Harry Kalven, Jr., a late law professor at the University of Chicago, once wrote that, from time to time, circumstances arise “in which the society, or segments of it, threaten the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry.” These words are from the Kalven Report, a 1967 policy paper that has since become gospel for college presidents, who, over the years, have been asked to weigh in on matters ranging from the war in Gaza to the feud between Biggie and Tupac. To avoid stifling one viewpoint by endorsing another, Kalven wrote, universities should maintain an approach that would become known as “institutional neutrality.” In other words, for followers of the Chicago tradition, the best way for a university to defend its core values is typically to not make a stand.
Today, as the federal government wages a war on higher education, hundreds of academic leaders have rejected neutrality and are actively fighting back. But one school, Dartmouth College, has attracted outsized attention for its refusal to join the resistance and, perhaps not coincidentally, for its avoidance of any direct sanctions by the Trump Administration. This past April, Dartmouth declined to join more than six hundred other academic institutions—including all of its Ivy League peers—in signing a letter in defense of Harvard University, which has seen cuts to its funding after refusing the government’s demands to bring its admissions, disciplinary procedures, academic hiring, curricula, and more in line with Trump’s ideological priorities. Dartmouth’s president, Sian Beilock, does not see her school’s stance—or lack thereof—as a retreat. As she wrote last year in The Atlantic, she believes that Dartmouth’s approach is “saving the idea of the university.”
Beilock, who for twelve years taught and served in the administration at the University of Chicago, recently introduced a policy of “institutional restraint” at Dartmouth, which requires that senior administrators speak on behalf of the college only “sparingly,” so as to preserve a diversity of viewpoints. Her ideas have earned praise from free-speech advocates, conservative publications, and members of the Trump Administration, along with furious condemnation from academic leaders convinced that universities must stand united against Trump. “This is a mix of cowardice, hypocrisy, and naïveté,” Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a longtime professor of management at Yale, who organized an initial letter in support of Harvard, told me. “This is Trump’s classic playbook: divide and conquer.” But this is also classic Kalven, an attempt to balance the university’s obligations to open dialogue and to an open society. Should Dartmouth, as in its motto, be “a voice crying out in the wilderness?” Or should it follow Kalven and remain silent?
Dartmouth had only been accepting women as students for fifty years when it announced the appointment of Beilock, its first female president, in 2022. Beilock, who was forty-six at the time, is a cognitive scientist who served for six years as the president of Barnard College. When she arrived at Dartmouth, she immediately took aim at the perceived censoriousness of campus discourse. In September, 2023, during her inaugural address, she announced a sweeping cultural transformation that would encourage “brave spaces”—not safe spaces—where a diversity of viewpoints would thrive. “We cannot squash an idea simply because there’s a certain faction of our community that doesn’t like it, or stifle dialogue on a controversial topic because it makes people uncomfortable,” she said. As part of her commitment to free speech, she launched a new initiative to promote civil discussion inside the classroom and out, along with a series of talks on thorny subjects, called “Dartmouth Dialogues.”
The first test came two weeks after her inauguration, when Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th. Faculty from the Jewish Studies and Middle Eastern Studies departments held joint discussions as part of the Dartmouth Dialogues series. The events drew hundreds of students to pour out their anguish and anger, but also to learn about the underlying causes of the conflict. It seemed as if Dartmouth might be able to avoid the kind of controversies that were roiling other schools. Later in October, however, after the invasion of Gaza commenced, two students began camping on the lawn outside Beilock’s office, calling for the college to commit to a list of written demands, including divesting from Israeli “apartheid and its apparatuses.” In a statement, Beilock cited lines in the students’ document that promised to “escalate and take further action” if those demands weren’t met, including “physical action”—words that the administration interpreted as a threat of violence. (The students would later clarify that physical action meant more demonstrations.) Police arrested the pair for criminal trespassing and removed their tent. Leaning against it was a sign that read “Brave Space.”
Despite the arrests, Dartmouth was cultivating a reputation as a haven for constructive conversations about the war. In late 2023, NPR and CBS covered the school’s dialogue initiatives; in January of 2024, Biden’s Education Secretary, Miguel Cardona, visited campus and praised its culture of free expression.
Not all of Dartmouth’s community members found its new direction so exciting, though. Annelise Orleck, a history professor, had been slightly miffed by the seeming implication, in Beilock’s early statements, that Dartmouth professors were indoctrinating and coddling their students. (Her own classroom is no kindergarten, she says, with freewheeling discussions that she describes as “just this side of controlled chaos.”) With the October arrests—and an incident in February, 2024, in which students went to Beilock’s office hours to voice their concerns about Dartmouth’s reinstatement of SAT scores as an admissions requirement, and were surprised by the presence of security officers in the building—Orleck began to question where the fragility really lay. “There was a beginning of a narrative that the students are threatening somehow, which I’ve never seen at Dartmouth,” she told me.
