The early nineteenth century was a formative era for American higher education, a time when colleges were fragile, small-scale institutions, often caught between their colonial legacies and populist hostility to privileged elites studying the liberal arts. These tensions came to a head in the case Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, which helped to establish the independence of American higher education from governmental control. At issue was the very nature of a college. Is it a public utility, subject to the demands of the state? Or is it a self-governing institution whose autonomy deserves constitutional protection?
Dartmouth had been founded in 1769 under a royal charter from King George III, and for nearly fifty years it had operated as a private institution governed by an independent board of trustees. But in 1816 the New Hampshire legislature passed a law aimed at converting it into a state-run university. National political divisions hovered in the background. Dartmouth’s trustees were aligned with the Federalist Party. The legislature and governor were Democratic-Republicans aligned with James Monroe, who was elected president later that year; they viewed the unaccountable, elitist college with suspicion, and they planned to rewrite the charter, pack the board with political allies, and rebrand the school as “Dartmouth University.” One of the college’s own officers, William H. Woodward, defected, taking with him the financial records, the college seal, and the legal authority that went with it. The trustees sued to regain control; the case went all the way to the Supreme Court.
Their star advocate was Daniel Webster, class of 1801, a rising Federalist congressman from Massachusetts. In March 1818 he stood before the Court and argued for the college’s independence in language that was both legal and deeply personal. No transcript survives, but a witness recorded the final words of his closing statement: “It is, Sir, as I have said, a small college. And yet there are those who love it.” That line, now etched into the American legal imagination, reportedly brought Chief Justice John Marshall to the brink of tears. Dartmouth was not only a legal entity, it was a community, Webster argued; to tamper with it was bad law, but also a kind of betrayal.
The Dartmouth decision created a constitutional shield for all private educational institutions in the United States. In the years after the decision, colleges and universities across the country invoked the Dartmouth precedent to fend off states’ attempts to intervene in their internal affairs, from governance to curriculum to faculty appointments. The ruling helped ensure that private educational institutions would not become mere tools for the exercise of government power and that their founding documents had legal force.
The case laid the groundwork for what eventually came to be called academic freedom. Legal scholars treat Dartmouth as an early marker for institutional autonomy. The decision implied that intellectual inquiry requires distance from the state—that colleges should be places where truth is sought, not dictated. Thanks to Webster, Dartmouth’s name was immortalized not for any scientific breakthrough or curricular innovation, but for its resistance to political encroachment.
Two hundred years later, with Sian Beilock running the college, the issue of government control over academia came up once again. This time, instead of serving as a defender of American higher education as it had in the nineteenth century, Dartmouth did precisely the opposite. At a moment that demanded solidarity among threatened institutions, it eagerly bent the knee and pursued a strategy of accommodation and appeasement.
During Donald Trump’s first term, higher education emerged as a fixation for some of the president’s closest allies. Trump’s administration took aim at colleges and universities with a small tax on endowment income and gestures like the 1776 Commission, which promoted “patriotic education” as a counter to The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project. But these attacks were for the most part limited to blustery performances with no consistent follow-through—what the legal analyst Benjamin Wittes called “malevolence tempered by incompetence.”
Then, during Joe Biden’s presidency, protests against Israel’s war in Gaza proliferated on campuses across the country. House Republicans held high-profile hearings on antisemitism, which led to the resignations of the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and later Columbia. After the protests receded, universities felt a measure of security. This turned out to be false. On January 29, 2025, less than ten days into his second term, Trump signed an executive order called “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism.” It tasked the Departments of Education, State, Justice, and Homeland Security with making colleges and universities monitor foreign students and staff and report protesters to the government. In the words of a fact sheet accompanying Trump’s order, “To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you.”
The administration’s new initiative quickly expanded into a sweeping federal campaign. In March the Department of Education warned schools that they must take disciplinary action against students and faculty involved in Gaza protests that it deemed antisemitic—including peaceful demonstrations critical of Israel or US foreign policy. Antisemitism was a genuine problem on many campuses, and one that many administrators were handling inadequately and inconsistently. But to the Trump administration, antisemitism was simply a cudgel to use against liberal institutions and left-wing academics. The same officials expressed no concern whatever about the rising tide of right-wing antisemitism.
