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Is higher education losing public trust, and what can universities do about it?

Today on Heterodox Out Loud, Sian Beilock, President of Dartmouth College, joins John Tomasi to confront one of the most urgent challenges facing universities today: a growing crisis of confidence among the American public.

Drawing on her background in cognitive science and leadership under pressure, Beilock explains why trust is declining and what universities must do to restore it. From free expression policies and institutional neutrality to student culture and viewpoint diversity, this conversation explores how universities can return to their core mission: truth-seeking and education.

Offering a unique, insider's view, the discussion explores how a university president manages the conflicting pressures of a polarized age. It delves into real-world scenarios, including campus protests, speech disruptions, faculty relationships, and external pressure from the government.

In This Episode:

• Why 7 in 10 Americans distrust higher education
• The role of affordability, ROI, and ideological concerns
• How Dartmouth is implementing institutional restraint
• Where free speech ends and disruption begins
• Why students are hungry for real dialogue, not echo chambers
• What “viewpoint diversity” actually means in practice
• How universities can reform without political capture

About Sian Beilock:

Sian Leah Beilock is the 19th president of Dartmouth College, an Ivy League institution and one of the nation’s leading research universities. She is the first woman elected president of Dartmouth by the Board of Trustees and began her tenure on June 12, 2023. A distinguished cognitive scientist, Beilock is one of the world’s foremost experts on performance under pressure, a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine, and the recipient of the 2017 Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences. She has authored over 120 peer-reviewed papers and two books: Choke and How the Body Knows Its Mind. Before Dartmouth, she served as president of Barnard College at Columbia University and as executive vice provost at the University of Chicago.

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction

01:00 Sian Beilock on Leadership, Pressure, and Cognitive Science

04:00 Why Open Inquiry Matters in Universities (Chicago Principles Influence)

09:30 Institutional Neutrality & Mission Clarity in Higher Ed

13:00 Free Speech, Protest Limits, and Campus Safety at Dartmouth

18:00 Student Culture: Dialogue vs Disruption on Campus

24:30 Viewpoint Diversity in Faculty and the Classroom

36:00 Rebuilding Trust in Higher Education (Data, SATs, Reform)

43:30 Universities, Government Pressure, and Institutional Independence

New Yorker Article: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/03/16/the-unmaking-of-the-american-university

Follow Sian: https://x.com/sianbeilock

Episode Transcript

John Tomasi: Sian Beilock, welcome to Heterodox Out Loud. It's a particular pleasure having you here, as I mentioned before we came into the studio. You're the president of Dartmouth. I used to go to the winter festivals at the Dartmouth campus as a child, and it's always been a special place for me. I had a Dartmouth coat for years when I was a little boy. It's really a pleasure to have you here, not just for that personal reason, but also because there have been so many interesting things at Dartmouth under your leadership that we've been watching at HxA. You're one of the university leaders we really want to learn from.

Beilock: Great to be here. Dartmouth is a special place. We just had the Winter Carnival, and my favorite aspect of it is the Polar Plunge, where we carve out a hole in the ice of our pond and students jump in. One of these days I'm going to do it with them.

Tomasi: Is that a promise? We'll hold you to that, it's online now. You're a cognitive scientist. You've done work on what happens to people under pressure and wrote a book called Choke. I understand you had an experience as a promising high school athlete, a soccer goalie, that may have influenced your decision to go in that direction. But I'm just curious: studying people under pressure, and you're now a university president at an extremely high-pressure time, has your research on choking affected the way you proceed?

Beilock: I've always been interested in human performance. I certainly use what I know about psychology and cognitive science and neuroscience in my own work and in how I deal with my team and how my team deals with each other. I started my work looking at people under pressure because I wanted to understand why I sometimes performed really well in a stressful environment and sometimes I didn't.