On May 1st that year, International Workers’ Day, unions and other campus groups held a rally on the college green. A few hundred students, staff, and faculty had gathered in solidarity with striking graduate-student workers and Palestinians, but word had gotten out that a smaller number planned to set up a Gaza encampment later on. After a few hours, Orleck left campus for dinner. But she soon got a call from a colleague: “You have to get back here. Right now.”
Orleck rushed back to the green. Blinding spotlights illuminated what felt like, for quiet, rural Hanover, New Hampshire, a surreal scene. Local and state police, including special-operations officers in riot gear, were lined up near a circle of protesters enclosing a handful of tents. An armored vehicle was parked nearby. Orleck and other professors stood between the students and the baton-wielding police. Chaos erupted as the arrests began. Orleck broke from the line to film the detentions, and suddenly felt a shock as an officer rammed into her from behind—“I could feel the body armor”—pushing her to the ground. A policeman took her phone, and, as she tried to get it back, several more officers dragged her down again. She felt a knee in her back. Pinned, struggling to breathe, Orleck wondered “if I was going to be one of those videos.”
Eighty-nine students, professors, and community members were arrested, including a bystander who said that he had wandered by to see what was going on. (He fractured his shoulder in a scuffle with police.) In an e-mail to the Dartmouth community the next morning, Beilock explained that the police had intervened after the protesters had received repeated warnings that an encampment would be a violation of college policy. “Last night, people felt so strongly about their beliefs that they were willing to face disciplinary action and arrest,” she wrote. “While there is bravery in that, part of choosing to engage in this way is not just acknowledging—but accepting—that actions have consequences.” In a separate e-mail to Orleck, she wrote, “I truly care about your well-being.”
Days later, as videos of Orleck’s arrest made the rounds on social media, Beilock issued an apology that justified calling the police as a necessary step to prevent violence and division, echoing her past statements about averting antisemitism on campus. After the intervention of national press organizations, the college said that it had asked the police to drop charges against two student journalists who had been arrested in the chaos. (Initially, a college spokesman said of the reporters’ objection to their arrests, “We stand behind their right to vindicate that belief through the legal process.”) A few weeks later, for the first time in Dartmouth’s history, faculty voted to censure the sitting president.
The margin was narrow—183–163—reflecting a deeply divided campus. Though online commenters feasted on the irony of Orleck, a sixty-five-year-old former chair of the Jewish Studies department, being roughed up in the name of preventing antisemitism, the current chair, Susannah Heschel, told a reporter that Orleck had ignored calls to vacate the green and therefore “intended to be arrested.” (Orleck denied this.) Heschel, who helped to organize the October 7th dialogue series, has spent years building bridges and co-teaching classes with the Middle Eastern Studies department. That kind of work is the way to address conflict, she told me. “There are colleagues who want to turn their classrooms into political agitations of sorts, and that’s not helpful. It can suppress political viewpoints and suppress dialogue.”
On campus, the Dartmouth Dialogues and other speech programming have evolved in parallel to an escalating protest movement. The term “brave spaces” has become a mocking catchphrase among student activists, who have also invented derisive chants about Beilock “choking” under pressure—a reference to her academic background studying athletes and other high-stakes performers. “Brave spaces” is not Beilock’s term, however. It belongs to a longtime Dartmouth administrator, Kristi Clemens, who, in 2006, coined it with another educator, Brian Arao. Clemens described the mockery of brave spaces as “a heartbreaking moment”—especially because she and Arao originally thought of the concept not as a rebuke of safe spaces but as a way to help students have conversations about social justice. (Beilock has taken the term in a slightly different direction, Clemens told me.) Clemens now leads the Dartmouth Dialogue Project, which runs the discussion series and a wide range of open-expression initiatives on campus. Her office offers classroom-discussion workshops for faculty, and students can receive wellness credits—a graduation requirement—for attending trainings on how to facilitate conversations between people with opposing views.
In learning about these well-intentioned attempts to improve the school’s public discourse, I was struck by the pervasive language of policy and process from the people leading these efforts. This language does not touch on the substance of the debates but, rather, on the venues and the terms. And it can give the impression that the speaker has no personal stake in the matter under discussion. An alumnus who recently moderated a panel on campus speech co-sponsored by Dartmouth Dialogues, for instance, told me that the college was well on its way to repairing its culture of free expression. “There have to be clear time, place, and manner limits, which I think can be established in a way that creates ample room for appropriate speech and protest,” the moderator, Gerald Hughes, told me. In 1986, when Hughes was a sophomore at Dartmouth, he and nine other staffers of the conservative Dartmouth Review made national headlines for using sledgehammers to dismantle an anti-apartheid “shantytown” on the school’s green. In college disciplinary hearings, he spoke not of South African racism or the politics of divestment but of procedure: “We wanted to take something down that we felt should not have been out there and I don’t think that was violent.”
In the fall of 2024, Beilock testified in the trial of the two students who had camped on her office’s lawn. (They were found guilty of trespassing and sentenced to community service.) She also published her piece in The Atlantic, arguing that, in preventing a few loud voices from seizing control of the conversation, Dartmouth was setting an example for academia as a whole. She wrote, “Appeasement can feel safe and easy—if that means giving in to the demands either of student protesters or of vocal donors.”
