At the direction of Dartmouth leadership, Hanover police arrested two students on October 28 and charged them with criminal trespassing, a misdemeanor. At 1 a.m.that Saturday, officers handcuffed Roan Wade ’25 and Kevin Engel ’27 and removed them from the lawn in front of the president’s office, where they had erected a tent fronted by a sign that read “Brave Spaces.”

Wade and Engel had been holding a vigil since the previous afternoon, after participating in a climate justice rally. President Sian Beilock justified the arrests in a campus-wide email. “College leadership spent more than six hoursworking with students to de-escalate the situation. We then asked Hanover police for assistance,” she wrote on October 28. “The students threatened in writing to ‘escalate’ and ‘take further action,’ including ‘physical action,’ if their demands were not met.” 

According to Dartmouth policy, “a protest or demonstration shall not be discouraged so long as neither force nor the threat of force is used, and so long as the orderly processesof the institution are not deliberately obstructed.”

“Dartmouth claims to support free speech but arrested me for demonstrating against Dartmouth’s complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza,” Wade wrote in a press release from the local chapter of Sunrise, a student activist group that wants to see resources committed to, among other things, “climate change resilience in the Upper Valley,” “divesting the College’s endowment from all organizations complicit in apartheid,” and “reparations for Native American students,” according to its website. The site also lists “solidarity with Palestine” as another focus.

“This struggle isn’t going to end anytime soon,” said Wade. On October 30, Sunrise and other student activist groups held a rally to protest the arrests. Student government leaders circulated a petition that called for an apology from the administration. Engel and Wade have been placed on probation for two academic terms. Their arraignment was set for December 18.