Tomasi: Very interesting. And I'm curious whether that's connected to decisions you made later on about SAT performance, but we can come back to that. I'm just curious before we begin the formal questions: you're known as a leader in this field of open inquiry, and I've known some other presidents personally who seem to have a kind of moral clarity on these issues even when they take fire. They make decisions under pressure that seem to hew to a line of principle about defending open inquiry that's not normally seen. Is there a backstory about why you care about universities the way you do? What keeps your compass running the way it does?

Beilock: I've spent my entire adult life in universities, from being an undergrad to a PhD student to a professor to being in administration. And I would go back to my days at the University of Chicago. I spent 12 years there as faculty and then in leadership under Bob Zimmer and working with Daniel Diermeier. I realized how important having a set of values was to getting the kind of different dialogue and speech on campus that you might not always hear. That really shaped a lot of how I think today about what the purpose of a university is: that it's special, it's different from a business, different from a political organization, different from a social advocacy organization. Our purpose is education and knowledge creation. When you have that purpose, I think you can lay out a set of principles that should guide your actions. And the idea is that if you follow those principles, people start having faith and trust that you're going to be clear in everything you do, even if they don't like a particular decision.

Tomasi: I've noticed as a professor for many years that many of us who care about academic freedom haven't actually read the classic texts, we don't know the founding documents. I'm just curious: when did you start developing a sense of principles about this? Was it when you entered administration at Chicago?

Beilock: Yeah. I'll back up a little bit. I grew up with two parents who were lawyers, in an environment where it was very clear that if you could put out a set of rational arguments, you could push for particular things. But I had a couple of really important moments as a young kid that started to shape these ideas, and they came back to me at Chicago. One particular moment: my father was a corporate lawyer defending construction companies against claims of lung cancer from employees who had been exposed to asbestos. I remember saying to him, I can't believe you're defending the construction company, that's horrible, it's morally wrong, these people are sick. And my father talked about how everyone deserves representation. He talked about the rule of law and our systems of checks and balances. That really affected me, because I thought: I have a particular passionate view, why wouldn't you just take that view? And he talked about the systems.

Then I saw that again at Chicago. Certainly everyone at Chicago knows the Kalven Report, the Stone Report, the Chicago Principles. And when I moved from Chicago to Barnard and Columbia, I realized those institutions were not the same. There was something special at Chicago that allowed for a certain tolerance of different views on campus. Not always great, there were problems there too, but people were operating by that set of principles. And it was actually one of the reasons I was interested in Dartmouth, because Dartmouth has a history of having different views on campus. I realized how important that was to what we think of as the best universities in the country.

Tomasi: Interesting. And just on that point: I'm sometimes asked whether Chicago's principles are distinctively principles for Chicago, or to what degree they're a model for all universities everywhere. At HxA we're basically pluralists about university missions. We think universities should all be aimed at knowledge-seeking as their central or highest telos, but we recognize that different universities, for example a religious school, might pursue that knowledge-seeking function with faith-based elements built in. So there's a variety of ways universities might reasonably be knowledge-seeking. Chicago stands out as a particularly pure example perhaps. As you know, in the Kalven Report, the charge to the committee is not to devise an institutional neutrality formula for every university everywhere. It's very specific: formulate a policy for this particular university given our particular history. And as you also know, the founding president listed three principles that Chicago was founded on, and one of them was that the university would not take positions on controversial issues. So, a bit of a complicated question: do you see Chicago as a thing in itself? How far should Dartmouth go toward becoming Chicago? How far should other universities go?

Beilock: I don't want Dartmouth to be Chicago. I want Dartmouth to be Dartmouth. We have something very special there. I think there are elements of the Chicago Principles that apply broadly, like this idea that the university should be the home and sponsor of critics rather than the critic itself. I quote that line a lot. But I do agree with you that institutions that have a religious mandate or mission, or women's colleges focused on particular issues around women, might take different positions on things related to what they do in a way that I wouldn't at Dartmouth, which doesn't have that mandate. It's not one size fits all. But I do believe that at the core, universities are special places focused on acquiring truth, understanding knowledge about the world, and training the next generation of leaders. There has to be some underlying foundation that they're going to be places where people push on each other. And I think that requires the institution being clear about its mission and then following through on it.

