Freakonomics Radio - 680. Can Universities Win Back Our Trust_

0:07Last week on the show, we heard from the Chancellor of Vanderbilt University, Daniel Dearmeyer, who operates under a framework that originated at the University of Chicago. It's known as institutional neutrality. Which means that universities, university leaders, will not take positions on policy issues or political issues unless they directly affect the core function of the university. This week, we will hear from Sian Bylock, the president of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.

0:36Bylock runs Dartmouth using a similar framework. Yeah. I mean, I knew it as the Calvin report. I didn't know it as institutional neutrality, but I was faculty and then in an administration at Chicago for 12 years. So Bylock and Deer Meyer have that in common, a belief in institutional neutrality and time served at the University of Chicago. There's one big difference. Deer Meyer trained as a political scientist with a focus on institutions. You can hear this when he talks.

1:06And what you learn there is that the details really matter. Setting things up the right way can make a big difference, and you have to be very, very conscious on that. Bilock, meanwhile, trained as a psychologist with a focus on why people choke under pressure. And you can hear that when she talks. From my research, we know that you worry a lot, not necessarily when you're doing the scary thing, but when that scary thing is out there, the what-ifs.

1:31Bylock and Dartmouth, like just about every university today, are dealing with a lot of scary things. For instance, a steep drop in public trust. I look at the data and what we're seeing is that counter to previous decades right now, seven out of 10 Americans, for example, think higher education is going the wrong direction. And she has no trouble believing those numbers because she thinks universities have earned that distrust. We talk about the high cost and the debt of student loans. But one thing that's often not talked about is among four-year institutions, a little under 60% of students graduate. I don't know if you'd hear lots of university presidents talk about this, but I think the universities have some of the responsibility there. But what other responsibilities does a university have? We're not a political organization. We're not a social advocacy organization. We have a very clear mission. And when people trust in that mission, they trust you.

2:29Today on Freakonomics Radio, Sian Bilak tries to go from choke to clutch. Our full conversation starts now. This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner. All right, please just start with your name and what you do. My name is Sian Bilak. I am the president of Dartmouth and a cognitive scientist. And do you want to just explain why your name is Sian and not Sean or?

3:17Something, it's spelled S-I-A-N. Can you just explain the story behind that? It actually is supposed to be Sean, but my parents named me Sian. They were watching a PBS documentary with an actress, Sean Phillips, and they thought it was Sian. So here I am. Because she spelled it like that? Yes, but she was Sean, but they didn't know that. You were a college athlete, correct, soccer?

3:40I played soccer in the Olympic development growing up, and then I played lacrosse at UCSD. Let's talk about your research on choking, which is how I came to know you initially. Why did that topic interest you first of all? Was it a first-hand interest? Yes, I did. I was doing research. I was interested in why I sometimes didn't play as well under pressure or didn't test as well in the pressure-filled situation as when I was not in that stressful environment. And what did you learn? A lot of what we found is that Counter-intuitively, we perform poorly under pressure or choke when we start trying to control too much of what we're doing instead of letting it go on autopilot. Oftentimes when we're worried about a situation or its consequences, we think that controlling every step of what we're doing is going to lead to a better outcome, but it actually disrupts more automatic processes that would run off better without conscious attention. Do you think that trying to control too much generally, not just in the athletic realm, is a big problem?

4:38Certainly. As a leader, I mean, you often hear about leaders failing by micromanaging or trying to be deep on everything. If I tried to control everything my head of operations was doing or my head of public safety, I don't think we'd be getting a lot done. You know, I noticed something in our icebreaker conversation the other week, which is that you have mostly a serious look. Like you don't smile a lot in the course of talking, but then once in a while you break into this very big full tooth smile.

5:08And I wondered what Sian Bilak, the psychologist, would say about that. Is it a signal? Is it strategic? I'm probably concentrating when I'm talking. And then when you're smiling, you're not, you're saying? Yeah, I don't know. I don't think about it. But now I'm going to be focused on it, which my research shows is a bad idea. So thank you for that. It's a bad idea because it'll mean you're too self-conscious and you'll choke. Yes, exactly.

5:35Bylock had her own lab at the University of Chicago, the Human Performance Lab, where she studied decision-making under pressure. After serving as executive vice provost at Chicago, she was recruited for the president's job at Barnard, the women's undergraduate college that is affiliated with Columbia University in New York. After institutional neutrality in Chicago, Bylock had a bit of culture shock at Barnard. There was lots of people who thought about the purpose of the institution in the same way, but...