These questions would soon be overtaken and amplified by a national crisis. This March, as the second Trump Administration escalated its threats toward universities, Dartmouth hired the former top lawyer at the Republican National Committee, Matt Raymer, as general counsel. Raymer is an alumnus who, as recently as January, had argued that Trump was right about birthright citizenship in a conservative online publication called the Federalist. Though some faculty and alumni told me they were outraged by the hire, Sonnenfeld, the Yale management professor, suggested that it was within bounds, comparing it to Harvard’s enlistment of conservatives for its legal defense. (The school has brought on Robert Hur and William Burck, among others, as counsel.)
In April, the Trump Administration froze $2.2 billion in grants to Harvard and threatened the school’s tax-exempt status after the university refused to place itself in what amounted to federal receivership. Soon after, the American Association of Colleges and Universities published the now famous letter by academic leaders, which proclaimed “one voice against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education.”
When Beilock declined to sign, the real fracas began. “I understand that some see any sort of self-reflection at this moment—anything less than all-out battle—as surrender. I disagree,” she wrote in an e-mail to the college community. A small group of élite schools—Stanford, Vanderbilt, Rice, and the University of Chicago—also declined to sign, but the prominence in the media of Dartmouth’s abstention has led to a growing perception that it is, as one alumnus called it, “the Trump-friendly college.”
Around that time, Beilock concluded her latest visit to Washington, D.C., having met with what she calls the “Dartmouth caucus” of alumni in Congress, as well as with officials from the Trump Administration. Harmeet Dhillon, the recently confirmed Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, posted on X after their meeting, “I was so impressed to learn how Dartmouth (my alma mater) is getting it right, after all these years. Kudos to Dartmouth! I heard Jewish student applications are way up!” Dhillon became notorious in 1988, as editor of the Dartmouth Review, for publishing a column depicting then president James Freedman, a Jew, as Adolf Hitler. She is now investigating most of the Ivy League for antisemitism, but not Dartmouth. (Dartmouth has also avoided the direct threats to international students and nonprofit status that Harvard faces, and is the only Ivy aside from Yale to escape targeted attacks to its funding.)
Prominent alumni praised what they saw as a canny strategy to protect the school—“I like my president,” Jeff Immelt, the former C.E.O. of G.E., wrote, on LinkedIn. As of this week, though, more than twenty-seven hundred people had signed an alumni petition urging Dartmouth to make a stronger stand against federal overreach. (A counter-petition garnered about a fifth of the number of signatures.) Elizabeth Frumkin, a lawyer who co-wrote the petition, told me that she was organizing alumni into a sort of “Dumbledore’s Army”—a reference to a group of students in the “Harry Potter” series who defy a rules-obsessed headmistress, Dolores Umbridge, who was installed as the puppet of an authoritarian regime.
“Everyone is entitled to their opinion,” Beilock told me, when I asked her about her critics. “People ask, ‘Why aren’t you suing Trump like Harvard?’ Well, [the Administration hasn’t] made those kinds of demands.” That includes in private meetings with Dhillon and Education Secretary Linda McMahon, she told me in a conversation last month. In her e-mail explaining the decision not to sign the A.A.C.U. letter, she said 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.”
Dartmouth’s limited advocacy—it is involved in three federal-funding lawsuits filed by the Association of American Universities, of which it is a member, and recently joined an amicus brief in Harvard’s funding case—would seem to be an acknowledgment that some level of active defense is required. But, wherever Beilock’s line is between principled independence and outright opposition, many of her students do not recognize it. On May 1st, protesters set up another encampment outside her office, and, later that month, a group occupied the building’s reception. Beilock suspended two students accused of participating in the sit-in for property damage and harm to university employees. (The students denied the accusations, and one of them said she wasn’t present at the protest.) The school temporarily suspended access to the e-mail account of a Black-alumni group after its president sent out an e-mail disputing the official version of events. One day, the campus unrest may provoke a more direct showdown with the federal government, and not one of Beilock’s choosing.
At a panel last month, Beilock clashed with Wesleyan’s president, Michael Roth, over her adherence to what he called “a new form of conformism.” Roth went on, “As a heterodox person, and as a Jew, I’m very suspicious when my compatriots find a new religion, be it viewpoint diversity or be it institutional neutrality.” Written in response to activists’ demands that the University of Chicago take a stand against the Vietnam War draft, the Kalven Report has long faced criticism that it provides cover for universities to avoid pressing moral problems. But the prophet of neutrality had an entirely different prescription for times like these, during which the “very mission” of the academy lies in the balance. Here, Kalven’s words were confrontational—not a may, but a must. “In such a crisis,” he wrote, “it becomes the obligation of the university as an institution to oppose such measures and actively to defend its interests and its values.”
In our conversation, I started to read that quote to Beilock. She stopped me. “You don’t have to,” she said. “I know it well.” ♦
