On Jan. 10, Dartmouth Dialogues, a program created by College President Sian Leah Beilock in 2024 to foster constructive dialogue on campus, celebrated its two-year anniversary.
This past year, the program held workshops with students, co-sponsored the “Law and Democracy: The United States at 250” series with the Rockefeller Center for Public Policy, partnered with the Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies department for their “Borders and Immigration” series and supported the Dartmouth Political Union’s debate series.
Dartmouth Dialogues executive director Kristi Clemens said the project’s goal in its second year was to make dialogue a “part of the fabric of the Dartmouth experience.”
“I don’t want Dartmouth Dialogues to be something that just happens over in this little corner of campus,” Clemens said. “You could encounter it in a sports team, you can encounter it in the classroom, encounter it in your residence hall.”
Rockefeller Center director of programming Dvora Greenberg Koelling said Dartmouth Dialogues is an “incredible partnership” for hosting events that bring “different perspectives.”
“Sometimes an idea is really big, but you need to capture it with a few words, and that’s what Dartmouth Dialogues does,” Koelling said. “Externally facing, it’s very easy to explain what this initiative is and what is at the core of what we’re doing.”
As part of its “culture-change initiative,” Dartmouth Dialogues partnered with the Constructive Dialogue Institute to offer a hybrid training in dialogue to first-year students, according to Clemens. However, only 4% of students completed the program, which Clemens called a “failure.”
“We couldn’t quite dial in [a] great methodology for delivery,” Clemens said.
Maya Dombroskie ’29 said the hybrid training project’s goals were “totally unrealistic.”
“I honestly don’t know any student who has gone and done that, and [the College] says it’s expected, but not required,” Dombroskie said.
Speaking on the program overall, students expressed varying degrees of exposure to Dartmouth Dialogues programming.
Dartmouth Political Union president Malcolm Mahoney ’26 said he has seen a recent “change in campus culture,” where members of the Class of 2029 are “the most invested” in the debates and events hosted by the DPU.
“We just haven’t really seen engagement like this before,” he said. “I think part of that is because Dartmouth has made dialogue a really critical part of its day-to-day operations and its overall ethos.”
Eden Cho ’26 said the program needs “more advertisement,” but said it is a “good idea.”
In September 2025, a survey by government professor Sean Westwood this year revealed that for 66% of surveyed ’29s, the College’s “commitment to fostering dialogue across difference” was a factor in choosing Dartmouth. Westwood added that he sees the dialogue project as a model for other institutions around the country.
“The majority of our peers are trying to copy the infrastructure that we put in place,” Westwood said.
Professor of Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies Matt Garcia, who co-hosted the Borders and Immigration series, said that Dartmouth Dialogues is using the College’s resources to “expand the conversation.”
“We’ve done some really important work with the kind of significant budget that [former] Dean [Elizabeth Smith], and by extension, the President’s Office has supplied us,” Garcia said.
However, Garcia said that Dartmouth Dialogues was “a brand” and that the state of free speech at Dartmouth was not “different than anything else that’s happened at other institutions.”
Mahoney agreed, calling Dartmouth Dialogues an umbrella organization that makes hosting events “more accessible.”
“I definitely think having a dedicated administrative wing for this project has just given both administrators and groups on campus more resources … to do events and to put on these conversations,” Mahoney said.
Mahoney added that the program does a “great job maintaining student autonomy” when they partner with them for events.
Despite the College’s initiatives, some groups on campus have expressed anxiety in interviews with The Dartmouth about sharing their opinions over the past year.
“A lot of international students I’ve talked to have expressed a greater fear in recent years of expressing their opinions, in light of all of the immigration stuff that’s going on,” Dombroskie said.
Westwood said that fear over speech on college campuses is “a fundamental failure of the federal administration.”
“Everyone in this country should be able to express themselves and should not fear censure, should not fear deportation, should not fear consequence,” he said.
Clemens said that she wants Dartmouth Dialogues to not be “guided or constrained by what’s going on politically.”
“Dartmouth will endure beyond the current administration,” she said. “What we’re building here will outlast whatever the political moment is.”
Moving into its third year, Dartmouth Dialogues will focus on engaging faculty and students through workshops and continuing their partnerships with academic departments and student groups, as well as continuing to foster a culture of dialogue across campus, according to Clemens.
“There’s great work happening in Rocky, in [the] Dickey [Center for International Understanding], in our residence halls [and] in a lot of our classrooms,” Clemens said.
Iris WeaverBell ’28 is a news reporter. She is from Portland, Ore., and is majoring in economics and minoring in public policy.
