A university president makes a case against cowardice

So far the fight/not fight decisions can be predicted in advanced based on whether an institution has a medical center with NIH grants.

And if they hire the right alumni lobbyists - major reason why you don't hear about Dartmouth in the news [0] despite a similarly active student activism scene.

Most other private universities could have easily managed the relationship, but a mix of inertia and vindictiveness from certain alumni (eg. Ackman) messed it up.

Mind you, Dartmouth is also kind of unique in that their alumni relations team actually TRY to maintain a relationship. The other high prestige colleges (excluding USC) ignore you until they need to hit fundraising KPIs.

A Tuck or Dartmouth College grad will always fight for an alum if they make it to the shortlist - most other Ivy grads don't (Wharton kinda, but that's only for Wharton). This really helps build loyalty.

[0] - https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/19/trump-is-bombarding...

And NSF grants?

He states in the interview that Wesleyan has NIH grants. They are preparing to let scientists go if it comes to it.

Dartmouth is smaller and has, historically, had a stronger and more intense ongoing alumni connection in various ways than is probably the norm with the Ivies in general.

Wesleyan does not have a medical center and according to the NIH’s public reporting, they have under $2 million in NIH grants, compared to $600 million for Columbia. (Edited from $400 million, which is the value cut.)

Wesleyan has a $250 million operating budget, so the (from what REPORTER indicates) $1.6 million in NIH funding represents 0.6% of their budget. In contrast, the $600 million in NIH funding to Columbia represents about 10% of its $6 billion operating budget.

So both in terms of absolute numbers and relative numbers, the NIH contributions to Wesleyan are de minimis.

Dartmouth is also famously the "conservative" Ivy.

I’m not familiar with the NSF funding mechanisms or how people track NSF funding. Not saying NSF is not relevant, just that I’m not using it for my personal heuristic right now.

More "conservative" than Columbia but still fairly liberal - the overwhelming majority of students backed Harris [0] and support abortion rights [1]

The Israel-Palestine protests (which sparked this whole university culture war issue) were fairly active at Dartmouth as well, but messaging around it was better handled by their admin.

The only conservative-ish and kinda prestigious college (not university) I can think of is Claremont McKenna, but they are drowned out within the larger Claremont community.

[0] - https://www.thedartmouth.com/article/2024/11/2024-election-a...

[1] - https://www.thedartmouth.com/article/2023/11/2023-election-s...

> Dartmouth is smaller

Yale and Dartmouth are similar in student body size, yet Yale has been hit by investigations [0] while Dartmouth has been spared.

[0] - https://www.ed.gov/about/news/press-release/office-civil-rig...

Fair enough. Yale has more/bigger grad schools--though Dartmouth has tended to expand in that respect (though it doesn't have a law school).

https://dellweb.bfa.nsf.gov/awdlst2/default.asp shows the NSF funding for Wesleyan.

You can drill down and infer some of the details about the funding programs.

Thank you. So, another de minimis amount ($1.8 million): it's not exactly zero, but it's just about as much as their NIH support. Columbia, as a comparator, gets $100 million in NSF funding.

I also found a DOE grant, about $800K.

I think this is the full list, NIH looks like a subset of overall HHS funding, and NSF is the actual single largest (around $2.5M)

https://ncsesdata.nsf.gov/profiles/site?method=report&tin=U3...

Wesleyan falls into a really weird bucket: a private liberal arts university, generally considered a "little Ivy" with a modest, slightly better than its competitors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ivies) in terms of research clout. The impact of losing all scientific federal funding would be noticeable, but presumably, not fatal; I don't think they structured the operating costs of the university to be dependent on federal research funding like many other schools.

I grew up at Wesleyan- both my parents worked there, it paid for my university education, gave me access to the internet in the 1980s (via NSF funding), and gave me insight into liberal education, all of which prepared me to go off to a California university, maximize my education, and deploy that into my career. I think many people don't recognize the intense second order effects (mostly positive) of federal funding of research.

That makes a strong case for academic institutions not being substantially dependent on government research dollars.

The way I saw the Columbia protests was that Donny's trial was downtown, and because it was not televised, producers told their crews to stop filming the doors to the courthouse. So, looking for any story at all, they took the subway uptown to the hippies camping out on the quad. Hey, at least it's better than literally staring at a door, right? Next thing you know, the student protest thing blew up. Why? Because there was literally nothing else going on for the TV news crews to film those days. Soon as graduation happened and the trial wrapped up, we never heard another thing.

Dartmouth, sure, it may have a high energy protest scene and be smart and whatever. But no-one knows about it - not because they are crafty - but because it's in freakin Hanover.

No it doesn’t. The First amendment is supposed to prevent the government from conditionalizing access to government services based on the speech of the recipient. Private institutions are not subject to such restrictions. If we want to encourage academic freedom, we want to find this behavior by the government to be illegal.

> we want to find this behavior by the government to be illegal

of course we do - but we're sadly discovering how easy it is for the government to target and coerce these universities, with nobody stepping up to stop them

So we want universities to get their funding from private sources that are expressly entitled to impose the same kind of conditions? Or do we want universities to spend more time and overhead on cobbling their funding together from a large number of intellectually and morally diverse sources? Where will these sources get their money without the power of taxation?

If you're going to resort to Constitutional arguments, you shouldn't gloss over the fact that the federal government is supposed to be one of enumerated powers, and there's no 'bribing universities to do what you want' federal power.

What do you think that 10% of budget is paying for that the university is spending on? It's more or less paying for the building and all that goes into it for the research that the NIH called for grant proposals to happen in. This is the entire idiocy about indirect benefits. Yes, paying for the building is not spending money directly on research. But you can't exactly do lab work without a lab building you know.

Dartmouth's time may still come. Brown is apparently about to be targeted next. Trump is clearly not done yet.

Unfortunately, that's not true. Article 1 gives congress very broad budgetary powers. Basically congress can spend money how they want, including bribing universities.

It's nice to be against something, but incomplete to uselessness if you are leaving out your alternative suggestion(s). They will always be dependent on someone.

If you were to go the most direct route, you might want to let the actual "customers", the students, pay for it all, delayed until they have a job of course?

A different version of student loans, it's the university itself that lets them study for free to collect later. I have no idea how that would turn out, I'm sure there would be so many different cases, impossible for me to tell what this would mean and look like.

The biggest problem I can see right away is that it's probably going to increase inequality between institutions. Ever more sorting of the rich and the poor into different places, with huge disparity of funding. So, probably a terrible idea unless the goal is dystopia.

Which leads me back to my question: What is your alternative? I think the government is better than pretty much all others. Private donors are quite problematic to rely on, and you only get the 1% to have even more power over education.

It's ironic that we're re-discovering this in 2025, it was pretty transparent in the late 1960s and early 70s, to students protesting their govt-funded universities' involvements in supporting the Vietnam War. The demands of students back then involved withdrawing from govt-funded grants and programs.

If you take money from an entity, you become an extension of that entity.

It depends on your understanding of Article 1 Section 8:

>"The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;"

What does "general Welfare" mean in this context? Are those words just meaningless filler, or should they be interpreted to indicate that the spending must be in furtherance of another specifically enumerated power? I believe the latter (Madisonian take), but this is a contentious subject:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxing_and_Spending_Clause#Gen...

I don't think the first amendment protects this. The first amendment protects against prosecution from speech. In this case, they are not being prosecuted, they are just being denied funding. Where are you getting that the "First amendment is supposed to prevent the government from conditionalizing access to government services based on the speech of the recipient." It does not state that at all

I have fond memories of the game MacWesleyan. I wonder how true the depiction of campus was.