Dartmouth president Sian Beilock argues that universities lost public trust by abandoning their core mission — and that principled, politically neutral leadership is the path back. She points to concrete wins: Dartmouth was the first Ivy to restore SAT requirements after COVID, citing data showing test scores better predict success for low-income students than essays or letters of rec, and it climbed from outside the bottom 200 to 35th in FIRE's free expression rankings under her watch.
Key Moments
Sian Beilock
“We talk about the high cost and the debt of student loans, but one thing that's often not talked about is among four-year institutions a little under 60% of students graduate. I don't know if you'd hear a lots of, you know, university presidents talk about this, but I think the universities have some of the responsibility there.”
Beilock acknowledging that universities have genuinely earned public distrust, citing the graduation rate problem most presidents avoid discussing.
“What we found in a test optional environment is that students coming from less resource backgrounds were actually less likely to report their scores. And if we had them, it would have been a really important indicator of success.”
Explaining Dartmouth's data-driven rationale for being the first Ivy to restore SAT requirements after COVID, countering the assumption that standardized tests hurt low-income applicants.
“You can protest, but you can't shout down a speaker. You can protest, but you cannot take over campus, build an encampment, and declare shared space for one ideology. Students knew the consequences, they knew what the ground rules were, and we were willing to enforce the rules, unlike many of our peers.”
Describing how she handled the campus protests following October 7th, which led to a faculty censure and student no-confidence vote.
“My worry with campuses that are not as open to those heterogeneous views is that you don't get the benefit of other people's good thinking. They self-censor or they're not allowed to be at the table. That iteration of getting that converging evidence and always pushing and questioning falls off, and that's where I think we fall away from getting to what is true, and that's always the aspiration.”
Responding to Dubner's question about truth-seeking versus relativism, connecting ideological openness to the scientific process of converging evidence.
“From my research I know that you're less likely to approach those situations if you don't feel okay. If you're anxious. And so I want students to have the tools so that they can take risks. They can fail. They can enter into a conversation they know thinks very differently than them.”
Connecting her psychology research on choking under pressure to the case for investing in student mental health as a prerequisite for academic excellence.
Sian Beilock is the president of Dartmouth College and a cognitive scientist who built her academic career studying why people choke under pressure at the University of Chicago's Human Performance Lab. She previously served as president of Barnard College before moving to Dartmouth, where she has been for about three years. Her research background in psychology and decision-making under stress directly informs her leadership philosophy and institutional priorities.
Takeaways
1
SAT scores better predict low-income student success Dartmouth's internal data showed that in a test-optional environment, students from less resourced backgrounds were less likely to submit scores — even when those scores would have been strong predictors of their success. This flips the conventional narrative: eliminating standardized tests may actually disadvantage the students it claims to help, because alternative signals like essays and letters of recommendation are easier to polish with money. Raj Chetty's research at Harvard supports the same conclusion.
2
Free expression rankings jumped 165+ spots in three years When Beilock arrived at Dartmouth, the school ranked outside the bottom 200 in FIRE's (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) annual free speech rankings. By last year it had climbed to 35th. More striking: Dartmouth students scored approximately two standard deviations above the mean in willingness to tolerate speakers from both the political left and right — a data point Beilock treats as a leading indicator of whether the school is actually fulfilling its educational mission.
3
Institutional neutrality is a competitive moat Beilock credits a principled, politically neutral stance — rooted in the University of Chicago's Kalven Report framework — with keeping Dartmouth out of federal civil rights investigations and funding freezes that hit Harvard and others. Rather than signing the Trump administration's 'compact for academic excellence,' she engaged in direct dialogue with the Secretary of Education and Congressional members on both sides. The strategy appears to have worked: Dartmouth is the only Ivy League school to have avoided both a federal investigation and major funding disruption.
4
Choking research applies directly to leadership Beilock's academic finding — that performers choke when they try to consciously control too much of what they're doing — maps directly onto leadership failure via micromanagement. The instinct under pressure is to take tighter control, but her research shows this disrupts processes that run better on autopilot. For executives, the implication is that building trusted systems and delegating is not just efficient but neurologically sound.
5
Dartmouth built AI from 1956 birthplace to Anthropic deal The term 'artificial intelligence' was coined at a 1956 Dartmouth summer conference, and Beilock is leveraging that legacy to position the institution at the frontier of AI in education. Dartmouth announced one of the first university partnerships with Anthropic and AWS, and is piloting 'Evergreen,' a campus mental health chatbot adapted from a clinical AI therapist called Therabot that showed measurable benefits in a clinical trial. The Therabot research — led by Dartmouth scientist Nicholas Jacobson — used hundreds of thousands of hours of clinical data.
6
Mental health is a prerequisite, not a soft add-on Beilock rejects the framing that student mental health support is separate from academic rigor. Her psychological research shows that anxiety directly reduces people's willingness to approach challenging conversations or take intellectual risks — meaning a student who isn't mentally okay is structurally less able to learn. Dartmouth economist Danny Blanchflower's happiness research across populations shows the mental health deterioration is concentrated in young people, making it a particular priority for universities.