Attacking universities fit neatly with Trump’s depiction of Muslim immigrants as terrorists or terrorist sympathizers. The Justice Department began investigating student organizations under material-support-for-terrorism statutes. Working in concert with the Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security began revoking visas, making arrests, and attempting deportations. The campaign went far beyond trying to stamp out Gaza protests. Federal agencies demanded internal university records: admissions data disaggregated by race, sex, ethnicity, nationality, family. income, grades, and standardized test scores, as well as confidential information about faculty hiring and fundraising. Schools were ordered to shutter their diversity, equity, and inclusion offices. The most consequential change involved the enforcement of civil rights laws. Rather than initiating formal Title VI investigations—a process that would trigger administrative review—the government began treating alleged violations as grounds for immediate suspension of federal contracts and research funding. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon put it bluntly in an interview: universities could continue receiving federal funds “as long as they’re abiding by the laws and are in sync…with the administration and what the administration is trying to accomplish.” It was no longer a question of lawfulness but of political alignment.
Billions in federal research dollars were at risk. Even Harvard, the wealthiest and most powerful academic institution in the world, faced an unprecedented threat after the federal government froze more than $2.2 billion in research funding and revoked its certification to enroll international students. On April 11 Alan Garber, the university’s president, received a letter from the administration that officials subsequently claimed was an “unauthorized” draft sent in error. In exchange for allowing Harvard to keep its research funding and its foreign students, the letter demanded government supervision of its admissions policies, its faculty appointments, and even its student organizations. There were many other intolerable requirements. Harvard had to screen foreign students and reject those “hostile to… American values and institutions,” discontinue all DEI programs, and submit to a faculty plagiarism review. All of this would occur under outside supervision.
In response to the funding freeze Harvard filed suit against the government, arguing that the administration’s actions amounted to political coercion, not legitimate civil rights enforcement. Its complaint alleged that the administration’s demands were retaliatory and unconstitutional. Central to the lawsuit was a claim that the federal government was weaponizing civil rights law not to protect vulnerable groups but to control the internal operations of an independent academic institution. The suit, President and Fellows of Harvard College v. United States Department of Health and Human Services et al., marked a potential turning point in Trump’s war on higher education. Though technically about one institution, it functioned as a referendum on the future of American universities. Could they retain their autonomy under a regime determined to bring them to heel?
University presidents around the country issued statements of support for Harvard. Editorials defending the principle of academic independence appeared in major newspapers. The American Association of Colleges and Universities circulated a forceful joint letter that read:
As leaders of America’s colleges, universities, and scholarly societies, we speak with one voice against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education.
The letter’s 666 signatories included all of the other schools in the Ivy League with one notable exception: Dartmouth.
As federal immigration authorities began terminating the visas of international students across US campuses, Dartmouth set itself apart by putting its head down—and keeping it there. On April 23 Dartmouth’s president, Sian Beilock, not yet two years into the job, circulated a carefully worded internal message justifying the college’s decision to avoid taking a public stand. “As president, I have never signed open form letters because they are rarely effective tools to make change,” she wrote. “I prefer joining action-oriented coalitions, as we have done this past month as part of two successful AAU [American Association of Universities] lawsuits.”
That wasn’t true. At both Dartmouth and Barnard College, where Beilock served as president from 2017 to 2023, she had signed open letters. One denounced the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. Another endorsed the Biden administration’s CHIPS Act and pushed for increased representation of women and people of color in engineering. The AAU lawsuits she mentioned, meanwhile, weren’t responses to the Trump administration’s attempts at political coercion. They challenged across-the-board reductions in federal reimbursement rates for research overhead—harmful to universities, yes, but universally applicable and not tied to any demands for political conformity.
