The College’s website lists 43 people working in the Office of Communications. With an army of in-house flacks at its disposal, why then would the College need to employ a student and secretly work with him on an op-ed hyping Evergreen.AI for The Dartmouth?
Simple.
The independent student newspaper has credibility — an essential commodity, which under the Beilock administration, the College sorely lacks.
The College needed The Dartmouth to help persuade students that Evergreen, which provides mental health support via an artificial intelligence app, was legit.
If the Office of Communications churned out its own Evergreen fluff piece, the chances of it having meaningful public impact were about as likely as “Melania” winning next year’s Oscar for Best Picture.
A guest column in The Dartmouth would carry more weight with a student’s name attached to it. The communications department was also aware that the paper wouldn’t publish a column that the College was trying to pass off as a student’s handiwork. So it plotted to deceive the paper’s editors, and ultimately the paper’s readers.
Ethics be damned.
In a recent interview with The Dartmouth, Teddy Roberts ’26, an Evergreen project assistant, said the communications department approached him last fall about promoting the wellness chatbot.
A staff member proposed that Roberts undertake several “public-facing opportunities,” including media interviews, donor panels and submitting an opinion column to The Dartmouth.
After Roberts agreed to write the column, members of the communication staff made and suggested edits to his draft “like we were all writing it together,” he said.
“It was very hollow and just sort of parroting what the administration or … the leadership team of Evergreen had been saying,” Roberts added.
The web of deception didn’t end there.
Evergreen paid Roberts for what it described as “drafting for op-ed.” The compensation — $81.25 — wasn’t a lot. Then again, he didn’t have to do much heavy lifting. The communications staff did it for him.
Unaware that the communications department had manipulated the writing of the piece and Evergreen had compensated him for it, The Dartmouth published Roberts’ guest column in its Nov. 17 issue.
Leaders in the communications department and at Evergreen might have escaped public scrutiny of their ethically depraved tactics, if Roberts hadn’t come clean, albeit after the fact.
On Nov. 21, four days after the column ran, Roberts informed The Dartmouth that he had been coached on what to write and got paid for it.
Roberts shared emails from the communications staff. College spokesperson Jana Barnello emailed Roberts “food for thought” and “prompts.” She suggested he address “Why is this project so important for Dartmouth students?” and “How and why are you involved in Evergreen?”
Barnello emailed Roberts that he “might also want to mention” that he thinks his op-ed is an “important counterpoint” to an earlier column written by Eli Moyse ’27, one of The Dartmouth’s opinion editors, that was critical of the Evergreen project.
In a Jan. 30 news story, The Dartmouth told readers what it had recently uncovered. The paper pointed out that its ethics code, which is available on its website, doesn’t allow staff members to be compensated by external organizations for their work.
The Dartmouth’s publisher, Quentin Proud ’26 said that authors receiving compensation for opinion columns is a “violation of the spirit of our ethics code” because it can lead them to “argue opinions that might not be their own.”
The paper’s Jan. 30 issue also contained a follow-up guest column by Roberts. He wrote the November piece that carried his byline, “wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t the whole truth.”
Leaders at Evergreen and the Office of Communications continue to pretend that they didn’t cross any ethical lines.
It’s Evergreen’s standard practice to pay employees for “press engagement,” director of the Center of Technology and Behavioral Health Lisa Marsch wrote in an email statement to The Dartmouth.
When asked about Roberts’ initial guest column, associate vice president in the Office of Communications Kathryn Kennedy maintained that her staff “offered advisory support only.”
As for the folks in Parkhurst Hall, I suppose they can claim plausible deniability in the write-what-we-say-and-we’ll-pay-you-for-it scheme. However, they still might want to look into why their subordinates were desperate to manufacture favorable media coverage for Evergreen.
People who work outside the Parkhurst Hall cocoon know any initiative the Beilock administration puts forth on student mental health will likely be met with a heavy dose of skepticism on some parts of campus and beyond.
For good reason.
Beilock and her top lieutenants didn’t seem concerned about students’ well-being on May 1, 2024, when they invited police in riot gear to forcefully shut down a peaceful pro-Palestinian demonstration on the Green.
Before the night was over, 89 people, including 65 Dartmouth students, were arrested, handcuffed and hauled away in Outing Club vans to area police stations.
Public trust in the College was lost.
The recent revelations about the Evergreen project — and the deception involved — are a reminder the College has little interest in rebuilding that lost trust.
Jim Kenyon, who lives in Norwich, was the news columnist at the Valley News for 24 years before retiring in November. Guest columns represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
