1000 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
(09/18/26 8:10am)
In 1818, Daniel Webster declared to the Supreme Court: “It is, Sir, as I have said, a small college, and yet there are those who love it.” Today, Dartmouth’s president is erasing Webster’s Dartmouth in The Atlantic. In “Why I Want More AI at Dartmouth,” College President Sian Leah Beilock writes that universities that don’t embrace AI “guarantee their own irrelevance.” She claims her essay is pedagogical. It isn’t — it’s a marketing strategy for growth.
By November 2024, Beilock called for 1,000 more beds, reinstated standardized testing, mass arrested peaceful protesters and reorganized undergraduate education under a new School of Arts and Sciences.
After Trump’s election, she hired the Republican National Committee’s former attorney, adopted an institutional restraint policy barring public statements, changed Dartmouth’s diversity, equity and inclusion website and organizational chart, cut the libraries’ budget, signed an AI partnership with Anthropic and Amazon Web Services and began expanding the student body — while her spokesperson insists we’ll remain “the smallest Ivy.”
AI is the story that lets Beilock’s blueprint for growth sound like a distinction that sets us apart from the other Ivies as we begin to more closely resemble them.
“AI at 70,” the Dartmouth conference marking the anniversary of the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project that coined the term “artificial intelligence” is billed as an inquiry into “what must remain human.” The lineup reads like a trade show for industries whose claims need scrutiny: Amazon keynotes, Anthropic hackathons — the companies selling Dartmouth its AI infrastructure at an as-yet unreported price — and a “Presidential Session” moderated by Beilock to boot.
What’s missing is as revealing as what’s included. Nita Farahany ’98, one of the world’s leading AI and neurotechnology ethicists, isn’t on the program — even though she was quoted in CalMatters last month warning that neural-monitoring tools could let employers detect when workers are thinking about organizing a union. That omission may be innocent, but her work goes directly to the conference’s stated theme — and an expert on these tools’ potential harms would complicate a stage built around Beilock’s enthusiasm for AI.
Those sounding alarms about what their former companies built were also kept off the program.
On Feb. 9, Mrinank Sharma resigned as head of Anthropic’s Safeguards Research team, writing on X and Substack that “the world is in peril,” citing AI and bioweapons among a “series of interconnected crises.” As Beilock’s essay made the rounds, Jacob Coxon, who spent three years on pretraining research at OpenAI and Anthropic, resigned publicly, writing on X that the two companies “are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives” and that the people building it “earnestly believe AI could kill all humans.” Two current Anthropic staffers, including its own alignment science lead, publicly agreed. On Sept. 11, Anthropic chief executive officer Dario Amodei said AI development needs to slow down and be closely monitored.
If people inside Anthropic are worried about where their own work is headed, Dartmouth’s president is complicit in handing a spokesperson for a company chasing a $1 trillion valuation a stage and calling it “academic inquiry.”
Beilock’s claim that AI will “future-proof” Dartmouth graduates collapses the moment one looks at who the future has already stopped working for. She opens by citing Stanford University research showing employment for young workers in AI-exposed fields has fallen 19%, then turns to her own research on math anxiety, suggesting anxiety can be reduced through practice and exposure.
That analogy is elegant — and a category error.
Math anxiety is a psychological state, softened by preparation and repeated exposure. The AI economy isn’t a test a student can practice for until the fear fades — it is a series of decisions employers, investors and tech companies are making about which jobs to automate, which workers to keep and which labor to make cheaper, including roles requiring advanced degrees. Adjunct faculty don’t get tenure no matter how many years they teach. Staff attorneys don’t make partner no matter how many hours they bill.
(09/18/26 8:00am)
When I read the most recent installment in College President Sian Leah Beilock’s seemingly annual series of Atlantic articles last week, two main contradictions stuck out to me.
(09/17/26 8:00am)
In addition to its chip-winning basketball franchise and bodega cats, New York City is home to some of our country’s finest welfare programs. Millions of kids, including myself, grew up on them. Beyond the typical surprises city kids face when going rural — constellations, deep breaths of air, Republicans, et cetera — I was especially taken aback by New Hampshire’s school lunch program.
(09/17/26 10:01pm)
We are now approaching the second anniversary of College President Sian Leah Beilock’s implementation of institutional restraint at Dartmouth. In anticipation of a presidential administration that espouses strong rhetoric against universities, institutional restraint was presented as a form of protection for students: opening doors for dialogue without self-censorship and ensuring that students are able to speak out in the so-called brave spaces. Beyond that, it was a strategy for the university’s self-preservation, a marked attempt to distance itself from potential attention of the Trump administration. As the only Ivy League not signing onto likened it to the “Ivy League’s Switzerland” in an essay in The Atlantic.
