The Green at Dartmouth College was frozen. It was January in New Hampshire. Upon this cold canvas, students had built a shanty town. Not a real one, but a symbolic cluster of makeshift huts. They were props for a protest, demanding the college divest its endowment from companies doing business in apartheid South Africa. The shanties had stood for weeks. They were plywood and plastic, crude and intentional eyesores.
On the evening of January 21, a different group arrived. They were members of *The Dartmouth Review*, a conservative paper. They came armed not with arguments, but with sledgehammers and axes. Their intent was demolition. What followed was not a debate. It was a physical altercation in the dark and cold. The sounds were of wood splintering, shouts echoing off the collegiate Gothic facades, the thud of tools against protest signs. Pro-divestment students rushed to defend the structures. Scuffles broke out. The police arrived.
The event lasted minutes. The aftermath lasted longer. There were injuries, though minor. There were editorials and disciplinary hearings. The shanties were rebuilt. The incident was a microcosm, compressed and chilled. It contained the national foreign policy debate, translated into campus politics. It contained the shift from verbal protest to physical confrontation. It contained the irony of privileged students, on both sides, fighting over the symbolic representation of suffering an ocean away. The tools were not pens, but sledges. The message was not in the building, but in the breaking.