680. Can Universities Win Back Our Trust? | Freakonomics Radio

Dartmouth president Sian Beilock, a psychologist by training, made her name studying why people choke. Now she’s applying those insights to one of the most scrutinized jobs in America. No pressure! You can find the transcript and show notes for this episode on our website here: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/can-universities-win-back-our-trust/ FOLLOW FREAKONOMICS RADIO: YouTube: https://freak.ws/3yIl6dl Apple Podcasts: https://freak.ws/3yAvQh0 Spotify: https://freak.ws/3TsdCmV ABOUT FREAKONOMICS RADIO: Discover the hidden side of everything with host Stephen J. Dubner, co-author of the Freakonomics books. Each week, Dubner speaks with Nobel laureates and provocateurs, intellectuals and entrepreneurs, and various other underachievers to uncover things you always thought you knew (but didn’t) and things you never thought you wanted to know (but do) — from the economics of sleep to the future of education, from markets for marriage to the surprising utility of wolves. ABOUT THE FREAKONOMICS RADIO NETWORK: Freakonomics began as a book, which led to a blog, a documentary film, more books, a pair of pants, and in 2010, a podcast called Freakonomics Radio. Hosted by Stephen J. Dubner, it’s one of the most popular podcasts in the world, with a reputation for storytelling that is both rigorous and entertaining. Its archive of more than 500 episodes is available, for free, on any podcast app, and the show airs weekly on NPR stations. Freakonomics Radio is now the flagship show of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which includes the podcasts No Stupid Questions, People I (Mostly) Admire, and The Economics of Everyday Things. FREAKONOMICS RADIO NETWORK PODCASTS: Freakonomics Radio: https://freakonomics.com/series/freakonomics-radio/ No Stupid Questions: https://freakonomics.com/series/nsq/ People I (Mostly) Admire: https://freakonomics.com/series/people-i-mostly-admire/ The Economics of Everyday Things: https://freakonomics.com/series/everyday-things/ Special series: https://freakonomics.com/topics/ CONNECT WITH US: [email protected] https://twitter.com/freakonomics https://www.instagram.com/freakonomics/ https://www.facebook.com/freakonomics/ https://www.tiktok.com/@freakonomicsradio https://www.linkedin.com/company/freakonomics-media Subscribe to our newsletter: https://stephendubner.substack.com/subscribe

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  Last week on the show, we heard from the chancellor of Vanderbilt University, Daniel Deere Meyer, who operates under a framework that originated at the University of Chicago. It's known as institutional neutrality.

• 0:18Speaker 01

  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.

• 0:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  This week, we will hear from Seon Byalak, the president of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Byalak runs Dartmouth using a similar framework.

• 0:38Speaker 02

  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 the administration at Chicago for 12 years.

• 0:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Byalak and Deere Meyer have that in common, a belief in institutional neutrality and time served at the University of Chicago. There's one big difference. Deere Meyer trained as a political scientist with a focus on institutions. You can hear this when he talks.

• 1:05Speaker 01

  And 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.

• 1:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  Byalak, meanwhile, trained as a psychologist with a focus on why people choke under pressure. And you can hear that when she talks.

• 1:22Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Byalak and Dartmouth, like just about every university today, are dealing with a lot of scary things. For instance, a steep drop in public trust.

• 1:40Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  And she has no trouble believing those numbers because she thinks universities have earned that distrust.

• 1:57Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  But what other responsibilities does a university have?

• 2:19Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Today on Freakonomics Radio, Sian Beilock tries to go from choke to clutch. Our full conversation starts now.

• 2:47Speaker 03

  This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 3:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, please just start with your name and what you do.

• 3:06Speaker 02

  My name is Sian Beilock. I am the president of Dartmouth and a cognitive scientist.

• 3:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  And do you want to just explain why your name is Sian and not Sean or something? It's spelled S-I-A-N. Can you just explain the story behind that?

• 3:21Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  Because she spelled it like that?

• 3:33Speaker 02

  Yes, but she was Sean, but they didn't know that.

• 3:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  Got it. You were a college athlete, correct? Soccer?

• 3:39Speaker 02

  I played soccer in the Olympic development growing up, and then I played lacrosse at UCSD.

• 3:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  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 firsthand interest?

• 3:52Speaker 02

  Yes, I did. I was doing me 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.

• 4:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  And what'd you learn?

• 4:07Speaker 02

  A lot of what we found is that, counterintuitively, 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, processes that would run off better without conscious attention.

• 4:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you think that trying to control too much generally, not just in the athletic realm, is a big problem?

• 4:38Speaker 02

  Certainly. 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.

• 4:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  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. And I wondered what Sian Beilock, the psychologist, would say about that. Is it a signal? Is it strategic?