The pragmatic explanation for Beilock’s restraint was that, unlike every other Ivy League school, Dartmouth had not been hit with a civil rights investigation. Nor had it suffered frozen research grants, withdrawn contracts, or visa decertifications. At least for the moment, the Trump administration was leaving Dartmouth alone. The reason, officials made clear, was the way that Beilock had handled a campus demonstration the previous spring. On May 1, 2024, students held a candlelight vigil on the Dartmouth Green to protest the war in Gaza. Large protests are rare at Dartmouth, which is more rural and has less of an activist tradition than many of its peers, and this one was tame by any standard. There were no building occupations, blocked walkways, or loudspeakers. Protesters stood in a circle, held hands, sang songs, and pitched a few tents bearing Palestinian flags and signs reading “BRAVE SPACE”—a phrase Beilock had used to describe the kind of civil dialogue she hoped to foster on divisive issues, an inversion of the “woke” demand for “safe” spaces.
Her office called the police. Within hours officers in riot gear surrounded the Green. After issuing a warning, they moved in. Eighty-nine people were arrested, including two student journalists wearing press credentials and several bystanders, one of whom suffered a broken arm. A sixty-five-year-old history professor, Annelise Orleck, who had come to observe the demonstration, was knocked to the ground and arrested—an incident caught on video. As a condition of her release, she was temporarily banned from campus. The college declined to enforce the ban but refused to drop charges against the students.
It was a grossly excessive way of dealing with a peaceful protest. The faculty voted to censure Beilock, and the student body followed suit with a no-confidence resolution. Beilock apologized, saying she hadn’t intended mass arrests or the intervention of heavily armed officers. “Part of a college president’s job is to put the safety and wellbeing of students first,” she said. “Unfortunately, my attempt to keep all of those on our campus safe made some people feel unsafe…. I am sorry for the harm this impossible decision has caused.”
But when Trump returned to power in January 2025, the overreaction Beilock regretted became an unexpected asset. It turned out that Dartmouth had an influential advocate inside the administration: Harmeet Dhillon, a Dartmouth alum now serving as assistant attorney general for civil rights. “I’m proud that Dartmouth is leading the way in dealing with antisemitism and campus unrest,” she told the alumni magazine. “I never thought I’d say those words. But I have to say, compared to the other Ivy League schools that I’m dealing with on a daily basis, Dartmouth is really one of the good guys.”
Dhillon was a classic Trump appointee: highly visible on the right, poorly suited to the position, and trailed by a disturbing past. A former Trump campaign lawyer and election denier with no prior government experience, she was also a Fox News regular—and a past editor-in-chief of The Dartmouth Review. Founded in 1980 by a group of conservative students, the Review was an early vehicle for the aggrieved style that would eventually fuel Fox and the MAGA movement. Its editors specialized in racist provocations. They mocked Black English in a 1982 column titled “Dis Sho’ Ain’t No Jive, Bro,” and in 1986 they wielded literal sledgehammers to smash anti-apartheid shanties on the Green—the Gaza tents of their day.
There was considerable irony in Dhillon serving as the face of the administration’s complaints about antisemitism. In 1988, under her editorship, the Review published a column likening Dartmouth president James O. Freedman, who was Jewish, to Adolf Hitler. The piece was so wildly offensive that it drew national coverage: it referred to Freedman as “Der Freedmann,” accused him of pursuing a “‘Final Solution’ to the Conservative Problem,” and compared his supposed right-wing victims to survivors of the Holocaust. The following issue included a cartoon of Freedman with a Hitler mustache in full Nazi regalia. Under Dhillon’s successor the paper published excerpts from Mein Kampf. Dhillon defended the column against the subsequent backlash. “This episode of public breast-beating is yet another example of the liberal hypocrisy that has been practiced and institutionalized at Dartmouth over the past generation,” she wrote. Thirty-eight years later Dhillon has yet to apologize or distance herself from an outburst of antisemitism far worse than anything that occurred at Dartmouth in the aftermath of October 7. The only change was that Jews, once her target, had become her instrument.
Dhillon’s hypocrisy put Beilock in a truly absurd position. A Jewish college president was now being hailed for standing up to antisemitism by the person responsible for the most notorious antisemitic incident in Dartmouth’s modern history. And because of her own biggest mistake on the job, which she seemed genuinely to regret, her school was enjoying an official exemption from the hell descending on its peers. Whatever her personal feelings, Beilock took the win. A few days after declining to stand with Harvard, she traveled to Washington to meet with Dhillon, after which Dhillon praised her on X: “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!”
