Letter to the Editor: Student Votes Make a Difference
Re: Students can no longer vote in N.H. using school-issued IDs
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Re: Students can no longer vote in N.H. using school-issued IDs
On April 12, President Donald Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself cosplaying as a Jesus-like figure healing a sick man with divine power. Trump loves posting incendiary AI content; in less than a year, we’ve received a post depicting the Obamas as monkeys, a press release of a Minnesota protestor mid-arrest edited to appear as though she was crying when she was not and a video of Trump flying a fighter jet, spraying literal shit on American protestors. Trump’s Jesus post, however, feels different. Trump took the Oval Office in large part due to the frustrated white, Christian nationalist voters who felt Christian values were no longer a priority in this nation. Trump is known for trolling his opposition — it’s his shtick — but aggravating his own side feels different.
In a recent article for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Eric Kelderman reported that now-Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock became a client of BerlinRosen, a high powered New York-based public relations firm, in 2017. That same year, she was named the president of Barnard College, a private women’s liberal arts college affiliated with Columbia University. In a 2021 article published on BerlinRosen’s site, the firm counted “thought leaders like Sian Beilock of Barnard College” as one of their team’s “greatest wins” of the year.
A new Pew Research Center survey, entitled “Americans’ Shifting Views on Energy Issues,” should worry anyone who cares about climate policy. Americans still say, on balance, that the United States should prioritize renewable energy over fossil fuels. But that majority has fallen dramatically, from 79% in 2020 to 57% this year. Among Republicans, the shift is even more striking — in 2020, a majority said the country should prioritize renewables. Now, 71% say the country should prioritize fossil fuels. The trend is not subtle. Something has changed.
The Beilock administration is about “brave spaces.” So why doesn’t that ethos extend to taking Leon Black ’73’s name off of the Black Family Visual Arts Center? What is Dartmouth leadership waiting for?
Dartmouth recently instituted a new software for course selection and registration called Courses@Dartmouth. We asked The Dartmouth’s Opinion writers how they felt after using it for the first time to register for courses earlier this term.
In a recent opinion article in these pages, Unai Montes-Irueste ’98 wrote that “Dartmouth’s sixth President Nathan Lord was an abolitionist and admitted Black students to Dartmouth before the Civil War.”
Over a year ago, I wrote a column arguing that many of Dartmouth’s recent buildings do not respect the campus’ historical fabric. Newer additions, as I stated, are often architecturally lazy, trying to find a middle ground between appearing modern and fitting in with the Georgian red-brick theme of the College’s older buildings. This results in an unsatisfying appearance that achieves neither goal. Since that piece, multiple new campus projects have either begun construction or neared completion, including the West Wheelock residences and the renovation of the Fayerweather Halls. Rather than improving upon past additions, however, these projects continue the trend of poorly thought-out modernism. More so, they say something about the College’s shaky relationship with its own historical aesthetic.
Recently, deep into a mindless scroll of X, a supposed entertainment news post caught my eye. It claimed that Disney is remastering Orson Welles’s seminal 1941 film “Citizen Kane” in 4K, “updating it for modern audiences with meaningful additions such as credit scores and transition lenses.”
“I think it’s really time for the country to get on to something else,” President Donald Trump asserted two months ago in response to questions about the new batch of Epstein files. Despite Trump’s usual success in diversion, he can’t seem to shake the looming shadow of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Over the last few weeks, I have been working on a personal project in which I try to draft a list of things that AI cannot replace with ease — a humanity conservation project, if you will. Of all the items on that rather short list, poetry both excites and worries me the most. In an age where poetry is consumed primarily through short-form content of nature with yellow serif font, and the average attention span of a college student is shorter than most printed poems, we are indeed in a heap of trouble. I was even more alarmed when I saw the latest installation at the Hopkins Center for the Arts: Being, a 30-foot-tall humanoid artificial intelligence that “represents a Griot — a West African storyteller, poet and oral historian,” according to the Hopkins Center’s website.
It is no secret that networking plays a critical role in obtaining a job, especially in one’s early career. 85% of today’s jobs are found through networking, and 70% of open positions aren’t even posted. The desire to have expansive social structures is practically baked into our DNA — we are hardwired to expand our social networks and collaborate, and we are more inclined to give positions to individuals we know and trust to be successful in certain roles.
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.
In the opening scene of Aaron Sorkin’s “The Newsroom,” three panelists are asked, “In one sentence or less, why is America the greatest country in the world?” The show’s lead, a famous news anchor named Will McAvoy, attempts to dodge the question but eventually blurts out “It’s not the greatest country in the world … that’s my answer.” He continues, “You know why people don’t like liberals? Because they lose. If liberals are so fucking smart, then why do they lose so goddamn always?”
There are a number of things that are particularly anomalous about the American college experience when compared to life in the real world. Many college students live in walkable neighborhoods, something that is remarkably rare in the United States. Only about half of college students participate in the labor force, making it one of the few groups of American adults where broadbased unemployment is accepted. One of the activities relatively unique to college students is the broad use of and participation in shared spaces. College students frequently live, study and socialize in shared spaces that are managed by their institution.
On Friday morning, I received an email announcement for an upcoming installation at the Hopkins Center for the Arts: “Think you know AI? Meet Being.” The email and the Hopkins Center’s website with information about the event was filled with a cascading series of cringe-inducing red flags. The exhibition features a “virtual entity” trained on “anti-racist frameworks, Black queer poetry and vogue dancing” to get viewers “moving, thinking and collectively envisioning the future.” I didn’t even know where to start, other than to say “what the actual fuck” and file away another reason that the Luddites were onto something.
“Don’t bother using AI — I’ll catch it” is a sentence I’m sure you’ve heard from your professors at some point in high school and college. It’s bullshit.
I recently wrote a piece where I criticized the political rhetoric of “dialogue” as perpetuating the status quo. The piece, ironically enough, did end up generating some dialogue on campus, and I’ve since heard many different takes on my argument from my friends, some positive and some negative. In these conversations, I’ve come to realize that my original piece did not paint the full picture — that not only is “dialogue” more often than not a means of maintaining the status quo, but that it is also a way to push it in a particular political direction.
Last December, Dartmouth announced an institution-wide partnership with the artificial intelligence company Anthropic. While Dartmouth’s agreement with Anthropic has been under scrutiny by students and several faculty members over copyright infringement, a more pressing concern is Anthropic’s relationship with the Pentagon.
Yesterday was my final night as opinion editor for The Dartmouth. For the better part of two years, I’ve had the opportunity of working with incredibly talented editors, writers and student journalists, and I leave with nothing but appreciation for the tremendous work student journalists have done on our campus and beyond.