In the Trump administration’s campaign to “reclaim” universities that conservatives see as too woke, it has moved to withhold billions of dollars in federal funding from schools across the country. The hit list includes Harvard, Columbia, Cornell and Princeton.

The $150 million or so a year that Dartmouth receives in funding for research, however, appears safe.

“There’s a reason why the (Trump) administration isn’t targeting Dartmouth, because Dartmouth managed itself really, really well,” former New Hampshire Republican Gov. Chris Sununu said at a campus forum last week.

Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock’s heavy-handed (and that’s an understatement) response to a peaceful pro-Palestinian campus demonstration on May 1, 2024, and her actions since then, no doubt make her a hit with the Trump regime.

But I think it’s safe to say that Beilock’s Trump-really-isn’t-such-a-bad-guy approach is not winning Dartmouth many friends in higher education circles, or the Upper Valley.

This week more than 200 college presidents co-signed a letter condemning the Trump administration for its “unprecedented government overreach and political interference” in higher education, which includes threatening to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status.

Among the eight Ivy League presidents, Beilock was the only one not to add her signature to the letter.

“Dartmouth is the lone institution that can’t see it’s being played by the Trump administration to the detriment of democracy,” Bethany Moreton, a history professor, told me in a phone interview.

“There’s no way to play nice with the Trump administration,” she said. “The right thing — and the smart thing to do — is to stand up for our principles.”

Moreton helped coordinate a faculty response to Dartmouth’s unwillingness to join the national movement in the fight against the Trump administration’s assault on academic freedom and free speech rights.

Beilock and Dartmouth trustees should “work purposefully with other colleges and universities in collective defense… We require your courageous leadership,” states a letter co-signed by 300 faculty members.

About an hour after receiving the letter on Wednesday evening, Beilock released a lengthy email to the Dartmouth community. A college spokesperson told me that Beilock’s message showed her “support for Harvard, academic freedom, and the values, integrity, and independence of all higher education institutions.”

In the message itself, Beilock said, “As president, I have never signed open form letters because they are rarely effective tools to make change.”

She prefers to join “action-oriented coalitions.”

One coalition Beilock hasn’t joined consists of five leading college presidents who, like her, are Jewish. The presidents of Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, MIT and Wesleyan have all disputed the Trump administration’s claim that its attacks on higher education are designed to “root out” antisemitism on college campuses.

“These Jewish presidents are actively defining what antisemitism actually is in the face of the Trump administration’s weaponization of the term, and organizing their fellow college presidents in response to the federal government’s assault,” the Forward, a Jewish-American news site, wrote last week.

Some people on the Dartmouth campus think Beilock is under the mistaken impression that staying in Trump’s good graces is a strategy that will work to Dartmouth’s advantage. Or put another way: Beilock, an award-winning cognitive scientist, sees herself playing chess while the college presidents who have chosen to stand up to the Trump administration are playing checkers.

For people who were arrested during Beilock’s crackdown last year on May 1, 2024, however, it hardly felt like a game.

They were among hundreds of people, most of them students, who had gathered on the Dartmouth Green for the protest. It started out like other student-led demonstrations that were popping up on campuses across the country last spring.

Roughly 500 students and Upper Valley residents, along with a number of curious onlookers, had come together to express their opposition to the Israel-Hamas war and the college’s investment policies in a peaceful manner.

But on this occasion all that started well didn’t end well.

Less than a year into her presidency, Beilock set off an unprecedented scene on campus when she invited dozens of armed officers, many of them belonging to a state police “special operations unit,” to arrest her own students.

With darkness settling in, 20 storm troopers marched out of the shadows cast by police floodlights.

“If you do not leave the area, the use of force can be used against you and you will be arrested,” a state police officer declared over a loudspeaker.

The vast majority of protesters and onlookers didn’t comply. And why should they have? For decades, centuries perhaps, the Green has been viewed as a de facto public space. Except on this night, when the powers-that-be at Dartmouth suddenly decreed that was no longer the case.

