Last week, Society of Fellows leaders informed the current fellows that the Society will no longer recruit new cohorts and will effectively end by summer 2028, when the current fellows complete their appointments. Society leaders shared that the decision followed proposed reductions in the number of fellows, their tenure in the program and uncertainty about the program’s future funding. This news has not, as of this writing, been publicly announced. I am a third-year postdoctoral fellow in the Society, and I am writing to explain why this cut matters.
Restructuring the SoF out of existence
The Society of Fellows was founded under then-College President Phil Hanlon in 2014. It was extraordinarily competitive from the beginning, drawing more than 1,700 applicants for just five positions in its first year and promising early-career scholars three years of residency to “broaden, deepen and animate academic life at Dartmouth.”
In 2025, we were informed as fellows that the administrative responsibility for the SoF moved from the President’s Office into Dartmouth's newly established School of Arts and Sciences. An initial budget cut by the President’s Office required the School to restructure the program with fewer resources. Yet the College described the move as part of its effort to enhance Dartmouth's "academic vitality," aligning the Society more closely with departments by giving them a more direct role in selecting fellows.
During the move, the restructuring reduced incoming cohorts from five fellows to four, shortened appointments from three years to two and cut funding for professional development and visiting scholars. Recruitment also narrowed. Previously open to scholars across all disciplines, the search was restricted to four home departments in 2026: cognitive science, economics, environmental studies and geography. The humanities and the arts, once central to the SoF’s purpose, were sidelined. This academic year, the School proposed halving incoming cohorts to two fellows, without committing to funding beyond the College President’s three-year guarantee for the program. Faced with proposed further reductions and uncertainty about future funding, the Society’s leadership decided to stop recruiting.
My cohort will complete our fellowship in the summer of 2027, but we have already experienced the effects of downsizing. Dartmouth recruited no new cohort during restructuring in 2025, and the number of postdoctoral fellows fell from 11 to seven. This meant fewer perspectives at the seminar table, fewer events and visitors and fewer collaborations. The four fellows who arrived this fall accepted positions in a program that still called itself a Society. In their second and final year in 2027-2028, they may find themselves in a substantially reduced version of the community they were promised.
What the fellowship gave me
I came to Dartmouth from a public university after a long and demanding Ph.D. journey. Like many doctoral students at public institutions, I paid for my degree by teaching and providing service to the school alongside my research. While my doctoral program made me a better teacher and a more resourceful scholar, it also meant that I finished my Ph.D. with less of what early academic careers are actually measured by: time to publish, travel and build a network. Doctoral students in well-endowed programs often have that time built in from the start. The SoF gave it to me afterward. That is one thing fellowships like the SoF do quietly, yet strongly. They level an uneven field before anyone goes on the job market.
Institutions often pay lip service to interdisciplinarity while remaining siloed in highly territorialized departments, funding structures and professional categories. As an architectural theorist working across science and technology studies, craft and computational design, I found mentors at Dartmouth who truly valued interdisciplinarity. With their support, I extended textual research into material practice, building a textile studio and organizing two international workshops that brought scholars, artists, makers and scientists into conversation with Dartmouth and the Upper Valley. Through the SoF, an architectural theorist like me — someone who thinks through making things — found a home in the studio art department and collaborated with the art history department and Design Initiative at Dartmouth in the Thayer School of Engineering.
None of this is embedded in conventional research infrastructure. For the College, it is easy to recognize infrastructure when it looks like a laboratory or an expensive instrument. In the humanities and arts, it looks like a studio, a workshop bench, a research account, a term without teaching, visiting scholars and colleagues who read your work closely or three years in which an idea has time to fully develop. These things look expendable precisely because their value is hard to measure quantitatively in the short term.
The new economics of Arts and Sciences
The end of the SoF tests the promises on which Dartmouth’s new School of Arts and Sciences was founded. The College’s own explanation for founding the new school says its new budget model would give Arts and Sciences greater agency to pursue its priorities while “increasing cross-campus funding transparency.” It promised “sufficient and reliable sources of funding” and argued that decisions about resources could be made closer to faculty, students and staff. Little over a year later, the SoF faces further reductions and has no assurance of continued funding. The gap between the School’s objective and the Society’s uncertain future raises a question: What does the College count as essential academic infrastructure?
I witnessed this logic at work at the beginning of this academic year when funding was cut for the studio art department's off-campus studio in Lebanon, the space where I had built my textile research and practice. The associate dean for the arts and humanities offered to renew the lease on the condition that the department make no further requests for the rest of the year. Thanks to my department chair Tricia Treacy and the Hopkins Center for the Arts, my studio found a temporary space at the Hopkins Center, through goodwill instead of an institutional commitment.
None of this is happening in a vacuum. Universities across the country face real financial pressure: cuts to federal research funding, a steeper federal tax on large endowments, rising operating costs and intense political scrutiny. Dartmouth is not exempt from difficult choices. But constraints do not eliminate choice. They reveal it. And while this same institution found the SoF and an artist’s studio too expensive to sustain, it found the resources to become one of the first institutions of higher education in the country to adopt artificial intelligence at scale.
My concern is that Dartmouth invests primarily in consuming AI developed by a handful of companies whose resources no university can match, while urgent questions about its development and consequences remain sidelined. Whose language do they encode? Whose labor trains them? Who benefits from them, and who bears their costs? What do they do to authorship, learning, care and judgment? Dartmouth is confronting questions about AI, authorship and intellectual labor while dismantling a program that gives scholars the time and community to pursue them.
What the College chooses
Institutions reveal themselves through what they treat as an investment and what they treat as an expenditure. This experience taught me how academic austerity works. Resources are rarely declared unnecessary. Yet the administration makes them difficult to keep. Institutional support comes with conditions that would constrain the department’s ability to meet other needs, so that declining the offer looks like a choice. A reduction is called a restructuring. Responsibility moves from the office that controls the budget to the people who depend on it. Nothing is dismantled outright. It is simply made impossible to sustain.
The question, then, is not simply why the SoF was forced to end, but what Dartmouth chooses to sustain instead. If financial transparency is a founding promise of the new School of Arts and Sciences, the community deserves to know how these choices are being made. And if Dartmouth intends to lead universities into an AI-intensive future, it must also account for the human infrastructure of thought, experimentation and scholarly community that makes a university worth transforming in the first place.
Hayri Dortdivanlıoğlu is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Dartmouth Society of Fellows. Guest columns represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