Beilock worked other Washington connections as well, making at least eight trips there in 2025. To ensure that Dartmouth stayed in the Trump administration’s good graces, in March of that year she hired Matthew Raymer, an alum and the former chief counsel for the Republican National Committee, as the college’s general counsel and a member of her senior leadership team. Raymer had defended Trump’s proposal to end birthright citizenship. Now he was overseeing Dartmouth’s Office of Visa and Immigration Services. It was a strategic appointment for an institution that hoped to secure quiet exceptions to the Trump administration’s tightening anti-immigration policies.
Beilock didn’t openly take the administration’s side at any point. She subsequently signed on to an amicus brief in the Harvard suit. But that brief did not criticize the Trump administration. It made a straightforward argument that federal funding for academic research had a long history, had yielded many scientific breakthroughs, and generally benefited American society. She was, it could be argued, simply keeping her school out of trouble. As the saying goes: You don’t have to outrun the bear. You just have to outrun the other small liberal arts colleges.
Beilock is a cognitive psychologist who wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on underperformance in the face of pressure. Her argument was that performance is as much about the environment as it is about individual talent. As a junior faculty member and a vice-provost at the University of Chicago, she encouraged students to relieve stress by spending ten minutes writing about their feelings of anxiety before taking a test.
Her ideas soon found traction beyond the academy. Beilock became a sought-after speaker for businesses and sports organizations. In her first book, Choke (2010), she argued that people falter under pressure because they overmonitor routines (like making a golf putt) that should be automatic, a kind of “paralysis by analysis.” Her research made a case for DEI, examining the way that stereotyping—particularly of women and Black students—can weaken performance in math and science by diverting mental bandwidth. Her second book, How the Body Knows Its Mind (2015), extended her exploration of embodied cognition, arguing that the brain doesn’t think in isolation.
At Barnard Beilock had the chance to apply her theory that campuses are performance environments and that fostering “belonging” improves outcomes. She became fluent in the era’s social justice language. In 2020 she announced a sweeping antiracism initiative, promising
broad changes to our curriculum and academic support; new measures to recruit diverse faculty, students, and staff; re-examination of campus climate and public safety practices; and monetary and human investments.
Faculty participated in a six-week antiracism “mini-institute.” She promoted departmental antiracism statements and exempted Black, Latinx (her term), and Indigenous faculty from a hiring freeze. She created a “DEI Cabinet.” The college created a new fund for courses on race, including one Beilock championed on “chemistry and racism.”
Beilock began singing a different tune when she arrived at Dartmouth, an institution where legacy admissions outnumber African American students. Out went “underrepresented minorities,” “structural and social differences,” “antiracism,” and “privilege”; in came “civil discourse,” “institutional restraint,” and “diverse viewpoints.” When her counterparts at Harvard and Penn, Claudine Gay and Liz Magill, resigned after congressional testimony in which they sounded weak on antisemitism, Beilock took a different approach. She didn’t just change her tone. At the first sign of Gaza, she called the cops.
Her reorientation in a new political moment reflects what peers at other institutions describe as her intense ambition. It also drew on her experience at the University of Chicago, with its historic commitment to free expression and administrative neutrality. In 1967, amid the upheavals of the civil rights and Vietnam era, Chicago convened a committee chaired by the law professor Harry Kalven Jr. to articulate a position on political engagement. The Kalven Report, a two-page marvel of clarity and concision, concluded that institutional neutrality was essential to preserving free inquiry and viewpoint diversity.
After the Gaza protests and rising accusations of antisemitism on campuses nationwide, several institutions—including Princeton, Harvard, and Vanderbilt—adopted versions of the Kalven document. Daniel Diermeier, Vanderbilt’s chancellor, had appointed Beilock as Chicago’s executive vice-provost back in 2016 when he himself was provost. At Dartmouth she followed the Chicago model, pledging to refrain from official commentary on political issues. “To provide space for diverse viewpoints to be raised and fully considered, Dartmouth should exercise general restraint in issuing institutional statements,” the college’s declaration read. It was a striking evolution for a leader who, a couple of years earlier, had championed antiracism initiatives as a matter of academic responsibility.