Tomasi: Let's stay on this for a minute more if we may. I'm just very interested to hear, since I have you here, what does it mean to be a pluralist about university missions while also being committed to a certain ideal that we call open inquiry? So we're interested in the Chicago-esque ideal of the scientific method being the dominant mode in the pursuit of knowledge, recognizing the variations in which people actually pursue that. What I sometimes see is that many universities claim in their public proclamations to be committed to making truth-seeking central, but in their practices, they often enact policies that don't map well onto that mission. It seems to me that a university's policies and practices should be a reflection of its mission, whatever that mission is. And there seems to be a disconnect sometimes, almost, I don't want to say a subterfuge, I think it's not even self-conscious perhaps, but at a lot of universities it seems as though they don't have clarity about connecting the mission as publicly stated to the practices on the ground. That's almost like a covert commitment to ideals other than truth-seeking. Does that sound familiar to you?

Beilock: Yeah, it's interesting. I think there are two ways to think about this. One is that universities are often so large and decentralized that even if you have clarity of mission at the top, it doesn't necessarily trickle down to the policies being put in place in particular departments, centers, law schools, student affairs, and so on. That's one thing: universities are very complex organizations. The other is that if you don't keep the mission central and constantly beat the drum on it, people aren't holding it as the prime thing when they're thinking about policies and also budgets. Budgets are another reflection of values, an instantiation of them in many ways.

One of the reasons I'm so excited about Dartmouth and what we've done is that its size and scale allows us to move as one entity. Our goal is to be the best undergraduate education in the world within a world-class university. Our faculty to student ratio is seven to one. We have a business school, a world-class medical school that is the most rural academic medical center in the country, an engineering school, and PhD students in the sciences though not in the arts and humanities. But our size and scale allows us to move as one unit, and I think that has helped us shape what a model of higher education can look like.

When we talk about institutional restraint, it applies to our undergrads, to our departments, and to the business school. We've been very clear at the top that we're not a political organization and we're not a social advocacy organization. Those are great, but it's not what universities do. Our focus is on education, and if that is always the guiding principle, it determines what can happen on campus and what can't. That's where our policy around institutional restraint came from, which I was very proud of. It came from the faculty and a group of staff, and the whole idea was that it wouldn't just apply to senior leaders but to academic departments as well. It's also where our free expression policies have come from, which are among the broadest in the country. In contrast to a Harvard where you can't chalk certain things, we have a lot of latitude about what you can chalk on campus. When students chalk something mean about me, I might walk over it an extra time, but that's okay. The goal is to be a place where people feel like they can express their views. But we're also clear that free expression does not mean disruption. Your free expression can't rob someone else of theirs.

Tomasi: One of the reasons Dartmouth was in the news not that long ago was because of your decisions regarding the initial first wave of protests. So remind us what happened.

Beilock: It was, I guess, May of 2024, my first year at Dartmouth. I came in the summer of 2023, and in my inauguration I talked about creating a brave space rather than a safe space on campus, where people could push on different views and we had a big tent, but also where there were boundary conditions on what could happen. Those boundary conditions at Dartmouth are very clear. You can protest, but you cannot take over spaces in such a way that people with particular ideologies can't walk through them. You can certainly protest outside a speaker's event, but you cannot disrupt the speaker, because that's disrupting someone else's free expression.

Tomasi: These are the time, place, and manner restrictions that many university presidents were either rediscovering or attempting to publicize in the heat of the moment around the country at about that time.

Beilock: And it was around the time when encampments were going up at universities around the country and there were serious safety issues at UCLA and other places. We have a lot of protest and I think protest is a fine form of expression and often important, but we drew the line at overnight encampments. We knew it was coming and we let people know. In fact, the provost sent an email to the community saying: if you do this, you will be arrested. They set up the encampment and we arrested people. Those arrested included students, a few faculty members, and some people from the community who were not related to the institution.

