In recent months, Dartmouth has received attention in national media outlets as the sole Ivy League school to largely avoid the Trump administration’s renegotiation of federal funding: “How one Ivy League university avoided the president’s wrath,” declared The Economist on May 1. “How one Ivy League university has avoided Trump’s retribution so far,” published the New York Times on May 11.
The articles come after College President Sian Leah Beilock was the only Ivy League president to abstain from signing a letter condemning the Trump administration’s revocations of federal funding.
Most recently, The New Yorker published an article by Rob Wolfe ’12 titled, “How Dartmouth became the Ivy League’s Switzerland.” The article interrogates how the College’s institutional restraint policy — the expression-defensive framework cited by Beilock in her reasoning not to sign the letter — manifests in the realities of speech on campus, including the arrest of 89 individuals at a pro-Palestinian protest on May 1, 2024.
Some members of the Dartmouth community are happy to be affiliated with the famously-neutral European country. Others aren’t so sure.
Three days after The New Yorker’s piece, Robert Reich ’68 wrote a Substack post titled, “This week’s Neville Chamberlain Award Goes to Sian Beilock. Who’s She?” in which he asserted that the College is not Switzerland — it’s Great Britain. Beilock’s titular honor refers to Chamberlain’s pre-World War II policy of appeasement, which allowed Nazi Germany to expand its territory without sanction.
“Just before the war, [Britain] sought to appease the tyrant,” Reich wrote. “As the world painfully learned, tyrants can’t be appeased. Tyrants view appeasement as weakness, and always want more.”
English professor Alexander Chee also wrote critically of the “Switzerland” label in a statement to The Dartmouth, albeit for different reasons. He criticized the comparison for implying that Switzerland was truly neutral, instead of acknowledging its “complicity” in Nazi genocide.
“We now know, thanks to decades of investigations by Holocaust survivors, that Switzerland used their public identity as neutral to cover for their complicity in the Holocaust,” Chee wrote. “Can we agree that Switzerland is not an ideal role model?”
As for the level of coverage itself, history professor Bethany Moreton said that Beilock is “getting her money’s worth with that greatly expanded and very active PR department.”
“They are doing their job —if their job is making her a national figure of compliance with administration policies,” Moreton said
John Mott ’81, a retired District of Columbia Superior Court judge, wrote in a statement to The Dartmouth that the College “does not appear to recognize the extent of the current crisis.”
The College “has failed to speak out forcefully — at a time when integrity and leadership is needed — against this unacceptable assault on academic freedom, free speech, our rights and the rule of law,” he wrote.
Other members of the College community, however, are supportive of Beilock’s actions.
Nolan Valliere ’29 said he was “pleasantly surprised” with how Beilock has handled the Trump administration thus far.
Valliere said his first reaction to the federal funding freeze at Harvard was, “Oh, God, I hope nothing happens with Dartmouth.”
“Even though in the moment, some people said [Beilock’s decision] was appeasement, if you look at the bigger picture, we held on to a lot of our research funding,” Valliere said.
Government professor William Wohlforth wrote in a statement to The Dartmouth that he agrees “strongly” with Beilock that “for institutions like ours, ‘self-reflection at this moment’ is not tantamount to ‘surrender’ to the Trump administration’s most egregious policies.”
“The New Yorker’s Rob Wolfe ’12 calls us the Switzerland of the Ivy League,” Wohlforth wrote. “That’s not necessarily a criticism. As one student in my strategy seminar showed in his splendid term paper this spring, Switzerland’s grand strategy was probably the best available given that country’s circumstances.”
Economics professor Bruce Sacerdote ’90 wrote in a statement to The Dartmouth that the State Department resumed issuing student visas as a “result of universities and lawmakers engaging with the [Trump] administration.”
“I am proud that the Dartmouth Caucus [of alumni in Congress] has engaged with the administration on any points where there was the potential for agreement and progress,” Sacerdote wrote.
Sacerdote added that the College “is joining with other universities in lawsuits whenever there is a federal action that is blatantly illegal.”
“My model of President Trump’s behavior is that a frontal assault in the press against him (‘united’ or not) is often not the best approach and leads to more tit for tat,” Sacerdote added. “The beautiful thing is, I could be wrong and others should and will disagree.”
In contrast, Moreton said College community members are “fooling [them]selves” for thinking it is possible to “wait out this attack.”
“It may feel to some people like we are isolating ourselves in a protective way,” Moreton said. “I would invite them to find an example of an authoritarian attack on higher education anywhere in the world that did not damage every single campus involved.”
Jackson Hyde '28 is a news reporter. He is from Los Angeles, Calif., and is majoring in Government modified with Philosophy.
