On Nov. 19, a Tuesday, Hanover police served Dartmouth student-athlete Q. Jones with an arrest warrant for his alleged involvement in hazing incidents that occurred at a college fraternity in August and September.

Four days after being handed a court summons at the Hanover police station, Jones was taking handoffs on Memorial Field during the Dartmouth football team’s final game of the season.

Why did Dartmouth not have a problem using a player who was a subject of a criminal investigation and facing possible — under its own hazing policy — “permanent separation from the college?”

Simple.

Dartmouth needed Jones, the team’s leading rusher, to improve its odds winning a fourth Ivy League championship in five years.

Dartmouth got what it craved. The 56-28 victory over Brown gave the Big Green a share of the Ivy League title.

Football championships not only add more hardware to the college’s trophy case. They can spur alums into writing checks that increase Dartmouth’s endowment, which is what elite colleges seem mostly about these days. Now that the season is over, Dartmouth doesn’t need Jones, a senior, any longer. He served his purpose.

This week, I asked Dartmouth why Jones was allowed to continue to play and who made that decision. The college declined to answer.

Jones wasn’t available for comment this week, but on Friday I reached his father in Colorado. “My son is innocent of any charges,” said Lex Jones, who was at the Hanover police station — along with an attorney — last month when the summons was issued. “He wasn’t in the vicinity when anything was happening.”

Lex Jones questions why Dartmouth hasn’t attempted to clarify the situation on behalf of his son. “Dartmouth wanted him when he helped them win a championship,” he said. “Now they’ve turned their back on him and are trying to make an example of him.

Dartmouth can now go back to talking a good game about how it doesn’t tolerate hazing in any shape or form. “Hazing is an unproductive and hazardous custom that is incongruous with organizational and community values,” states the college’s website. “It has no place in college life.”

But 46 years after the release of “Animal House,” not much has changed. The student who reported the hazing told me that that he and five other pledges were “beaten” repeatedly with wooden paddles as part of their initiation into the Dartmouth chapter of Omega Psi Phi.

“Additionally, the victim also reported that he was forced to eat an onion which made him vomit and then was pressed to eat the regurgitated onion,” according to a Hanover police news news issued Wednesday.

Arrest warrants were also issued for Milan Williams, 37, of Los Angeles, Calif., and Gregory Dominique, 38, of Boston, Mass. Williams, a 2009 Dartmouth graduate and former football player, and Dominique, who isn’t affiliated with the college, are “graduate” members of Omega Psi Phi, Hanover police said.

Dartmouth has known about the allegations since late September. Sophomore Ulysses Hill, the hazing victim, and his mother, Olivia Sanchez, reached out to Dartmouth Safety and Security, which in turn contacted Hanover police on Sept. 24.

On the night that Hill and his mother called college security, they were at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center’s emergency department. Sanchez was concerned that her son’s contusions from a beating that occurred a week earlier weren’t healing. Sanchez, a single mom, moved to the Upper Valley last year, after her son started at Dartmouth. (In a 90-minute interview with the Valley News on Tuesday, Hill and Sanchez agreed to allow the paper to use their names.)

This week, Dartmouth announced that it had suspended Omega Psi Phi “upon learning of these serious allegations” earlier this fall.

Meanwhile, Jones, a first-team All-Ivy League running back, continued to play on Saturdays.

What’s the message that Dartmouth is sending?

Winning is everything. Plus, hazing is just frat boys being frat boys — until it becomes public.

The timing of the arrests works out well for Dartmouth. Not only is the football season over, students have left campus for term break and won’t return until January. Dartmouth can only hope that it’s old news by then. Except Hill, 20, and his mother will still be dealing with the aftermath.

In September, he moved out of the on-campus apartment that the college had provided Omega Psi Phi and severed ties with the fraternity. Hill, a biomedical engineering major and a goaltender on the men’s water polo team, told me that he plans to remain at Dartmouth.

Since reporting what had happened, Sanchez said that she and her son have met multiple times with college administrators, and have little to show for it.

Hill faults Dartmouth administrators for hazing rituals on campus that have shamefully withstood the test of time. “The administration is willfully blind,” he said. “They didn’t want to know.”

Hill told me that to become a fraternity member he’s sure Jones “had to go through what we went through.”

The college’s Omega Psi Phi chapter, known as Theta Beta Beta, was dormant for 31 years before it was re-established last year, The Dartmouth student newspaper reported in April 2023.

Jones, 22, was vice president of the Dartmouth National Pan-Hellenic Council, which oversees “historically Black Greek organizations.”

Jones, whose first name is Alexisius, had earned enough credits to graduate following the recently concluded fall term, Dartmouth’s athletics department wrote in a feature story about him that went online the day before the final game. Although his Dartmouth football career is over, Jones has one more year of college eligibility. He recently posted on Instagram that more than a half-dozen schools have expressed interest in him.

If only Dartmouth took more interest in what happened off the field, hazing might only be the stuff old movies are made of instead of real life.

Jim Kenyon can be reached at jkenyon@vnews.com.