U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona met with Dartmouth College students and President Sian Beilock on Wednesday afternoon to discuss ways to improve the quality of political dialogue on college campuses.
Dartmouth’s administration arranged the visit to coincide with the launch Wednesday of the Dartmouth Dialogue Initiative, a campus-wide effort to foster constructive dialogue around difficult and contentious issues.
Both the visit and the initiative came in the wake of intense criticism of many colleges and universities nationwide for mishandling their responses to students following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza.
Facing pro-Palestinian campus demonstrations, backlashes against those demonstrations and increases in instances of overt antisemitism, a number of institutions saw their administrations criticized for moving too slowly to condemn the initial Hamas attacks, not denouncing antisemitic rhetoric forcefully enough, or simply waiting too long to say anything at all.
Amid the controversies, Dartmouth has garnered praise for providing meaningful platforms for student voices without compromising freedom of speech or campus safety.
“Across the country,” said Cardona, “we have universities who are ‘getting it’ and those that are not.” But at Dartmouth, he said, “they’re onto something.”
“We have to do better on our campuses,” said Cardona, because “too often we’ve seen differences of opinion turn to violence.”
Speaking before the event, Samantha Lofman, a senior from Detroit, said that it was “incredibly important that we learn to have dialogues that are about learning instead of about winning.”
Cardona asked the students what they felt was working well at Dartmouth, and where challenges remained.
Lofman, a member of the social justice-focused a cappella group the Rockapellas, said that social justice means different things to different people and that it’s important to identify “the core values that we can all get behind,” and intentionally bringing up those points of agreement.
Student Body President Jessica Chiriboga said that in her leadership roles, she tries to model “having grace for people where they are.”
A number of students pointed to a faculty that modeled constructive disagreement as well as a close-knit campus community that fosters civility and respect.
“They disagree all the time,” said Jackson Yassin, a sophomore from Santa Monica, Calif., of professors Ezzedine Fishere and Bernard Avishai, who co-teach the “Politics of Israel and Palestine” course as part of the Middle Eastern Studies Program. And that disagreement conveys a message that professors want students to “question why they believe what they believe,” he said.
Anthony Fosu, a senior from New Jersey said that the secret to Dartmouth’s success was its ability to bring together people from disparate backgrounds. And Muhammad Faisal Azizi, a student from Afghanistan who recently transferred to Dartmouth, emphasized the importance of opportunities for student input, saying that “when there’s a platform, you don’t need to take it up in the streets.”
Cady Rancourt, a senior studying education, said there had been an “invigoration of a desire to take on difficult conversations” with the arrival of Beilock, who took office last June. Rancourt praised the college’s leadership in general for being proactive on issues of dialogue.
For her part, Beilock said much of the effort at improving the quality of discourse on the campus involved collaboration with students, noting that initiatives to support students’ mental health came directly from student input.
Palestinian-Tunisian sophomore Yasmine Abouali pushed back at the praise for Dartmouth’s administrative leadership. She noted the relatively scant presence of Palestinian students at previous dialogue efforts earlier in the fall, saying that it “made me feel unheard.”
She was particularly disappointed in the arrest of two Dartmouth student demonstrators in late October in connection with a protest in front of Parkhurst Hall, the college president’s office. While student activists characterized the arrests as an overreaction to a peaceful protest, Beilock held that it was a response to threats of physical violence.
Speaking directly to Beilock on Wednesday, Abouali suggested that the president knew, or should have known “that there was no threat of violence, we were just ramping up our protests.”
Acknowledging that it’s “nice” that the administration is making an effort to cultivate an atmosphere of constructive dialogue, Abouali said, “it’s Dartmouth students that make the place special.”
Beilock listened intently as Abouali addressed her and Cardona.
“I’m proud that you are able to speak your mind so that we can move forward together,” Beilock said.
Chiriboga, the student body president, suggested that many college students arrive on their campuses not expecting or understanding that the purpose of college is to “promote vigorous and open dialogue that challenges your ideas and helps you grow.” She thought that institutions could do a better job of framing that idea more explicitly from the beginning of the college experience to help students understand that “that’s what a university is about.”
Whatever its driving forces, there seemed to be a consensus that Dartmouth was doing something right.
“Culture doesn’t happen overnight,” said Cardona, emphasizing that expectations of respectful and open dialogue “must exist before the crisis,” through intention, effort and collaboration.
After the session, Cardona praised Dartmouth’s efforts as “an example of what I want to see throughout the country.”
These articles are being shared by partners in The Granite State News Collaborative. For more information visitcollaborativenh.org.
