On May 1, former State Department director Josh Paul canceled his Dickey Center for International Understanding event due to the College’s response to encampment protests that night, he wrote in a post on LinkedIn. Paul — who resigned from the State Department on Oct. 17, 2023 in protest of the Biden administration’s military assistance to Israel during the ongoing conflict in Gaza — was scheduled to participate in an event on May 2 titled “When American Diplomats Dissent” with former State Department career diplomat Elizabeth Shackelford.
In an interview with The Dartmouth, Paul said he still attended meetings with faculty and students on May 2 and May 3, including two classroom visits, a meeting with Dartmouth Student Government representatives and a meeting with the Dickey Center’s War and Peace Fellows.
“I came to Dartmouth with an understanding — I think it was a broadly shared understanding — that Dartmouth [was] actually leading the way … on discussion and dialogue between the College and the students on [issues such as] Israel-Palestine and divestment,” Paul said. “I’ve been very optimistic there’ll be some good opportunity to have some solid discussion.”
Paul said he arrived at Dartmouth on the night of the protests and immediately saw “riot police with truncheons [grab] peaceful protesters out of the crowd.” He added that a staff member told him that College President Sian Leah Beilock requested the police response.
“In light of that, I just thought that it wouldn’t be appropriate to go forward with what would appear to be, first of all, an endorsement of Dartmouth’s approach on this,” Paul said. “I also didn’t want to give the administration the ability to turn around the next day and say, ‘We do support this whole dialogue. Look, we’ve just had a State Department dissenter, Josh Paul, here.’”
Paul also said he wanted to use his platform to “draw attention” to the crackdown on protesters at Dartmouth in the context of similar college responses across the country.
“I felt the appropriate thing to do was … to make sure that what … was happening at Dartmouth also got the attention that it deserved and didn’t go under the radar [and] that [the administration] couldn’t just think that they could crack down on students and no one would notice,” Paul said.
