Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Caleb Kenna/The New York Times/Redux, Getty Images
Dr. Sian Leah Beilock, the president of Dartmouth, arrived at the Aspen Ideas Festival in the mountains of Colorado on a peak of her own. The recent commencement speech by tennis great Roger Federer had gone viral during a season when most viral college videos were not the kind that thrilled admissions officers.
For the most part, Dartmouth had avoided rancorous protests. There had been no existential crisis, no challenge to Beilock’s leadership. “This is what we need to see across the country,” Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said during a visit to the campus in January, praising the civility with which she guided the school through the immense and painful complexity of October 7 and the war in Gaza.
The reception in Aspen was certainly positive. “Dartmouth is the only Ivy League college that has not faced a federal civil-rights investigation over its handling of allegations of antisemitism and Islamophobia on campus,” reported Jewish Insider from the summit. Like other outlets, it credited Beilock for preventing the campus from devolving into chaos, either right after October 7 or in the spring of 2024. It even gave Dartmouth a nickname: “Nonpoisonous Ivy.”
At the conference, Bielock gave an account of her approach to running an elite college in a time of increase scrutiny: “One thing that we were clear about from the beginning is that protests can be an important form of free speech,” she said. “But there’s a difference between protest and then taking over a shared space for one ideology and excluding another. That is taking over someone else’s free speech. That is not at the heart of our academic mission.”
Later, in preparation for the new year, Beilock published an essay in The Atlantic, “Saving the Idea of the University.” She cited the work of 1950s psychologist Solomon Asch, whose experiments laid bare the immense power of social conformity. “It takes only a single well-informed dissident to break the conformist mindset,” she wrote, making perfectly clear that was the role she seeks to play.
Not that her tenure has been without any turbulence. Just weeks before her Aspen appearance, Beilock had overseen the arrests of 65 students — after which she had been censured by the school’s arts and sciences faculty. During the Federer speech, some pro-Palestinian protesters walked out. In an op-ed for The Dartmouth, freshman Eli Moyse said that Beilock’s decision to call in law enforcement to clear a pro-Palestinian tent encampment on the college green on the evening of May 1 was “callous” and evidence of “Beilock’s obsession with her own self-image.”
Indeed, her detractors among the student body and faculty argue that Beilock has simply been adept at public relations. She had done nothing spectacular. In fact, her call for civil discourse disguised an authoritarian streak. Her embrace of intellectualism was better read as a rejection of Palestinian suffering.
Even with all that, Dartmouth has been comparatively calm. Some attribute this to the school’s overall more conservative reputation than its fellow Ivies, but it also has something to do specifically with Beilock, who came to the school with an unusual focus and background on how to promote the mental wellbeing of young people. When she took over in late September, Beilock was the first woman to lead the college in its nearly 300 years. At 48, she is also by far the youngest president in the Ivy League. (Most others are in their 60s.) And she hailed from the social sciences: Before becoming an administrator, Beilock had been a neuroscientist who studied emotional responses to stress.
Her declared intent was creating a campus truly optimized for young brains to thrive and to avoid negative vortices of stress and despair — a goal she saw as achievable, but not really being done very well at other colleges. It figured into her opening address to the campus: “The single greatest service we can do for our students, our faculty, and our staff, is to support them on their wellness journeys,” Beilock said in her inaugural speech, describing mental health as her top campus priority.
There was reason for this: At Princeton, six students had taken their own lives between 2015 and 2022. Yale was forcing students struggling with suicidal ideation to withdraw, the Washington Post reported. During the pandemic, four Dartmouth students committed suicide. “When in the history of the College have so many died in such a short time span to so little reaction?” wondered a columnist for The Dartmouth.
“I think the data are pretty clear that young people’s mental health has been degrading. The pandemic exacerbated it, but it wasn’t necessarily the pandemic that started it,” Beilock said during an interview in her office in Parkhurst Hall. The trend, Dartmouth happiness expert (and close Beilock ally) David Blanchflower has found, began in the mid-aughts and, in his view, is doubtlessly related to the profusion of smartphones.
Beilock’s greater vision for the campus was roughly this: She wanted students to get well and, once they were, to promptly make themselves uncomfortable. She envisioned Dartmouth as a series of “brave spaces,” a constellation of difficult but necessary conversations conducted by students who were confident in their own views, but open to discourse and not confrontational.
