Re: Dartmouth only Ivy to abstain from signing letter against Trump administration funding cuts
To the editor:
As reported in The Dartmouth, Dartmouth is the only Ivy League institution to abstain from signing a letter condemning the Trump administration for trying to dictate policies to universities and withholding federal funding. College President Sian Leah Beilock has decided that signing the letter along with over 300 university and college presidents “is [not] an effective way to defend Dartmouth’s mission and values,” opting instead to join lawsuits challenging pauses in funding for the National Institutes of Health and other indirect research grants.
Why not both? Is President Beilock concerned that both signing a letter and pursuing litigation would be an inefficient allocation of resources? It costs nothing to sign. More likely, President Beilock is afraid of angering Trump, and is intimidated by MAGA’s assault on academia.
At stake here is much more than federal funding for academia. Consider some of the demands the Trump administration made to Harvard as a condition for continuing federal funding: eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion programs, filling academic units with MAGA Republicans, appointing Trump commissars to monitor compliance, “reform” “biased” programs such as the law and medical schools and the mandate of aggressive police crackdowns on student protests. It’s clear that the Trump administration’s concerns about “woke” ideology, antisemitism and ideological bias are pretexts to justify a political takeover of academia, and a squelching of intellectual freedom and exercise of First Amendment rights.
Isn’t protecting academic freedom and integrity among Dartmouth’s values? And how is semi-anonymous involvement in a suit to recover federal funds the most effective way to vindicate those values, especially in light of the administration’s propensity to ignore judicial orders?
Faced with these demands, Harvard University and most other institutions of higher learning have decided they have no alternative but to push back judicially and politically. Dartmouth should be part of that resistance. Submission to Trump would mean the end of the American university as we know it. However it’s sugar-coated, Dartmouth’s failure to join her sister institutions will be viewed by history for what it is: a craven act of capitulation to a tyrant.
Greg McClelland ’72
Greg McClelland is a member of the Class of 1972. Letters to the Editor represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
