Reflections on Tradition and Time

Free e Economics Rod videoo sponsored Hotels dot com dot hotelsot com gives you access to hundreds of thousands of hotels worldwide, and when you join for free, you can save up to twenty percent instantly with member prices Plus every stay earns rewards, so when you book one trip, you're already lowering the cost of the next one Hotels. com is simple, rewarding, and designed to help you get more out of every stay. Sign up for free and book todayodayhotels. com. It's all in the name Free economics Radio sponsored by Amica. You know what they say If you want to go fast, go alone, If you want to go far, go together. So go with AIica and get coverage from a mutual insurer that's built for their customers, one that looks after what's important to you together Auto, home, life, and more, coverage that fits your unique needs. Amika helps you protect what matters most. Visit amica. com and get a quote today Economics Rio is sponsored MintMobile, Unlimited talk text and data and fast reliable coverage on the nation's largest five G network. No catch To get your new wireless plan for just fifteen bucks a month, go to mintmobile dot com slash freak. That's it. There's no catch. forty five dollars upfront payment required, equivalent to fifteen dollars a month. New customers on first three month plan only speeds slower above forty gigytes on unlimited plan, addditional taxes fees and restrictions apply, see MintMobile for details Last week on the show, we heard from the Chancellor of Vanderbilt University, Daniel Deermmeyer who operates under a framework that originated at the University of Chicago. It's known as institutional neeutrality whichich 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 Son Billock, the president of Dartmouth College in Hanover New Hampshire Bilac 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 twelve years Bilock and Deermmeyer have that in common, a belief in institutional neutrality and time served at the University of Chicago But there's one big difference. Deeremeyer trained as a political scientist with a focus on institutions. You can hear this when he talks 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 Billock, 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 Bilock 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 ten 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 sixty percent of students graduate I don't know if you'd hear lots of university presents talk about this, but I think the universities have some of the responsibility there 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. Today on Freonomics radio, Seon Bilock 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 Please just start with your name and what you do My name is Son Bilock. I am the president of Dartmouth and a cognitive scientist. And do you want to just explain why your name is Son and Sean or something It's spelled S I A N. canan you just explain the story behind that It actually is supposed to be Sean, but my parents named me Seion They were watching a PBS documentary with an actress, Sean Phillips, and they thought it was Son. So here I am. Because she spelled it like that? Yes, but she was Sean, but they didn't know that U You were a college athlete, correct? soccer I 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 firsthand interest? Yes, I did. I was doing me search. 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 What'd you learn 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. Do you think that trying to control too much generally, not just in the athletic realm is a big problem 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. 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 Seon Bilock, 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 Bilock had her own lab at the University of Chicago, the Han Performance lab where she studied decision making under pressure. After serving as executive vice provroost at Chicago, she was recruited for the president's job at Barnard, the women's undergraduate collollege It is affiliated with Columbia University in New York After institutional neutrality in Chicago, Bilock had a bit of culture shock at Barnard There were lots of people who thought about the purpose of the institution the same way, but certainly there was less of an appetite for different views. So Colombia was really enmeshed in the Gaza protests. It got very messy and violent and it's still very difficult there Manufk 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, 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 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 Bernard When I was at Barnard, I was my plan had been to wait and I knew I would be a top candidate in the Colombia 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 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. 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 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 are 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 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 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, Rush Chedy at Harvard, who's shown that actually socioeconomic status or resources in a family help 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 Rack. we showed the data that it was important and Just now Columbia was the last Iy 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 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 is really led is around cultivating free expression and civil dialogue We launched Aartmou Dialogues, my first year soon after october seventh and several different institutions have followed in our footsteps. And that was modeled by our faculty actually in Jewish and Middle Eastern stududies who On october ninth and on october eleventh, 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. 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 centured 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? 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 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 builduild 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 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 has 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 Iividual Rights and expxpression. When I got to Dartmouth, we were in bottom two hundred in something, and I think last year we were ranked thirty fifth. 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 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 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. L what's the best ice cream I don't know if that can be empirically proven I mean, obviously, it's Mant chip God, it's so nice Can I tell you what my favorite is, but everyone ridicules me for this. 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 rumraays and haters in the world I think it's disgusting. I don't know This is my truth. Well, I think menship is disgusting. 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 view 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 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 I think We fall away from getting to what is true, and that's always the aspiration In twenty twenty five, 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 endnding the use of race and sex in admissions and hiring promoting a broader spectrum of political viewpoints on campus and limiting disruptive protests Neither BilLock 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 deemocratic administrations and we're getting pushed in different directions under the current administration. 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. to talk about the value of what we do and have conversation instead of picking aside and sccreaming 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 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 in the government. And at the end of the day I believe that we're American universities with the global reach and our customers are the American people 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 Ramer, 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's got experience at the RNC has 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 is that because the role of general counsel is often lobbying is a major role 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 What's it for instance? It could be anything about the policies we put in place around free expression I our policies have very wide wide latitude As a juxtaposition to Harvard, you can chalk. Any mean about me you want outside my building And I think there's no chalking policies at a lot of other places. Have you been talkalked quite a bit, then Not lately, actually. Hopefully this won't invite it. Maybe someone will just talkalk, we love President Bilock. Yeah, I would like that. My fifteen year old who walks by my building every morning when she goes to Hanover High looves to see all the mean things written about me I was serious. Like one of her highlights. So we make everyone happy. That'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 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 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 coming from the University of Chicago The example I was giving was about federal regulations, whether it was some of the regulations around Title nine 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. W was she the next president? I didn't even get that memo. I've heard she lis rum raised Come on I'm Sthven Dunner, speaking with Dartmouth Presidentcyon Bilock. We will be right back Frecomics Rod is sponsored Mint Mobile Mint mobile plans are only fifteen dollars per month. wondering what's the catch There isn't one. There are no gimmicks and no gotches. just unlimited talk, text and data and fast reliable coverage on the nation's largest five G network That makes Mint Mobile a catch. 