The dust is already settling. Including the Hanover Police Department and President Beilock, virtually everyone now agrees that all of the people who demonstrated on the Dartmouth Green the night of May 1 were peaceful and that riot police should never have been ordered or empowered to treat them as if they were just trespassing on college property.

What they are now doing is a perfect solution: fully complying with college rules, they are demonstrating in a permitted area from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. each day, with no tents, which the rules now forbid. Furthermore, President Sian Beilock has apologized — as indeed she should have — for inadvertently initiating this fiasco, and I trust her to make sure, as she says, that “anyone who was swept up in the chaos on the green but not in violation of any Dartmouth policy suffers no consequence.”

But I must also say that Beilock’s banning of tents on the green is a brilliant move. It is the best possible way to forestall the kind of confrontations that have roiled and disrupted colleges and universities across the country, and even now, the University of Chicago — which has long prided itself on its commitment to free speech — has finally decided to ban tents.

But Beilock needs to do more. Before making the protesters disperse, she should have asked them to choose a small delegation who would be free to make their case in her own office within a week. Thus assured that their demands would be heard by the president herself, the protesters would have had no reason to go on violating any rules. What would Dartmouth lose by such a concession? Nothing. And it would take a giant step forward in the direction of civil discourse — precisely what colleges and universities dedicated to humanistic values are meant to foster.

Brown University has already met its protesters halfway. In October, its board of trustees will vote on divestment. In consequence, a billionaire donor to Brown is “pausing” his donations. So I ask, should Dartmouth be thus cowed by anyone who thinks the college should not even consider changing its policies? Or should it not prove to everyone here that it is always ready and willing to listen to its critics?

Besides being willing to take even that modest step, it is high time that Dartmouth and other institutions of higher learning in this country spoke out loudly and clearly for humanistic values, which require a mature grasp of complexity: the capacity to see beyond raw division into something that may sound miraculous but is nonetheless desperately needed: a world of empathy, cooperation, and mutual understanding.

In a nation as polarized and tribal as it’s ever been, we have signally failed to furnish this sort of guidance. I detest both Hamas and polices of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for both are strait-jacketed by their own stories and handcuffed by their own mind-forged manacles. But instead of recognizing this obvious point, our institutions of higher learning have allowed themselves to be bullied by Republicans damning them for “tolerating” or even endorsing the terrorism of Hamas when all they are tolerating are calls for the independence of Palestine.

Case in point: last fall, when Harvard President Claudine Gay was asked by a Congressional committee why Harvard was tolerating “calls for genocide,” Gay simply failed to explain that calls for “intifada” — which Harvard does tolerate — were not calls for genocide, any more than the American Revolution called for the genocide of the British people. “Intifada” means simply “uprising against occupation,” which in turn means simply calling for an independent state of Palestine.

The plain fact is that both sides in this conflict oppose what many insist is the only solution: two independent states. This what is precisely what Netanyahu has always opposed, and why he denounces all pro-Palestinian protests as the work of “antisemitic mobs.” Iit is emphatically not antisemitic for anyone to attack the recklessness and ruthlessness of Netanyahu’s policies. In quest of the impossible goal of eradicating Hamas from Gaza, he defiantly insists on the right to kill Palestinian citizens as well as to precipitate what has been called “full blown famine” in northern Gaza, and is even now planning to attack Rafah, where over a million Palestinian civilians are now helplessly trapped.

That is why his policies are bitterly opposed not just by hundreds if not thousands of American Jews but also by a majority of his own people, who massively demonstrated against him before Oct. 7 and who would vote him out if he called an election right now.

Which brings me to the heartbreaking case of Annelise Orleck, the 65-year-old history professor, and former professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth — who was thrown to the ground by police as they arrested her and who was initially banned from campus for six months. Though I understand that the college is revoking that ban as a mistake, what happened to Orleck is absolutely inexcusable and should never be allowed to happen again to any peaceful protester here at Dartmouth or on any other college campus.

Orleck herself is a model of what humanistic learning can do. As a Jewish woman who stood up on behalf of Palestinian rights, she heroically embodies what we have almost entirely lost in this polarized world: the capacity to imagine the suffering of others.

Why is this so important?

Just see what happens when we try to solve our present problem by means of quantification alone, when we play the numbers game.

According to Wikipedia, Hamas killed 1,339 Israelis, mostly civilians, on Oct. 7. In return, Israelis have now killed over 34,000 Palestinians in Gaza. Since an estimated 70% of the Palestinians killed have been civilians, Israelis have taken more than 25 Palestinian lives for every Israeli killed, so far.

You can see how impossible it is to settle this matter by numbers alone. Each side believes that its suffering trumps the other’s. There is no common ground of humanity on which we can share our feelings or find a way to break this deadly cycle of provocation, revenge and retaliation.

On my personal website, therefore, I have posted a truly radical proposal: require all first-year students at Dartmouth to take one full year, three terms, of a humanities course stretching from ancient to contemporary authors.

Radical and even irrelevant to the protests as this proposal might sound, I believe that what happened here on May 1 has made one thing clear: We have never before so much needed what the unifying, imaginative, soul-building power of the humanities can give to students.

We need the wisdom of ancient texts such as Homer’s “Iliad,” the first great epic of war, the first great story of the killing we have relentlessly inflicted on each other for more than 3,000 years. To be initiated into a mature humanity, students need to ponder and discuss among themselves such things as the great scene at the end of the Iliad, when King Priam of Troy goes to the tent of the Greek warrior Achilles, his mortal enemy, and on his knees begs him for the body of his son Hector, whom Achilles has killed in retaliation for Hector’s killing of Achilles’ beloved friend Patroclus. Thus caught up in the deadly cycle of provocation and revenge, both men shudder and weep together, and both men, I believe, can be heard as weeping also for us.

Believe it or not, Annalise Orleck is not the only Jewish person who can imagine the suffering of Palestinians, and I’m sure there are Palestinians capable of imagining the suffering of Jews. But the only way we can build this capacity in the hearts and minds and souls of our students is to revive what was once offered to all first year students at Dartmouth: one full year of humanities courses — a common core of texts whose wisdom has resoundingly stood the test of time.

Right now there is not a single text that all Dartmouth students read. Under such conditions, how they can possibly experience the intellectually unifying power of humanistic education? How can they possibly discover for themselves what it means to be a truly educated human being above all other vocations?

So I ask you to read my case (posted on my website jamesheff.com) for reviving the study of humanities at Dartmouth. If I were 30 years younger, I would gladly spearhead this effort myself. At the very least, the faculty should pass a motion to launch a committee charged with exploring this proposal.

James A. W. Heffernan is an emeritus professor of English at Dartmouth College. He lives in Hanover.