(09/15/26 7:00am)
A year ago, I wrote an article in these pages arguing that Greek life at Dartmouth works because it’s exclusive, and that the open housing system fell apart because it wasn’t. Nobody guards a house they got for free. I believed it. I wrote it from the outside, before I’d rushed, and I acknowledged that at the time. I’ve since gone through sophomore fall and am unaffiliated. I think being on this side of the rush process is the only reason anything I have to say is worth saying, and the thing I most want to say is simple: You are going to be perfectly fine, and you should try to enjoy the process while it’s happening.
(09/15/26 7:05am)
When College President Sian Leah Beilock published her splashy new think piece in The Atlantic, four people texted me the link to read it before I could find it on my own. And, although some may be surprised by this, I found myself agreeing with the general spirit of her argument.
(09/04/26 10:10am)
This article is featured in the 2026 Freshman Special Issue.
(09/04/26 10:15am)
This article is featured in the 2026 Freshman Special Issue.
(09/04/26 10:05am)
This article is featured in the 2026 Freshman Special Issue.
(09/04/26 10:00am)
This article is featured in the 2026 Freshman Special Issue.
(08/14/26 11:10am)
Call me naive all you want, but I don't think there is anything particularly dystopian about artificial intelligence itself, as long as the companies behind our frontier models are conscious about what parts of our humanity must be conserved and are making efforts to do so. Most of us have forgotten how to write, or at least how to write confidently and, more importantly, trust our own writing. Almost everywhere except in my academics and at The Dartmouth, I too have almost always relied on my trusty dear pal Claude to check my writing. “Hello, Night Owl,” it will say, as I, in the worst possible grammar and incomprehensible spelling, tell it to check if the email I am sending to my boss at 2:00 AM on a Wednesday is polite enough. Sometimes, when I am feeling daring and lethargic enough to surrender to the machines, I just ask it to write the whole email from scratch. I know that you too, dear reader, have probably, at least once, done the same. The saddest statistic of all is that now there is more suspected AI generated content on the internet than original human copy.
(08/14/26 7:05am)
When Grafton County Sheriff Jill Myers first won her seat in 2024, she laid out a largely uncontroversial vision for the responsibilities of the county’s sheriff department with the hopes of mending a disconnect between the public and the police force after she observed that policing had become “frowned upon.” In her ideal, deputies would take on more diverse day-to-day responsibilities: stopping to help someone on the side of the road, assisting local police in domestic calls. All the while, the department would also engage in more direct community outreach through local fundraisers and would send out more frequent public announcements so people could “actually see what their department is doing.” Doesn’t that all sound so nice?
(08/07/26 7:05am)
Last week, in this space, I argued that the federal investigation into the Geisel School of Medicine had brought Dartmouth’s commitment to institutional restraint to its first real test. I resisted prescribing exactly how the College should respond. The investigation had just begun, and the “fierce defense” of Dartmouth that College President Sian Leah Beilock has promised could take many forms, including cooperation with federal investigators.
(08/07/26 7:00am)
“When we get it right, the structures we build around learning will look like the world we are creating, not the one we have left behind.”
(08/07/26 8:00am)
(07/31/26 3:25pm)
Over the last year and a half, the second Trump administration has pursued a confrontational relationship with higher education, targeting federal funding, diversity programs, admissions practices and international student policies. Although Dartmouth joined several of its peers in rejecting a White House funding compact, it has otherwise charted a noticeably different course.
(07/31/26 3:21pm)
Last week, in the wake of a report that the College was considering expanding its undergraduate student body, Rohan Taneja ’28 wrote a well-crafted response in defense of the familiar spirit of the small college we know and love. In it, he argued that, beyond posing logistical challenges, expanding Dartmouth’s student body would degrade the sense of tight-knit community that makes the school special, and that this community-level impact is something the College overlooks when it treats expansion as a matter of balancing a spreadsheet.
(07/24/26 9:45am)
Over the past year, The Dartmouth has devoted significant attention to New Hampshire’s changing election laws. The paper has covered new voter identification requirements, changes to absentee voting, lawsuits over voter registration rules and, most recently, a warning from U.S. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon ’89 that state election officials face criminal liability for knowingly allowing noncitizens to remain on state voter rolls.
(07/24/26 7:00am)
I’m writing this partway through my sophomore summer, and the thing I keep noticing about this famed term is that it feels like the version of Dartmouth everyone tells you about when you get here, the mythical version you stop believing is real by winter of freshman year. The campus empties out — with no freshmen, juniors or seniors, it is less than half of the usual crowd — and what’s left is just my class, all still here, all still finding each other. Each time I walk from my dorm to Collis I run into someone I know almost immediately. This isn’t because I’m trying to do so, but because of the inherent intimacy of the small campus. Your path keeps crossing with the same people whether or not you mean it to. People talk about sophomore summer as the term when Dartmouth feels most like itself. I understand now why they say that.
(07/17/26 7:10am)
