A gray-haired Dartmouth professor was tackled, zip-tied, and detained on May 1 along with about 90 other protesters. “I’ve been teaching here for 34 years,” Annelise Orleck told The New York Times after video of the arrest went viral. “There have been many protests, but I’ve never, ever seen riot police called to the green.”
Much of the debate about the campus protests sparked by the Israel-Hamas war has centered—quite reasonably—on questions around free speech, civil disobedience, and violence. When do chants become threats? When does blocking access to a building become the use of force? Less attention has been paid to the role of policing. But even as Americans have become numb to the militarization of police in other contexts, there’s something shocking about the sight of cops in riot gear on college campuses.
About 2,700 protesters have been arrested or detained at dozens of schools this spring. At UCLA, nearly…
