Dartmouth College President Sian Leah Beilock just went to San Francisco and Miami to deliver the same stump speech she’s been making since she mass-arrested students on May 1, 2024. She’s added some new elements since the White House’s January 21, 2025 executive order targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion, but by and large her principal claim has been — say it with me — “At Dartmouth, we teach students how to think — not what to think.”
Shockingly, this assertion has gone unchallenged. The Dartmouth Review, which has been critical of College administrators since its inception, has showered Beilock with effusive praise. The Board of Trustees was historically a place where disagreements about Dartmouth’s direction have revealed themselves: in the 1980s when discussing divestment from South Africa, for instance, or in the mid-to-late 2000s when Peter Robinson ’79, Stephen Smith ’88 and Todd Zywicki ’88 — all of whom were vocal in their opposition to Dartmouth’s 16th president James Wright — were elected to serve. Today’s Board has become, in my opinion, an obsequious syndicate of rubber stampers — unwilling to take action when directly asked to do so by alumni, faculty and students following the mass arrests in May 2024, and President Beilock’s refusal to sign the AACU open letter in defense of academic freedom in April 2025, to name but two of many examples. Other than two brave members of the Class of 2029, no one on campus has written an editorial in The Dartmouth questioning Beilock since the start of 2026.
Yet, Beilock’s claim that Dartmouth teaches thinking, not opinions, must be contested. And the vehicle for scrutinizing it, should be the very thing that Beilock touts as evidence of her veracity: Dartmouth Dialogues.
Before spring term ends and commencement is held, Dartmouth Dialogues executive director Kristi Clemens should host a series of meaningful, public exchanges about Beilock’s questionable decisions as College president.
Research proves there is a strong positive correlation between household income and SAT scores. In other words, the test reflects socioeconomic advantage rather than innate ability or future college success. This is not a value neutral proposition based on the preponderance of research. It’s a decision that affirms and institutionalizes bias. The question then arises: Did Beilock reinstitute the standardized testing requirement because of this data, or in spite of it? Her claim that the SAT benefits low-income students is not supported by peer-reviewed studies that have consistently demonstrated that socioeconomic class impacts both SAT results and essay scoring. She therefore seemingly wants a school that is 80% wealthy and 20% unicorns — first generation college students from working class backgrounds and Pell Grant recipients. Her decision to reinstate the standardized testing requirement should be rigorously challenged in a Dartmouth Dialogue held on campus and livestreamed for alumni to see.
Since Donald Trump’s second term began in 2025, over 700 lawsuits have been filed against his executive actions. In a government with checks and balances, the executive abides by judicial rulings. But Trump has taken actions to defy one out of every three judicial rulings against his White House’s actions. He has even defied the Supreme Court. It’s not just one individual who considers himself unbound by what’s in the Constitution. There is now a Department of Homeland Security memo stating that no judicial warrants are needed to enter private property. American citizens have been detained, deported and killed in the name of immigration enforcement. The Constitution and the First, Fourth, Fifth and 14th Amendments are not partisan. Their destruction is relevant to Dartmouth, and there needs to be substantive dialogue about why threats to them aren’t a red line that would trigger the dissolution of The College’s institutional neutrality policy.
Theologians, Holocaust survivors, and historians insist that leaders like Beilock must stand up in uncertain times. Desmond Tutu said, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” Elie Wiesel said, “Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.” Howard Zinn said, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.” Dartmouth’s sixth President Nathan Lord was an abolitionist and admitted Black students to Dartmouth before the Civil War. Dartmouth’s 12th President John Sloan Dickey was an anti-fascist and connected undergraduate education directly to contemporary problems. Dartmouth’s 13th President John Kemeny was a First Amendment champion and cancelled classes to allow for “intense but peaceful discussion” instead of punishing students for protesting the Vietnam War. On what basis can Dartmouth justify a policy of institutional restraint if there is no ethical or historical basis for it? This, too, should be a topic of conversation at Dartmouth Dialogues.
Artificial intelligence has a detrimental impact on learning, and causes environmental damage through ravenous energy and water use. Legal settlements have recently been reached to compensate Dartmouth faculty for having their research and writings accessed without authorization and plagiarized by Anthropic. In other words, Anthropic is an embodied violation of Dartmouth’s Academic Honor Principle. Yet, Dartmouth is rolling out a partnership with it as fast as the College can. All of this is occurring while AI data centers are on pace to produce 44 million metric tons of fossil fuel emissions by 2030. Therefore, going all in on AI means both abandoning Dartmouth’s Honor Principle and its commitment to a 60% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 (and 100% by 2050). How can Dartmouth justify cutting its Libraries budget by millions of dollars while signing contracts with Anthropic and Amazon? This, too, should be a topic of conversation at Dartmouth Dialogues.
Alumni have spent the last two years being barraged with propaganda from Dartmouth’s communications office and President Beilock’s PR team at BerlinRosen. We’ve had to sit through softball interviews without follow-up questions, such as President Beilock’s May 2025 virtual town hall, and tolerate moralizing lectures delivered through official communications channels about how it is better to pay for Laura Ingraham’s travel, lodging, meals and speaker fees than to seek to prevent her from being given a microphone. It’s sold to us as “brave spaces.” But it’'s insulting. It’s trite. It’s clickbait.
If it is true that we are not being told what to think, then it’s time to prove it.
Let’s have a series of substantive dialogues about the outcomes of what Beilock has done and failed to do. Let’s debate if Beilock’s plan to grow student enrollment by 30 to 40% is wise. Let’s have an intense but peaceful discussion about whether the world’s troubles are still Dartmouth’s troubles, or if an institution whose founding precedes the Declaration of Independence has no responsibility to the future of our democracy.
Let’s have a Dartmouth Dialogues series about Dartmouth. And if we’re not willing to, let’s admit that Beilock’s claim that we’re teaching people how to think — not what to think — is, at best, Janus-faced, and at worst, a lie.
Unai Montes-Irueste is a member of the Dartmouth College Class of 1998, Dartmouth Association of Latino Alumni, and Dartmouth College Alumni Council. He lives in Southern California with his wife and three children. Guest columns represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
