On Friday, a group of student activists held a rally in front of the Black Family Visual Arts Center to call on the College to remove eponymous alumnus and former trustee Leon Black ’73’s name from the building. Approximately 20 students, faculty and community members attended the protest.
In 2012, the Debra and Leon Black Family Foundation donated $48 million to fund BVAC’s construction. Controversy around the building’s name has grown in the wake of the Department of Justice’s release of the Epstein files between November 2025 and January 2026, which included documents detailing Black’s close relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Black also faced multiple lawsuits accusing him of sexual harassment, abuse or rape. He has denied all allegations of wrongdoing, and the three lawsuits have since been dismissed.
In April, Dartmouth Student Government and the Student and Presidential Committee on Sexual Assault called for the College to rename BVAC, as well as the Women of Dartmouth alumni group. Erik Siegel ’26 and Roan Wade ’25 also created a temporary art installation on the Black family donor wall, which was removed in April at the direction of the studio art department.
The rally — which began at 5 p.m. and lasted until 5:45 p.m. — was led by four student organizers who delivered a series of speeches. Attendees also repeated chants between and after speeches, including “Raped, murdered, disappeared; women are angry, that’s why we’re here,” “Rape and violence, we say no, Leon Black has got to go” and “When women are under attack, what do we do? Stand up, fight back.”
Wade, one of the protest’s organizers, said in an interview with The Dartmouth that the rally was organized by an “autonomous group of students” involved in “various organizing spaces” on campus, rather than by one official student organization. The protest was promoted on social media by the Dartmouth Palestine Solidarity Coalition, Sunrise Movement at Dartmouth and Dartmouth New Deal.
“Renaming this building unites all movements,” they explained.
Wade said organizers wanted to create a “visual presence” on campus to pressure the College to rename the building and to address what they described as Dartmouth’s “systemic history of [sexual] violence.”
“We [the protest’s organizers] wanted to have a presence on campus,” Wade said. “It demands that the building be renamed. But more importantly, it’s a starting point for the conversation about the more systemic history of sexual violence on this campus.”
Wade said that organizers wanted to have “some sort of visual progress” on the renaming. In April, the Dartmouth Board of Trustees moved to establish a committee focused on naming across campus that will be formalized at the trustees’ meeting in June.
“We keep running into these barriers of Dartmouth saying, ‘We’ll revisit the policy,’” Wade said. “Why are we so fixated on slow policy progression?”
In a speech at the rally, organizer Noor Boukari ’26 questioned the terms of Black’s agreement with the College for funding BVAC.
“So what did Leon Black sign?” Boukari said. “Why did the College agree to take his money without signing such a clause [that would have allowed Dartmouth to rename donor gifts for “conduct unrepresentative of the College”]?”
The College’s gift acceptance policy — enacted in June 2020, after the donation for the naming of BVAC — specifies that in “rare” cases, existing gifts can be renamed if they “jeopardize the reputation or functioning of Dartmouth or its graduate schools, generate enough controversy to substantially frustrate and defeat the gift’s intention or cannot practically be implemented in a manner consistent with a gift’s intention.”
Throughout the rally, speakers connected the name of BVAC to larger criticisms of Dartmouth’s handling of sexual violence and institutional power. Wade said organizers hope the protest will lead to continued action beyond the spring term.
“I hope we can continue to have momentum in the coming years and throughout the summer,” Wade said. “We really need real changes here.”
In an interview after the protest, Boukari said the organizers want “very clear-cut statements” from the administration explaining why the building had not been renamed, which she described as the “bare minimum” action from the College.
“It should have happened immediately after those rape accusations [against Black] came out back in 2022,” she said.
Boukari added that the protest was also meant to push the College to take steps to end “rape culture,” which is defined as prevalent and normalized interpersonal violence by the University of New Hampshire. In 2021, the College released a sexual misconduct survey, which found that 10.8% of students — including from graduate schools — said they experienced “nonconsensual sexual contact by physical force or incapacitation” since attending Dartmouth. This statistic was down from 15.8% in 2017.
“The College needs to recognize survivors,” Boukari said. “The College needs to actually take steps to end rape culture at Dartmouth, rather than just managing sexual assault as a liability issue for them.”
Boukari also said that the organizers thought “it was very important that we get [the protest] done before the end of the term” and promised that “there will absolutely be more protests” in the future.
In an interview, Ameha Fekade ’29 said he attended the protest because he believed the building’s name showed that the College is “more committed to money than to justice.”
“At the very minimum, Leon Black must not be honored at Dartmouth regardless of how much money he may have or how much he donates,” Fekade.
Women’s, gender and sexuality studies professor Mingwei Huang said in an interview with The Dartmouth that some of the students at the protest were enrolled in her course WGSS 31.05 “Activism, Violence and the University,” which studies the “problem of ‘campus sexual violence’ by situating it in histories of racialized, gendered and sexualized violence that produce its normative meanings and subjects,” according to the course description.
Huang said the protest was not organized as a class project, but that there was “synergy” between the rally and her course, whose material helped motivate students’ involvement. She said she was asked by her students to attend and agreed to do so to support her students and help place the rally’s demands in the context of sexual violence and institutional accountability on campus.
“I think just raising awareness around [BVAC’s name], creating a bit of a ruckus to express dissent,” was part of the rally’s purpose, Huang said. She described the continued use of the Black family name as “a monument to the culture of impunity” around sexual violence on campus. The message is that “if you are a powerful man, alum, donor, you’re above consequences,” Huang said.
The protest also drew community members, including Upper Valley resident Laura Simon, who said she attended after students announced the rally in a Signal group chat for pro-Palestinian groups in the Upper Valley. Simon said she has worked professionally on issues related to sexual violence and wanted to support the students’ action.
“Rape affects a lot of women,” Simon said, describing what she hoped people would take away from the protest. “I think we have to be a lot more conscious of that. And I think Dartmouth needs to change.”
College spokesperson Jana Barnello wrote in a statement to The Dartmouth that the College takes allegations made against Black “seriously,” and that the College currently has no financial relationship with Black.
“We continue to evaluate any new information that comes to light with the seriousness it deserves,” Barnello wrote.
A spokesperson for Black declined to comment on the protest or the nature of any agreement between Black and the College relating to the donation of BVAC.
Alex Klee ’29 is a reporter from Woodbridge, Conn. He plans to major in economics and minor in math. He enjoys live music, skating and climbing.
Haley S. Rodriguez ’29 is a reporter with roots in New York City. She is studying history and biology and enjoys long-distance running, reading and sailing.