6:04Certainly there was less of an appetite for different views. So Columbia was really enmeshed in the Gaza protests. It got very messy and violent, and it's still very difficult there. Manusia Fik, who was the president then, got gone, as did Liz McGill from Penn, got gone, Claudine Gay from Harvard got gone. That was my class. That was my class of presidents. What was it like to watch all of that defenestration happening? I mean...

6:33It wasn't fun, I'll say that, and I certainly was taking a different tack and I'm proud of where we went, but... Did you feel you were spared because you had that different tack? I think that following a set of principles allowed folks both who agreed and didn't agree to see where I was going. Did you ever think what would have happened to you had you stayed at Barnard? When I was at Barnard, my plan had been to wait and...

6:59I knew I would be a top candidate in the Columbia presidency, but Dartmouth came quick. I had an offer and I couldn't turn it down. So it was kind of an interesting, like I could have been at Columbia at that point. Okay. So you've been at Dartmouth for about three years now. What are your top priorities? I am very interested in bringing back trust in higher education and making sure the American people trust in what we do. And I see Dartmouth.

7:28potentially as a model for how to do that. I think if we can do really important work on Dartmouth's campus, it can have an impact on other institutions. You can be a model by how? Because even if you do everything right to become a model means that other people need to buy into it. So what's your plan for that? I think we've seen it in action in several cases. Dartmouth was the first IV to bring back the SAT and ACT as part of admissions after COVID. We modeled the data.

7:58and showed that it was an important predictor of performance counter to many people's assumptions. It actually was a really important way to find students who were less prepared or supported financially, who were excelling in their environment. And it actually turns out it's a better indicator of success than things like letters of rack or grades. One story that we've heard for a long time is that kids that do well on SAT are doing well in part because they come from middle or upper middle-income families and they can afford coaching and taking the test multiple times. But you're saying the data actually show that whether that's part of the equation or not, that it's a better predictor of ability, yes? There's no doubt that practicing and having financial support to practice those tests helps make you better. But even taking that into account, what we're able to show is that students who are excelling on those tests relative

8:55to say the mean of their high school was actually a really good predictor of success at Dartmouth. And what we found in a test optional environment is that students coming from less resource backgrounds were actually less likely to report their scores. And if we had had them, it would have been a really important indicator of success. And this supports data by others, Rush Chetty at Harvard, who's shown that actually socioeconomic status or resources in a family helps students with all of the non-quantitative things that folks look at like your summer job. You can go to the Galapagos instead of work at McDonald's or who's helping you write your letters of rec. So we showed the data that it was important and just now Columbia was the last Ivy to bring it back. Most of our Ivy Plus peers followed closely after and that's one example of where we've been able to lead. What is Dartmouth looking for in an either typical median or maybe optimal student?

9:53We're really looking for students who want to be uncomfortable, to engage in difficult conversations, to challenge themselves, learning how to think, not being told what to think. And that comes to a second place where Dartmouth has really led, is around cultivating free expression and civil dialogue. We launched Dartmouth Dialogues my first year, soon after October 7th.

10:18several different institutions have followed in our footsteps. And that was modeled by our faculty actually in Jewish and Middle Eastern studies who on October 9th and October 11th, where on most campuses people were just screaming at each other, came together and had open dialogue where anyone could come and talk about the complexities of the Middle East. So I've read a lot about those discussions and it does sound like they produced a lot of really good thinking and talking and trust building and so on.

10:47On the other hand, Dartmouth, like many, many other campuses, especially the Ivy campuses, had a lot of protests from the pro-Palestinian side, especially after the war began, and you were censured by the faculty, and there was no confidence vote by students. What was that like from your side? I mean, you survived, so plainly you can smile about it now, but what was that like from your side in the moment? The only way I know how to lead is by making principled decisions.

11:15Free expression and the ability to hear different points of view and everyone to share in campus is at the heart of what we do in trying to discover truth. And I was willing to call balls and strikes. You can protest, but you can't shout down a speaker. You can protest, but you cannot take over campus, build an encampment and declare shared space for one ideology. Students knew the consequences. They knew what the ground rules were.

