Sian Beilock

Now the second piece.

Why does the clever thing to say only arrive afterwards? There's a body of research on this, most famously the work of Sian Beilock on what researchers call choking under pressure, and the finding is beautifully precise.

Pressure doesn't delete your skill.

It steals your attention.

But that wasn't the story a- about what was going on.

It was particular people in a particular institution, particularly the president of, of Dartmouth, Sian Beilock.

Could you tell us more about what happened at Dartmouth and why it was so special?

Yes.

And I do think this is a sin of omission as opposed to a sin of commission, which is, which is different, but, but bad in a, you know, in a, in a, in a, in a r- really important way.

So, um, Sian Beilock, who was president of Dartmouth, had become president of Dartmouth quite recently.

She was previously the, the president of, of Barnard, where, by the way, she was a champion of DEI.

She said she was gonna have a DEI cabinet and they were gonna...

Who is she, and what's the story?

Well, she's called Sian Beilock, and it's-- And Dartmouth is an interesting story, and it's a complicated story.

Dartmouth was the only Ivy League school out of the ten that didn't fully support Harvard in its lawsuit against the Trump administration when Trump tried to deny Harvard billions of dollars in research grants that had already been awarded and tried to say Harvard, this most important international university, couldn't enroll any foreign students.

What happened to Dartmouth was they got a free pass for bad reasons.

They cracked down really excessively on a quite benign Gaza protest in 2024, and as a result, the Trump Justice Department, and particularly a woman named Harmeet Dhillon, who is a Dartmouth alum, gave Dartmouth and Sian Beilock a free pass.

And she said, "Great, we'll take it.

We'll play ball with them.

Just as, as Chris said, it was good to get into some of the characters I think people will, will know of less.

So Sian Beilock, could you just tell me a bit about who she is and why you felt it necessary to i- include her?

Yeah.

And even in the US, most people don't know who, who she is.

Yeah

... and, um, uh, John Roberts, the, the chief justice.

But Sian Beilock is the president of Dartmouth, and I thought Dartmouth was really the epitome of the story I wanted to tell about Trump and the universities.

Um, not because she exactly capitulated in the way Paul, Weiss and the other law firms did, um, but because her, her college, Dartmouth, that she's president of, got a free pass.