Tomasi: I want to stay with this a bit more because it was such an interesting moment, and we're very curious on this podcast to give our listeners some insight into what it's like as a college president to make these decisions sitting in that seat. You made that call. Subsequently there were some other protests on campus. They took over your office at one point. You did not call the police in that case. Can you tell us a bit about the difference between those two cases, or how you saw them?

Beilock: Yeah. I never want the police to be intervening on our campus. I think that is certainly the goal: a campus where people feel like they can express their views, but where everyone feels safe and secure, not just some people. It is fundamentally not free speech when you take over a shared space and declare it for one ideology, where students feel like they can't move through campus if they're Zionists or Jews or hold any viewpoint that's not shared. There were also real safety issues going on across the country. Safety is my first priority. We've since really worked to create a structure where asking for help from the police is the last resort, which I think is good. We have a whole new division including free expression facilitators who help calm situations. When students took over our office, they left at the end of the day. They left when the building was still open, and they were disciplined. The students inside were disciplined and some were suspended.

Tomasi: Was that made public, what the punishments were?

Beilock: I don't believe we made it public because of privacy, but students made it public and wrote about it in the student paper. But they were suspended.

Tomasi: Interesting. I want to ask about your observation of the attitude of students these days. I remember at Brown, in 2019 I think it was, Commissioner Ray Kelly came to campus to give a talk. He'd been involved in Stop-and-Frisk and other policies considered very controversial, especially at Brown. At that event there was one of the first public shoutdowns. Students, and some outside people, shouted him down. The striking thing, and I was there, was that other students were standing up saying let him speak, I want to ask a question. But it was chaos. The really striking thing was that the next day, the student who had led the shoutdown, which was clearly against Brown's policies just as you described Dartmouth's, gave an interview for the student paper and said: yeah, I shouted him down and I'd do it again. I told them to cancel it and they wouldn't, so we canceled it. That person went through disciplinary hearings, but we never heard exactly what happened to them. There were rumors that the person won an award at graduation for courage from their own department, and was actually given a job at Brown for a year. Those are rumors, who knows whether that's true, there's no official statement. I'm just curious about that point about publicity or non-publicity.

But more generally, I think there's something interesting about a set of ideas that are more common on campuses now that encourage some students to object to the Chicago-esque way of doing things. They're taken by certain critiques of power and see power as really the most important lens through which to understand the world. They don't just accept a principle because it's stated as a principle. They don't accept that lawyerly approach you were describing that struck you so much. They seem to have a different idea about how we analyze the social world and the campus world too. Do you want to say anything about that?

Beilock: I am so impressed with almost all of our students. Dartmouth students are amazing. My goal is to help build a culture where they come here thinking it's cool to have conversations rather than shout each other down. We see that at Dartmouth. We have one of the only student-led bipartisan political unions in the country, run by the Dartmouth Conservatives and the Dartmouth Democrats, who've had debates between Kellyanne Conway and Donna Brazile, or Cornel West and Robert P. George. Our DPU, the Dartmouth Political Union, was supposed to have Charlie Kirk and Hasan Piker a week after Charlie was murdered. They are having the conversations on campus. Our Turning Point chapter just had a debate on immigration where there was certainly a lot of dissent in the room from people who weren't part of it, but it was impressive the way they were able to talk to each other.

My goal is to create a culture where students are interested in pursuing really hard and uncomfortable conversations, and that's okay. But I also think that we are a community you can opt into, and we have a set of principles and common rules that every student reads when they come to school. When our first-years come in, they actually recite those Dartmouth principles before they come into my office. I shake everyone's hand in the first week of school, all the new first-years coming in, and then I shake their hands again at graduation. Communities have shared sets of norms and rules that allow us to have these uncomfortable, often difficult conversations and debates. Not everyone has to be part of our community if they don't want to live by those shared norms and rules.

We try to give the broadest latitude. You can protest all you want and scream outside my office. You can chalk things as long as you're not threatening violence. But the whole idea is that people are given wide latitude for speaking. We're seeing that on our campus. In the last two weeks, Pete Buttigieg, Ro Khanna, and Laura Ingraham all came to campus and all spoke. No disruptions. We had a little protest igloo for Laura Ingraham, which came down that night.

