Say it ain’t so, Phil

According to Joe Asch, “word from the inside” at Dartmouth is that no students are currently under investigation or facing College discipline for the Black Lives Matter invasion of Baker Library last November. Readers will probably recall that BLM demonstrators stormed into the library shrieking racist vulgarities and intimidating students who were trying to study.

I hope Joe’s sources are mistaken. Otherwise, as Joe says, it means that at Dartmouth it’s okay to scream epithets such as the following at students working in the library:

You white racist piece of sh**

F*** your white privilege

F*** your white tears (to a student reduced to tears by the racist onslaught)

Stand the f*** up! Do you not think that black lives matter?

It also means that Dartmouth’s president Phil Hanlon is spineless (to cast this in the light most favorable to him). This isn’t exactly news. At an alumni event in Washington, D.C., Hanlon responded to a question from a black alum by discussing what he’s doing to promote the hiring of black professors. When I asked him about hiring conservative professors, he said that there’s nothing he can do because hiring decisions are up to individual departments.

But a failure to discipline the BLM protesters would take gutlessness and racial pandering to another level. Say it ain’t so, Phil.

Joe says that his mailbox “has been brimming with letters from alumni upset of the injustice that there will be no prosecution of the BLM library invaders.” Nearly all of them are pledging to stop contributing to the College.

It’s easy to understand why. If Dartmouth takes no action against students who harass, intimidate, and direct racial slurs at fellow students in the library — if it shows that little regard for civility and that little respect for academic freedom, and refuses to preserve its library as a “safe space” for academic endeavor — then it does not deserve our support.

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