• 5:14Speaker 02

  I'm probably concentrating when I'm talking.

• 5:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  And then when you're smiling, you're not, you're saying?

• 5:19Speaker 02

  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.

• 5:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's a bad idea because it'll mean you're too self-conscious and you'll choke?

• 5:31Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly.

• 5:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  Beilock 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, Beilock had a bit of culture shock at Barnard.

• 5:59Speaker 02

  There was lots of people who thought about the purpose of the institution in the same way, but certainly, there was less of an appetite for different views.

• 6:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Columbia was really enmeshed in the Gaza protests. It got very messy and violent, and it's still very difficult there. Manoush Shafik, who was the president then, got gone. As did Liz McGill from Penn, got gone. Claudine Gay from Harvard, got gone.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  That was my class. That was my class of presidents.

• 6:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  What was it like to watch all of that defenestration happening?

• 6:31Speaker 02

  I mean... It wasn't fun, I'll say that. And I certainly was taking a different tack. And I'm proud of where we went, but.

• 6:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  Did you feel you were spared because you had that different tack?

• 6:44Speaker 02

  I think that following a set of principles allowed folks, both who agreed and didn't agree, to see where I was going.

• 6:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  Did you ever think what would have happened to you had you stayed at Barnard?

• 6:55Speaker 02

  When I was at Barnard, I was, my plan had been to wait and I 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.

• 7:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so you've been at Dartmouth for about three years now. What are your top priorities?

• 7:17Speaker 02

  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 potentially 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.

• 7:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  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?

• 7:47Speaker 02

  I think we've seen it in action in several cases. Dartmouth was the first Ivy to bring back the SAT and ACT as part of admissions after COVID. We modeled the data and 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 rec or grades.

• 8:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  One story that we've heard for a long time is that kids that do well on an 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?

• 8:40Speaker 02

  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 were able to show is that students who are excelling on those tests relative to, 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, Raj Chetty at Harvard, who's shown that actually socioeconomic status or resources in a family helps students

• 9:25Speaker 02

  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.

• 9:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  What is Dartmouth looking for in an either typical median or maybe optimal student?

• 9:53Speaker 02

  We'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 7. And several different institutions have followed in our footsteps. And that was modeled by our faculty, actually, in Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies, who on October 9 and on October 11, where on most campuses, people were just screaming at each other, came together and had open dialogue.

• 10:34Speaker 02

  Where anyone could come and talk about the complexities of the Middle East.

• 10:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  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. On 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 a 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?

• 11:09Speaker 02

  The only way I know how to lead is by making principled decisions. Free expression and the ability to hear different points of view and everyone to share on campus is at the heart of what we do and 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, and we were willing to enforce the rules, unlike many of our peers.

• 11:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  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?

• 11:55Speaker 02

  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 has aged pretty well, but it's also been borne 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 and 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.

• 12:39Speaker 02

  I believe that one 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.

• 12:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  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.

• 13:36Speaker 02

  I mean, obviously, it's mint chip.

• 13:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  God, it's so not. Can I tell you what my favorite is? But everyone ridicules me for...

• 13:44Speaker 02

  If you say rum raisin, I think we're just done.

• 13:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  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?

• 13:54Speaker 02

  I think it's disgusting. I don't know. This is my truth.

• 13:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  Well, I think mint chip is disgusting. See, this is how it all starts.

• 14:01Speaker 02

  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 and 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. And 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, or 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

• 14:42Speaker 02

  I think we fall away from getting to what is true, and that's always the aspiration.

• 14:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  In 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 Beilock nor any of the other university leaders signed the compact.

• 15:25Speaker 02

  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 is to talk about the value of what we do and have conversation, instead of picking a side 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.

• 16:09Speaker 02

  But the best way to get to a shared understanding is actually to have conversation. While 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.

• 16:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  As 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, A, that a House Counsel who's got experience at the RNC has been for you, and also why Dartmouth has not been subject to that investigation?

• 17:16Speaker 02

  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-

• 17:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is that because the role of general counsel is often lobbying is a major role?

• 17:36Speaker 02

  No, I mean, not lobbying, but I'd say strategy in 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.

• 17:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  What's it, for instance?

• 17:55Speaker 02

  It could be anything about the policies we put in place around free expression. And when our policies have very wide, wide latitude, like as a juxtaposition to Harvard, you can chalk anything mean about me you want outside my building. And I think there's no chalking policies at a lot of other places.

• 18:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  Have you been chalked quite a bit, then?

• 18:14Speaker 02

  Not lately, actually. Hopefully, this won't invite it.

• 18:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  Maybe someone will just chalk, "We love President Beilock."

• 18:20Speaker 02

  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.

