The Black Alumni of Dartmouth Association has long been a valuable ally for the college. BADA, as it’s known, assists with the recruitment of Black students and helps fuel the college’s nonstop fundraising machine.

Why then has President Sian Leah Beilock’s administration picked a needless fight with the nonprofit, which has a mailing list of nearly 4,000 Black graduates?

When dealing with alums, Beilock takes a “command-and-control” approach, BADA President Dr. Maria Cole told me: “We’re supposed to shut up and rally around her.”

And when they don’t, as BADA recently discovered, there’s a price to pay.

Earlier this month, Dartmouth temporarily suspended BADA’s college email account, claiming the organization had put out “inaccurate information” about a student sit-in at Parkhurst Hall in late May.

In a June 2 email to BADA members, Cole expressed skepticism about the Beilock regime’s version of what occurred inside Parkhurst.

Within hours of Cole hitting send, Dartmouth jumped into retaliation mode, shutting down BADA’s ability to communicate via email with its members through the college’s web portal. In an email to BADA members, Dartmouth called the suspension a “pause” while it “assessed the inaccuracies in the message and the use of Dartmouth’s platform and data.”

BADA called it something else. “It’s definitely censorship,” Cole said when we met during her visit to Hanover last week for commencement events.

“To be clear,” Dartmouth spokeswoman Jana Barnello told me, “the decision to suspend access to (BADA’s) email account was made by Alumni Relations, not President Beilock. She was not aware of this issue until after the account access was suspended.”

BADA, which was founded in 1972, is still waiting for an apology. So far, the Beilock administration, has only lifted the suspension.

The brouhaha started, oddly enough, with Beilock and Co. asking BADA for a favor. Dartmouth wanted BADA to send around an email that Deans of the College Anne Hudak and Eric Ramsey had authored about a “disruption at Parkhurst” on May 28.

A dozen activists converged on Parkhurst, which is open to the public, to protest Dartmouth’s refusal to stop investing in defense companies that supply weapons to Israel for use in its ongoing operation in Gaza.

Unlike some other campus protests since the Israel-Hamas war begin in October 2023, Dartmouth didn’t call in Hanover police. No arrests were made. The protesters left voluntarily when Parkhurst, the college’s main administration building, closed at 6 p.m.

Still the Beilock administration made a big fuss about it, alleging “protesters attempted to steal and photograph files from this outer area and to force their way into the president’s inner office.”

A Dartmouth safety and security officer and a member of the president’s staff were “hurt during the confrontations,” the college claimed in the “community message” that it wanted BADA to send around — no questions asked — to its constituents.

“The president’s staff member was out of the office for over a week following the incident,” Barnello, the college spokeswoman, said in our email exchange without providing any details on the staffer’s injury. The security officer returned to work the next day.

Unbeknownst to the college, Cole had seen a video filmed during the sit-in showing “one of the students being knocked to the ground — an image that didn’t align with the college’s statement,” she wrote in her email to BADA members.

“The thing I couldn’t get past was the college’s false narrative,” Cole told me. “It didn’t comport with reality.”

In her email, Cole linked to the deans’ statement as well as statements from student activists.

“We have been witnessing a steady erosion of trust within the Dartmouth community, and this moment demands that each of us examine the situation and ask the difficult questions,” Cole wrote.

She went on to reference an April survey by the college’s daily student newspaper. Two-thirds of respondents didn’t feel safe engaging in political action on campus in light of the Beilock administration’s crackdown on peaceful pro-Palestinian protests, The Dartmouth reported.

“As alumni, we have given our time, talent, and treasure to a college we love,” Cole wrote to BADA members, providing a link to the paper’s survey. “We are regularly asked to serve as ambassadors to prospective students — to welcome them, encourage them, and answer their questions. But it compromises our integrity to advocate for Dartmouth when we ourselves are not assured these students will be safe.”

Rather than accept Cole’s comments as constructive criticism, the college, a la Donald Trump, quickly cried, Fake News! The college warned BADA members not to read anything into the survey since it had a 4.7% response rate.

Reading between the lines, I got the sense the college hoped it could discredit Cole by making it seem that she was some sort of rogue who was out of touch with other BADA leaders and its membership overall.

Not so.

BADA’s trustees, “as officers of the corporation, reviewed the statement before it was released,” Eric Freeman, a 1988 graduate who serves on the executive board, said in a phone interview this week.

Or simply put, BADA’s board had Cole’s back.

Even before she was elected in 2022, Cole, a 1984 graduate who lives in South Florida, was well schooled in campus politics.

After selling her dental practice, Cole has served since 2012 as business manager for Cornel West, the Ivy League scholar and activist known for taking on the establishment.

“She’s very clear and consistent,” Freeman said. “She does her research before coming to any conclusion.”

The Beilock administration “can try to censor me, ” Cole said near the end of our conversation, “but I’m not changing.”

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