1 May 2026

I signed two letters to Dartmouth's president. One made me question everything I thought I knew about my college, my fellow alumnae, and, honestly, the world.

Today is May Day. In my adoptive country of Austria, this day means something. It is Tag der Arbeit—the Day of Labour—national holiday since 1919, rooted in the mass demonstrations of the workers' movement that began here in Vienna in 1890. In the city (die innerstadt), the Social Democrats gather at the Rathaus, speeches echoing across the plaza. In the countryside, towns erect the Maibaum—a towering, decorated pole, ribbons and wreaths and a fir tip at the crown—and people dance around it to brass band music in traditional dress, celebrating the arrival of spring. It is a holiday about collective action. About what people can accomplish when they show up together and refuse to be ignored.

It is usually a day of rest for me. A melange, a book, maybe a walk if Vienna cooperates with the weather.

But today I am thinking about another May Day: May 1, 2024.

A day that started like any other Until, in the early hours of May 2, my inbox filled up with messages about protesters on the Dartmouth Green being forcibly removed.

The two letters

The first letter was about what happened on 1 May 2024, when Dartmouth's administration—specifically, our newly appointed President, Sian Beilock—called law enforcement to disperse a nonviolent student protest on the Green. Officers arrived in riot gear. Nearly 100 people were arrested. A Dartmouth professor—a Jewish woman—was thrown to the ground, zip-tied, and banned from campus. Her story was reported in the New York Times and across national media. A student's white sage, a culturally and spiritually significant object, was taken from their pocket and never returned. And two Dartmouth student journalists, arrested while reporting on the protest, later had their charges dropped after the College successfully lobbied on their behalf—demonstrating that Dartmouth knew how to intervene in the legal process. It simply chose who was worth supporting and who wasn’t.

We were not writing a letter about Gaza. We were writing a letter about who gets hurt when an institution calls the police.

The second letter was signed April 7, 2026. As Chair Emerita of Women of Dartmouth, I signed this letter—a letter I did not draft, on a cause I fully believe in—asking Dartmouth to remove Leon Black's name from the Black Family Visual Arts Center. By then the Epstein files had confirmed what many had long suspected: that Black likely assaulted multiple women and girls,that Epstein helped manage the cover-up with hush money, that Black paid approximately $20 million to a dozen women—documented by the New York Times and Senate investigators—including a $9.5 million settlement with a woman who accused him of rape. The letter was clear, well-argued, and right.

And the coalition behind it included some of the same Women of Dartmouth leaders and volunteers who, two years earlier, had been furious with me for signing the first one.

I have been sitting with that for a while now. I think it's time to say something about it.

The Dartmouth I Thought I Knew

Dartmouth College was founded in 1769, in part, with a charter obligation to educate Native Americans. I am an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation and the direct descendant of a member of the Choctaw Nation. My forebears were the people that Dartmouth was theoretically built to serve.

I say "theoretically" not to be cynical, but to be precise. Institutions make promises. Whether they keep them depends entirely on who is watching, who is pushing, and who the institution believes it must answer to.

What I loved about Dartmouth was never the institution as it was, but the institution as it understood itself to be—and the moments when it actually lived up to that understanding.

In 1819, Daniel Webster stood before the Supreme Court to argue that Dartmouth's charter—its founding promise, its institutional soul—could not simply be dissolved by a state legislature that found it inconvenient. He won. And in winning, he established that a charter is a contract. I would go further to say it is a covenant, in that it contains promises made to an institution, and by an institution. Promises that are not suggestions. They are binding.

What Webster understood—and what every Dartmouth alumna who has ever written a check, chaired a committee, organized a reunion, or signed a letter knows in their bones—is that institutions are only as strong as the people who refuse to stop believing in them. Alumni are not a constituency to be managed. We are the covenant made flesh. We are what Dartmouth's promises look like when they're kept. That love is not incidental. It is the lifeblood of the institution.

"It is, Sir, as I have said, a small college. And yet there are those who love it."

I am one of those people. Which is precisely why I will not let it off the hook.

Dartmouth: a history of integrity and protest

President John Kemeny, responding to the Kent State Massacre in June 1970, said something I have carried with me for years: that while institutions as such cannot effectively take stands on controversial issues, individuals must—and he made clear that the President of Dartmouth College would be no exception to that rule. That was a president who understood that leadership is not the same as risk management.

President David McLaughlin, when Dartmouth Review members attacked anti-apartheid shanties on the Green with sledgehammers in January 1986, cancelled classes and called the destruction what it was: "racism, violence and disrespect for diversity and opinion." He held College-wide teach-ins to conduct, in his words, "the humane work of learning and understanding." He did not send anyone to jail.