With Beilock’s blessing, police wasted little time in carrying out the show of force. They didn’t just target a small group of 10 or so protesters starting to set up tents — an act of civil disobedience that college officials found intolerable.

Before the night was over, 89 people, including 65 Dartmouth students, were in police custody. They were handcuffed and carted off in Dartmouth Outing Club vans to area police stations to be booked for criminal trespass. Those arrested included two student journalists covering the nonviolent protest and police response for The Dartmouth, the college’s daily student newspaper.

Annelise Orleck, a Dartmouth history professor for 35 years, was also among those forcefully removed. She had come to Green to check on the welfare of her students who were participating in the protest.

The 65-year-old Orleck was yanked to the ground by state police troopers who later claimed she had tripped over her own feet.

“Lying there with my face pressed into the grass, hearing myself say, ‘I can’t breathe,’ I realized I now felt and understood police brutality in a whole new way,” Orleck, now 66, told me when I called her this week.

As police randomly went about picking out people to arrest, Beilock and her team watched from behind locked doors and darkened rooms in the administration building across the street.

Six days later, The Dartmouth published a letter from Beilock under the headline, “College President Apologizes for Community Harm.”

It came across as less of an apology than damage control. “No one, including me, wanted to see heavily armed police officers in the heart of our campus,” Beilock wrote. “Nor did we want any members of our community to be arrested.”

But she couldn’t leave it at that. “As I have said,” her letter continued, “actions have consequences.”

This week, I asked a college spokesperson if, a year later, Beilock had any regrets about how she handled the night.

Her “sentiment remains consistent with her message” published in The Dartmouth shortly after that night, said Moran Kelly, senior media relations officer.

Undoubtedly, the crackdown won Beilock points with many of the college’s conservative donors, her bosses on the board of trustees and anyone who doesn’t have a problem with calling in police to forcefully break up a nonviolent demonstration, such as Trump.

Still, it’s hard to imagine that the night won’t go down as a permanent stain on Beilock’s legacy.

In the days after the arrests, Dartmouth tried to pretend that it had no control over what happened next. It was all in the hands of Hanover police prosecutor Mariana Pastore, or so the college wanted the public to believe.

Without explaining her reasoning, Pastore opted not to file charges against 34 of the 89 people arrested.

For the 55 others, Pastore reduced the criminal trespass charge from a misdemeanor to violation, which is more along the lines of a traffic offense.

She then offered to cut them a deal. For anyone who agreed to forego a trial (costly to taxpayers and time consuming for an overburden court system), Pastore would place their case on file “without finding.” If they remained on “good behavior” (reading between the lines that meant no more campus protests) for as long as 13 months, the charge would be dismissed.

After months of wrangling, all 55 people accepted the deal. While arrest records can be expunged, it doesn’t necessarily mean the damage is undone.

When applying for jobs and graduate school, or entering a profession that requires a state license, people can sometimes be asked if they have ever been arrested.

Having an arrest record is a “little spooky, but I’ll be OK,” said Christian Harris, who is making plans to attend law school.

Harris, a 2009 Hanover High School graduate, now works for Vermont Legal Aid. Harris, a Lebanon resident, was one of the last to accept a plea deal, only signing the agreement earlier this month.

After growing up in Hanover, where his dad was a Dartmouth administrator, Harris told me this week that he still can’t believe the night ended the way it did.

“People were just singing songs and holding hands around a circle,” he said. “There weren’t any windows or doors being broken. It’s a little disheartening that Dartmouth can endorse this kind of police violence.

“I know Dartmouth is a private college, but when a respected institution does something like this to stomp out free speech, it’s worrisome. If it can happen in a small, quiet, liberal town like Hanover, it can happen anywhere.”

Andrew Tefft, 46, didn’t join the protest, but he ended up as the only person charged with resisting arrest, along with criminal trespass.