The concept of “brave spaces” comes from a 2013 paper by two progressive educators who observed that many social justice protesters were prone to a “defensive tendency to discount, deflect, or retreat from a challenge.” Brave spaces traded “the illusion of safety” for “controversy with civility.” They would become “a hallmark of our campus,” Beilock said at her inauguration in September 2023.
Just days later, American campuses convulsed with protests over the violence in Israel and Gaza. When Dartmouth managed to avoid the tumult, Beilock began to gain notice. “How Dartmouth Keeps Its Cool,” read the headline of a Wall Street Journal profile from February. When protests resumed two months later, some criticized her for a heavy-handed response. But for the most part, Beilock dodged the pitfalls that claimed other Ivy League presidents.
There had been six female Ivy League presidents when the academic year began. When it ended, there were only three. Then, in August, Columbia president Minouche Shafik abruptly resigned and returned to London. She has been replaced by Katrina Armstrong, but only on an interim basis. So this academic year begins with only two of the six women who had been in charge 12 months before still at the helm: Beilock and Brown’s Christina Paxson.
With the situation in the Middle East violent and volatile, another round of confrontations between Beilock and the stiff critics of her approach seems inevitable. Pro-Palestinian protests are already heating up again at other campuses. At Columbia, the year opened with protesters spilling red paint on the school’s iconic Alma Mater statue and calling, in an official statement, for the “total collapse of the university structure and American empire itself.” Meanwhile, other schools are implementing more strict rules on encampments and protests. Beilock’s ideas for how to create a campus of brave spaces, where protest is encouraged even as it remains within strict bounds of civility, will be put to new tests.
Beilock was raised in a Jewish family in Berkeley, California. Her parents, attorneys, gave her the name of a Welsh actress whose turn as a suffragette in a BBC miniseries they liked. She went to the University of California at San Diego, then Michigan State for a doctorate in psychology and kinesiology.
Landing at the University of Chicago, Beilock earned tenure there at 32. Her mentor was the school’s president, Robert J. Zimmer. In 2014, Zimmer issued a defense of free speech that has come to be known as the Chicago Statement. “In a word, the University’s fundamental commitment is to the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed,” the statement read. Coming before Trump, Black Lives Matter, and Israel-Palestine, Zimmer’s manifesto made Chicago a bastion of reasoned discourse at a time when that discourse did not yet seem under threat. (When I asked Beilock for a role model in higher education today, she named Zimmer; he died last year.)
Beilock became Chicago’s vice provost in 2016, at 40, but left for Barnard the following year. Two years into her tenure, first-year student Tessa Majors was murdered while walking through Morningside Park. A few weeks later, the coronavirus was tearing through New York. By the time New York emerged from the pandemic, she was ready for something new.
In one of her first moves at Dartmouth, Beilock gathered every living surgeon general — the current holder of that post, Dr. Vivek Murthy, and six of his predecessors — to discuss mental health at a symposium hosted by Dr. Sanjay Gupta of CNN. She says that something Dr. Murthy said stays with her to this day: “It’s hard to hate up close.”
A little more than a week later, Hamas attacked Israel. What happened next is a matter of debate.
The pro-Beilock narrative goes as follows. For the last several years, Ezzedine C. Fishere, an Egyptian former diplomat and novelist, and Bernard Avishai, an Israel scholar, had been teaching a joint seminar on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: “a miniature academic peace process,” as Avishai called it in The New Yorker. At the direction of Beilock’s administration, they held two campus-wide seminars, which were not only well attended but set precisely the kind of brave space Beilock had sought. Because the seminars took place almost right after the attacks (the first was on October 10), they set a tone from which Dartmouth would not deviate in the weeks and months to come.
Few elite schools took a similar approach. “I’ve had conversations with other presidents,” Beilock said. “Some of them couldn’t get their faculty to do these kinds of things.” She was celebrated in the press. 60 Minutes came to campus. What was happening at Dartmouth was “much more valuable than one more violent protest or any of that stuff,” Fishere said for the segment.
The anti-Beilock faction has a different take: The two seminars were a spectacle intended to suppress protest, not foster dialogue. Some on the left had always seen calls for “civility” as a silencing tactic, a means of suppressing popular rage. David Adkins, an Egyptian American student from Atlanta and an opinion editor at The Dartmouth, told me that the college has never made a space for Arab American and Muslim students to express their grief over what was happening. “I think the college has certainly played a role in making sure protests are not as visible,” he said, favoring an “academic” response (seminars) over an emotional one (protests).
Skeptics also thought that Beilock benefited from the fact that Dartmouth is small, remote, and relatively conservative to begin with. Her only accomplishment, skeptics thought, was to turn these factors to her advantage, roping them into the self-congratulating story she wanted to tell.
It was also true that Dartmouth had been growing more progressive in recent years, even producing a few prominent radical organizers. Campus progressives unimpressed by Beilock’s initial response tried to challenge her attempt to set the mood on campus. On October 19, Dartmouth students began a sit-in on the lawn of Parkhurst Hall. Some criticized Beilock for “supporting genocide” in Gaza, while others called for Dartmouth to divest from companies with ties to Israel, which was then in the opening rounds of its relentless reprisal to the October 7 attack by Hamas. Then, on October 27, two of the protesters, freshman Kevin Engel and junior Roan Wade, pitched a tent on the Parkhurst lawn. The tent was adorned with a Palestinian flag, as well as a sign that seemed to taunt Beilock: “BRAVE SPACE.”
That evening, Engel and Wade (who did not return my requests for comment) presented Beilock’s office with a list of demands compiled by the local chapter of the progressive Sunrise Movement titled the Dartmouth New Deal. These demands included funding a regional public-transit system, raising the minimum wage and paying reparations to Native American students. If the demands were not met, the document intimated there could be “physical action.”
That night, a phalanx of campus security staff and members of the local Hanover Police Department showed up. Engel and Wade were arrested and charged with trespassing. Their supporters were especially enraged that Beilock refused to drop the matter, insisting that the students be tried.
“It’s had a real chilling effect. Students fear they’ll face retaliation for speaking out,” Chris Helali, a Dartmouth graduate student and pro-Palestinian activist, told columnist Jim Kenyon of the Valley News, the local paper of record, as that trial opened this spring. “Students know as soon as they pop up a tent, Hanover police will be there.”
That appears to have been the point. Slight as the action may seem, the arrest of Wade and Engel set a tone early in that season of unrest — and set Dartmouth apart from other schools, where administrators seemed more reluctant to curtail student responses to October 7.
Beilock maintains that she has simply done what needed to be done to keep the peace. “I’m committed to not seeing the kind of hate and violence we’ve seen on other campuses,” she told me. But that commitment requires a certain level of official vigilance. The day I arrived on campus, The Dartmouth ran an article about a surprise crackdown on students hanging flags. Apparently, there was an ordinance somewhere in the obscurity of the school’s student handbook that banned it, a rule that had seemingly gone unenforced for the last two and a half centuries. That changed in March, when security officers entered student rooms (sometimes when those students weren’t there) and pulled down flags — Palestinian, Israeli, LGBTQ — hung from windows.
“I’m trying to to run an institution that is academically excellent,” Beilock said, offering no apology. Pitching tents and flying provocative flags, she seemed to suggest, was something academically excellent institutions did not do.
Beilock’s good publicity — at least in the political center — continued through the winter, boosted by her decision to reinstate the SAT, which had been dropped as an admissions criterion during the pandemic. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology had made the same move earlier, but Beilock was the first Ivy League president to do so. A new flood of positive press swept over Hanover. Late-night talk-show host Bill Maher awarded Beilock with a pair of balls wrapped in gold foil; New York Times columnist John McWhorter said he was nominating her as “Antiracist of 2024.”
In what was hard to see as anything but an endorsement of Beilock’s tenure, in March, the estate of Glenn Britt, the late Time Warner Cable chief executive, gave his alma mater $150 million for financial aid, which will allow any student whose family makes $125,000 or less to go there for free. A few weeks later, Beilock hosted a gala at Lincoln Center, during which she announced that Steven Roth, the Vornado Realty Trust founder, and his wife, Daryl, an influential Broadway producer, were giving $25 million to Dartmouth for the arts.
As Beilock was preparing for her Lincoln Center gala on April 17, Columbia president Shafik testified about antisemitism at a congressional investigation. She said nothing especially controversial, deftly combining condemnations of antisemitism with a defense of the freedom to protest and voice potentially unpopular opinions. But if her performance seemed to pacify the Acela establishment — politicians, business executives, media elites — it only infuriated campus activists, who erected a boisterous encampment on the school’s Butler Lawn. Having avoided disaster on Capitol Hill, Shafik returned to find Morningside Heights in crisis.
Even as the protests and encampments spread across the country throughout late April, Dartmouth stayed quiet. “While campus encampments and demonstrations rock colleges from Boston to Los Angeles, Dartmouth remains a lawn of serenity,” wrote Kenyon, the Valley News columnist, on April 29. Two nights later, the pastoral serenity came to an end, as several hundred students gathered on the college green, chanting pro-Palestinian slogans and intending to set up an encampment.
There is little ambiguity, or disagreement, about what happened next: Beilock called the cops, as she had in October, and the cops cleared the nascent encampment. But this time, they did it under much more scrutiny than when there had only been two people to arrest in front of Parkhurst Hall.
Among the arrested that evening were two reporters for The Dartmouth, as well as history professor Annelise Orleck, whose needlessly rough treatment at the hands of the local police was captured in a now-viral video, the only one to emerge from Hanover that evening. “Neither the students nor the faculty have been as radicalized in a long time as they’re feeling today,” Orleck, a Jewish native of Brooklyn who has been teaching at Dartmouth for more than three decades, told the Times.
“Tonight was a grotesque display of intimidation against students, press, and faculty,” Adkins, the Egyptian-American student and editor, wrote to me in a text message. “If Dartmouth was asleep yesterday, it woke up today.”
The following morning, Beilocock wrote an email to students, faculty, and staff. Her message was that the protesters knew what they were getting into. “Part of choosing to engage in that way is not just acknowledging — but accepting — that actions have consequences,” she wrote. She also responded to their calls for divestment from companies that do business with, or in, Israel. “The endowment is not a political tool,” Beilock wrote.
She continues to maintain that position. Dartmouth was “a different kind of Ivy,” she said at Aspen. Jews were being urged to avoid schools like Harvard and Columbia, where they had been once limited by quotas, then welcomed with open arms only now to be spurned again. That wasn’t Dartmouth. There would be no stopping students to check if they were Zionists on the college green.
Despite the fact that she was censured by the arts and sciences faculty, Beilock maintains strong support from the larger base of faculty and alumni, who are considered, along with Princeton’s, to be the most loyal among elite schools. “I’ve talked to the trustees quite a lot about it, and they feel like she’s protecting our values,” the economist Blanchflower says. “We didn’t need this chaos.”
There are also political dynamics at play, as Ivy presidents who have lost their jobs after testifying on Capitol Hill have discovered. Elite colleges could be in for a tough spell, particularly if the Republicans take Congress or if Trump prevails in November and appoints a conservative ideologue as his education secretary.
Harvard appears to be taking the danger seriously, recently announcing that it will not take positions on issues not directly pertaining to campus. But it may be too late for it and other institutions to wiggle out of the trap. “Would Cutting Off Columbia Really Be So Bad?,” wondered a Wall Street Journal headline.
Beilock retains enough support from donors, trustees and alumni to continue with her “brave spaces” experiment, but she has sacrificed a good measure of her initial campus goodwill to save Dartmouth from the kind of ire rival institutions have faced. Suspicions about her plans among some segments of students and faculty members — the mental health initiative, the brave spaces vision — has only deepened.
On May 23, Dartmouth held a “Day for Community.” Burritos were reportedly served. For pro-Palestinian students on campus, the pivot back to mental health was a replay of October’s effort at suppression. Back then, the byword was “dialogue.” Now, they were to set out on a “journey of connection and community building,” as the May 23 event was billed. Some saw the framing as an attempt to discredit their concerns about Gaza and demands about Israel — in effect, to paint them as asocial malcontents. “The first event in the schedule of the ‘Day for Community’ was a webinar titled ‘Calming Everyday Anxiety,’” wrote first-year student Aina Nadeem in a poignant and biting letter to The Dartmouth.
“The only thing capable of ‘calming my anxiety’ right now,” Nadeem wrote, “is a permanent and immediate ceasefire ending the genocide in Gaza.”
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