• 18:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, seriously?

• 18:29Speaker 02

  Like, one of her highlights. So we make everyone happy.

• 18:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's funny.

• 18:34Speaker 02

  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

• 19:18Speaker 02

  perspectives on our campus. And Matt wears a jersey that is green now. He represents Dartmouth.

• 19:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  You said before the Trump administration that the universities have been pushed to the left from outside. Can you just describe that process? 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 sensed 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 OK with that. And it always surprised me. I'm curious how you felt about that, especially

• 20:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  coming from University of Chicago.

• 20:10Speaker 02

  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 sign 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.

• 20:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, is she the next president? I didn't even get that memo.

• 20:33Speaker 02

  I've heard she likes rum raisin.

• 20:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, come on. I'm Stephen Dubner, speaking with Dartmouth President Seon Byalak. 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?

• 21:08Speaker 02

  Do you want from the very early morning?

• 21:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  Absolutely.

• 21:11Speaker 02

  Okay. At 4:45, I wake up and make my 15-year-old breakfast before she goes to play tennis.

• 21:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, my goodness.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  Then I go back to bed. She plays tennis at 5:00.

• 21:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Why can't she make her own breakfast?

• 21:24Speaker 02

  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.

• 21:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you have a spouse or partner or something too?

• 21:47Speaker 02

  No, it's just us home together. So I make the breakfast.

• 21:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  Got it. Okay. And she's a very serious, committed, competitive tennis player plainly?

• 21:55Speaker 02

  I mean, she has aspirations to play tennis at university, so.

• 21:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  How's Dartmouth's tennis team?

• 22:01Speaker 02

  It's pretty good, but she says she wants to go anywhere but Dartmouth. She's 15 and is growing up on campus, so totally understandable. I think we're in agreement about that.

• 22:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  You wake up, make breakfast, go back to sleep?

• 22:12Speaker 02

  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 meeting 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.

• 22:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  Are you pretty good at that?

• 22:43Speaker 02

  I love it.

• 22:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  You do? Tell me why.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  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. We 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.

• 23:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  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?

• 23:19Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 23:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  But does that mean you have many outposts of the Dartmouth medical system essentially?

• 23:24Speaker 02

  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 healthcare workers are very much in need and they don't have

• 24:06Speaker 02

  a very good career path or workforce training system. And with a lot of the advances in AI and the ability to do technological 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 better quality of life.

• 24:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  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. To 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?

• 25:01Speaker 02

  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 from 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

• 25:43Speaker 02

  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.

• 26:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  Dartmouth 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 Therobot, 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.

• 26:28Speaker 02

  So the idea is that using hundreds of thousands of hours of clinical data, Therobot 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, one 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

• 27:11Speaker 02

  and help people get to the places they need, we believe can be really helpful to student success.

• 27:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  I've read some pushback from students. One person writing in the student newspaper, wondered why you need to build your own model when LLMs already exist. Although I'm guessing if you used 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 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.

• 27:53Speaker 02

  We'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 is 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,

• 28:36Speaker 02

  but also wanted to take an advanced biology class. It's helping augment people's ability to deal with complex problems.

• 28:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  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 university 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. It'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.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  I think what's been so striking about the work Dr. Blanchflower has done is that it's 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. And so I want students to have the tools so that they can take

• 30:12Speaker 02

  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.

• 30:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'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?

• 30:46Speaker 02

  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.

• 31:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  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 in 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

• 31:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  something that's not what I thought was the primary purpose of the university.

• 31:58Speaker 02

  I 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.

• 32:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  Beilock'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.

• 32:54Speaker 02

  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 advises the president and provost. And I spent the whole year as a faculty member arguing with Bob Zimmer.

• 33:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  Bob Zimmer, a mathematician by training, was UChicago's president from 2006 to 2021.

• 33:13Speaker 02

  And at the end of the year, he said, come work for me. And I thought, wow, like, that's so interesting.

• 33:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  What were you arguing about?

• 33:21Speaker 02

  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 it 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 pushed back a lot.

• 33:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  Were there changes then because of your pushback?

• 33:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think there were some. I don't remember any specifics. But the idea that the institution should be the 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, 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,

• 34:36Speaker 02

  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 against each other, and that we shouldn't be encouraging statements that...

• 34:58Speaker 02

  Could 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.

• 35:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's considered the most conservative, small c conservative of the Ivies, would you say? I mean, I've always heard it talked about like that.

• 35:20Speaker 02

  I think people do talk about it that way. And we have 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 U Chicago like tolerance for different voices on campus. And I don't think I had really understand after being at U Chicago that not all institutions were like U Chicago.

• 35:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  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. And we're all familiar with the Peter Principle that 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?

• 36:27Speaker 02

  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.