Tomasi: Sounds so dark.

Beilock: I thought it was very creative, actually. And then there were a series of op-eds in the student newspaper, one student saying it was horrible that the political union invited Laura Ingraham and another student saying you should have just come to the event and asked questions. And that's exactly what we want.

Tomasi: That's fascinating. I'll share with you that I have a dear friend whose daughter was applying to schools this last year. She visited a number of top schools, including Brown, and when she got into Dartmouth her father sent me a message saying she can't wait to go. What he wanted to say was that she was excited about Dartmouth precisely because she saw the Dartmouth Dialogues, which we'll talk about in a moment, and just the general ethos of Dartmouth being special in that way.

Beilock: I think young people want this. Our applications have gone up as our Ivy peers' have not. Our yield has gone up and 74% of students we accepted came to Dartmouth as their first choice. And 66% of our incoming students said they chose Dartmouth over another institution because of Dialogues. They are hungry for having different viewpoints and hearing from different people. Students are constantly telling me, even our most liberal students, that their best experiences are often when they hear conservative speakers on campus.

Tomasi: And so let me ask about that. Some of my colleagues at Brown didn't like viewpoint diversity. They didn't like the idea of constructive disagreement. They thought there should be more of a consensus on moral issues that were very clear to them. They thought it was a mistake and kind of a subterfuge to allow conservative views onto campus to open up conversations, that what conservatives were doing was proselytizing a false view. That's just a common view among the professoriate, not just at Brown but at many places, and I'm sure at Dartmouth too. Are there things you're trying to do to bring ideological diversity to the faculty?

Beilock: One thing is very clear: the faculty own the values of an institution in many ways, and my goal is to uplift faculty who believe in the purpose of a university as a place of education rather than pushing a particular ideological view. I think a lot of our faculty do that and I take every opportunity I can to recognize it. After October 7th, what we did was ask faculty who had volunteered, in Jewish Studies and Middle Eastern Studies, to hold an open debate on October 9th and October 11th on our campus. They were painful. They were very hard. But they were already co-teaching the politics of Israel and Palestine. They trusted each other, and we wanted to uplift and model that.

Tomasi: I remember reading about them and we were just amazed by that.

Beilock: The whole idea as we were thinking about how to communicate with campus about the terrorist attacks was to show that the purpose of the university is around education. And what better way to do that than to have our experts in dialogue who don't agree on everything. I always want our faculty to lead. We had faculty last quarter teaching classes on Rockefeller Republicans, on where have all the moderates gone, through our Rockefeller Center. I went to one of the dinners for the class and it was just amazing. We had faculty teaching classes on conservative views in politics. Students are so interested in hearing different ideas. And of course we have classes that are less broad in what they talk about, and that's okay too. The idea is to make sure that whenever we can, we're not allowing intellectual narrowing. I want the whole variety of a discipline on display for students to engage with and then decide how they're going to be in action in the world.

Tomasi: Can I ask you to talk a bit more about viewpoint diversity? We did a large study last fall of convocation addresses of university presidents. One of the things we found was that some very high percentage of the presidents whose talks we studied emphasized open inquiry as being one of the things they cared most about, and often talked about constructive disagreement and the free exchange of ideas. At HxA, we think a culture of open inquiry has a variety of components, but the central ones are unleashing the free exchange of ideas, committing to truth-seeking as your central purpose, investing in constructive disagreement, and insisting on viewpoint diversity.

We did a big study recently of all the studies on faculty political diversity. We found that most of them are not very well constructed, and the least well constructed ones tended to produce the widest variations, interestingly. But we have a pretty good sense now for what the best data shows: in 1990, the ratio of left to right-leaning faculty was about two to one. Currently nationally it's about five to one, which is much less than you sometimes read. But in some disciplines it's extremely high, thirty to one, forty to one, even higher perhaps, and there's some evidence that younger faculty show higher imbalances.

