College President Sian Leah Beilock has travelled to Washington, D.C., eight times since the beginning of the year to meet with members of the federal government, according to senior vice president for communications and government relations Justin Anderson. College leaders are “focused on” protecting the school’s research and financial aid funding as the Trump administration has continued to renegotiate its relationship with higher education, according to Anderson.
“Each of those trips is an advocacy trip,” Anderson said. “She is going there to meet with senators, Congresspeople and members of the administration to advocate for Dartmouth students, faculty and staff.”
This is part of a larger College effort. In June, Dartmouth, along with 16 other universities, filed an amicus brief backing Harvard University’s lawsuit against the Trump administration after federal funding cuts. Similarly, in October, the College rejected the Trump administration’s higher education compact, which offered funding benefits in exchange for capping international enrollment.
Students and community members have had mixed reactions to Dartmouth’s engagement with the second Trump administration. Beilock received some pushback after she was the only Ivy League president not to sign an April American Association of Colleges and Universities letter to the Trump administration against funding cuts, saying “reflection does not mean capitulation.”
In D.C., Beilock has met with leaders of several federal agencies, including education secretary Linda McMahon and assistant attorney general for civil rights Harmeet Dhillon ’89, according to a Nov. 5 email statement to The Dartmouth from Dartmouth Federal Relations. Beilock also met with alumni in Congress, including Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand ’88, D-NY, Sen. John Hoeven ’79, R-ND, and Rep. Brandon Gill ’16, R-TX.
Anderson said that a “priority area” for the College has been protecting funding for the Geisel School of Medicine.
“Medical schools are a real focal point for federal research dollars, and that’s certainly the case at Dartmouth,” Anderson said.
Vice provost for research Dean Madden said that the Trump administration “imposed a lot of new processes” that researchers must complete for grant funding.
“The Trump administration … overlaid a layer of political review that was unprecedented,” Madden said. Funding required “additional layers of review, often not in ways that were well explained to researchers, so they were flying a little bit blind.”
The federal government canceled four DEI-related research grants at Dartmouth in April and May.
Madden noted that the College has “attempted to bridge” funding gaps left by the Trump administration, but added that Dartmouth “can’t fully replace the federal dollars that were terminated.”
“As a result, there are fewer resources for some of these activities on campus, to the extent that they had been funded externally,” Madden said.
Anderson said that another priority for the College since Trump’s inauguration has been preventing an increase in the endowment tax. In July, the One Big Beautiful Bill expanded the endowment tax to a tiered structure based on universities’ endowment per student. Dartmouth now pays 4% of endowment revenue, an increase from the 1.4% that the university paid previously.
“We want to make sure that, if this tax is going to continue, it either doesn’t go up or it goes up as little as possible, because an endowment tax is taking money from our endowment that would otherwise go to financial aid or to research,” Anderson said.
Anderson added that the Office of General Counsel and Office of Visa and Immigration Services have been “constantly providing advice, guidance, support and advocacy” for international students. He noted that after some students’ visa statuses were revoked, the College “engaged in a series of actions” to get their statuses reinstated.
After two graduate student visas were revoked in April, international students told The Dartmouth that they were “scared” to speak on politics in public.
Government professor and State Rep. Russell Muirhead, D-Hanover, said that “this is a very, very difficult time to be leading an institution of higher education.”
“What we have right now is government by presidential mood,” Muirhead said. “That makes it very, very hard for all institutions, companies and universities to figure out what to do.”
Muirhead said that he has “a great deal of confidence” in Beilock and “other leaders” at the College working with the federal government.
“I think it takes extreme delicacy, extraordinary judgment and diplomatic finesse to manage this situation,” Muirhead said.
