This article is featured in the 2026 Freshman Special Issue.
To the Class of 2030,
This coming week, you’ll be made to sing the lyrics of your alma mater a good few times. Hopefully, by the last time you sing it, you will have caught on enough to be able to contribute more than a mumble, and you’ll remember at least one line: “Greet the world from the hills with a hail!”
One envisions a crowd of Dartmouth students standing at the footsteps of the White Mountains, their voices projecting around the globe. It’s exactly this vision of you as a future leader, roaming ’round the girdled earth, that you’re going to be fed throughout your time at Dartmouth — by your peers, your professors and most certainly from the College as an institution. You’re at Dartmouth now. This is where leaders are born, you among them, and your voice will be able to have an impact in any corner of the world.
And all of this will happen at an institution that itself proclaims to have almost no voice. During your orientation, alongside singing your alma mater, you might be given the institutional restraint spiel. College President Sian Leah Beilock delivered it last year to the Class of 2029 during their matriculation ceremony, warning them that the College is “not a political organization” or an “advocacy organization,” in order to, by her own logic, allow students to engage in their own dialogues. You will continue to see institutional restraint in action as you receive emails and hear statements — or lack thereof — from the College in response to political demands or threats. Time after time, these statements will fail to meet the severity of the issues they try to address. As Dartmouth’s academic freedom is under threat, you will read such strong words about the College’s commitment to “defend its mission and values.” Riveting, I say.
The College will tell you that institutional restraint does not impede on students’ ability to greet the world but rather facilitates it by allowing students the intellectual freedom to grow into the kinds of leaders they want to be. I fear it could instead encourage students to grow apathetic to the idea of institutions as changemakers.
For one, the notion that the College is “not an advocacy organization” is a lie. Since the second Trump administration began, the College has been involved in lawsuits, engaged in meetings in Washington in defense of its international students and spent five times more on lobbying in 2025 than in 2024, largely in defense of federal research grants. While the College maintains in its words that it is a neutral vessel for political discussion, the money shows that, behind all the talk, it has clearly come to terms with the reality that even it — especially it — is directly affected by politics.
This has forced an awkward situation in which the College, in order to address the concerns of students directly affected by the Trump administration’s actions, has highlighted its legal actions without ever making the normative statement that so obviously follows: What the Trump administration is doing to the College and its students is bad, and it needs to stop. So much for greeting the world with a hail. Maybe a more apt description would be greeting the world with a clandestine handshake.
One might argue that, when they do engage against the Trump administration, Beilock and the College aren’t taking a political stance beyond defending the freedom for students to engage in dialogue and intellectual exploration, and thus these political actions remain consistent with the vision of institutional restraint. This may be most clearly true of Beilock’s rejection of the compact that Trump offered Dartmouth and several other universities last fall, and which would have led to government oversight of Dartmouth’s curriculum.
One might also argue that, in avoiding direct normative statements while keeping its activism low-key, the College is avoiding the wrath of the Trump administration and thus better protecting its funding, its freedom and its students. This exists as its own debate, and I certainly see the merit in this view, although last year’s compact offer could stand as evidence that an institution that doesn’t appear resistant will be seen as an easy target. More recently, the Trump administration opened an investigation of the Geisel School of Medicine’s admissions practices.
But even if the College is avoiding direct statements to dodge federal scrutiny, and even if the College is taking political action only to defend intellectual freedom, so be it, as long as it is being consistent and honest with its students about the serious qualifications to its vision of institutional restraint and dialogue. Yet the College still continues to peddle institutional restraint and the notion that it is a place for all ideas to be welcomed into a dialogue despite knowing very well that a not-insignificant flank of mainstream American political ideology, if it had its way, would destroy this College and its community. Dialogue in the college auditorium, lawsuits in D.C.
The lie that the College is trying to sell you in all of this is that there is a certain class of institutions that can and should remain apolitical. I worry this, if taken to heart, could spoil the vision of leadership for all of us. Many will likely warn you about the allure of Dartmouth’s consulting and investment banking pipelines and tell you to resist it. I agree that you should explore beyond these options, but I’m not going to try to tell you that you should not also consider them. I recognize that many of you will end up at these places, and that’s okay. What matters is that many of you, in going down these paths, may end up in a position of institutional power.
My concern is that the institutions you’d end up leading wouldn’t be institutions of activism by name. They wouldn’t be non-profits or NGOs. They’d be boutique firms or corporate divisions, the kinds of institutions that might at first glance appear beyond the scope of direct political engagement. The kinds of institutions where the status quo might thrive. And the College, by hiding from you the reality that it has — out of necessity — thrown itself into the political wrestling ring, would be setting you up to enter these positions of institutional power with this exact belief that the institutions you are leading have no business with politics, activism or disruption of the status quo. That is the idea I want you to keep out of your mind, but I know it’s going to be hard to do so for the next four years.
Why? Because Dartmouth is a place tailor-made to build in you a sense of institutional apathy, and institutional restraint is just its most recent such installation. I can’t count the number of times I spoke with people my freshman fall who expressed doubts about rushing and fears about hazing only to be rushing the next fall with those previous reservations either completely gone or wrapped in humor and reduced to a light-hearted discussion of which fraternities’ hazing practices are most vile.
The point is not to critique every person who changes their mind about Greek life. Many people do genuinely have a change of heart when exposed to this unfamiliar system, and that can be a great thing. But when Dartmouth is bringing in people like you, freshmen, from all sorts of backgrounds with all sorts of priors regarding Greek life, significant majority assimilation into this system is suspicious. This place will give you the sense that Greek life’s dominance, and the way it manifests, is just the way it is, that it’s a fact and not a choice. And this is what keeps a broken system running.
When the College makes restrained statements in response to political happenings, it is doing so in the exact same breath in which it makes statements responding to the tragic consequences of Greek life. Both pay lip service to an issue that threatens our community while providing no longer-term commitment to solve it. When a student drowned in the Connecticut River two summers ago, the College suspended the involved Greek houses, promised an internal review and implemented new riverside safety measures. All of these are good, and none of these address the core issue — that Greek life created the environment in which this tragedy happened. Will it take a student getting hurt at a different kind of Greek event, one away from the water, for greater institutional change? When this is how the College responds to threats to our community, we are left with no conclusion to draw other than that certain institutions will always maintain the status quo, and that we have no part in changing that.
I don’t want to let any of this leave you feeling like your time here can’t be amazing. You are in for what will undoubtedly be some of the most exciting, frustrating and confusing four years of your life. You will meet brilliant people in your peers and professors. You will be given tremendous opportunity to set yourself up to be a future leader. You can and should engage in Greek life as much or as little as you’d like. And you will probably end up treating certain things as normal that your current self would be freaked out by. But in the midst of all this, I hope you remember that, for many of you, this will be the first time in your life that you will engage with an institution of global reach daily, and that your experience at Dartmouth should not define for you what the bounds of institutional action are.
When you graduate in four years, and when you begin to roam ’round the girdled earth, know the responsibility you have, so that the next generation of Dartmouth students don’t have to go searching for that responsibility on their own.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