11:42and we were willing to enforce the rules unlike many of our peers. So you kept your job after that chaos. Did you think for a while that you might lose it? Was there anyone on your board that was agitating for your departure? No, my board was very supportive. I think, again, we were leading by principle. And as a leader, sometimes you have to make decisions that are based on those principles that are not going to be the most popular decisions. I think the decision is aged pretty well, but it's also been born out in the work we're doing around dialogue. And I'm proud of where Dartmouth has gone, for example, in the free expression rankings from the foundation of individual rights and expression. When I got to Dartmouth, we were in the bottom 200 in something, and I think last year we were ranked 35th. You know, you can debate rankings, but one of the places I was really proud is that our students were, I think, two standard deviations above the mean and being tolerant of speakers on the right and the left. I believe that

12:40one of the goals of a liberal arts institution and elite university is to develop the next generation of leaders for our democracy and being able to lead people who think differently than you and cut across our very polarized environment is one of the most important things that a university can do. I can't disagree with that. I don't know if anybody would disagree with that. On the other hand, you said something earlier about how you want to create an environment where you can arrive at the truth. When I read an academic paper by someone like you, I look for the conclusion. I look for someone really smart who has had an idea, gathered a lot of data to measure that theory or thesis, and then comes to a conclusion about what's true about it and what's not. So plainly, we do value truth, but there's also this notion that I have my truth and you have your truth, which in some realms is possible. Like, what's the best ice cream? I don't know if that can be empirically proven.

13:37I mean, obviously, it's mint chip. God, it's so not. Can I tell you what my favorite is? But everyone ridicules me for that. If you say rum raisin, I think we're just done. I'm not kidding you. It's rum raisin. I'm not kidding you. That's my favorite ice cream. Why are there so many rum raisin haters in the world? I think it's disgusting. I don't know.

13:56This is my truth. Well, I think mintship is discussing. See, this is how it all starts. But I still like you as a person. I haven't let your one view change my feeling of you as a person, and that's really important, because I think we might agree on some other things. When I think about truth in a process of getting to truth, I think about converging evidence. You want lots of ways to look at something, and you want people being able to voice a heterodox opinion.

14:24And my worry with campuses that are not as open to those heterogeneous views is that you don't get the benefit of other people's good thinking. They self-censor. They're not allowed to be at the table. That iteration of getting that converging evidence and always pushing and questioning falls off. And that's where I think we fall away from getting to what is true. And that's always the aspiration.

14:52In 2025, the Trump administration sent nine prominent universities a compact for academic excellence in higher education. It offered preferential access to federal funding in exchange for adopting a variety of policies, which included a cap on the number of foreign students, ending the use of race and sex in admissions and hiring, promoting a broader spectrum of political viewpoints on campus and limiting disruptive protests. Neither bylock nor any of the other university leaders signed the compact. I don't think universities should be political footballs. We often forget that we often got pushed to the left under democratic administrations and we're getting pushed in different directions under the current administration. The best way to make sure that our government knows that we're going to be responsible for what we do and held accountable for our actions.

15:49is to talk about the value of what we do and have conversation instead of picking aside and screaming. We will push back when we need to. We've joined many amicus briefs related to laws or actions that we believed were unlawful around indirect cost rates or immigration or others. But the best way to get to a shared understanding is actually to have conversation.

16:16While many of my peers were not spending time in DC doing this, I was more than happy to have conversations with the Secretary of Education, folks, our representatives in Congress on the right and the left. It is so important because I do believe in the relationship between universities and the government. And at the end of the day, I believe that we're American universities with a global reach and our customers are the American people.

16:42As far as I know, Dartmouth is the only Ivy League school to avoid a federal civil rights investigation, and you've avoided the funding freezes that have hit Harvard and elsewhere. I've also seen that you've hired as your House Counsel Matt Raymer, a Dartmouth alum who's a former top lawyer at the RNC, the Republican National Committee. My brain wants to make a connection between those two facts. I don't know if there is a connection, but tell me what value aid that a House Counsel has got experience at the RNC.

17:11has been for you and also why Dartmouth has not been subject to that investigation? Well, I think a lot of people forget that a lot of those federal investigations started under the Biden administration for many of those schools. And Matt, a lot of general counsels at universities come out of government, so that's not unusual. And Matt, of course, is that because the role of general counsel is often lobbying is a major role?

17:37No, I mean not lobbying, but I'd say strategy and dealing with complex organizations. And so Matt certainly brought that and as a Dartmouth alum. And look, I practice what I preach. The best way to get to the best outcome is to have lots of folks with different ideas and perspectives at my senior table. What's it for instance? It could be anything about the policies we put in place around free expression. I mean, our policies have very wide, wide latitude. Like as a juxtaposition to Harvard, you can chalk.

18:06Anything mean about me you want outside my building? And I think there's no talking policies at a lot of other places. Have you been chalked quite a bit then? Not lately actually. Hopefully this won't invite it. Maybe someone will just chalk, we love President Bylock. Yeah, I would like that. My 15 year old who walks by my building every morning when she goes to Hanover High loves to see all the mean things written about me. Oh, serious? Like one of her highlights. So we make everyone happy.

