680. Can Universities Win Back Our Trust?

Cian Bylock, Dartmouth’s 19th president and a cognitive scientist by training, frames her presidency around restoring public trust in higher education by clarifying institutional mission and modeling open inquiry. Drawing on research about 'choking' — when people over-control automatic skills under pressure — she argues for leadership that empowers others rather than micromanages. Bylock traced her governing philosophy to the University of Chicago (she calls her stance 'institutional restraint') and contrasted that with her Barnard experience; she declined the 2025 federal compact and instead emphasizes dialogue with policymakers, asserting Dartmouth has been proactive in Washington while avoiding the federal civil-rights probes and funding freezes that hit some peers.

Much of the conversation centered on concrete reforms and controversies. Bylock described Dartmouth’s return to requiring SAT/ACT scores after modeling showed test scores predicted campus success and that lower-resource students were less likely to report scores under test-optional regimes. She defended Dartmouth’s response to the October 2023–24 Middle East protests — enforcing rules against encampments and speaker disruptions — and said the board backed her through faculty censure and a student no-confidence vote; she points to a rise in free-expression rankings (from the 'bottom 200s' to 35th) as evidence the approach 'aged well.' On technology and student welfare, Bylock emphasized Dartmouth’s AI history and launched partnerships with Anthropic and AWS, piloting 'Evergreen' — a mental-health chatbot built from Therobot clinical research (Nicholas Jacobson) — to augment, not replace, human services. She also highlighted Dartmouth’s rural-health footprint, financial-aid commitments (free tuition for families ≤$175,000; need-blind, meet-full-need), and recent philanthropy (a $25 million gift for Dialogues). Throughout the interview she and host Stephen Dubner agreed on the importance of converging evidence and open debate, though they briefly diverged on campus reactions to AI; overall Bylock’s narrative ties her psychological research, administrative choices, and institutional reforms to a single goal: make Dartmouth a demonstrable model for renewing trust in American universities.