In an era of declining trust in higher education, College President Sian Leah Beilock stands out for saying less. Her rhetoric is often confident, polished and calm, yet sparing in commitment. She avoids offense, diffuses tension and speaks in statements so clean and tempered they seem engineered to endure and resist reinterpretation. It is a way of using language that fills the page yet leaves no position to dispute, no quote to age poorly. She has made linguistic restraint an art form.
One recent example, Beilock’s October 2025 message to campus, sent as Dartmouth declined to sign onto the Trump administration’s Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, typifies her voice. “I do not believe that a compact — with any administration — is the right approach to achieve academic excellence,” she wrote, warning that it would compromise “our academic freedom, our ability to govern ourselves and the principle that federal research funds should be awarded to the best, most promising ideas.”
Yet, even as she appeared to reject Trump’s goals in the compact, she balanced that rejection with a note of openness, noting, “We remain open to other ways to work with the federal government to enhance higher education.” Her full statement is thus a model of equipoise, calibrated less for conviction than for flexibility.
Her language reflects her background. Before coming to Dartmouth, Beilock was president of Barnard College and provost at the University of Chicago, where she built her career as a cognitive psychologist, studying how people perform under pressure. In her book “Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To,” she argues that elite performers succeed when they control attention and emotion under stress. Her presidential rhetoric does exactly that: low-variance, high-control and hard to rattle.
That style has become institutional philosophy. Last winter, Dartmouth formally adopted an institutional restraint policy, replacing its earlier neutrality framework. Beilock wrote that the goal was to ensure that “when the institution … exercise[s] restraint in making statements, individual students, faculty and staff can fully explore and voice opinions that may be contrary to the majority view.”
Yet, Beilock’s composure has not meant inaction. In May 2024, she authorized campus police to arrest 89 student and faculty protesters during a pro-Palestinian encampment on the Green, an action that drew national attention and criticism across the campus community and from civil-liberties groups. For supporters, it showed firmness under pressure; for critics, it revealed the limits, if not failure, of institutional neutrality. Either way, the episode made clear that ambiguous composure at the top does not preclude decisive, and controversial, action on the ground.
Her instinct for control extends beyond crisis management to exposition itself. In her September 2025 welcome letter, she assured the community that “our steadfast commitment to Dartmouth’s academic mission and values … has put us in a strong position,” while urging that the College “not veer from the clarity of purpose that brought us this far.” This clarity, however, is more tonal than directional. It is the art of future defensibility: statements crafted to sound firm today and harmless tomorrow. They cannot be misquoted or weaponized because they commit to nothing concrete.
Her recent column, “From the President’s Desk,” embodies this. “American higher education doesn’t need a new identity,” she wrote. “It needs unwavering commitment to what already makes it valuable: rigorous inquiry, open debate, student success and societal impact.” The column reads like a self-portrait: steady, orderly and immune to panic. “We’ll keep listening and learning,” she concluded — in effect, a promise of motion without movement.
Even her 2023 Dartmouth inaugural address previously hinted at this approach. She noted that “Americans’ confidence in higher education has fallen to an all-time low of 36%,” but pivoted quickly to optimism: “Our histories fuel us to do better. And we must.” Her answer to the crisis was not declaration but composure and, perhaps, a bet that calm consistency can outlast volatility.
Whether Beilock’s approach proves shrewd or simply cautious remains to be seen. In rejecting the White House’s compact, she staked out a middle ground: independent but not oppositional. If federal policy turns even more hostile to universities, her flexibility could shield Dartmouth. But if resolve in the face of political power becomes the new measure of leadership, her caution may begin to sound feckless. It is tricky.
In “Choke,” Beilock argues that elite performers succeed when they trust their training and allow well-learned skills to run automatically under pressure. As president, she has turned that insight inward. Her training is composure; her practiced skill is restraint. Whether the art of ambiguity proves to be wisdom or mere calculation will become clearer as the implications of turning down the compact come into focus and may define Beilock’s presidency.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