18:34That's funny. I don't know if I could pull up one specific example. The free expression would be one, but it's just great to have different people with different opinions and backgrounds. And Matt has been such a great general counsel on everything we deal with. Certainly the federal government is one part of it, but he oversees immigration and our office is there. And we've really been able to support our faculty, students and staff. We have a lot of real estate. We have all sorts of things we're dealing with at a university. And so I just like having smart, strategic people who bring different perspectives to the table. And I don't think anyone would have made a peep if I had hired the general counsel from the DNC, which I think underscores the fact that we need people with different perspectives on our campus. And Matt wears a jersey that is green now. He represents Dartmouth. You said before the Trump administration that the universities have been pushed to the left from outside. Can you just describe that?

19:32process and where was that coming from? Was it coming from government? Was it coming from student and or faculty components? Was it coming from outside actors? Because I sense that a lot of people who were in universities or around them a lot, as I was certainly for the past bunch of years, everybody felt it and everybody knew it but somehow no one wanted to address it and it felt to me as if there was a sort of agreement that most colleges and universities, not all, but most, especially prominent ones, like this is the way it's going to be and we're okay with that. And it always surprised me. I'm curious how you felt about that, especially coming from University of Chicago. The example I was giving was about federal regulations, whether it was some of the regulations around Title IX or pushes around diversity statements and grants. And when I said I didn't want to

20:23sign the compact. I don't want to sign a compact with Trump. I also don't want to sign a compact with AOC as president. I want to be responsible. Oh, is she the next president? I didn't even get that memo. I've heard she likes rum raisin. Oh, come on. I'm Stephen Dubner speaking with Dartmouth President Seon Bilock. We will be right back. Can you give me just a quick day in the life of you, the Dartmouth president? I don't need every 15 minute increment, but how is the pie generally divided?

21:08Do you want from the very early morning? Absolutely. Okay. At 4.45 I wake up and make my 15 year old breakfast before she goes to play tennis. Oh my goodness. Then I go back to bed. She plays tennis at five. Why can't she make her own breakfast? You know, a lot of people ask me that. I feel like she's so committed and it's nice to sort of be on the team with her. And I only have her for a few more years and I miss her so many nights when I'm at events or traveling, and so it makes me feel good to do it, but I still complain about it. Do you have a spouse or partner or something, too? No, it's just us home together, so I make the breakfast. Got it. Okay. And she's a very serious, committed, competitive tennis player, plainly. I mean, she has aspirations to play tennis at university, so. How's Dartmouth's tennis team? It's pretty good, but she says she wants to go anywhere but Dartmouth.

22:04She's 15 and is growing up on campus, so totally understandable. I think we're in agreement about that. You wake up, make breakfast, go back to sleep. Yeah, I get up around 6.30. I have a trainer or I go on a run. And then I usually work at home for about an hour and then I'm in the office. It can be anything from...

22:24meeting with my senior team to every week I hold office hours for students at our dining hall where they just can come up and talk to me. I sometimes meet with faculty. I often meet with donors. It's a big part of what I do is raise the philanthropy to do what we do. Are you pretty good at that? I love it. You do? Tell me why. To get to tell the story of the amazing folks on our campus and what they do, I get such a thrill out of that.

22:53We just announced a $25 million gift for Dartmouth dialogues. And one of the things I've gotten to do is tell the story of our faculty coming together to model how to have dialogue about Israel and Gaza or for Dartmouth actually has the largest rural medical system in the country. I've read that and it shocked me. I know that New Hampshire is mostly rural and Dartmouth is a big deal with a really good medical school and hospital, correct? Yes.

23:21But does that mean you have many outposts of the Dartmouth medical system, essentially? Yeah. And the most rural VA is down the road from us in White River Junction, Vermont. Our doctors and our clinicians and our researchers are really focused on building an economic model of aging at home. We have some of the best hospitals and technology in the world and some not as good health outcomes. What we know in rural areas is there's often a mismatch between access to care when people come into the hospital and when they can be at home, how they're supported. And we know that a lot of folks who are aging want to age in place but don't have the structure around it. We also know that home health care workers are very much in need and they don't have a very good career path or workforce training system. And with a lot of the advances in AI and the ability to do

24:16technological healthcare over the phone, we think we can really build a model system for how to help folks age in place and come into the hospital when they need to, not take beds when they don't, which saves the hospital, saves insurance companies and leads to a better quality of life. Have you been surprised by the anti-AI sentiment on campuses at graduation ceremonies? Because I have, honestly, anyone that brought up AI seemed to get either heckled or booed off the stage.

