Rebuilding Trust Through Institutional Restraint

There’s no question it’s a difficult time to lead in higher education. I’m in my third year at Dartmouth and I’m already one of the longest serving Ivy League presidents. My peers and I are navigating intense debates over free expression and protest, questions about academic freedom and institutional autonomy, and relentless pressure concerning affordability, access, and whether a college degree is still worth the cost.

It’s coming from all sides—students, faculty, donors, politicians, families.

And what unites these seemingly disparate issues is something more fundamental. We’ve lost trust. Not with one constituency but across the board. According to the Pew Research Center, seven in 10 Americans say higher education is headed in the wrong direction.¹ Increasingly, the public sees universities not as places of learning but as political actors advancing particular ideologies.

Some of this criticism is unfair, and in fact trust in higher education is starting to creep upward. But much of it is legitimate. We have given the public reasons to question whether we are staying true to our mission.

Over time, many universities became more willing to issue statements on divisive national and international issues far removed from education and research. In doing so, we blurred the line between institutional voice and individual expression, signaling orthodoxy rather than fostering inquiry. When universities look like partisan actors, we invite political intervention. The irony is painful: By acting as political organizations, we turned ourselves into political footballs.

The solution, as I see it, is mission-driven reform. And at the heart of that reform is what we at Dartmouth call institutional restraint—a policy developed by a faculty-led committee and recently endorsed by our board of trustees. It’s simple in concept: universities should be disciplined about when they speak and when they don’t. We should make statements on public issues only when they directly affect our mission. And in that case, one could argue we have an obligation to speak up.

To be clear: Faculty and students should absolutely engage the day’s political issues—debate them, research them, write about them. The goal of restraint is to create the widest possible latitude for free expression and viewpoints, without the institution itself signaling a “correct” view.

Why does this matter? At Dartmouth, our north star is straightforward: attract the broadest swath of talented students possible and give them the skills to debate and disagree productively—preparing them to be the next leaders of our democracy. That requires creating environments where students encounter diverse perspectives and learn to engage them seriously, where questions remain open, where disagreement is expected, and where changing one’s mind based on evidence is a strength, not a weakness.

Institutional restraint serves that mission. Institutional statements on divisive issues undermine it.

Social psychology research backs this up. In the 1950s, Solomon Asch conducted experiments showing that when groups converge on a single view—even an incorrect one—individuals feel intense pressure to go along, suppressing their own judgment out of fear of social consequences. But introduce just one dissenting voice and suddenly individuals feel permission to think independently. When institutions signal “correct” positions on contentious issues, we create exactly the conditions Asch identified. When we practice restraint, we create space for the genuine disagreement that learning requires.

This matters urgently because our democracy needs citizens who can engage productively across differences. Research shows that polarization threatens democratic function and that dialogue skills can counteract those effects. Universities have a responsibility to teach these skills—but students can’t learn them in environments where disagreement feels dangerous or where institutional positions define orthodoxy.

At Dartmouth, we’ve invested heavily in this through our Dartmouth Dialogues initiative. The program teaches dialogue skills, facilitates structured conversations inside and outside the classroom, and brings diverse speakers to campus so students hear directly from people whose views challenge their own. The goal isn’t for students to change their minds—though they might. It’s the practice of engaging with different viewpoints that sharpens arguments, forms beliefs, and builds the capacity to disagree productively.

The results are striking. A recent assessment by Sean Westwood, associate professor of government at Dartmouth, found that 85 percent of Dartmouth students express confidence in their ability to engage respectfully with differing viewpoints.² More than 90 percent believe engaging with challenging perspectives is essential to their education. And two-thirds of incoming students identified dialogue programming as a factor in choosing Dartmouth—close to half pointed to institutional restraint itself. We’re not recruiting students who think alike. We’re recruiting students who like to think.³

Some worry that restraint means cowering to political pressure. It doesn’t. A university should respond when its mission is directly threatened—when academic freedom is undermined or when research funding is politicized. This is true whether the government leans more conservative or liberal. And, by being disciplined about when universities speak, our voice carries more weight when we do need to defend our mission.

Rebuilding trust will require more than restraint, of course. Universities must also demonstrate commitment to mission through concrete actions aimed at affordability, access, and its return on investment. At Dartmouth, we offer free tuition for families earning $175,000 or less. We’re also building toward a guarantee that every student who wants a paid internship will have access to one. We brought back standardized testing in our holistic admissions process because a faculty-led study showed test scores help identify talented students from every background—particularly those from less advantaged families who might otherwise be overlooked.

These reforms share a common thread: they emerge from educational mission, not political pressure. They require the institutional autonomy that restraint protects. And they demonstrate to families that universities are focused on what actually matters—preparing students for meaningful lives and careers.

Institutional restraint is how we return to that mission. It creates the conditions where diverse perspectives can flourish in which students learn to engage productively across differences, and where universities can rebuild the credibility and trust that public confidence requires.

That is how we lead in this moment.

Sian Beilock, PhD, is president of Dartmouth College.

1. Kim Parker, “Growing Share of Americans Say the U.S. Higher Education System is Headed in the Wrong Direction,” Pew Research Center, October 15, 2025, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/10/15/growing-share-of-americans-say-the-us-higher-education-system-is-headed-in-the-wrong-direction/.
2. Sean Westwood, Dartmouth Dialogues Assessment Fall 2025 Student Survey Results (Dartmouth, 2025).
3. Dartmouth College Office of Communications, “Dartmouth Dialogues Survey Results Reveal Impact,” Dartmouth, November 7, 2025, https://home.dartmouth.edu/news/2025/11/dartmouth-dialogues-survey-results-reveal-impact.