Over a year ago, Dartmouth College leadership called in police to arrest 89 students, faculty and community members during a protest calling for divestment from Israel, claiming it was enforcing a policy against erecting encampments. The decision sharply divided the community, leading to faculty censuring College President Sian Leah Beilock and the student body voting “no-confidence” in her leadership. After this wave of discontent, in December 2024 the College formulated its “institutional restraint” policy, limiting the administration and academic departments to only making statements “when confronted with issues directly relating to Dartmouth’s mission.”
This is not the first time the College administration has acted in this way. Dartmouth has historically updated its freedom of dissent policy in order to stifle student protest movements, progressively adding restrictions on how to exercise free speech. In fact, several key moments actuated the College’s choices on May 1, and institutional neutrality is the latest show.
The first chapter in this history began in response to the George Wallace protests in the 1960s. When segregationist George Wallace spoke at the College while running for president in 1967, many groups boycotted and protested. The demonstrators stormed the event and rocked his car for fifteen minutes — with Wallace inside.
Instead of focusing on the fact the College was hosting a prominent racist, College President John Sloan Dickey homed in on something else: the protest was far too disorderly. The College responded with a new policy — which stands in stands in an amended form today — that prohibits dissent inside a speaker’s event. These actions established a precedent, suggesting that the College can formulate policies directly aimed at suppressing campus protests, without addressing what motivated students to speak up.
Protest movements continued in the 1960s, this time over the presence of Reserve Officers’ Training Corps on campus, a partnership with the army which pays for student’s tuition in return for a commitment to military service. Some students saw it as a sign of the College’s complicity in the bloody Vietnam War. After little progress working with the administration, students staged sit-ins and an occupation of Parkhurst in May of 1969. In response, the administration amended its dissent policy to impose further limits on student protest and make its provisions enforceable by law. The College facilitated the arrest of 56 students and set a precedent for criminalizing protest.
This trend continued into the 1980s. Students once again gathered on the Green, this time erecting shanties to demand Dartmouth’s divestment from Apartheid in South Africa. In response, College President David McLaughlin ’54 requested a new policy that explicitly prevented structures on the Green without the prior approval of the administration. Nearly 40 years later, the administration used the descendants of these same policies to arrest protesters on the Green.
Tracing all these developments, the takeaway is clear. In implementing the institutional restraint policy, the administration’s goal is that which it has always been: to suppress student movements while shirking its responsibility to address their concerns. The so-called dissent policy is a malleable tool that helps them continue to censor.
In this context, restraint is not neutrality, it’s avoidance. Each new rule and regulation isn’t to promote speech, but instead to contain it. From punishing the students protesting America’s most racist man to jailing its own students, if history is any indication, Dartmouth will continue to expand its speech policies until public protest is effectively rendered mute.
Opinion columns represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
