Talking leadership: Sian Beilock on encouraging difficult conversations

Sian Beilock is not interested in a comfortable life. The president of Dartmouth College wants students and academics to have difficult conversations and experts to push back against her ideas.

Since taking the helm at the Ivy League institution last summer, Beilock has launched an initiative called Dartmouth Dialogues, aimed at facilitating conversations that “bridge political and personal divides”. As part of that mission, the university has partnered with national non-profit StoryCorps to bring together two undergraduates with different political beliefs for a conversation – “not to debate politics, but simply to interview each other and get to know one another as people”, according to the university’s website.

“The students who have participated in StoryCorps just have rave reviews,” says Beilock, who was previously president of Barnard College at Columbia University. “Finding common humanity in each other, understanding that differences of opinion are ok [and that] it’s ok to be uncomfortable in those spaces is really important.”

And she isn’t afraid to practise what she preaches. She admits that she makes “mistakes all the time” in her job as president, and she seeks criticism from “people who have expertise in areas I’m working in or trying to understand”.

“I often go to the people who are going to give me the most negative feedback to try to understand how I can improve,” she says.

“That’s uncomfortable, and so it’s a little bit like what we’re doing with StoryCorps where students are having uncomfortable conversations with people who they don’t see eye to eye with. But I think they come out better for it.”

Beilock’s approach to leading a university is informed by her own research. A cognitive scientist, she is a leading expert on the brain science behind “choking under pressure” in business, education and sport, having written a book and delivered a TED Talk on the topic. Her latest research focuses on success in mathematics and science for women and girls, and on how performance anxiety can either be exacerbated or alleviated by teachers, parents and peers.

Perhaps then, it is no surprise that one of her priorities at Dartmouth, alongside encouraging difficult conversations, is mental health.

“In order to be able to have these difficult conversations with each other you have to feel OK about yourself. My own research has shown that when people are really anxious they tend to not want to do things that make them more anxious. And we know it’s hard to have conversations with people you openly disagree with,” she says.

She adds that many higher education institutions “talk about mental health as sitting next to academic excellence, or something you think about as an afterthought, but we’ve really taken a different viewpoint that it’s central to excellence”.

To reflect that, Dartmouth recently hired its inaugural chief health and wellness officer – a member of the senior management team who is responsible for health and wellness across the entire university, from “making sure we have enough counselling hours” to “helping our students get involved in mindfulness” and “being in the outdoors”.

“What is really important to get across…is that perfection is not the goal…We all make mistakes all the time. We’re all messing up. The goal is then to learn from that and move forward,” she says.

Source: 

Robert Gill/Dartmouth

Last autumn, the university hosted US surgeon general Vivek Murthy and his seven living predecessors for a panel discussion on the future of mental health and wellness.

“One of the things that I thought was so exciting about this was that it was across the political spectrum – whether it was the surgeon general for Bush or Trump or Obama or Clinton, they were all on the stage talking about the importance of mental health,” says Beilock.

Another of her priorities is promoting diversity in STEM. Last year, Beilock – along with the president of Indiana University – formed a consortium of the six US research universities that had both female presidents and female deans of engineering (the others were Brown, Rochester, Berkeley and the University of Washington).

The so-called Edge consortium aims to leverage the $280 billion (£220 billion) CHIPS and Science Act – a 2022 law that aims to boost US competitiveness, innovation and national security in the global semiconductor industry – to encourage more women and people of colour to go into semiconductor-related careers. A mentorship programme connects students with industry professionals and top academics “that reflect the diversity of the STEM workforce we seek to create”, while the group is also expanding student access to internships and job opportunities.

Dartmouth was the first comprehensive research university in the US to achieve gender parity in engineering at the undergraduate level, back in 2016, so Beilock says it is well placed to be leading on this work.

A key part of the initiative is explaining what “being in the semiconductor field is all about” and the “value of working in those spaces”. Beilock is also keen to ensure that engineering courses are not “weed-out courses” – those that are so intense and rigorous that only the highest-performing students can progress – as is typical in many STEM majors.

“At Dartmouth you can go into engineering through design thinking [for example], through classes that get you to think about design rather than just a calculus class. And it turns out that when you go into engineering that way, you’re more likely to attract women and people who haven’t typically been in those fields,” she says.

Beilock herself is used to breaking down gender barriers. When she took over at Dartmouth, much was made of the fact that she was the first female president in the institution’s 254-year history.

Are we right to draw attention to those kinds of markers or – as suggested by former Penn State president Eric Barron when his successor Neeli Bendapudi was appointed – does this do women a disservice?

“It’s an interesting question about whether just drawing attention to it leads to more pressure or not,” says Beilock.

“I think it’s here, it’s part of the Dartmouth institution, which was an all-male institution for a long time, and I think it shows that Dartmouth continues to evolve, which is really important. Certainly, there’s research showing that women are often held to a higher standard in leadership roles and I think that doesn’t change whether you draw attention to the fact I’m a woman or not.”

When Beilock started the job, six of the eight Ivy Leagues were led by women. She is now one of just three female presidents in the group, following the high-profile resignations of the Pennsylvania and Harvard leaders. Elizabeth Magill and Claudine Gay were both criticised by Republican members of Congress and leading institutional donors for being too lenient with students protesting against Israel’s killing of Palestinian civilians.

Cornell’s president also announced her retirement in May; while Martha Pollack did not give a specific reason for her decision, she said she had been regularly contemplating the move since December, when students criticising Israel’s military assault on Gaza occupied a central administration building and staged a mock trial that accused her of complicity because of Cornell’s academic collaborations with Israel.

Like many US campuses, Dartmouth was the site of a pro-Palestinian student protest this year. But, as reported in The New York Times, the university stood out for its almost instantaneous response to the non-violent protest. Just two hours after students had pitched an encampment on the college green, Beilock authorised police to take action and more than 90 students were arrested.

By contrast, other universities called in police after several days of protests, sometimes only after they became violent, or they struck agreements with their student protesters.

All approaches have faced criticism, but what was the thought process behind Beilock’s decision-making?

“We’ve been very clear about our policies and the fact that we really support free speech and protest is fine but always the safety and security of our campus is what’s most important. And encampments to the extent that they take over shared space for one particular ideology is not free speech,” she says.

However, Beilock has encouraged discussion on the fraught topic. Starting just two days after the Hamas terrorist attacks last October, Dartmouth’s faculty of Jewish studies and Middle Eastern studies came together to “have a series of open conversations about the Middle East”.

“They were willing to do it publicly, to broadcast it live, and model what it means to talk across divides. We have several classes and speakers that continue to push that,” she says.

Beilock acknowledges that it is a “really interesting, exciting and difficult time to be leading in higher education”. She is only a year into her presidency, but what does she hope to achieve during her tenure?

“When I think about what Dartmouth is, our purpose is to train the next generation of leaders and they’re going to run our democracy,” she says.

“And our goal is to find students from the broadest swath of society who are excelling where they are and bring them in and give them the tools to learn how to think, not what to think, to learn to have dialogue across differences, to learn to get help when they need it and to think about their own mental health. And then go out and lead the world.”

ellie.bothwell@timeshighereducation.com

This is part of our “Talking leadership” series with the people running the world’s top universities about how they solve common strategic issues and implement change. Follow the series here.

The World University Rankings 2025 will be published on 9 October.