Dartmouth president refuses to join Ivy League push against Trump, pledges institutional neutrality
Dartmouth College President Sian Beilock has faced criticism for embracing institutional neutrality and declining joint opposition to the Trump administration’s legal actions against Harvard.
Critics, including a Yale professor, have called her stance cowardly, while Dartmouth maintains it protects free inquiry amid political pressures.
Dartmouth College President Sian Beilock has sparked controversy by embracing institutional neutrality and declining to criticize the Trump administration for its legal battles against Harvard.
Beilock refused to join a coalition of universities defending Harvard University against the Trump administration’s efforts to freeze federal funding.
“Everyone is entitled to their opinion,” Beilock told The New Yorker. “People ask, ‘Why aren’t you suing Trump like Harvard?’ Well, [the Trump administration hasn’t] made those kinds of demands.”
Beilock has stated that “receivership, censorship, and external pressures about what can and cannot be taught or studied hamper the free exchange of ideas on our campus and across institutions. Dartmouth will never relent on these values.”
A professor of management at Yale University, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, stated that Beilock’s decision to remain on the outside of the controversy represents “cowardice.”
“This is a mix of cowardice, hypocrisy, and naïveté,” Sonnenfeld argued. “This is Trump’s classic playbook: divide and conquer.”
Members of the Dartmouth community have also created a petition calling for action against the Trump administration, writing that “our institutions of higher learning face an unparalleled and thoroughgoing assault from the federal government.”
Campus Reform reported in December about Dartmouth’s decision to adopt a policy of institutional restraint, joining the University of Michigan, Yale University, and the University of Pennsylvania.
“A president’s embrace of neutrality—or restraint, as we call it at Dartmouth—is a good thing,” Beilock observed at the time. “When presidents make statements about something unrelated to the academic mission of the university, they advance politics, not education.”
Outside of the Ivy League, the Trump administration’s crackdown on campus anti-Semitism has found support among many Americans.
16 Republican-led states have filed an amicus brief backing the administration’s effort to withhold federal funding from Harvard University, accusing it of failing to stop anti-Semitic incidents and refusing to dismantle federally flagged DEI programs.
[RELATED: Harvard Kennedy School lays off staff amid backlash over DEI, anti-Semitism response]
The Trump administration’s Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism declared in June that Harvard is in “violent violation” of Title VI for its anti-Semitism response.
“Failure to institute adequate changes immediately will result in the loss of all federal financial resources and continue to affect Harvard’s relationship with the federal government,” the task force stated.
Campus Reform has reported that a majority of Americans support President Trump’s crackdown on anti-Semitism in higher education, with 66 percent of adults and 56 percent of college students backing cuts to federal funding for universities that fail to protect Jewish students.
Campus Reform has contacted Dartmouth College for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.
