As the world waited with bated breath, Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock finally showed moral courage last week by informing the Trump administration that she wasn’t signing its so-called “Compact for Excellence in Higher Education.”
Beilock didn’t exactly tell the White House to go pound sand, stating in a letter to the Trump administration flunkies peddling the compact that she would “welcome further engagement around how we can (a) enhance the long-standing partnership between the federal government and this country’s leading research universities and (b) ensure that higher education stays focused on academic excellence.”
Of the nine elite schools offered preferential treatment in their financial dealings with the federal government if they agreed that “academic freedom is not absolute,” Dartmouth was among the last to take a stand before Monday’s deadline.
I’m not sure what Dartmouth was waiting for. Still, it was a relief to hear that Beilock and the college’s trustees, who undoubtedly signed off on the non-signing when they were in Hanover for a board meeting last week, weren’t interested in turning Dartmouth into a satellite campus for Trump University.
No amount of free money is worth making a deal with the devil. (Seven schools refused to sign while the University of Texas at Austin and Vanderbilt left the door ajar this week.)
I figured Peter Golder, a marketing professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, was a good person to ask about the college’s decision to join Brown, M.I.T, Penn, the University of Arizona, the University of Southern California and the University of Virginia, in rejecting Trump’s offer. He was the lone dissenting vote last year on a college committee that approved strictly limiting the topics that Dartmouth leaders could publicly weigh in on.
“I’m very grateful that Dartmouth has reaffirmed its commitment to academic freedom and our ability to govern ourselves,” Golder said via email. “Those cornerstone principles will guide us well going forward.”
Speaking of moving forward, perhaps Beilock will now work on building public trust in her administration that’s been sorely lacking during the first 21/2 years of her presidency.
Support for nonviolent forms of political protest on campus is a good place to start. She could even lead students in a demonstration on the Green against the Trump administration’s militant anti-immigration platform. (White South Africans being an exception.)
I forget, however, that Beilock is a big proponent of “institutional restraint.” Of course, that was before inviting police in riot gear to forcefully break up a peaceful pro-Palestinian demonstration, a la May 1, 2024.
Where was the institutional restraint that night?
History professor Annelise Orleck was among 89 people, including 63 students, arrested on the Green that night. Orleck wasn’t even protesting. She was checking on the welfare of her students when New Hampshire storm troopers flung her to the ground. The Hanover police prosecutor eventually opted not to file a criminal trespass charge against Orleck and 33 others who were hauled off in handcuffs that night.
Orleck and her colleagues in the history department haven’t been shy about calling out Beilock for clamping down on free speech. (Thank goodness for tenure.)
“The question all along has been who is Beilock playing to,” Orleck said when I phoned her this week. “Washington? Wealthy donors? Other college presidents?”
In Beilock’s meetings with faculty, “everything feels so staged,” Orleck told me, adding that people are expected to submit their questions in advance, if they want to get called on.
Beilock isn’t the first Dartmouth leader to script her meetings with faculty, but “I’m old enough to remember when we had actual discussions,” said Orleck, who has been teaching at the college for 35 years. “There needs to be more give and take.”
Beilock also needs to “stop insulting the faculty” with condescending rhetoric, Orleck said. She pointed to the president’s go-to phrase: “At Dartmouth, we teach students how to think, not what to think.”
Does Beilock actually think young people can be so easily manipulated? I imagine any student who aces the SAT is capable of thinking for themselves.
A college spokeswoman declined to comment for this column.
To their credit, senior Roan Wade has been a leading student activist willing to challenge the Beilock administration’s efforts to keep people from exercising their constitutional rights.
It’s come at a price.
In October 2023, Wade and another student were arrested for refusing to leave a tent pitched on the lawn in front of Parkhurst Hall, the college’s main administration building, as an act of civil disobedience against Dartmouth’s warmongering investment policies.
This spring, Wade got entangled in another of Beilock’s I’ll-show students-who-is-boss moments. Wade was suspended for allegedly helping orchestrate a sit-in by masked protesters outside the president’s office.
The suspension was lifted in time for Wade to return to classes this fall. However, Wade remains on probation, which is Dartmouth’s way of saying, one more strike, and you’re out. No diploma for you.
The Beilock administration’s desire to throw the college rule book at students who color outside the lines, so to speak, has had a “chilling effect,” on campus, Wade told me when I called them this week.
International students, in particular, worry that engaging in nonviolent political activities could lead to disciplinary action by the college, putting their stay at Dartmouth — and in the country — in jeopardy.
Which brings me to the next step that Beilock could take to lessen tensions on campus.
Matt Raymer, Dartmouth’s top in-house lawyer and part of Beilock’s inner circle, has no business overseeing the college’s Office of Visa and Immigration Services. When Beilock announced Raymer’s hiring in March, she failed to mention that he supported Trump’s legal efforts to end birthright citizenship, a legal principle that’s been guaranteed under the 14th Amendment to nearly everyone born in the U.S. since the Civil War.
An executive order that Trump issued on his return to the White House in January, is part of the not-so-subtle strategy by conservatives to make the country even more white than it already is.
Raymer, or MAGA Matt as he’s known around campus, endorsed Trump’s plan to kill birthright citizenship, early on. In a January op-ed that appeared in The Federalist, Raymer argued that “children born to illegal immigrants are not ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of the United States, and therefore are not entitled to birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment, for the simple reason that the United States has not permitted them to be here.”
The statement alone is enough to disqualify Raymer from having his thumb on student visas. Dartmouth’s international students and employees can’t help but suspect his anti-immigrant leanings go beyond stripping children born in the U.S. of their citizenship.