At Commencement this year, Dartmouth College President Sian Beilock will repeat her claim that, “Dartmouth is not an advocacy organization,” while giving an honorary degree to an advocate who drives discrimination against Trans people. And then she will state that Dartmouth is taking steps to “restore trust in higher education” while defending a prominent purveyor of the predation of minors on the Epstein list.
Dartmouth College is awarding Gregory Lukianoff an honorary degree. Lukianoff’s organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) is not an independent research institution. It’s an advocacy organization funded by entities, such as the Charles G. Koch Foundation and Hugh M. Hefner Foundation, to fight regulations that would hurt the business bottom line.
Lukianoff is not an academic, he’s an advocate. One of his central tenets has been, “Equating words with violence trivializes actual physical harm, shuts down conversations, and even encourages real violence by justifying the use of force against offensive speech.” Adding, “Free speech isn’t violence, it’s the best alternative to violence ever invented.”
A persuasive sentiment. But one that breaks down when applied to Lukianoff’s participation in Trans bashing and embrace of Beilock’s attacks on free expression.
On May 1, 2024, a nonviolent gathering without threats, confrontations, or property damage ended in mass arrests of peaceful protesters and journalists. Andrew Tefft’s arrest caused a fractured arm bone. And the violent arrest of professor and former Jewish Studies Chair, Annelise Orleck, was featured on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and the New York Times.
Devon Chaffee, Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of New Hampshire stated, “We are highly concerned that police, many in riot gear, moved quickly and forcefully into protests at Dartmouth College. Use of police force against protestors should never be a first resort.”
Henry Klementowicz, Deputy Legal Director of the ACLU of New Hampshire wrote, “[Dartmouth’s] response to these protests amounted to a serious overreaction that has had profound implications for free expression on college campuses… Dartmouth called the police. The Lebanon District Court acknowledged that the protesters at Dartmouth were arrested ‘at Dartmouth College’s behest’.” Adding, “And with respect to Dr. Beilock’s apparent concern – referenced in a May 2, 2024 email – about spaces being taken over ‘only for people who hold one specific ideology,’ it is important to note that all political speech in a public forum, by necessity, occupies a public space and conveys a ‘specific ideology’.”
Instead of condemning attacks on free expression by police in riot gear conducting mass arrests, Lukianoff wrote, “Dartmouth became the only ivy league school to earn a ‘green light’ rating from FIRE. This is largely the result of Dartmouth’s new president Sian Beilock.”
Lukianoff is a hypocrite.
Beilock is too.
Beilock’s Nietzschean volonté de puissance is unquestionable. She orders unprecedented mass arrests and then passes a new “institutional restraint” policy. She pulls down Dartmouth’s DEI website, and then makes the SAT mandatory. She signs a $1.6 million contract with Anthropic, and then cuts Dartmouth’s libraries budget – leaving vacant positions unfilled and firing workers.
Beilock has made it clear that she does not care about letters from the alumni council, faculty censure votes or student survey results. She would rather union bust, and replace workers with robots, than bargain with workers. Beilock was the only Ivy League president not to sign the AACU letter in defense of academic freedom, despite the fact that former-Dartmouth President Phil Hanlon urged doing so in Fortune and TIME, and former Dartmouth Provost Lee Bollinger has urged taking even bolder action in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Beilock is both an irresistible force and an unmovable object, unless we’re talking about the interests of oligarchs. In that case, she is a lackey of plutolatry. She’s dogged until money is involved. For the right price, she’ll apply a wholly separate set of standards to her decision-making.
Leon Black ’73 and his family have given over $50 million to Dartmouth College.
In 2023, when Beilock became President of Dartmouth, billionaire Leon Black’s deep financial ties to Jeffrey Epstein became a major focal point for legal and congressional scrutiny.
In 2024, investigations into the financial and personal ties between Apollo Global Management co-founder Leon Black and Jeffrey Epstein deepened significantly.
In 2025, Senate investigations and unsealed communications outline that billionaire Leon Black paid Jeffrey Epstein $158 to $170 million, possibly as hush money or to fund trafficking. It was at this point that Beilock started getting questions about renaming the visual arts center.
In 2026, it was reported that Black had been accused in a civil lawsuit of raping a teenage girl inside Epstein’s New York townhouse in 2002, and that he had privately reached out to the federal judge involved in order to “defend his good name.”
Also in 2026, Beilock received a letter from Women of Dartmouth, another from the editorial board of the student newspaper, and a Change.org petition calling for action on Black’s name.
Taking Black’s name down or covering it up would make the whole thing go away. Instead, Beilock met with the Trustees in March and April, and will meet with them again in June. At which point, a committee will be formed to start the process of looking into this matter.
Beilock claims that nothing is more important than preventing distraction away from Dartmouth’s core mission. Yet what could be more distracting than insisting that the name of someone who appears prominently in the Epstein files remain prominently displayed on campus?
Dartmouth’s communications office and Beilock’s PR team at BerlinRosen have painted a picture of a college president who is “decisive” and “stands against the grain.”
No one is lauding her for her “resoluteness” regarding Dartmouth’s visual arts center.
In 2018 when seven women filed a federal lawsuit against the College, alleging the school enabled decades of severe sexual and psychological harassment by three tenured professors in the Psychological and Brain Sciences department, it took then-President Hanlon one day to convene the Trustees and take action.
In 2026, when the César Chávez story broke, the Latino and Latin American and Caribbean Studies Department renamed the César Chávez Fellowship immediately.
Black’s name remains on Dartmouth’s walls – right there for the whole world to see.
This hypocrisy is amoral. And as Daniel Webster said, “liberty cannot subsist without virtue.”
Dartmouth predates the Declaration of Independence. Its gravitas shouldn’t be sold so cheaply.
Unai Montes-Irueste is a member of the Dartmouth College Class of 1998, Dartmouth Association of Latino Alumni, and Dartmouth College Alumni Council. After leaving the Upper Valley, he moved to Southern California, where he now lives with his wife and three children.