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Come on everybody, let's get online. thirty a month gonna blow your mind. fiveive oes don't hesitate. Luck it in now before' two l eight, seven, seven, three nine three, four, four four eight Tes apply see optimum dot com for details With my Sapphire preferred card, we took a trip to a desert oasis. eararning five times the points on Chase travel, two times the points on all other travel, plus a one hundred dollarars hotel credit. Chase Sapphire preferred, a card's preferred for a reason Card isued by J. Morgan J's bank and a member of DC subject to credit approval terms app Give me just a Stay in the life of you, the Dartmouth president. I don't need every fifteen minute increment, but how is the pi generally divided? you want from the very early morning Absolutely. Okay At four forty five I wake up and make my fifteen year old breakfast before she goes to play tennis Oh my goodness. Then I go back to bed. She plays NS 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' Dartmouths tennisam It's pretty good, but she says she wants to go anywhere but Dartmouth She's fifteen 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 six thirty. 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 anythingthing from meeeting 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 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 twenty five million dollars gift for Dartmouth Dialogues 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. But 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. a lot of the advances in AI and the ability to do technological health care 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 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 boooted 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 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 nineteen fifty six, we had a summer conference where the term in the field artificial intelligence were born. And so we talk about Dartmouth as the birthplace of AI And now seventy 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 push back then from folks. so I knew that it was there. I think for young people F 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. 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 Therbot, 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 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 and help people get to the places they need. we believe can be really helpful to students success 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 deartment 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 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. 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' 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 skiway 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 university president hat for a minute And look at the data that I know has been examined by among others, Danny Blancheflower, 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 I think what's been so striking about the work Dr. Blanchefer has done is that it's really changes in young peopleop'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 brring up a headeterox opinion or have a conversation with someone that makes you uncomfortable From my research, I know you 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 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 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 I think every older person always says this about the younger folks around them. What I see on campus are students who or 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 deevelopment 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 try 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 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 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 advises the president and the provvost, and I spent the whole year as a faculty member arguing with Bob Zimmer Bob Zimmer, a mathematician by training, was U Chicago's president from two thousand six to twenty twenty one And at the end of the year He said, comeome work for me And I thought, wow, like that's so interesting What were you arguing about Every. 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 Cncil I think was like twelve faculty. I was, I believe the only woman on the committee and the youngest by probably twenty 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 orinary. 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 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 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 against each other and that we shouldn't be encouraging statements that 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. Conservative student newspaper and a more liberal student newspaper. It's considered the most conservative, small se conservative of the Ivyys, would you say? I mean, I've always heard it about like that 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. I don't think I' really understand after being at U Chicago that not all institutions were like U, Chicago 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. 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 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, I hate to say. 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. 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 deans, we have faculty once 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 PNL, 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 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 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 Steven Dunner, this is Free economics Radio. We will be right back to finish our conversation with Dartmouth President Seon Bilock. cnom radi sponsored Net Se. They say that every day your business is late to AI, you fell two days behind How do you keep up? Unfortunately, there's Net Suite next. 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Hi, I'm Angie Hicks, co founder of Angie. One thing I've learned is that you buy a house, but you make it a home. For decades, Angie's helped millions of homeowners hire skilled pros for the projects that matter. Angie, the one you trust to find the ones you trust. find a pro for your project at Angie dot com d So 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 perod in 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 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 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 teeaching 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 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? 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. 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 U.S. is 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 peopleeople coming from different backgrounds working toward a common goal Do you see the university serving that function anymore? or it really failed 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 So if you could create Dartmouth from scratch today What would you do differently in order to fulfill that mission? 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 tntill nineteen seventy six. There were quotas for Jews I think I would go back and think about 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 advantaged 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 one hundred seventy five thousand doll a year, it's free to Dartmouth. We have continued and push to focus on first generation and low income students as well as rural students And we're need blind to meet full financial need for everyone 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. 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 Dartmouth somewhat bigger becausecause I think what we do is so important. We have a responsibility to serve more students and that means more faculty. And 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 Darmouth 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. Let's talk about college sports for a minute. How is it different now than when you were in college The power divisions and 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 athletic scholarships. We only give kn 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 ur NIL in the Ivy League is pretty small. Certainly, we're competing with teams who have bigigger 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 It's really interesting. I just asked my athletic director not only the portal, but going pro. Our three top players are staying next year, which I think said something so important about program we're running and our coaches 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. 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