Dartmouth College history professor Annelise Orleck went viral Thursday following her arrest the previous night for taking part in a pro-Palestinian demonstration on campus. Video from New Hampshire television station WMUR showed police in riot gear pulling the 65-year-old Orleck away from the protest before one officer appears to push her to the ground.
“Are you kidding me?” a stunned demonstrator can be heard yelling.
Orleck said she was zip-tied, placed in a van with other arrestees and held in lockup in Lebanon, New Hampshire, for two and a half hours. She was charged with criminal trespass, and the terms of her bail stated she was not allowed to return to the campus where she’d been teaching for more than 30 years.
A former chair of the college’s Jewish Studies program who specializes in U.S. political history and women’s history, Orleck had been teaching the Civil Rights Movement just that afternoon. In an interview with HuffPost, she explained how the whole ordeal unfolded.
She initially came out to the college’s Green on Wednesday afternoon in support of graduate student workers who went on strike. The labor action, she said, eventually morphed into a broader protest against the college, calling for Dartmouth to divest from companies tied to Israel.
A “very small number” of students intended to set up an encampment, Orleck said. She and other supporters were asked to encircle them to create a barrier with police.
“It was peaceful,” Orleck said. “It was a very minor, mild protest. There were multifaith expressions of solidarity, Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, Christian. It was a really nice, peaceful event.”
She and others broke for dinner around 7:30 p.m., but they soon got a message that more cops had shown up. Concerned, Orleck and her group — “older women faculty,” she described them — headed back.
“The Green was transformed,” Orleck said. “There was an unbelievable presence of militarized police. Like nothing I’d seen…
Read the full article here