The doctrine of institutional neutrality or “restraint” is grounded in the idea that universities best protect academic freedom by not taking sides in political debates. But in applying that doctrine at Dartmouth, Beilock appeared to miss its deeper purpose. The Kalven Report argued that neutrality exists to safeguard free inquiry, not to evade conflict. It also made clear that when a university’s central functions of teaching and research are under threat, silence is not an option. “From time to time,” the report warned,
instances will arise in which the society, or segments of it, threaten the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry. In such a crisis, it becomes the obligation of the university as an institution to oppose such measures and actively to defend its interests and its values.
That line was written with the memory of McCarthyism still fresh. Kalven’s goal was for the university to protect free speech, not to provide an excuse to keep silent about the freedom of its faculty and students. Dartmouth’s statement on institutional restraint does contain a version of the Kalven exception but renders it in lifeless legalese: “When confronted with issues directly relating to Dartmouth’s mission, senior leaders will reaffirm Dartmouth’s core values and commit to taking actions in support thereof.”
The challenge for Dartmouth was that its values were under threat, but indirectly. The Trump administration’s 2025 actions struck at the foundations of higher education as a whole: who gets admitted, what gets taught, which ideas can be researched, who can speak. It was a campaign of coercion far more menacing than what happened during the McCarthy era because of the way the expansion of federal funding had increased the government’s leverage in the intervening seventy-five years. But the government wasn’t threatening to put Dartmouth itself out of business. Because of a confluence of circumstances—Beilock’s misjudged crackdown and Harmeet Dhillon’s favoritism—Dartmouth got a hall pass and was taking full advantage of it. By staying quiet, Dartmouth sent a powerful signal throughout a wider academic community that was struggling to form a unified front. The message was that individual self-preservation mattered more than solidarity or fundamental beliefs.
In September 2025 US District Court Judge Allison D. Burroughs handed a victory to Harvard, ruling that the Trump administration’s actions amounted to “retaliation, unconstitutional conditions, and unconstitutional coercion.” But the victory did little to solve Harvard’s problems. Instead it underscored just how much power a hostile federal government could wield to punish disobedience. The administration said it would appeal, and there was no assurance that a sympathetic Supreme Court wouldn’t ultimately endorse the government’s view that it could simply declare Harvard noncompliant and cut off all its funding. Meanwhile Trump’s team held plenty of other cards. It could delay or deny grants, or initiate audits and investigations. In the middle of the lawsuit Kristi Noem, then secretary of homeland security, revoked Harvard’s authorization to enroll international students, a devastating blow for a research university.
Harvard managed to secure a temporary restraining order but still faced a protracted court battle, as well as the very real possibility that DHS would simply sidestep the ruling by delaying visa approvals. If Harvard kept fighting, it risked legal costs in the hundreds of millions, endless compliance demands from federal agencies, reputational damage, and significant disruption to international recruitment. It was a bleak prospect. In February 2026, after The New York Times reported that Trump was offering to drop his demand that Harvard pay a $200 million fine, he became enraged and raised his settlement price to $1 billion.
As the most prominent institution in American higher education, Harvard’s response would set the pattern for all the other holdouts. When Harvard had a good day in court, other universities were emboldened to hold the line. But when word spread that it was close to striking a deal, the mood shifted. If Harvard, backed by a $57 billion endowment, couldn’t resist the administration, how could anyone else? Trump understood this. He wanted a settlement that would send a clear message to the rest of the academy: Harvard had to give in, so you do too.
No college can withstand a systemic political assault alone, especially one backed by control over funding, visas, and regulatory oversight. The strength of academic freedom has always depended on unity and collective resolve. Every separate peace with Trump weakened the positions of those standing firm. Each capitulation—first Columbia, then Brown, then several others including Penn, Cornell, and Northwestern—allowed the administration to portray the remaining opposition as marginal and weak rather than united by principle.