• 36:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  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. I hate to say.

• 36:48Speaker 02

  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, I worry about the viability of those candidates.

• 37:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  Did you get training?

• 37:06Speaker 02

  No, I mean, I apprenticed and a lot of it was trial by fire. And I wish I had more training.

• 37:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is anyone working on that?

• 37:15Speaker 02

  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, what it means for different units. A P and L in my mind is an instantiation of your strategy. You have to understand that.

• 37:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  If you were to eventually, let's say, start a leadership institute at Dartmouth to train university leaders, what would be your motto?

• 37:47Speaker 02

  That's good. I think it is something about your role is 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.

• 38:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We will be right back to finish our conversation with Dartmouth President Seon Byalak.

• 38:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  So what do you make of this period of history we're living through? By whatever means you want to measure it, 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 sanity and prosperity and all that?

• 38:59Speaker 02

  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 are world experts on misinformation. And the ideas that we're getting through social media and others are seeping in as fact sets. And I think we have to get a handle on what that looks like.

• 39:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  You have any ideas for how to do that?

• 39:18Speaker 02

  Education is one way. Teaching people to be discerning and how to think.

• 39:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  Are you worried, though, that a college education in particular has come to be viewed by so many as essentially a luxury 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?

• 39:39Speaker 02

  I am very worried. And 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 in thinking and ideas. And again, I think that is the basis for getting to the best outcomes.

• 39:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  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 has certainly fallen. They say that certain institutions are quite good at creating 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? Or is it really failed?

• 40:34Speaker 02

  I 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.

• 40:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  So if you could create Dartmouth from scratch today, what would you do differently in order to fulfill that mission?

• 41:00Speaker 02

  In a lot of Dartmouth'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.

• 41:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  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 advantaged and so on. Has Dartmouth done anything significant to change that?

• 41:33Speaker 02

  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 of low income students as well as rural students. And we're need blind and meet full financial need for everyone.

• 41:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  Here'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?

• 42:08Speaker 02

  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.

• 42:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  And would it be bigger in that spot in Hanover? Would you want to open other campuses elsewhere?

• 42:26Speaker 02

  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. That'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.

• 43:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  Let's talk about college sports for a minute. How is it different now than when you were in college?

• 43:10Speaker 02

  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 are students first, that we don't give athletic scholarships, we only give need based scholarships. And athletics enhances our academics rather than.

• 43:30Speaker 02

  Vice versa.

• 43:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  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?

• 43:43Speaker 02

  Our 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.

• 44:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  And did any of those players then take an offer through the portal to get an NIL payday?

• 44:07Speaker 02

  It'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 says something so important about the program we're running and our coaches.

• 44:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  Interesting. 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.

• 44:27Speaker 02

  It matters to me.

• 44:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  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?

• 44:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's work in the Ivy League showing that Ivy League athletes go on to be very successful in terms of what they do.

• 44:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  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.

• 45:03Speaker 02

  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. It 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.

• 45:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Talk for a minute about the power of athletics, just as an animating force. What is so good about participating in sports or even games?

• 45:55Speaker 02

  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.

• 46:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  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. And 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?

• 46:32Speaker 02

  Oftentimes, there's a resistance to change or we've done it this way.

• 46:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  So an abundance of tradition, maybe?

• 46:39Speaker 02

  Yes, Dartmouth is a 250-some-odd-year university. There's a lot of, this is how we do it.

• 46:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  Can you give an example?

• 46:47Speaker 02

  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?

• 46:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  And what about scarce, something that is too scarce?

• 47:01Speaker 02

  I think time, especially, I would say, among our faculty. Our faculty, we ask 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.

• 47:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  I would think that if Dartmouth, as you said, invented artificial intelligence, that you could come up with a way to make more time.

• 47:39Speaker 02

  We're working on it.

• 47:45Stephen J. Dubner?

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

• 48:11Speaker 04

  It 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.

• 48:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  I tracked down Dick Cavett, the legendary talk show host. I wanted his advice on a new show that I'm making.

• 48:34Speaker 04

  Well, I hope you do it.

• 48:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  You're just saying that, aren't you?

• 48:37Speaker 04

  Yeah. I just wanted to make your friends laugh.

• 48:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  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. Freakonomics 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 Osborne, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Elaria Montenacort, Mandy Gorstein, and Teo Jacobs. Our theme

• 49:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  song is "Mr. Fortune" by The Hitchhikers, and our composer is Luis Guerra. As always, thanks for listening.

• 49:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  It tastes good when you put it on popcorn, but outside of that context, it smells like vomit.

• 49:41Speaker 02

  Already a really fun conversation.

• 49:47Speaker 03

  The Freakonomics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything.