Beilock’s First Term: So Far So-So

Dartmouth’s history over the past decade can be viewed as a series of upheavals. Starting with former President Hanlon’s “Moving Dartmouth Forward” initiative and ending with COVID-19, the lockdown, and its aftermath, it seems as though Dartmouth has not gone more than a year without a major event of one kind or another. Most recently, Dartmouth lost its decade-long President Philip J. Hanlon and for the past two months has operated under the command of President Sian Beilock. Now, Beilock has not been president long, and so the full extent of her goals for the College is not yet apparent. However, enough time has passed for the tone of her administration to become clear. In looking at what kind of president she has been so far, we may be able to guess at what kind of president she will be moving forward, so to speak.

Even before moving into the president’s house on Webster Avenue, Beilock established a presence on campus. She visited several times and held official meet-and-greets with Dartmouth students on multiple occasions. Her presence was often a topic of discussion on Fizz, the popular campus social media app, and in the course of general gossip.

The College’s social media accounts flooded their pages with pictures of Beilock meeting students, shaking hands, and taking pictures. From the start, she conveyed the impression of a friendly “hip” newcomer who wanted to relate to the student body. Once she took charge, Beilock made special effort to ensure that this “cool” image continued, presumably in no small part to distinguish herself from her predecessor. To date, she has maintained a busy calendar of social events and has passed out Trailbreak tacos to the ever-grateful student body.

While her public image and, as she would likely put it, “vibe” have been subjected to a great deal of care, what remains noticeably absent are any major initiatives that she has openly championed. Certainly, she has made plenty of overarching statements about free speech and campus culture, but she hasn’t actually instituted any definite policy changes.

Her supporters may point to changes in soft policy, saying that she is improving administrative culture. While “soft” policy is important and the culture of administration itself can affect the campus as a whole, and decisively so, it is also often largely unintelligible and impossible to hold accountable. When the administration operates through such vague means, any change can be enacted, or retracted, without the broader public taking notice.

Recently, Beilock announced a series of sweeping personnel changes in her administration. For the most part, they consisted of inserting one bureaucrat into the position left vacant by another, but there have been no substantive changes in Dartmouth’s approach to student life. Beilock has long focused on mental health in her rhetoric, perhaps unsurprisingly given her background in cognitive science. In her last email, Beilock seemed to be signaling that she will begin to make good on her broad promise to make all students feel better with her hiring of a series of new mental health-focused administrators. These superheroes of self esteem will surely uplift our spirits and rectify Dartmouth’s past tragic failures to take care of its student body. Yet, for all this dramatic expansion of Dartmouth’s administrative payroll, even Beilock’s latest announcement contained few specifics on what her approach to mental health will actually entail. Fundamentally, there is no panacea with which the president can “fix” the mental health crisis on campus. But one hopes that her mental-health initiatives become increasingly substantive and amount to more than increasing the number of people with fancy titles and beige offices.

Further, Beilock’s effects on Greek Life do not seem to be wholly positive, at least from the point of view of the wider student body. She has appointed a series of bureaucrats who seem inclined to change the Greek Life system to fit their own social and political agendas. While Beilock has directly pledged to preserve Greek Life on campus, that promise is singularly vague—and it does not preclude curtailment. 

So far she has made no drastic moves, but she has put in place even more impositions on Greek houses in the form of additional financial monitoring and restrictions on social events. Moreover, judging from surveys sent out to the student body, she seems to be looking into mandating the presence of non-alcoholic beverages at sanctioned social events.

Beilock’s immediately preceding position was president of Barnard, a school with no Greek Life to speak of. While Beilock may shortly direct her attentions  elsewhere, students’ ongoing concerns about the status of Greek Life are not ill founded. 

What’s more, some of Beilock’s official communication has not been as well thought out as the image she cultivates and presents. In an almost immediate response to the Supreme Court’s decision declaring affirmative action unconstitutional, Beilock sent a hurried email decrying the move. As described elsewhere in this issue, the letter read like a mishmash of various pro-affirmative action arguments all stated too quickly and with the inherent assumption that the reader already agreed with the writer. The president included links to various studies and statistics supporting her views, failing to concede that, on such a divisive topic, both sides can point to a host of cherry-picked surveys and papers. Whatever one thinks about affirmative action, such a hurried and unconvincing response from the president was unfortunate.

It is far too early to pass substantive judgment on the Beilock administration. That being said, the lack of overt, positive action, and the apparent existence of creeping efforts to impose change without general notice, may be cause for concern. Government, including that of a College, should be transparent. Attempts to minimize public backlash while carrying out an agenda subversively only distance the administration from the community and delegitimize arguments that the administration has the best interests of the student body at heart. If Beilock is to be a president for a new era at the College, she should at the very least not fall into the same politicking that dominated the tenures of her predecessors.