24:44To me, AI is a technology and a topic that I would think most college students would think about really hard and would see potential downsides and a lot of potential upsides and would maybe have that conversation. But it feels very much like the Luddite response from centuries ago. What about you? Yeah, I don't know if I agree with that. And I haven't been surprised because we've seen this on our campus. So Dartmouth actually was In 1956, we had a summer conference where the term and the field artificial intelligence were born. And so we talk about Dartmouth as the birthplace of AI. And now 70 years later, I believe we have a responsibility to talk about what it means to educate humans in the age of AI. And so we, at the beginning of the year, announced a partnership with Anthropic and AWS, one of the first institutions to do that. And I got a lot of pushback then.

25:35from folks, so I knew that it was there. I think for young people, from my research, we know that you worry a lot not necessarily when you're doing the scary thing, but when that scary thing is out there, the what ifs. And so I think it's okay to be worried and concerned about what's happening, but at the same time push forward and use it to extend your thinking rather than replace it. But I understand why young people are nervous about AI and where it's going.

26:07Dartmouth is currently piloting a chatbot of its own called Evergreen, which students will be able to use to address their mental health. Evergreen grew out of another project called TheraBot, whose lead researcher is a Dartmouth scientist named Nicholas Jacobson. You'll hear a lot more about this in an episode we are producing now about psychotherapy and technology. So the idea is that using Hundreds of thousands of hours of clinical data. Therabot was the first clinical trial to show benefits for an AI-powered therapist in terms of really helping rural folks connect with humans when they needed it. And we're adapting that technology on campus, and it's not to replace the humans. We have lots of humans who support students, but we know that, for example, during midterms or finals,

27:00one of the biggest indicators of anxiety or depressive episodes is sleeping during the day and being up all night or stopping exercise or not talking to your friends and having technology that can both sense that and help people get to the places they need. We believe can be really helpful to student success. I've read some pushback from students, one person writing in the student newspaper.

27:25wondered why you need to build your own model when LLM's already exist. Although I'm guessing if you use an existing LLM they would complain that it wasn't customized to students or to Dartmouth students and someone else subjected to the potential big energy consumption costs of running yet another LLM and you know these are kind of the anti-AI arguments you see it in a number of places but it seems like a pretty robust program you've built and I want to know what effects you've seen it having so far on student mental health especially.

27:53We're still testing it right now. We have hundreds of students working on it, actually helping to build the chats and dialogues that the LLMs will use to develop new responses. I think it's healthy that some people are skeptical of this technology. I think there's also this concern at first that it was going to replace humans, but it is not. I just watched a student demo of it at a presentation a few weeks ago and the students were so excited about what it could do They were showing me technology where it was helping a student pick the right classes during the winter term because they liked to be out in the sun during the day and wanted to be able to get to the ski way certain days for their mental health, but also wanted to take an advanced biology class. It's helping augment people's ability to deal with complex problems. So you're a psychologist by training and wrote a lot of really good and interesting research of which I'm a fan. I am curious if you take off the

28:53university president hat for a minute, and look at the data that I know has been examined by, among others, Danny Blanchflower, who's a professor at Dartmouth, an economist who's looked at happiness and satisfaction across many populations across many years. And the consensus seems to be that there is a significant rise in mental illness over the past few decades.

29:14It's natural, I think, to wonder maybe whether the measurement is just different or better, or if these are really secular spikes. So tell me what you know and think about that, especially from the perspective of young people. I think what's been so striking about the work Dr. Blanchfire has done is that it really changes in young people's anxiety, depression, and happiness. And we're in the business of helping young people reach their potential. So it's something I pay a lot of attention to. I also believe that health and wellness and mental health in particular doesn't sit alongside academic excellence. It is a precursor to it. And it goes back to my push for knowledge and truth and the ability to bring up a heterodox opinion or have a conversation with someone that makes you uncomfortable. From my research, I know that you're less likely to approach those situations if you don't feel okay, if you're anxious.

30:09And so I want students to have the tools so that they can take risks. They can fail. They can enter into a conversation with someone they know thinks very differently than them. They can have those debates in class. And so what I think about on our campus a lot and what our students and staff and faculty have been focused on is setting up the kinds of conditions that allow our students to feel okay about themselves and then thrive everywhere else.

