Like many campuses across the nation, Dartmouth College has been roiling with unrest over the war in Gaza.

On May 1, the college’s president called in local police and state troopers with riot gear to arrest 89 students, faculty, staff and community members who were peacefully protesting the war. The protest took place on the college green across the street from the building that houses the president’s office.

Organizers of the protest had gone to great lengths to ensure that the proceedings would be peaceful. “This is an exclusively peaceful protest,” a senior wrote on behalf of the Dartmouth Gaza Solidarity Camp. “Violence, threat of violence, and discrimination of any kind will not be tolerated in the camp. All involved parties appreciate Dartmouth’s concern on this issue and want to cooperate to make sure that hate speech of any kind is unequivocally condemned.”

Nevertheless, the president summoned the police, including state troopers and SWAT teams.

Dartmouth’s president, Sian Beilock, who took office last July, had previously won praise for forestalling the kind of turmoil that had afflicted other campuses. She was credited with establishing what she called “brave spaces” where parties on all sides could discuss their differences.

Despite Beilock’s overreaction in calling in law enforcement, the notion of brave spaces remains an idea worth pursuing. But she has work to do to regain trust on campus.

I’ve written previously in this column about the unforced errors of first-year college presidents. The arrest of two Dartmouth student protesters last October was the first blunder. Sadly, Beilock doubled down by calling in the troops on May 1.

Those arrested face legal consequences. In addition, they were slapped with the ludicrous prohibition against entering Dartmouth’s college green.

Can someone remind me how many thousands of dollars students pay every year for the privilege of inhabiting the Dartmouth campus? Now it appears they can frequent only a part of that campus. (At least the administration stopped short of demanding a loyalty oath.)

I teach a humanities course on the Sixties, and one of my purposes for devising that course was to highlight an era when students cared about matters beyond law school admission or internships on Wall Street. We look, for example, at the 1969 student occupation of Dartmouth’s Parkhurst Hall in opposition to the war in Vietnam.

I have no objection to campus protests; I think they’re healthy. Colleges should celebrate the fact that the education they offer tells students that it’s more important to stand up for their convictions than to kvetch about an A-minus.

Beilock has refused to back down or to apologize. At a meeting of the Arts and Sciences faculty on May 20, the faculty narrowly approved a resolution to censure the president.

I don’t want to minimize anyone’s sense of danger or beleaguerment, and I’m sure it applies to both sides in the current debate. But here is where I see an unrealized opportunity.

The current protests, with each side airing their grievances, are misdirected. Here’s my proposal to recalibrate campus dissent and repair Beilock’s credibility.

It seems to me that reasonable people on both sides, pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian, should be able to agree on one thing: The war in Gaza should end immediately and all hostages should be released.

At the risk of pressing the matter, both sides should also be able to agree that what Hamas did on Oct. 7 was heinous and worthy of condemnation. It should also be apparent that Benjamin Netanyahu, pursuing his relentless eye-for-an-eye policy, has more than exacted his revenge.

But as Mohandas Gandhi observed, an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind. It’s time for the war in Gaza to end.

That should not be a controversial proposal, one that should find support on both sides. I challenge Dartmouth’s president to declare forcefully and publicly that she will join any peaceful demonstration on campus jointly organized by pro-Israel and pro-Palestine students calling for an end to the war in Gaza.

Imagine the prospect of campus demonstrations with pro-Palestinians and pro-Israelis demonstrating side by side to end the war. That would be a powerful statement, one that could reverberate far beyond the Dartmouth campus.

They needn’t agree on everything — they don’t, and they won’t — but both sides surely can agree that the carnage in Gaza must cease. A unified demonstration to end the horrific war in Gaza would be the ultimate “brave space” that the Dartmouth president has advocated.

Randall Balmer is the John Phillips Professor in Religion at Dartmouth College.