On April 28, 2025, two days before the one-year anniversary of Dartmouth College’s short-lived and failed encampment in which 90 students and their supporters were arrested (see the story below), anti-Israel protests heated up again on the campus.

The protests included vandalism of an iconic building, a new encampment and an occupation of an administrative building housing the president’s office. It was not a coincidence that the protests took place during “Dartmouth Dimensions,” a week when prospective incoming students for the Class of 2029 visit the campus.

Here is the latest from the smallest of the Ivy League schools:

Dartmouth Hall

Red paint was splashed over the front of the historic Dartmouth Hall, the college’s original building.

The Dartmouth reported that the vandalism was a protest about “Gaza,” according to an interview with “a source who claimed full responsibility.” The source also stated that the vandalism was planned to coincide with “Dartmouth Dimensions,” a week where prospective incoming students for the Class of 2029 visit the campus.

Anniversary Encampment

Two days later, on May 1, 2025, the anniversary of the encampment, 40-50 protesters from the Palestinian Solidarity Coalition (PSC) staged an encampment in front of Parkhurst Hall, where the president’s office is located.

The protest lasted through the night and ended the next day when it started raining.

According to The Dartmouth Review, “The protest consisted of hijacking the area in front of Parkhurst with tents, chalking the sidewalks, screaming from megaphones, chalking the building, putting 10,000 ladybugs into a few of the bathrooms, and flying two large Palestinian flags from the building.”

The Review also noted that the protest was intended to “intimidate Dimension students” and concluded that the encampment and the red paint “changed virtually nothing in terms of college policy.”

Moreover, the paper stated that “PSC and its activists [have] lost an incredible amount of support following these recent events.”

Building Occupation

Less than a month later, on May 28, 2025, at 1:30 p.m., about 15 anti-Israel protesters – with their faces completely masked and heads wrapped in keffiyehs – occupied the reception area of the president’s office in Parkhurst Hall.

The protest was in response to a rejection of a proposal put forth by Dartmouth Divest for Palestine by Dartmouth’s Advisor Committee on Investor Responsibility.

When the building closed for the day at 6 p.m., the protesters left and declared victory. One protester wearing a keffiyeh said the protest “successfully disrupted [administrators’] workday.”

The protesters held signs that read “divest” and “Palestine will be free” and chanted, “Free, Free Palestine!”

An email sent out to the campus from co-interim Deans Anne Hudak and Eric Ramsey said that a security officer and a president’s office staff member were hurt during the protest. The email also stated that all protesters found to have violated college policies during the occupation would face disciplinary action.

The email noted that some of the protesters were “unaffiliated with Dartmouth.”

During the occupation, security officials locked the building to outsiders, including to the press. Dartmouth spokesperson Jana Barnello described the protesters as “confrontational” and said that the group “attempted to take files from the office.”

Protesters wrote slogans in chalk outside the building, including “Beilock, Beilock, you can’t hide,” referring to Dartmouth’s president Sian Beilock.

Instigator Suspended

The same day, Dartmouth temporarily suspended Roan Wade (who is referred to in court documents as Grace Hillery), Class of ‘25, one of the leaders of the anti-Israel protest movement at the college. Wade was arrested in October 2023 after erecting an illegal encampment for several days with fellow student Kevin Engel.

Wade had been put on probation after participating in the latest encampment on May 1, 2025, although the college did not inform her due to an administrative error. Wade stated that Dartmouth notified her of the suspension following the Parkhurst occupation, although she refused to state whether or not she participated it.

In a letter sent to Wade obtained by The Dartmouth, Dean Hudak wrote, “Since October 2023, you have engaged in a series of behaviors that have violated the College’s Standards of Conduct and resulted in disciplinary sanctions. You have continued to engage in these behaviors despite the College’s response. Your alleged behaviors on May 28, 2025, represent a significant escalation in the threat to community safety and functioning.”

Two days later, Dartmouth rejected an appeal by Wade to cancel the suspension. However, it appears she will be eligible for a hearing at a future unspecified date.

According to Wade, the terms of the suspension include:

• No access to Dartmouth-owned or Dartmouth-affiliated properties
• No participation in classes and no credit for them
• Termination of her student employment

Wade also said it was unclear whether or not she would be able to graduate and if she would be eligible to receive financial aid for a 13th term (which is normally limited to 12 terms of enrollment).

Introduction

On May 1, 2024, a handful of students, accompanied by hundreds of supporters, attempted to establish an encampment at Dartmouth College. Unwilling to see its campus devolve into violence and vandalism, the administration took swift action.

Within hours, the encampment was shut down, and 90 students and outside agitators who refused to comply with university rules regarding demonstrations were arrested.

See profiles of the arrested below

Protest or Choreographed Performance

At 5 p.m., protesters began pouring onto the Dartmouth Green, where campus and local police were already stationed. By 6 p.m., hundreds of people, both students and outsiders, had gathered.

A series of speakers laid out the crowd’s demands, which included:

• Divestment from entities supporting Israel
• Dropping charges of two students previously arrested for trying to establish an encampment
• A response from the administration regarding contract demands of unionized graduate student employees (who had announced a strike that morning)

Protesters engaged in the standard calls for the genocide of Jews and the destruction of Israel, chanting, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” and “Intifada Revolution!”

At 7 p.m., in what appeared to be a symbolic gesture, students set up five tents. The tents prompted an immediate response from the administration. Yellow slips of paper were distributed to protesters with the warning, “You are in violation of Dartmouth College policy. Please cease the disruption immediately and comply with college policy.”

At the same time, local police began cordoning off the surrounding streets.

The slip delineated three legitimate avenues of protest:

• Speech
• Expressing viewpoints
• Holding signs in hands

Violations of policy included:

• Amplified sound
• Tents of any kind
• Unattended signs
• Structures of any type
• Disruptive behavior

The slip also came with a warning of arrest for criminal trespass for engaging in any prohibited activity.

By 8 p.m. state police dressed in riot gear arrived. After multiple warnings to the crowd that if individuals refused to leave they would be arrested, police began moving closer to the protesters, who responded by locking arms.

Ten minutes later, the arrests began. Undeterred by cries from the expanding circle of protesters, police began walking up to the crowd, singling out an individual and calmly escorting him or her to waiting vans that would eventually transport the detainees to holding cells in Hanover and Lebanon, New Hampshire.

The only scuffle of the evening was during the arrest of history professor Annelise Orleck, 65, who tried to prevent police from arresting student protesters.

In a video that later went viral, Orleck can be seen being subdued on the ground by the arresting officers. Orleck was later banned from campus for two months by her bail commissioner.

Her bail conditions were subsequently changed to restrict Orleck only from the Green, Parkhurst Hall and the President’s residence after Dartmouth spokesperson Jana Barnello released a statement saying, “Dartmouth had no intention of seeking Prof. Orleck’s exclusion from campus, and we will promptly request that any errors be corrected.”

Religion professor Christopher MacEvitt was also arrested.

The swift arrests marked a departure from how the administration handled a previous “encampment” by two Dartmouth undergrads. In October 2023, Roan Wade (Class of ’25) and Kevin Engel (Class of ’27) set up a single tent for several days. After many hours of negotiations, the university eventually ordered their arrests after the two students threatened that if the university failed to meet their demands, they would escalate their “physical action,” which the administration interpreted as a threat of violence.

At the May 2024 protest in which the 90 participants were arrested, chants could be heard in support of Wade and Engel, including, “Kevin, Kevin don’t back down. Drop the goddamn charges now,” and “Roan, Roan, don’t arrest her. Beilock’s choking under pressure,” referring to Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock.

The Dartmouth Review, a 45-year-old independent student newspaper at the college, reported that several on-campus sources had informed the paper that anti-Israel groups, including Sunrise Dartmouth (a climate activist organization and intersectional ally of Dartmouth’s anti-Israel groups) and the Dartmouth Palestinian Solidarity Coalition, had “circulated a sign-up sheet on which students could volunteer to be arrested (as the administration had indicated would happen) by occupying encampments on the Green.”

Blowback After the Arrests

The morning following the 90 arrests, president Beilock addressed the campus community in an email, writing that those arrested were “removed from the Green by police after declining several opportunities to stage their protest in a manner consistent with Dartmouth’s policies.”

She added that the protesters had “multiple opportunities to avoid arrest” and implied that Dartmouth was seeking to avoid the fate of other campuses where similar policies “have been ignored.”

“When policies like these have been ignored on other campuses, hate and violence have thrived — events, like commencement, are canceled, instruction is forced to go remote, and, worst of all, abhorrent antisemitism and Islamophobia reign,” Beilock wrote.

