Students at Dartmouth are once again being threatened with punishment for standing up against injustice. The Valley News reported last week that protests have already broken out over the administration’s handling of the Gaza conflict and calls to divest from weapons manufacturers. Instead of listening, it seems that the school is trying to silence them, with College President Sian Leah Beilock telling students that the College is “not a political organization.”
That may protect administrators in the short term, but history will remember who had the courage to speak.
When I first came to Dartmouth in 1992, the Cold War had just ended. A book by Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History and the Last Man,” was everywhere, arguing that democracy had won and humanity’s struggles were basically over. Politics felt distant, and I focused on my classes and my friends, not on movements or causes.
Looking back in hindsight, it is clear how naïve Fukuyama was. Democracy is now under assault, and history is once again upon us. We face the question of whether young people can speak honestly about injustice without fear; these battles today are every bit as important and defining as the great battles that shaped earlier generations.
Dartmouth students have always been part of these fights. In the 1960s, students here and across the country pushed back against the Vietnam War. In the 1980s, they called for divestment from South Africa’s apartheid regime. In both cases, they were told they were wrong, that they were being disruptive, that they didn’t understand how the world really worked. In both cases, time proved the students right.
This is precisely what is happening again. The students protesting on the Green today are following in that same tradition. They refuse to be quiet, even when administrators threaten them. They are exercising a moral clarity that deserves respect. What they are asking for is not radical. They want their institution to stop profiting from companies that arm and perpetuate one of the longest and bloodiest conflicts in modern history. They want their college to live up to the values it claims to teach in classrooms like reason, justice, and humanity.
The stakes extend far beyond campus. Congress continues to approve billions for policies that deepen occupation and despair in Gaza, while universities punish students in the U.S. for speaking out against it. That is a betrayal of the principles we claim to believe in. You cannot champion democracy abroad while crushing dissent at home.
Even Dartmouth’s own alumni are outraged. Robert Reich ’68 recently gave President Sian Beilock his “Neville Chamberlain Award” for appeasement, pointing out that she has chosen to give in rather than defend students’ rights. When many alumni, faculty and students say the administration is failing, it is more than a campus dispute. It is a sign that a college once proud of free inquiry is drifting away from it.
I’m an Irish American; my father’s ancestors came from Ireland. Ireland and the Irish people have deep sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians. Ireland was colonized and harshly oppressed by the English for hundreds of years, just as the Palestinians are colonized and harshly oppressed now. Yet, that conflict between the Irish and English over land and religion, so similar to the current conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, is no longer violent.
What brought an end to most of the violence in the southern part of Ireland? The Irish got a homeland of their own.
The lesson of Ireland is one the world should not ignore. When people are denied self-determination, when they are treated as second-class citizens in their own land, resentment festers and violence erupts. When people finally achieve dignity and recognition, peace has a chance. The entire world, except for the far-right governments of the United States and Israel, seems to understand that the only viable outcome to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a two-state solution. Students are right to demand change, just as their predecessors were right to demand an end to the Vietnam War and apartheid.
I’m not a lone voice shouting out here from my home in the Mojave Desert. It’s a dull roar now, of citizens from all across the political spectrum saying that we, the American people, are done enabling genocide in Gaza and an apartheid colony in the West Bank. You can hear it at protests, in town halls and in living rooms where parents and children argue about the kind of world they want to live in. Polling shows that younger generations overwhelmingly oppose unconditional military aid to Israel. They are not “misinformed.” They are paying attention to images of bombed schools, starving families and grieving parents. They are demanding a better future, and their conscience is clearer than that of many elected officials.
History is being written again on Dartmouth’s campus. Once again, Dartmouth students are choosing the right side. Dartmouth has a choice — to honor its tradition of inquiry and debate, or to side with silence and complicity.
If history is any guide, the students will be vindicated, and those who tried to silence them will be remembered for standing in the way of justice.
James A. Lally is a member of the Class of 1996, now a cardiologist and Democratic candidate for Congress in Nevada’s 3rd District. Guest columns represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