Dartmouth’s Dhillon exemption put it in the strongest position to stand up for its peer institutions. Dartmouth has around seven thousand students, two thirds of them undergraduates, and no sprawling assortment of graduate schools. Instead it has three second-tier professional schools: engineering, medicine, and business. As a result, it doesn’t receive much federal research funding, and its finances are otherwise impregnable. Its $9 billion endowment works out to about $1.3 million per student. In practice, endowment funds are largely restricted and don’t support general operations or academic freedom emergencies. But differences in institutional structure and wealth still matter. Research-focused institutions like Harvard (with around 17,000 graduate students out of 24,000 in total) depend much more heavily on federal dollars. In 2024 Dartmouth took in $160 million in government contracts and research funding, which was less than 10 percent of its operating budget. Financial dependence gives Washington enormous leverage over large research universities—and far less over undergraduate-centered colleges like Dartmouth.
The same holds for visas. Twenty-one percent of Dartmouth’s student body is international, compared with 28 percent at Harvard. Because international students typically pay full tuition, having fewer of them means less financial risk from government meddling with visas. So while Dartmouth lacks Harvard’s size or global stature, it was in a much better position to resist government pressure. That made its silence all the more disappointing. Dartmouth had the leeway to be brave, yet it chose not to be.
Rejecting Trump’s malicious intervention doesn’t mean pretending that American higher education is perfect. The administration’s attacks contained many valid points of criticism—about Gaza protests that crossed the line into antisemitic harassment, the inconsistent application of free speech principles, excesses of identity politics, and ballooning student debt. But the answer to higher education’s shortcomings isn’t authoritarian coercion.
In October 2025, as legal and political pressure escalated, the Department of Education unveiled what came to be known as the Offer. Trump’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” presented itself as a sweeping blueprint for restoring meritocratic and apolitical values to American universities. In return for privileged access to federal funding, universities would be required to adopt a set of policies aligned with the administration’s agenda. Among other requirements, the compact demanded that universities cap international undergraduate enrollment at 15 percent; eliminate race and gender identity as factors in admissions, financial aid, and hiring; and submit to ideological audits, donor disclosure, and requirements to report protesters to the government.
Another clause required that signatories remake or abolish “institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas,” which sounded like it could turn mockery of Republicans into a punishable offense. Violations could trigger retroactive clawbacks, including the loss of all federal funds received during the year of the breach, plus private gifts secured in the same period. The carrot for agreeing to all of that was priority approval for research funding and continued authorization to enroll international students.
By then the familiar Trump-supporting billionaires were all popping out of the woodwork. Stephen Schwarzman was serving as a back-channel negotiator between Trump and Harvard. Marc Rowan, the private equity billionaire who had pressured Penn’s board to fire Liz Magill, had worked with the White House Domestic Policy Council to draft the compact. What the nine schools that received the Offer had in common was that the Trump administration thought they were pliable. Brown, Penn, and the University of Virginia had already cut deals with the government; Dartmouth and Vanderbilt had declared policies of institutional neutrality (or “restraint,” in Dartmouth’s case) and were seen as Trump-friendly; the University of Arizona and the University of Texas at Austin faced pressure from Republican state legislatures; and MIT and USC were both deeply dependent on federal contracts and research funding.
Most of the responses were immediate and unequivocal. MIT president Sally Kornbluth—the only survivor of Elise Stefanik’s 2023 congressional inquisition—was the first to say no. Her letter to Linda McMahon rejected the offer as incompatible with academic freedom and scientific integrity. She said that MIT didn’t want preferential treatment. “Scientific funding,” she wrote, “should be based on scientific merit alone.” Brown, Penn, USC, and UVA quickly followed with similar rejections.
Dartmouth moved more slowly. According to someone familiar with the internal deliberations, Beilock and the Dartmouth board found some of the content of the compact unacceptable. But her rejection of it, which finally came on October 18, 2025, wasn’t resounding, it was a simpering word salad:
I welcome further engagement around how we can (a) enhance the long-standing partnership between the federal government and this country’s leading research universities and (b) ensure that higher education stays focused on academic excellence….
We remain open to other ways to work with the federal government to enhance higher education.
Welcoming further engagement and finding other ways to work with the Trump administration? For an academic institution, it was like welcoming the ten plagues and asking for a few more. In the face of authoritarian bullying, fawning doesn’t protect you. It simply invites more coercion.