Back in town to visit his elderly father Tefft had walked over to the Green after leaving a Hanover bar around 8:45 p.m.

An officer’s report claimed that Tefft had been ordered to move back from the area where he was watching the protest. Tefft told me that he didn’t understand what the officer was asking him to do. After all, he wasn’t involved in the protest.

But that didn’t matter to Canaan police, one of the many local law enforcement agencies on scene, or Pastore. From looking at Canaan police videos, it became clear to me that Tefft was a victim of overzealous policing.

The three officers who had pinned Tefft to the ground probably didn’t appreciate his cursing or derogatory remarks while they took him into custody. But Teftt didn’t deserve, as he put it, getting “shoved face-first into a gravel path.”

Still feeling the aches and pains of the encounter, Tefft went to Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center the next morning. He walked out of the emergency department with his left arm in a sling. X-rays showed he had suffered a nondisplaced fracture.

His left arm and shoulder continue to give him trouble. An MRI scan in February found “some tearing around the rotator cuff,” said Tefft, who lives in the Boston area.

In December, Tefft appeared in Lebanon District Court with Charlie Buttrey, a longtime Upper Valley attorney who represented him pro bono.

Under a plea agreement on the resisting arrest charge, Tefft was sentenced to 10 days in jail, all of which was deferred. Tefft, who didn’t have a previous criminal record, can avoid jail time, if he remains in “good behavior” through 2025.

“Mentally, I know I have lingering trauma, especially because the incident was entirely unnecessary,” he told me in an email this week. “There is still the threat of 10 days in jail if I am not ‘good.’ And anytime I begin to think about it, it is generally not good for me.”

Alesandra Gonzales was just doing her job. A photojournalist with The Dartmouth, she was assigned to cover the protest.

Around 9:45 p.m., she saw an older woman, who it turned out was Orleck, the history professor, getting taken to the ground by police.

As good photojournalists instinctively do, Gonzales moved closer to capture the moment. She came eye-to-eye with two officers pointing at her. Seconds later, she was in police custody.

Charlotte Hampton, a reporter for The Dartmouth, tried to intervene on her younger colleague’s behalf.

She too ended up in handcuffs.

Both students wore press IDs. “They knew we were reporters,” Hampton said.

But as one cop told Gonzales, “I don’t care.”

Gonzales and Hampton, bound in zip tie handcuffs, were taken to the Lebanon police station, where the paper’s editor paid their $40 bail bond fee before driving them back to campus.

In her “apology” letter printed in The Dartmouth, Beilock said college officials were “working with local authorities to ensure this error is corrected.”

It still took nearly a week for Pastore to drop their criminal cases so the two could walk freely around campus. As a condition of their bail, Gonzales and Hampton had been barred from stepping on the Green. This week, I asked Gonzales and Hampton if Beilock had reached out to apologize or inquire about their well-being.

She hadn’t.

In case the president is wondering, both are doing fine.

Hampton, now the paper’s editor in chief, told me that what happened on the Green that night awakened her to the “fragility of press freedom.”

Gonzales, now a sophomore, continues as a staff photographer. Going through the ordeal has given her “the energy to pursue a career in journalism.”

Last October, Gonzales and Hampton shared one of the highest national awards bestowed upon student journalists. Recipients of the nonprofit Student Press Law Center’s 2024 Courage Award for “championing press freedom,” they have made Dartmouth proud.

Which is more than I can say for the so-called leaders who occupy the college’s executive suites these days.

In a walk around campus last weekend, I passed through the college’s arts district. Scratched in blue and yellow chalk on the concrete path were words that conjured up memories of that fateful night almost a year ago.

“Divest. Don’t Arrest.”

“Free Palestine.”

I imagine it’s only a matter of time before a spring rain — or college maintenance workers following orders — rub out the sidewalk graffiti. (If it even qualifies as such.)

But unlike protest slogans written in chalk, the events of May 1, 2024 that unfolded after dark on the Dartmouth Green can’t be washed away.

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