30:34I'm about to ask a question that is a terrible question to ask, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Do you think that the current generation of college students is just spoiled to some degree? I think every older person always says this about the younger folks around them. What I see on campus are students who are pushing themselves really hard and have often been rewarded for getting the next medal or success and sometimes don't step back and think about their potential or what will make them happy or how they live the fullest lives and I want to help them do that. A lot of those abilities to overcome failure to be resilient, to sleep and eat well and so on, those feel like things that one should learn by the time one goes to college. Plainly I'm wrong. So tell me, do you feel that the university is taking on a different societal role than it was meant to?

31:31in the development of young people because we used to talk about, you know, you want to produce leaders. And that connotes to me at least that someone has showed up ready to go. It sounds to me from what you're saying that you're needing to do a lot of foundational work. And I applaud that. I don't think anyone would decry that, but I just wonder it's a lot of time and resources that goes into something that's not what I thought was the primary purpose of the university.

31:58I may be different than some other leaders, but I think it's also my background as a psychologist. I don't think you can separate the health and wellness from the academic focus. And if you want students to push hard in the classroom, which they do, you have to equip them with the tools. And I also believe that developing great leaders is also about developing whole people who can be inside and outside the classroom. It's something that Dartmouth is known for. These skills are part of what it means to lead, especially in a future where knowledge is ubiquitous in many ways and it is the ability to bring people together, ask questions in different ways. That's going to be the hallmark of what a true leader is. Bilock's views on leadership are plainly rooted in her time at the University of Chicago. Her move there from professor to administrator was a bit of an accident. I came out of faculty governance. I was on the faculty senate and then something called the committee of the council, which is a small group that

33:02advises the president and provost and I spent the whole year as a faculty member arguing with Bob Zimmer. Bob Zimmer, a mathematician by training, was UChicago's president from 2006 to 2021. And at the end of the year, he said, come work for me. And I thought, wow, like that's so interesting. What were you arguing about? Everything. I thought he had so many things wrong in terms of the perspective of the faculty. Well, just to step back, the committee of the council, I think it was like 12 faculty, I was I believe the only woman on the committee and the youngest by probably 20 years, and I was really pregnant. I remember that there was never enough food at the lunch. I was always kind of hungry too. So I think I was just ordinary. But I thought they were maybe a little out of touch with the junior faculty and some of the perspectives of young folks on campus. So I push back a lot. Were there changes then because of your pushback? Yeah, I think there were some. I don't remember any specifics, but the idea that the institution should be

33:59the place that helps bring critics to the forefront rather than the critic itself was something that I really took to heart. And it was something that I put in practice when I was at Barnard, when we had a referendum around divesting from Israel. I talked about the fact that I did not believe the endowment was a political tool and that it wasn't the university's place to take a side in this sort of debate. And then at Dartmouth, it became very clear that having some sort of policy or idea around when the institution should make statements, when departments should make statements, what the purpose of the institution was, articulating that was important and we had a group of faculty and staff work on a policy and they did not use the term institutional neutrality but institutional restraint. The whole idea is to get individuals speaking and pushing it against each other and that we shouldn't be encouraging statements that

34:58could potentially suppress or quiet heterodox voices. I talked about creating brave spaces rather than safe spaces. Dartmouth has always been a place where there's different views on campus. We have a conservative student newspaper and a more liberal student newspaper. It's considered the most conservative, small sea conservative of the IVs, would you say? I mean, I've always heard it talked about like that.

35:22think people do talk about it that way, and we've certainly have had prominent conservative alums come out of Dartmouth. But one of the reasons I was actually interested in it is that I felt like there was the possibility of a more UChicago-like tolerance for different voices on campus. And I don't think I had really understand after being at UChicago that not all institutions were like UChicago. Can you talk for a bit about your route from academic researcher to an academic administrator. I know that in this industry, like in many industries, if you do really well at one level, then you get promoted into another level, but that other level is very, very different because the things that make a great academic researcher or professor are not necessarily the things that would make a university president.

36:12We're all familiar with the Peter principle. It talks about people getting promoted above their abilities. And I'm just really curious how it worked for you. Did you suspect from the outset that you'd be pretty good at being an administrator? Did you want to become an administrator? Yeah. And also, I think in addition to not always having a clear route, I think higher education does a really poor job of training. I didn't want to say it, but I so agree. It's like here now you're going to oversee first a department and then a whole school. I mean, many of these people are my friends and they have no idea what they're doing. Yes. Well, look, I mean, I think it's really important that we have a subset of higher education leaders that come through academia that are faculty. And if we're not training them to think about these next levels,

37:01I worry about the viability of those candidates. Did you get training? No, I mean, I apprenticed and a lot of it was trial by fire and I wish I had more training. Is anyone working on that? We are thinking about it at Dartmouth. One thing that my CFO does, which is fantastic, is he does a university budget course every year. We have deans, we have faculty, once in a while we have undergrads take it and he basically talks about the entire university budget, the history of it.

