Last month, the Black Alumni of Dartmouth Association sent out an email to its mailing list of about 4,000 members disputing the College’s campus-wide email account of a May 28 sit-in at Parkhurst Hall. BADA raised a broader concern about a “steady erosion of trust within the Dartmouth community” and a “failure by the administration and trustees to engage in true community building.”
“Last week, I was asked to forward you an email from the College regarding a student ‘disruption at Parkhurst,’” the email reads. “However, after seeing a video of one of the students being knocked to the ground — an image that didn’t align with the College’s statement, I felt it was more appropriate to provide you with the students’ statements in order for you to have a better perspective to form your own opinion.”
Later that day, June 2, the College temporarily suspended BADA President Maria Cole ’84 and the BADA executive committee’s access to BADA’s email account, citing “inaccuracies in the message.”
Cole said she was prepared to write an email addressing campus culture prior to the sit-in. The administration’s response to the protest, she said, deepened her existing concerns.
“That is, we do not trust you, and if you are sending out misinformation, incomplete information or mischaracterizing what students are doing, it should be concerning to all of us,” Cole said.
Founded in 1972, BADA is one of Dartmouth’s largest and most prominent affiliated alumni groups, which are organized around shared identities, and acts as a conduit for mentorship and community, according to their website.
Following a request for comment, the College shared communications between the Office of Alumni Relations, who was responsible for the email suspension, and BADA, which has about 4,000 members on its mailing list.
In an email from Alumni Relations to BADA on June 2, vice president for alumni relations Cheryl Bascomb ’82 and chief advancement officer Ann Root Keith wrote that they were “disappointed” that BADA presented “inaccurate information” over the “firsthand accounts of the staff in the room during these unsettling events.”
“As we would for any organization in this context, according to policy, we suspended access to the BADA email system while we assessed the inaccuracies in the message and the use of Dartmouth’s platform and data,” Bascomb and Root Keith wrote.
According to a June 3 email from Alumni Relations to BADA, Alumni Relations had a “productive conversation” with Cole, who wrote the email, and restored email access that day.
“The decision to temporarily pause access was consistent with Dartmouth policy and past practice when there are questions about the appropriate use of Dartmouth email by a volunteer,” Bascomb and Root Keith wrote.
In an interview, Cole said the College assumed she did not check with her board before sending the email and had gone “rogue,” which she said is not true. Cole said she communicates regularly with the BADA leadership team, and that they had approved every word of the email.
“I asked specifically what were policy infractions that we committed that caused it to be suspended,” she said.
College spokesperson Jana Barnello emphasized that the College only suspended a select group’s access to the email.
“Alumni Relations suspended access to the email platform account of Cole and the BADA executive committee for violating our alumni volunteer policy as individuals,” she said. “Suspending individual access for violating policy is an important distinction to understand because we did not take down, suspend, or change BADA’s account in any way nor its ability to send and receive messages.”
On the day of the sit-in, Cole said she had viewed videos that showed what was happening inside Parkhurst, including a video which she describes as showing one of the protesters being knocked to the ground.
Cole also received statements from some of the protesters. The next day she received an email from alumni affairs that asked her to distribute a letter from the deans to her mailing list.
The deans’ email alleged protesters were “threatening harm” and that a president’s staff member and a Safety and Security officer “were hurt during the confrontations.”
“I read the email and said, ‘this doesn’t look anything like what I saw in the video,’” Cole said. “So, what I said [in my email] was ‘this is what the College wanted me to send you, I saw a video that didn’t align, here is what the students said about that experience. You decide for yourself.’”
Cole added that The Dartmouth’s reporting, published the day after she sent her email, on a letter from all six House professors to top administrators alleging the College had mischaracterized the protest “supported” her email.
Cole said her concerns go beyond what she sees as the administration’s mischaracterization of student protesters and pointed to a series of “moral questions” related to dialogue and trust.
“How do we create community among differences when we’re shutting down debate, when there’s no longer trust, when people are concerned, and ideas are not clearly articulated,” Cole said.
The concerns stretch back over a year. Cole said she is inspired by Dartmouth’s history of protest and the efforts by alumni that have made Dartmouth a better place, especially for marginalized students.
Last year, when BADA held its annual meeting with admitted students, they discussed Dartmouth's history of anti-apartheid protests, Cole said.
“Students coming here were asking, ‘Are we going to be safe?’” Cole recounted. “One of my friends who was on the call, who participated in those protests [against apartheid] said, ‘No place is perfect but here we protect each other, we look out for each other.’”
A week later, 89 people were arrested during a pro-Palestinian protest on the Green. Cole saw the administration’s response as going against what she believes Dartmouth stands for.
“The night of May 1, 2024, and the morning of May 2, when those riot police were called to campus and 89 people were arrested — my alumni were very upset,” Cole said.
That frustration snowballed over time, she said.
This year, faculty and alumni generated separate petitions asking the College to sign on to an April 22 letter by the American Association of Colleges and Universities, signed by 659 colleges and universities, against federal overreach into higher education.
Cole said she was getting emails from her members, expressing concerns about Beilock’s decision not to sign the letter and urging BADA to make a statement. Cole was unsatisfied with Beilock’s explanation of why she wasn’t signing the letter.
“There’s a moral clarity around it in other conversations,” Cole said. “To say, first, you’re just not signing it because you don’t sign letters – and then you say you don’t sign letters that you didn’t write – isn’t addressing the real concerns that faculty and alumni have.”
On April 25, the College removed, and then restored, its main diversity and inclusion web page from its website. College spokesperson Kathryn Kennedy told The Dartmouth that changes to the page “will simply reflect that we do not practice illegal DEI at Dartmouth, and our programs have consistently been open to all.”
Hearing the College talking about “illegal DEI,” Cole said, raised “concern about what that means regarding our commitment as an organization to diversity” and worries that the administration’s actions will “adversely affect marginalized people the most.”
During an alumni council meeting on May 8 and 9, alumni brought several of these concerns to the trustees. One alumnus, Cole recounted, told the board, “‘We don’t trust you. So what are you going to do to address the trust?’”
The answer that the trustees gave was they need to communicate more, Cole said.
“I would suggest that you don’t need to communicate more; you need to listen more, because listening is when you discover that people are concerned, and a record number of alumni are concerned,” she said. “And the students who responded to the newspaper survey are concerned.”
Cole linked to The Dartmouth’s survey in her June 2 email, which reported that two-thirds of student respondents said they do not feel protected by the College from external prosecution for expressing their opinions.
In their June 2 email to BADA, Bascomb and Root Keith alleged the data was “not accurate” because it had a 4.7% response rate. Cole pushed back, noting that even one student not feeling safe is a cause for concern, and that the data was backed up by her conversations with students.
The BADA email also linked to a letter from the alumni council referencing a “dramatic rise” in feedback submitted through the alumni liaison committee, from 13 submissions in a previous quarter to over 650 in April alone.
“While we know there is support for the administration’s current approach, the responses expressing that sentiment represent only 3 to 4% of the 650+ submissions,” the alumni council letter reads. “The overwhelming majority reflect deep frustration and disappointment.”
Cole said in the interview that the alumni responses are an indication that alumni aren’t particularly divided in their disapproval of the administration’s actions.
“We’re always told, ‘Well, some people agree with us, some people don’t,’” Cole said. “And in this case, that’s just simply not true.”
Kent Friel ‘26 is an executive editor at The Dartmouth.