Some 600 college leaders recently signed a letter opposing the Trump administration’s interference in higher education. The only Ivy League president who did not sign the letter was Sian Beilock, the president of Dartmouth College.
Instead, she wrote her own letter to her campus, saying that higher education institutions should strive to do better, “to further our standing as a trusted beacon for knowledge and truth.”
“Reflection does not mean capitulation,” she added.
It is the kind of message, her critics and supporters say, that has so far helped to keep Dartmouth out of the Trump administration’s cross hairs.
Six of the eight Ivies are facing major funding threats, to the tune of billions of dollars, as the federal government attempts to punish them over concerns about antisemitism and other issues. Harvard University alone could lose over $2 billion. And every Ivy but Dartmouth is being investigated over allegations that they have allowed antisemitism on campus.
While Dartmouth hasn’t been targeted specifically, it would not emerge unscathed if the Republican administration gets its way. Higher endowment taxes could bring a significant financial blow, for example. And the administration’s visa crackdown has entangled some current and former Dartmouth students.
Dr. Beilock’s supporters see her as a champion of free expression and dialogue among people with different political viewpoints. They say she has been consistent, supporting these ideas long before the Trump administration or even the Hamas attack on Israel complicated campus politics.
“It’s just so clear to me this is something she’s genuinely committed to,” said Malcolm Mahoney, the leader of the Dartmouth Political Union, a nonpartisan group that sponsors debates. “It’s not something she does for political ease.”
But to her critics, she is trying to placate conservatives in a bid to spare Dartmouth from retribution. They say she has hurt, not helped, political tensions on campus, pointing to a police crackdown on a pro-Palestinian demonstration last year that many students and faculty said was unnecessary.
A number of reasons may also explain why Dartmouth has not faced the same pressure as its peers. Dartmouth, a small liberal arts college in rural New Hampshire with a tightly knit student body, may be off the radar of Washington lawmakers. It has also been known for having a more conservative bent.
And Dr. Beilock appears to have carefully positioned her school in territory friendly to conservatives. She has hired a former Republican Party official for a key administrative job, focused on free expression in her public messages and taken a hard-line approach toward protesters. She has also sought friends in high places.
White House officials have recently heaped praise on Dartmouth.
“I was so impressed to learn how Dartmouth (my alma mater) is getting it right, after all these years,” Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump loyalist who heads the Justice Department’s civil rights division, wrote on social media last week.
Ms. Dhillon said Dr. Beilock had recently met with her team in the message. (The White House did not respond to a request for comment.)
“Kudos to Dartmouth!” Ms. Dhillon added.
In an interview, Dr. Beilock said her university has been careful about protecting free speech. “But free expression does not mean robbing other people of free expression, shouting down speakers, taking over shared space and declaring it for one ideology,” she said.
Dr. Beilock said she reached out to Ms. Dhillon, adding that she talks to alumni across the political spectrum. They talked about academic freedom, viewpoint diversity and “the importance of being fiercely independent as an institution,” she said.
At 49, Dr. Beilock is the youngest Ivy League president and has been on the job less than two years. A wave of her peers — the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia — resigned following backlash over how they handled pro-Palestinian student protests.
Dr. Beilock, by contrast, won praise from conservatives as a model of university leadership.
In what her supporters and critics describe as a watershed moment for the university, she authorized armed state police to end a protest encampment on the college green. Student activists said the protest was peaceful, but the school said the tents were unauthorized.
It was a contrast from how the university handled another famous protest on the green in the 1980s, when the president tolerated a shantytown that students created to protest apartheid in South Africa. One night, a dozen students, mostly from the conservative student newspaper, smashed the shanties with sledgehammers.
After President Trump took office, Dr. Beilock named Matthew Raymer, the former chief counsel at the Republican National Committee, as the university’s top lawyer. As late as January, Mr. Raymer had argued in support of Mr. Trump’s plan to end birthright citizenship. Mr. Raymer now oversees Dartmouth’s Office of Visa and Immigration Services, a move student activists say has terrified international students.
The hiring of Mr. Raymer represents “the kind of difference in viewpoint across my team,” Dr. Beilock said.
“We hired Matt not as Dartmouth’s Republican lawyer, but as Dartmouth’s lawyer,” she added. “And I don’t hire people based on political party.”
Her posture toward the Trump administration has divided the campus. More than 2,500 Dartmouth alumni have signed a petition calling on Dr. Beilock to “join the growing ranks of colleges and universities that are resisting.”
“You’re Embarrassing Us,” read a headline in the student newspaper.
Dr. Beilock’s posture represents “a wink and a nod to the Trump administration,” said Roberta Millstein, a member of the Class of 1988 and an organizer of the alumni letter.
But another alumnus, Gerald Hughes, also from the Class of 1988, started his own petition describing Dr. Beilock as a “free speech leader” who is “taking a measured and deliberate approach.” It has received more than 500 signatures from alumni, faculty and students.
Dr. Beilock, a cognitive scientist who studies how high-performing people choke under pressure, said she is not going to change her approach.
Dr. Beilock served as a faculty member and then executive vice provost at the University of Chicago. That school was an early champion of institutional neutrality, the idea that school officials should avoid opining on politics or social issues except when central to the university’s mission. Dartmouth recently adopted a similar policy.
Dr. Beilock said her experience at Chicago had “a big impact on how I think.”
Chicago also hasn’t signed onto the letter from the university leaders. Neither has Vanderbilt, which is led by Daniel Diermeier, a former Chicago provost.
Amid the uproar, the university continues to sponsor programming meant to bridge the differences on campus.
On Thursday, Mr. Hughes, who started the pro-Beilock petition, moderated a panel with university administrators about how to improve “the environment for open dialogue, respectful disagreement, and academic freedom.” (Mr. Hughes was one of the students who took part in the sledgehammer attack on the shanties, a situation he declined to discuss in detail.)
In the interview, Dr. Beilock said that she is supportive of other universities as they navigate a difficult political climate but that her campus would continue to make its own way.
“We can stand with our peers and also speak in our own voice,” she said. “Those are not mutually exclusive.”