One of the striking things about the convocation addresses we studied was that as presidents talked about open inquiry and constructive dialogue and all the things they were doing, almost none of them talked about viewpoint diversity. They didn't want to go near it. And when I talk to presidents and we come to that part of the conversation, it's always like, yeah, well, that'll work itself out. Maybe that's what you'll say too. Was two to one a problem? Is it just a natural distribution of people making choices based on their values and careers? Was that worrying? Is it worrying that it's changed so much now, almost tripled in 30 years? What do you make of the viewpoint diversity situation regarding the faculty?

Beilock: I think viewpoint diversity is important and it's important to call out, because what I want is students to have a broad range of opinions, ideas, and people who have different experiences on campus. That involves making sure we're recruiting students who have diverse experiences and different ideologies. It also means I want faculty who can teach from different perspectives and are focused on different issues.

I don't love these studies though, because I look at faculty like Russ Muirhead, for example, who leads our political economy project. He serves in the state Democratic House, I believe, as a representative. He clearly has a political party, and yet he is one of the best people I know in terms of teaching a range of views across the spectrum. So I worry when we're using who gave to a Democratic or Republican election as a proxy for whether students are being pushed to reach across a discipline intellectually. I worry that's the wrong measurement, and that we actually have to look at what people are teaching.

I understand the argument that someone who leans more conservative might be more likely in sociology to study the sociology of religion or marriage than someone who leans more liberal. And if we only have people studying the sociology of gender in our departments and no one looking at other areas, that's where the problem lies. This is where deans and provosts and presidents have a responsibility to make sure that the ideas students are being exposed to in the classroom and that are being researched on campus represent the breadth of fields. If we can figure out how to look at that, it's a much better way to ask the question about diversity on campus than just relying on whether someone gave $10 to a particular party.

Tomasi: One thing we talk about sometimes at HxA is that anytime reformers can work with the underlying well-established values of the profession to achieve certain ends, they're in a stronger position than if they're working against those established norms. One of the important norms of the scholarly profession, from the AAUP in 1915 and other places, is that scholars should hold their opinions the way scholars hold opinions. They should come to their conclusions in a scholarly way and model that for their students too. The classroom is not a place for indoctrination, it's a place for liberation, intellectual humility, and an excitement of discovery. You can work with those well-established norms to encourage the kind of perspective-taking you're talking about.

In your Wall Street Journal piece in January, which is just fabulous, one of the things you say is that universities must double down on supporting faculty who provide structured opportunities for disagreement on complex issues and also provide clear protection for staff who have unpopular ideas. I'm going to pause on the doubling down bit. When I talk with presidents about increasing viewpoint diversity on campus, they often jump right to what they think is the hard question: how do you do faculty hiring? That gets administrators involved in questions that seem to go against some academic freedom norms. But if you can work with the norms, as I said, there's power. There's some low-hanging fruit, we think, about encouraging existing faculty, not asking who voted for what or contributed to what, but rather: what is the lived experience of a student? When they get their syllabus and look at the readings, how diverse are they? There are studies from last year showing a dramatic narrowing of the range of views especially on Israel-Palestine, criminal justice, and abortion. On that line of yours about doubling down: do you give prizes to professors who teach in these ways? What does doubling down mean?

Beilock: I think a majority of our faculty really are focused on giving a broad range of views to students and we can uplift them. As an example, our Jewish Studies and Middle Eastern Studies faculty who have done this work, we've supported their ability to have more co-taught classes, bringing in more visiting faculty. I think visiting faculty are amazing. As part of that Jewish and Middle Eastern dialogue, we had an Egyptian diplomat from Middle Eastern Studies and an Israeli writer from Jewish Studies. So doubling down on those opportunities means every year in Dartmouth Dialogues we have a special topic: we had Middle Eastern Studies one year, we had immigration as our first year topic. It's really providing opportunities for faculty who want to push the boundaries of what students are hearing and studying on campus.

