While presidents at Columbia, Penn, and Harvard were ousted during the Gaza protest wave, Beilock held the line at Dartmouth by enforcing clear, pre-stated rules — and her board backed her. Leading by principle, not popularity, is what kept her standing.
Where this was said
At 12:40 · chapter starts 11:20
Three years into her Dartmouth tenure, Beilock identifies restoring trust in higher education as her primary mission and frames Dartmouth as a potential model for how to do it. Her first exhibit: the SAT. After COVID, Dartmouth became the first Ivy to reinstate standardized test requirements [1] — Sian Beilock "The test-optional era hurt the students it was supposed to help. Low-income students were less likely to submit strong scores, and Dartmout…" 09:27 , and Beilock walks through the counterintuitive data behind the decision. The assumption that the SAT disadvantages low-income students was complicated by Dartmouth's own findings — that when tests were optional, lower-income students with strong scores were less likely to submit them, masking their talent. She cites Raj Chetty's Harvard research showing that family resources help with exactly the non-quantitative factors test-optional policies elevated, like summer experiences and recommendation letters. The result: most Ivy Plus peers followed Dartmouth's lead, with Columbia becoming the last to restore testing.
Dartmouth Dialogues launched after October 7th, modeled on faculty in Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies who held open forums for dialogue rather than protests within days of the Hamas attacks.
When Beilock arrived at Dartmouth, it ranked in the bottom 200 for free expression. It's now ranked 35th nationally, with students two standard deviations above the mean in tolerating speakers across the political spectrum.
Dartmouth's free expression ranking from FIRE improved from the bottom 200-something to 35th nationally after Beilock's reforms.
A baseball-playing junior who learned about compound interest now wants to quit the sport to start working and investing. George says let him decide and own it. Jade says team sports build something a job can't replace — try doing both during off-season first before making the call permanent.
May is 33, carries $69K in combined household debt, and wants to spend 11–13 years training to become a forensic pathologist at $14K/year in tuition. The prerequisite is non-negotiable: zero debt before a single class. Then, with the spouse earning $4,500/month and able to run the household debt-free, cash-flowing medical school is genuinely possible.
Kavak launched the Jedi Academy, an internal program where every employee — from CEO to mechanics — completes a 6-week training and ships a production-ready AI agent. The message to staff was blunt: train and adapt, or this may not be the right place for you.
The worst AI outcome for young people isn't cheating on homework. It's that passive, mindless consumption strips away the motivation and agency their brains need to develop. The second worst outcome is banning AI from classrooms entirely. The winning path is giving students AI-powered agency.
Prompting AI effectively is a skill that should be taught in K-12. The best prompter in history? Socrates. His method of relentlessly asking precise questions to uncover truth is exactly what powerful AI interaction looks like — and schools should explicitly teach it.
When ChatGPT launched in November 2022, Fei-Fei Li's first move was to email her child's elementary school principal and offer to lecture teachers and students. No investor or tech company did that. Teachers are scared, forgotten, and lectured at — and if they're not helped, neither are the kids.
After the KSI show exposed how hard physical comedy really is, Andrew Santino sincerely proposed doing a semester at clown school in France. Bobby agreed. This is apparently a real plan.
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Sunk costs are gifts from your former self — and like all gifts, you're allowed to decline them. Godin reframes every stuck-due-to-sunk-cost situation as a single question: knowing what you know now, would you choose this again?
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