These are the presidents I learned about as a young fundraiser, calling alumni for the Dartmouth College Fund, hearing their voices catch when they talked about what the institution had meant to them, what it had stood for. I held space for those alumni to describe a place they loved—and I believed in the place they were describing.

That belief is what made 1 May 2024 feel like a betrayal.

Dartmouth is a home—It was my home: a hearth that alumni return to across decades, a place where people figure out who they are and what they want to be.

When Sian Beilock called in officer armed in riot gear against her own students, she violated the covenant the institution holds with its community. She broke the trust held between the institution and her people.

Trust, unlike a building, cannot be managed with a press release. It cannot be restored by removing a name from a facade while leaving the conditions that broke it untouched.

What the 1st Letter Was Actually About

When students set up an encampment on the Green in solidarity with Gaza, Dartmouth's administration made a choice. They did not choose dialogue. They did not choose patience. They called law enforcement.

The officers who arrived did not look like campus security. They arrived in riot gear. And when they began making arrests, the people most at risk were not the ones with the most institutional protection. They were undocumented students who could face detention or deportation. They were Black students with every reason to fear what happens when police decide someone is resisting. They were trans students subject to misgendering in processing. They were students from communities that already know, in their bodies and in their bones, what it means when the state decides to restore order.

One arrested student said: "The experience has made me disappointed and embarrassed that I am affiliated with this College."

Another: "The College's response showed me how wrong I've been."

Those words are the sounds of an institution breaking a promise.

The letter I co-signed did not take a position on the conflict in Gaza. It took a position on the right of students to protest non-violently without being met with riot gear. It asked for amnesty for those arrested. It asked for a community reconciliation process. It asked Dartmouth to examine whether its policies and partnerships were exposing vulnerable community members to harm.

These are not radical asks. They are the asks of people who believe an institution should be accountable to its stated values.

What It Cost

Within days of signing, I was hearing from Women of Dartmouth members and volunteers who were angry. Not about the arrests. Not about the white sage. Not about the professor tackled on the Green. They were angry that WD had signed a letter that might make some members uncomfortable. That WD had waded into something political. That I had, without—in their view—sufficient consultation, attached the organization's name to a position.

I will concede that I did not consult. I did not consult in part because I did not believe consultation was required. Women of Dartmouth's own articles of incorporation commit the organization to encouraging equity and inclusion and to combating prejudice, discrimination and intolerance—and they are explicit that this commitment extends beyond gender to race, ethnicity, ability, sexual orientation, citizenship, language, and socioeconomic status.

When armed officers in riot gear arrested nearly 100 people on the Green, disproportionately harming the most vulnerable members of our community, signing that letter was not a political act: It was an organizational obligation. It was exactly what Women of Dartmouth exists to do, in my opinion.

The question that has stayed with me is not whether I should have consulted more. It is why so many of my fellow alumnae volunteers and leaders believed that what happened on 1 May did not fall within our mission. That the harm done to those 89 protestors, many of them women, had to be weighed against the comfort of the alumnae members. That WD's “lane” was narrower than its own charter.

One leader wrote that she was concerned about losing volunteers. Another said it wasn't WD's place to "fourth-quarter quarterback" decisions made in real-time by a president navigating a difficult situation.

I want to be fair to these women. They were not wrong that the letter was political. What I would push back on is the idea that Women of Dartmouth can be apolitical—because I believe that being a woman in a patriarchal society is an inherently political act. Our own organizational statutes commit us to combating prejudice, discrimination, and intolerance "related but not limited to gender, gender identity, race, ethnicity, age, ability, sexual orientation, religion, citizenship, language, socioeconomic status, and geographical location." WD had already released statements in solidarity with Black Lives Matter and with the AAPI community facing pandemic-era hate crimes. Choosing not to sign the 2024 letter would also have been a political act—just a quieter one.

What I found hardest was a specific framing that kept appearing: that by signing, I had silenced the voices of volunteers who disagreed. That it was a betrayal.

I kept thinking about what "betrayal" means in that sentence. Because from where I was standing, the betrayal was in the other direction—in an institution sending riot gear to meet students exercising their right to assemble, and in an alumni organization that wanted to hold space for the “good times” without holding space for those experiencing the bad ones.

Two Dartmouth board members reached out to me, my co-chair, and our executive committee to directly to discuss the letter. That was uncomfortable. It was also, I think, evidence that the letter landed. That it meant something.

They expressed concern for our wellbeing. For the blowback we might face. For the position we had put ourselves in by taking such a stance. It was, in its way, very thoughtful. I kept waiting for someone to express the same concern for the student who couldn't breathe with an officer's knee on her back. Or whose future was in jeopardy for expressing her right to assemble.

