Also on today’s menu:
Investment Advisor To Pay Nearly $6 Million
Dartmouth History Professor Among Those Arrested
Senator Debra Altschiller’s Senate Bill 359, which previously passed in that chamber, has now passed the House, 192-174, and is headed to Governor Chris Sununu’s desk for signature. The bill would prevent anyone under the age of 18 from marrying, even with parental consent. If signed into law, New Hampshire would join Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington in banning marriage under 18 and providing no exceptions. It also means that the state would not recognize the marriage of Maine 16- and 17-year-olds — who are allowed to marry with written consent from their parents, legal guardians, or custodians — should they move here.
Representative Margaret Drye (R-Plainfield) argued against the bill, saying there are some circumstances in which marriage under 18 is appropriate, such as when there is an unexpected pregnancy, and said that it can provide “stability, provision, protection, and a chance for a young family to be a family before a baby arrived”. Representative Jess Edwards (R-Auburn) argued, “If we continually restrict the freedom of marriage as a legitimate social option, when we do this to people who are a ripe, fertile age and may have a pregnancy and a baby involved, are we not in fact making abortion a much more desirable alternative, when marriage might be the right solution for some freedom-loving couples?” Representative Tony Lekas (R-Hudson) said he was 16 when he married his wife, “and we didn’t need any outside input from anyone. We’ve been married almost 53 years.”
Rep. Cassandra Levesque (D-Barrington) said, “we know that age of majority does not amount to maturity, and that there is a greater risk of human trafficking and domestic violence without these protections”.
Discussion: Democrats object to Republican efforts to insert themselves into personal decisions like abortion while allowing no exceptions, but they are willing to deny families the right to decide for themselves whether young couples are mature enough to marry. Many young marriages do fail, but some — such as Tony Lekas’ — last for a lifetime. Some people later regret choosing abortion, too.
Investment Advisor To Pay Nearly $6 Million
The New Hampshire Bureau of Securities Regulation and former investment adviser Thomas Chadwick of New London have agreed to a consent order requiring payment of $4,858,364.71 in restitution to Chadwick’s former clients, and another $1 million in costs and penalties for his handling of accounts while with the investment firm Chadwick & D’Amato.
The bureau investigated Chadwick, whose clients were mostly older, conservative-to-moderate risk investors, finding that Chadwick had invested most of their money in “an extremely risky securities product known as ‘REML’” which warned that it was not appropriate for investors seeking long-term investments, nor those who could not afford the risk of losing their entire investment. Despite the warnings, the bureau said, Chadwick concentrated significant portions of his clients’ accounts in REML at the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020, resulting in “devastating losses” totaling several million dollars.
The bureau wrote that Chadwick has claimed he does not have the resources to immediately pay the amounts owed, which “may result in the Bureau pursuing a separate legal action to recover the restitution.” Chadwick has agreed to be permanently barred from securities licensure in New Hampshire.
Discussion: Investors rely on “experts” to handle their money because securities is a confusing field, but they need to choose those experts carefully, and closely monitor what it happening to their funds.
Dartmouth History Professor Among Those Arrested
Among those arrested on the Dartmouth campus on May 1 was history professor Annelise Orleck, who wrote on X, “I promise I did absolutely nothing wrong. I was standing with a line of women faculty in their 60s to 80s trying to protect students.” Orleck wrote that police were “brutal” to her during her arrest, and that she was “banned from the campus” as a result.
Jana Barnello, speaking on behalf of the college in an email to the student newspaper, The Dartmouth, said it was a bail commissioner who imposed the restriction, and the college “had no intention of seeking Prof. Orleck’s exclusion from campus.” She said Dartmouth “will promptly request that any errors be corrected. … As we have advised the faculty member, we are taking every reasonable step to ensure she can continue teaching classes.”
Orleck has taught at Dartmouth for 34 years, currently teaching two history courses.
Meanwhile, President Sian Leah Beilock sent a letter to the Dartmouth community, noting that there have been more than 15 peaceful protests on the campus this year. “Last night,” she wrote, “people felt so strongly about their beliefs that they were willing to face disciplinary action and arrest. While there is bravery in that, part of choosing to engage in this way is not just acknowledging — but accepting — that actions have consequences.”
Long-standing Dartmouth policies limit the time, place, and manner where protests can occur to prevent interfering with classes or increasing safety risks. “When policies like these have been ignored on other campuses, hate and violence have thrived — events, like commencement, are canceled, instruction is forced to go remote, and, worst of all, abhorrent antisemitism and Islamophobia reign,” she continued.
Protest and demonstration are important forms of speech. Yet, we cannot let differences of opinion become an excuse for disrupting our amazing sense of place and the lived experience of our campus. And, most importantly, our opinions — no matter how strongly they are held — can never be used to justify taking over Dartmouth’s shared spaces and effectively rendering them places only for people who hold one specific ideology. This is exclusionary at best and, at its worst, as we have seen on other campuses in recent days, can turn quickly into hateful intimidation where Jewish students feel unsafe.
The protesters demanded that the Dartmouth Board of Trustees hold a vote on divesting its endowment from companies connected to Israel despite the fact that the Board has a clearly articulated process for considering such decisions, which was explained to student protesters. I am a deep believer in free speech. Dartmouth’s freedom of expression and dissent policy also defends this right. However, Dartmouth’s endowment is not a political tool, and using it to take sides on such a contested issue is an extraordinarily dangerous precedent to set.
Robert Reich has spoken to students and faculty at Berkeley and Columbia, and writes, “Most of the students and faculty I’ve spoken with found Hamas’s attack on October 7 odious. They also find Israel’s current government morally bankrupt, in that its response to Hamas’s attack has been disproportionate. They do not support Palestine as such; most do not know enough about the history of Israel and Palestine to pass moral judgment. But they have a deep and abiding sense that what is happening in Gaza is morally wrong, and that the United States is complicit in that immorality.”
Commentary: Students are motivated by the atrocities they are seeing on both sides, and want to do something about it. They do not have the answers, but are angry that world leaders also have not solved the situation. Seeing the problems persist, they become disenchanted; many are saying they will not be voting in November because they are angry that President Joe Biden Jr. has not taken a stronger stand against the Israeli government. They are demanding that colleges reallocate their investments so they do not support Israel or companies involved in war machines. Neither will be effective while hate remains.