Under sunny skies and (slightly) warmer temperatures, Dartmouth students flocked to the college’s quintessential campus Green this week. They left their camping gear behind, though.

They didn’t join the masses of students at other elite colleges across the country who set up tent cities on their campus lawns to protest the war in Gaza and loss of free speech at home.

They weren’t enlisting in the pro-Palestinian movement that led to the arrests in recent days and nights of hundreds of U.S. student activists who defied their college administrators’ orders to keep off the grass.

Dartmouth students who occupied the Green this week were sticking to Spikeball.

To be fair, not every student who took to the Green was bouncing a rubber ball the size of a grapefruit off a mini-trampoline. (I’m guessing the bouncing part is how Spikeball got its trademarked name.) Other students were playing volleyball and tossing footballs. A few, lounging on blankets, even had open books.

While campus encampments and demonstrations rock colleges from Boston to Los Angeles, Dartmouth remains a lawn of serenity.

What makes Dartmouth different?

During a late afternoon and evening walk around campus, I posed the question in separate interviews with a dozen or so Dartmouth students.

The answer I heard most: Geography.

The intensity and breadth of campus activism not seen since the Vietnam War-era is happening mostly (so far) at schools in or around large cities. Columbia, NYU, Harvard, MIT, Emory, the University of Southern California — and the list goes on — are located in settings that bear little resemblance to Hanover.

“We do live in our own little bubble here,” a Dartmouth senior said.

With the Israel-Hamas war such a “sensitive topic,” students said they preferred their names not appear in print or online.

“People are worried they’re going to offend someone they know by saying the wrong thing or have it taken the wrong way,” a student said.

Outside Robinson Hall, I talked with a student about the 100 demonstrators who were arrested after refusing to leave a campus encampment at Columbia. He motioned across the street to the Green.

“This isn’t New York,” he said. “It’s peaceful. We’ve got trees.”

Later I chatted with a student who was studying at Robinson Hall. She compared Dartmouth to her home state of Hawaii. “We’re not part of the mainland,” she said.

With 4,500 undergraduates, Dartmouth is the smallest school in the Ivy League. It only stands to reason, a student pointed out, that Dartmouth has “fewer students who are politically active” than Yale, Harvard and Brown, where encampments emerged this week in solidarity with Columbia students taken into police custody.

But it’s more than just a lack of numbers holding Dartmouth’s student body from becoming more active in the pro-Palestinian movement, Chris Helali said in a phone interview. Helali, a Dartmouth graduate student, served as a spokesman for Upper Valley for Palestine, following campus rally in early December that attracted about 50 people.

The arrests of Dartmouth student activists Kevin Engel and Roan Wade in late October hasn’t been forgotten by their schoolmates, Helali said.

“It’s had a real chilling effect,” he told me. “Students fear they’ll face retaliation for speaking out.”

Engel and Wade had pitched a tent on the lawn outside President Sian Leah Beilock’s office to bring attention to the plight of Palestinian residents in war-torn Gaza and also demand the college divest from companies connected to the Israeli military.

Within hours of Engel and Wade refusing to leave their tent, the Beilock administration summoned Hanover police to have them arrested and charged with criminal trespass. They’ve pleaded not guilty.

“The president has made it clear that dissent will not be tolerated,” Helali said. “Students know as soon as they pop up a tent, Hanover police will be there.”

A student, who told me that he’s Jewish, agreed with Helali: Students will think twice before setting up their own a pro-Palestinian encampment on campus, after seeing how quickly the college brought in police to haul off Engel and Wade in handcuffs. Which the student had no problem with.

“They broke the law, so they got arrested,” he said.

I suspect Beilock and her lieutenants couldn’t be more pleased with how their zero tolerance strategy is working out. (The only hitch has been a subpoena issed to Beilock, making it likely she’ll have to testify at the students’ trial for criminal trespass.)

This week brought droves of potential students with their parents in tow for choreographed campus tours. With no encampments in sight, moms and dads didn’t need to fret. The only tents found on this idyllic campus belong to the Dartmouth Outing Club.

Even with a lot of impressionable visitors in town, Beilock and Co., could live with the hour-long rally that drew roughly 200 people to the Green on Thursday. 

“We have been impressed with how our students have responded to divisive issues over the last six months with empathy, intelligence, and grace,” said Justin Anderson, senior vice president for communications, in an email response to a request for comment on the rally.

The rally-goers — a mixture of students, faculty, staff and Upper Valley activists — kept the event peaceful, making the 10  Dartmouth security officers patrolling the Green seem like overkill. A lone Hanover cop watched from his e-bike on the sidewalk. Chants to “drop the goddamn charges” against Engel and Wade were hardly a cause for alarm.

As long as the Green remains tent-free and students are content playing Spikeball, the Dartmouth bubble won’t burst.

Jim Kenyon can be reached at jkenyon@vnews.com.