Two Years Later

Now it is May 2026, and Leon Black's name is still on the Visual Arts Center.

The evidence against Black has been extensively documented: His sustained relationship with Jeffrey Epstein after Epstein's conviction. Epstein's role in advising on Black's philanthropic giving, including his gifts to Dartmouth. The $62.5 million settlement allowing Black to avoid Epstein-related litigation. The payments to women, some connected to nondisclosure agreements. The rape accusations and settlement. The Epstein files that named names.

Women of Dartmouth's April 2026 letter made the case clearly and well: that keeping Black's name on the building is a continuous injury to survivors, a statement about whose safety the institution prioritizes, and an institutional risk Dartmouth cannot afford to ignore.

I signed it. Without hesitation.

And I noticed that this time, the coalition was broader. The same voices that had raised concerns about the 2024 letter were now engaged, energized, aligned. The cause had reached critical mass.

I have been asking myself why. And I think the honest answer—the one worth saying out loud—is that the victims in the Leon Black case are women.

White women. Documented. Named. I will let you sit with what it means that this is the version of harm that unified us.

In 2024, the harm was diffuse. It was distributed across bodies that institutions have historically found easier to discount—Black students, undocumented students, Indigenous students, trans students, students whose politics made them easy to dismiss. The ask required sitting with complexity: about protest, about Gaza, about what it means to call the police on your own community.

Of course, it helps that the women harmed by Black have had their stories corroborated by financial settlements and federal files. The harm is unambiguous, the villain is singular, and the ask is concrete: take the name off the building.

I am glad the coalition is where it is now. I genuinely am.

As a Studio Art major and a Dartmouth alumna, and I want nothing of my Dartmouth experience to be tied to the likes of Leon Black.

I want Black's name off that building.

I want it off before commencement, before the fall, before the moment passes.

Windows of opportunity close. Sian Beilock has already demonstrated that she knows how to wait people out. Two years ago, all she had to do was let the term end.

On Signing Letters

In April 2025, Sian Beilock became the only Ivy League president to refuse to sign an American Association of Colleges and Universities letter defending academic freedom against the Trump administration's funding cuts—a letter signed by more than 600 university presidents. Her official explanation: she does not sign open form letters she did not help write.

I find that revealing. Unsurprising. And familiar.

I co-drafted the 2024 letter, and I signed it because I believed in the message and the ask made on behalf of the students arrested. I did not draft the 2026 letter, and I signed it because the cause was right and the moment required it. These feel to me like the only two legitimate reasons to sign anything: because you built it, or because it's true.

What I cannot do—what I don't think any of us can do and maintain our integrity—is only sign letters when the signing is comfortable. Brené Brown writes that integrity is "choosing courage over comfort; choosing what is right over what is fun, fast, or easy; and choosing to practice our values rather than simply professing them."

Women of Dartmouth has professed its values clearly and in writing. 1 May 2024 was the moment that asked us to practice them. To only show up when the victims are legible to us, when the harm is unambiguous, when the coalition is already assembled and the risk is low—that is not integrity. That is convenience dressed up as principle.

Dartmouth's founding promise was made to people like me. Not metaphorically—to the specific communities I come from, the nations whose children for whom this educational institution was chartered. That promise has been honored inconsistently at best. What keeps me engaged, what keeps me signing letters and making calls and writing blog posts from Vienna at ungodly hours, is the belief that institutions can be held to their own stated values if enough people refuse to let them off the hook.

That requires showing up even when it's inconvenient. Even when your steering committee is unhappy with you. Even when board members call.

It requires asking, every time a cause gains momentum: who has been here since the beginning, and who arrived when it became safe?

I think we owe it to ourselves—and to the students who were arrested on the Green—to notice who activated when, and for whom.

Both groups are welcome. The question is whether those who arrived late are willing to follow the lead of those who were already there. And I think we owe it to the people who paid a price to be honest about what that price was—and who paid it.

I've been showing up for Dartmouth for twenty years, from California to DC to Vienna, across time zones, through class giving campaigns to steering committees and affiliated group calls, and letters that cost me something. I'm not stopping now. If you're ready to join me, [start here →]

Christine Benally Peranteau is an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation, a member of the Dartmouth Class of 2006, a former Head Agent, Class Agent and Class President, as well as a former Co-Chair of Women of Dartmouth, and a current Chair Emerita. She works in international resource mobilization and lives in Vienna, Austria. She writes at benallyperanteau.com.

The views expressed in this post are her own and do not represent the positions of the United Nations, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Women of Dartmouth, or any other organization with which she is affiliated. She writes here as an individual alumna and private citizen.