It's also making sure we're helping, and I help to fundraise for, programs that bring in different views on campus. Our Rockefeller Center for Public Policy is a great one. We're doing a whole focus on the 250th anniversary of the country and the kinds of speakers who have come through campus and visited with our students, from Vice President Pence last year to Ezra Klein, who's coming in a week or so. I want to support those kinds of things. What I worry about is how easy it is to walk away from them because it's a little bit hard. It costs a lot to bring in speakers with security fees and everything going on. It would be much easier to just say we're not going to do it. But again, it goes back to what I prioritize as most important and what I think the purpose of an institution is. I do believe Dartmouth can be the model of what amazing, centered elite higher education looks like in this country, and I'm going to do everything I can to help push that.

Tomasi: That's marvelous. That Wall Street Journal piece, the central claim that got the most attention was your opening line that higher education has a trust problem. Can you say a bit about that trust problem, just briefly?

Beilock: The data are clear. When seven in ten Americans think higher education is going in the wrong direction, when folks on the right and the left and in the middle have all increased their distrust of higher education, it is clear to me that the data show there is a trust problem, that Americans are wondering about the value of what's going on. And the three biggest reasons are affordability, ROI, and the concern that institutions are teaching students what to think rather than how to think.

Now, some people would argue that this has all been manufactured by folks on the right. I don't find that a compelling argument, especially given that there's been a decrease in the gap between people on the right and the left in terms of how they view higher education, with both being more likely to distrust. And in some sense, I spend a lot of time in DC and we rely on resources from the government in all sorts of ways, from Pell Grants to federal funding. If folks in Congress whose constituents are questioning the value of higher education, for whatever reason, that has huge implications for us and we have to pay attention to it.

So I think this is just calling out the data. The data are very clear. I felt the same way when we brought the SAT back. It's calling out the data and being willing to say things that some people aren't going to like, or that some people are going to argue is capitulation. But what I care about is making American higher education the best in the world and keeping it that way.

Tomasi: I want to pause on the capitulation point, because I think the first time you and I met was a year ago in June at the HxA annual conference in Brooklyn. You were on our presidents' panel, and there was a moment where you had a conversation with one of our HxA members, Michael Roth. Michael is one of the people who worries that admitting things or saying things out loud about there being a trust problem, at this particular moment, is problematic. There was an exchange that you and Michael had at the conference that we're just going to play briefly if we may.

Beilock: Look, I think two things can be true at the same time, and we at universities have to hold competing and difficult ideas. One is that institutions should be independent from the government telling them what to teach or how to teach, what research to do, and that when governments assert that power, we need to push back through legal action. I think that's much more effective than shouting from the ethers. But also, we have work to do as institutions to reform ourselves. And so I started talking about this when I stepped foot on Dartmouth's campus two years ago. I talked during my inauguration, a few weeks before the terrorist attacks on Israel, about needing to create brave spaces not safe spaces, that we needed to have viewpoint diversity on campus, and that universities needed to go back to their mission. We're educational institutions, we're not political institutions, we're not social action institutions. These things are important, but it's not what universities do.

Tomasi: So this is a version of the capitulation concern we've just heard, and your response is quite strong. Can you say a bit more about why you don't think capitulation is a worrying concept at this moment?

Beilock: Look, first of all, I love to have conversations with Michael, and I think it's a great example of pushing one's views in reality. But again, if our goal is knowledge and truth, I think we can't worry, when we're calling out what we believe the data clearly show, about whether we're seen as being on one side or another. It is a hard position to be in to say that several of the things we're doing are accurately being called out by people who are simultaneously making illegal efforts to change what we do. Dartmouth has joined lawsuits when we believe that's the case. But it doesn't change the fact that some of the issues the government is pushing on could be right. Two things can be true at the same time.

If we can't figure out how to reform ourselves in optimal ways, someone's going to do it for us. And what I truly believe is that we can reform ourselves and stay independent institutions in terms of pursuing our own mission. But we have to be the ones responsible, and then we have to be responsible for the outcome.

Tomasi: There was an article that came out just a few days ago in the New Yorker by Nicholas Lemann. Have you seen it?

Beilock: I read it.

