth's small community makes regulating expression more necessary.
"The time, place and manner of expression," he said, "cannot be entirely unconstrained especially on college campuses where students live, study and would otherwise be captive audiences for potentially inflammatory expressive acts."
Rabbi Moshe Gray, who participated in organizing the Pipes lecture, declined to comment.