37:31what it means for different units. A P&L in my mind is an instantiation of your strategy. You have to understand that. If you were to eventually, let's say, start a leadership institute at Dartmouth to train university leaders, what would be your motto? That's good. I think it is something about your role as making other people's ideas better or putting them into effect. For me, going back to the route from being a researcher and leading a big lab of postdocs and graduate students and undergrads is that I actually think that was great training for leading an organization and you learn you have to manage people very differently. One graduate student you have to give a deadline and another if you give a deadline they will crumble. I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We will be right back to finish our conversation with Dartmouth President Sian Bilak.

38:40So what do you make of this period of history we're living through? By whatever means you want to measure, it's been an unusually chaotic period and a period of great uncertainty. Do you see it as the beginning of something worse and more chaotic, or do you see it as an interregnum between, you know, sanity and prosperity and all that? I am a glass half full kind of person. I do think we learn and get better at what we do. But we have some of our faculty or world experts on misinformation and the ideas that we're getting through social media and others are seeping in as fac sets and I think we have to get a handle on what that looks like. You have any ideas for how to do that? Education is one way. Teaching people to be discerning and how to think. Are you worried though that a college education in particular has come to be viewed by so many as essentially

39:30luxury good. I don't mean that in terms of just the cost, but it's a thing that only certain people want and that most people actually don't want or need. Does that concern you a lot? I am very worried. I think it builds into trust. And if the folks across the political spectrum in our country don't see college as a place for them, it means that we have Less diversity and thinking and ideas and again. I think that is the basis for getting to the best outcomes I'm guessing you know a lot more than I do about the literature on social trust which some people argue is key kind of hidden Ingredient to any well functioning society and social trust in the US is certainly fallen. They say that certain institutions are quite good at

40:11creating social trust, sports teams are one, the military and what these have in common is that people come together from very different backgrounds with a common goal. The university is also an institution that was held up as a place that could really build social trust for the same reason. People coming from different backgrounds working toward a common goal. Do you see the university serving that function anymore? Is it really failed?

40:35I think the university has stepped away from serving that function, and we have to get it back. And I know from that literature that one of the best ways to get it back is to be very clear about your mission. I talk about this a lot, that our mission is education and knowledge production, and that's it. So if you could create Dartmouth from scratch today, what would you do differently in order to fulfill that mission?

41:01Dartmouth's history, there were certain groups of people that were excluded from our campus. We didn't have women as a first graduating class till 1976. There were quotas for Jews. I think I would go back and think about how to bring the best and brightest coming from different backgrounds together from the beginning. The whole competition to get into schools like Dartmouth, though, we all know what that looks like. And most people think it's Somewhere between ridiculous and unfair that too many advantages go to the advantage and so on. Has Dartmouth done anything significant to change that? We really, first of all, focus on financial aid. So now for families making up to 175,000 a year, it's free to go to Dartmouth. We have continued and pushed to focus on first-generation and low-income students as well as rural students. And we're need-blind and meet full financial need for everyone.

41:54Here's a question that we solicited from one of your faculty members whose name I will withhold since I don't want to bias the answer. But this person wanted to know if you had an infinite budget, what would you do with it? It's a great question. One answer is that I would make Dartmouth somewhat bigger because I think what we do is so important. We have a responsibility to serve more students and that means more faculty.

42:21And would it be bigger in that spot in Hanover? Would you want to open other campuses elsewhere? We have such a sense of place. I would want to really make sure that areas where Dartmouth can have huge impact, whether it's rural health or we are a world leader in polar and ice sheets for obvious reasons. We have the Cold Weather Army Research Lab next to us that our faculty really had the resources to have the impact.

42:49That's the second one. And third, which hopefully we'll be able to do at some point, I would like to take everything we're doing around dialogues and give it to every high school student in the country so that when they get to Dartmouth, they're ready to have the kinds of conversations that are so important to reduce polarization. Let's talk about college sports for a minute. How is it different now than when you were in college? The power divisions in college sports has changed immensely. One thing I'm really proud of in the Ivy League is that we continue to live by the values that our athletes, our students first, that we don't give athletics scholarships, we only give need-based scholarships, and athletics enhances our academics rather than vice versa. What about the NIL revolution? Name, image likeness is a way for athletes to get actual cash for playing in college, but there are many other parts of that as well. How has that affected you?