Tomasi: I read it just last night. He interviewed me for background in that piece. For listeners who haven't seen it yet, it's a really important piece and I highly recommend you check it out. We'll put it in the notes to this podcast. Nick's main argument is that the relationship between universities and the government has fundamentally changed, very likely well beyond the Trump era. There's going to be a reconsideration of where we are regarding universities and their funding and their performance. I've heard other people say this too, that some of the elite schools may find themselves in trouble if someone like AOC becomes president, for a different set of reasons. Whatever the next administration might be, Lemann's claim is that there's been a reorientation. It's in the light now. People are seeing how deep this relationship is.

I did a podcast two years ago with a group called Open the Books that studies public funding and various things. At the time, they dropped a bombshell: the Ivy League makes more money from government grants than they do from tuition. That was kind of obvious in retrospect but at the time it was like, really? I thought they were being funded by tuition and their endowments. But no, the inflows from the federal government are larger.

Beilock: Well, part of the reason around tuition is that we give so much financial aid.

Tomasi: That's right, and Dartmouth is very much that way, which you draw out nicely in that op-ed. I hear you describing a principled approach to how you want to steer Dartmouth and what Dartmouth should become. That approach sounds like it might be somewhat impervious to various changes in Washington. Is that right, or how do you see it?

Beilock: The relationship between universities and the federal government is extremely important and has led to a lot of the great discoveries that have powered our world and saved lives. At Dartmouth, whether it's discovering and producing some of the first cancer immunotherapies, or discovering the mechanism for the mRNA vaccine, all of that was done initially through funding from the National Institutes of Health, for example.

But I also believe that we shouldn't be political footballs. Each administration pushes us in particular ways, whether it was a push around particular diversity statements in the Biden administration or what we're seeing now. The goal, I believe, is to be in a center lane where we are focused on knowledge and truth, can do our work, and are trusted to responsibly focus in those ways. If we are not trusted to focus on truth, on creating knowledge and producing the next leaders of our democracy, that's a recipe for becoming a political football. So I don't want to blow up any relationship with the government, but I'm not going to change my principles to acquiesce or move in a particular direction. If we can stay in that center lane, we won't have these troubles from administration to administration.

Tomasi: Does that mean that a president who acts that way can still be popular on campus? Several presidents I've had on the show who are very principled in their approaches have faced, at certain moments at least, pushback and unhappiness from their own constituencies. One of our recent guests, Jeremy Haefner from the University of Denver, who's doing remarkable things in terms of bringing viewpoint diversity and constructive disagreement into the culture of that campus, faced a vote of no confidence from his faculty. And I know you faced votes from, I believe, the undergraduates and the faculty. How do you think about that? How do you think about a group of undergraduates or faculty on your campus getting together and disagreeing with your leadership?

Beilock: I was censured by the faculty of arts and sciences after I didn't allow encampments and there were arrests on campus. It was not a fun process. We had a faculty meeting where faculty stood on different sides of the room and voiced their opinions, with a microphone in the middle as well. And it was pretty split, actually. But I thought it was actually a good example of people having discussion and debate. I didn't like being the center of it.

It's okay for them to voice those opinions and tell me they didn't like a particular thing I did. The next year we pushed an entirely new structure: we now have a School of Arts and Sciences that was voted on, I think, almost 80% in favor by the faculty. I've never seen anything pass 80% by the faculty. So we continue to move along. It doesn't feel fun when people don't like what you do, but I don't think you can be a great leader if your goal is to make everyone happy. I also don't believe that being centered on a particular issue is much more than people telling me they didn't like what I did in that particular situation. There's a lot of excitement about what we're doing and I'll continue to push forward. There are some people who disagree vehemently with me about what I believe the purpose of a university is, who believe it should be a place to push a particular moral ideology. We will continue to have pushback around that, but it doesn't mean they can't do a lot of their great work, and it means I will continue to push at these principles.

Tomasi: Sian Beilock, thank you so much for being on Heterodox Out Loud.

Beilock: Happy to be here. Thanks for the conversation.