She added that the college’s shared spaces, such as the Dartmouth Green, needed to remain welcoming for all students.

Beilock also objected to the protesters’ demands that Dartmouth divest from Israel, writing that “the endowment is not a political tool” and adding that using the endowment “to take sides on such a contested issue is an extraordinarily dangerous precedent to set. It runs the risk of silencing academic debate, which is inconsistent with our mission.”

Finally, while emphasizing her support for free speech, Beilock noted the threat that encampments can pose to Jewish students, as evidenced in such protests on college campuses across the county.

The same day, close to 100 faculty members congregated in a circle on the Green in solidarity with the arrested. Shouting “Hands off our students,” they circulated a petition to gather enough signatures to call an emergency faculty meeting.

According to the petition, the meeting's goal was to address the administration’s “use of excessive force” and “demand the immediate lifting of any total or partial campus bans, unjust academic consequences, and legal charges” for any arrested student, faculty or staff.

The petition called the arrests an “overreaction to the peaceful protest,” saying that it represented “an alarming escalation in administrative and police aggression.”

Dartmouth’s student government also criticized Beilock for failing to engage in dialogue and reach a “potential compromise” with the protesters.

The Dartmouth Review published some of the responses from various student clubs and staff members who wrote they were seeking to “process” the previous evening’s events, including:

• From a Dartmouth student club: “Please feel no pressure to attend this event if you do not have the capacity right now.”
• From a professor: “I join you all in trying to process the events of last night, how they unfolded, witnessing the presence of riot police on our campus and comprehending its implications for our faculty, staff and students.”
• From another professor: “We will … provide make-your-own nachos… [T]onight will focus on providing a space for us all to come together and be present as we process this together.”

The Review also commented that the protest at Dartmouth followed the script of universities across the country, quoting Daniel Henninger in his Wall Street Journal article, “The Cookie Cutter Campus Protests."

Henninger writes, “It’s the most basic flip-the-script tactic: The perpetrators of mayhem transform themselves into camera-ready victims of ‘state violence,’” adding, “It sounds rote, almost scripted. What seems to be going on here is a conscious strategy to establish an equivalence of sincerity … between the pro-Palestinian students and the Jewish students resisting antisemitism on these campuses.”

Labor Collectives and the Anti-Israel Movement

In a lengthy article on the Dartmouth encampment in The Nation titled, “For Many Students, Labor Organizing and Palestinian Solidarity Are One Movement,” Ramsey Alsheikh, a student at Dartmouth, writes that the fact that the graduate students union began a general strike on the day anti-Israel activists attempted to set up an encampment was not a coincidence.

Rather, the two actions were “a carefully-planned, jointly-coordinated challenge to the college’s investments in Israel and their treatment of graduate workers.”

Alsheikh notes, “Both events were announced at a crowded ‘Labor for Liberation’ rally, and the union and Palestine were explicitly linked as two halves of one action by the organizers.” Both groups, he said, are working toward a “vision of collective campus liberation.”

Yet, at Dartmouth, the connection between these two movements goes a step further.

“What sets Dartmouth apart is the unique unity that these two causes have achieved on campus, with no readily discernible difference between the people who organize labor and the people who organize for Palestine,” Alsheikh writes.

For example, Wade, who was sentenced (along with Engel) in January 2025 to 20 hours of community service for criminal trespass at Dartmouth following her attempt to establish an encampment in October 2023, is a key organizer for the Palestinian Solidarity Coalition (PSC) and the Student Workers Collective at Dartmouth (SWCD).

Less than a week after the October 7, 2023 massacre of 1,200 Israelis by Hamas terrorists, PSC along with 13 other campus and community groups issued a joint statement, blaming the attack on Israel. “The tragic violence we see today is the bitter fruit of apartheid for Israelis and Palestinians,” the statement read. “All leading human rights organizations, both international and Israeli, recognize Israel as an apartheid state predicated on the racial domination of Palestinian Arabs.”

“The unions and Palestine are one struggle…it’s the same people working for the same vision,” Wade told Alsheikh.

In September 2024, SWCD and PSC worked together and successfully unshelved Sabra hummus from cafeterias at Dartmouth.

Drop in Applicants to Dartmouth

Like many private, elite institutions across America, Dartmouth experienced an 11 percent drop in applicants for the 2025-26 academic year. At the same time, the college instituted a 4.75% tuition hike for the upcoming year, making yearly tuition at Dartmouth $91,935.

Profiles