43:43Our NIL in the Ivy League is pretty small. Certainly we're competing with teams who have bigger budgets. I think about our ice hockey team who went to the NCAA and played against Wisconsin. Their roster looked very different in terms of the support that their athletes were getting financially, but we held our own. And did any of those players then take an offer through the portal to get an NIL payday?

44:07It's really interesting. I just asked my athletic director not only the portal, but going pro. And our three top players are staying next year, which I think said something so important about the program we're running and our coaches.

44:21Interesting. I mean, it doesn't really matter whether Dartmouth wins something in the Ivy League, right? I mean, I know it's pride and all that. That matters to me. Okay. All right, I take it back. But I was told that college athletes are incredibly valuable for the institution as are fraternity and sorority students because those are the types of students who are most likely to become very loyal and generous donors. Can you talk about that for a second?

44:50Yeah, there's work in the Ivy League showing that Ivy League athletes go on to be very successful in terms of what they do. On the other hand, you could say anybody who's good enough to be an athlete and be in the Ivy League was going to be successful. That's right. I'm not saying it's causal, but there's a correlation there. And certainly, I think at a place like Dartmouth, people bleed green. I've never been at a place where there's as much camaraderie and loyalty to the school as Dartmouth.

45:18It comes from many different places. Certainly the Greek system, certainly athletics, our musical endeavors, the debate club. And my goal is to create lots of different places where students can get that relationship. It also comes from our foreign study programs where our faculty actually take the students for a quarter. And so it's 30 students together with a faculty member. The bond there is for life. I'm an athlete. I believe in the power of athletics. And I certainly think it's an important contributor to our community and culture. Talk for a minute about the power of athletics just as a animating force. What is so good about participating in sports or even games? It gives you opportunities to win and lose, to have to often work with other people. It's an amazing way to build character and to learn how to take risks and get up. All right, let me ask you maybe one last question. This is a question I like because it comes from my hero, Richard Feynman, the physicist.

46:14And he liked to ask, what is particularly abundant in a given system and what's particularly scarce? Maybe abundance to the point of a problem and scarce to the point of a problem. So what would you say in running a university is something that's particularly abundant that you maybe wish you had a little bit less of? Oftentimes there's a resistance to change or we've done it this way. So an abundance of tradition maybe.

46:39Yes. Starmuth is a 250-some-odd year university. There's a lot of, this is how we do it. Can you give an example? Sure. So we just put in place a new School of Arts and Sciences, which is a big deal in an institutional setting and it took a while to get there because people said, why would we need a new structure? And what about scarce? Something that is too scarce? I think time, especially I would say among our faculty. Our faculty, we asked them to be really these teacher scholars who are researching or working at the top of their field, but spend a ton of time in the classroom. And I know this because I've now taught at Dartmouth at Barnard and Columbia and at UChicago, and I've never spent more time with the students than I did at Dartmouth. It's amazing. It's one of the things that makes this place so special, but it takes a lot of time to do that, and we're asking a lot of our people. I would think that if Dartmouth, as you said, invented artificial intelligence that you could come up with a way to make more time,

47:39We're working on it. That again was Seon Bylock, the 19th president of Dartmouth College, which is in fact a university but prefers to keep college in the name. My thanks to Bylock and thanks also to some of her colleagues past and present who helped us prepare for this interview. Alexandra Horowitz, Bruce Sassardot, Chris Snyder, Danny Blanchflower, Lydia Chilton, and Susanna Heschel. And thanks especially to you for listening. Coming up next time on the show.

48:11It never occurred to me that television wouldn't work. Something just seemed to happen. I had no confidence that it was going to go big. Go big. When a master uses the English language, it's a thrill, isn't it? Go big. I tracked down Dick Cavett, the legendary talk show host. I wanted his advice on a new show that I'm making. Well, I hope you do it. You're just saying that, aren't you? Yeah.

48:39I just wanted to make your friends laugh. Dick Cavett, next time on Freakonomics Radio. And if you want to see the trailer for this new show that we are making, just follow the Freakonomics Radio network on YouTube and you will see it very soon. Until then, take care of yourself and if you can, someone else too.

48:59Freakonomics Radio is produced by Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app. It's also at Freakonomics.com, where we publish transcripts and show notes. This episode was produced by Augusta Chapman and edited by Pete Madden. It was mixed by Jake Loomis with help from Jeremy Johnston. The Freakonomics Radio network staff also includes Dalvin Abouaji, Eleanor Osborn, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Ellarium Antenna Court, Mandy Gorenstein, and Theo Jacobs. Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by The Hitchhike.

49:29and our composer is Luis Guerra. As always, thanks for listening. It tastes good when you put it on popcorn, but outside of that context it smells like vomit. Already a really fun conversation.