Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you all for joining me for our annual meeting of the general faculty, and my third State of Dartmouth address. I truly appreciate everyone taking the time to be here.
I thought for a long time about how I wanted to begin today. I’ve been here for two and a half years now. I can tell you sincerely: I wake up every day even more enthused, more energized than I was on my first day here (ok, most days). There is so much we have accomplished and are accomplishing together, and I want to speak to all of that today.
But I also stand here recognizing: We’ve been challenged over the past two years in difficult ways; unprecedented ways.
I’ve spent my entire adult life in higher education, as I know many of you have as well. I can’t tell you how many times over the years I’ve heard that our institutions are at an “inflection point.” The confluence of forces in this moment truly feels different.
We face questions about our ability to navigate debate, especially in the wake of war in the Middle East, a funding model that is under siege by new technologies and A.I. entering our classrooms and lecture halls and of course, challenges to our academic freedom. Above it all: More Americans than ever question the value of what we do. Ten years ago, in a Gallup survey of Americans, a robust majority said they had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education. Today only one-third of Americans feel the same way.
Facing those challenges and this moment requires clarity. Clarity of our mission; clarity of what we are here to do; clarity of how we should be evaluated as institutions.
Today I want to emphasize the importance of that clarity.
I want to share with you what I expressed to Secretary McMahon and her partners in the federal government, a few weeks ago, in response to their proposed “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” — after deep consultation with our Board of Trustees, faculty leadership of all of our schools, and many different members of our community.
I told her that we have a responsibility to the American people.
That we should be held accountable for the results. That we should be judged and evaluated — not by rankings, or endowments but by whether we’re creating the knowledge and the leaders who will change the world and elevate humanity.
But I also made clear: If we are to be held accountable if we are to be evaluated on those results then we must be empowered to lead.
We must be the ones who make the important decisions — on our direction and our values. Not government or anyone else.
We must be the ones who can go where our research takes us; who can teach what needs to be taught. Not government or anyone else.
We must be allowed to fulfill our mission.
I know everyone in this room accepts that responsibility and that challenge.
What will guide us are our mission and values, as they always have.
I believe it is important to be clear that the primary mission of higher education is to educate. We as an institution are not a political organization that exclusively follows the ideals of one political party or another. As an institution, we are also not an advocacy organization. Those are important, yes. But colleges and universities have a different role. We exist to be beacons of knowledge, pursuit, and discovery, which means we have to be a place where people in our community feel free to hold different views, express different political positions and advocate for different causes.
In recent years there are too many examples of schools getting away from this basic idea.
Educating means exposing our students to different viewpoints, bringing in speakers from across the political spectrum — and yet we have seen schools — including this one in the past — cancel speakers or shut down debate.
Educating means encouraging students to influence humanity across the full breadth of futures available to them — and yet we see schools, especially elite ones like Dartmouth, who have tailored career support to finance and consulting, rather than broadening that support to allow all our students--especially first-generation, low-income students--fully embrace the full range of the liberal arts that we offer.
Educating means creating a campus with diversity of all kinds, including socioeconomic diversity — and yet we have seen schools year after year raise the cost on middle-class families, and make a higher education more unaffordable than it has ever been.
The list goes on.
And yet we are proving here at Dartmouth, every day that there is indeed another way forward.
We can show the world what it looks like when one of the best institutions on earth doubles down on its academic mission.
Throughout this past year I’ve had a chance to meet with so many of you — whether informally through dinners at my house or Tuesday faculty lunches at FOCO or more formally through regular engagement with faculty members in the Arts and Sciences through Committee of Chairs, CPr, CAP and COP (who I have convened multiple times on short notice for advice), or faculty leadership at Geisel, Tuck, and Thayer. I also meet every two weeks with CIPr (a cross-university faculty group), which seeks input from faculty governing bodies across the schools. CIPR has been very helpful in sharpening my thinking.
I see these meetings and conversations, even when we disagree, as a positive thing. More than that, this input has fueled my thinking. That we can redefine success — not simply by prestige, or rankings, or endowment size — but by the knowledge we contribute to society and the caliber of leaders we produce.
By now I believe everyone is familiar with our five areas of strategic focus: Mental Health and Wellbeing. Climate and the Energy Transition. Dialogue. Career design, or what we call Lifelong Dartmouth. And Innovation and impact. In each and every one of those areas we are leading, because of the efforts of those in this room.
On Mental Health and Wellbeing: We recognized from the beginning this was the foundation of our academic mission.
When our young people are confident enough to take risks; healthy enough to have conversations with others from different backgrounds and perspectives; comfortable enough to lead those who are different that is how we create leaders.
When we launched Commitment To Care two years ago, we knew change would begin at the grassroots level.
Today we have more than 700 faculty, staff, and alums — including many here today — who have stepped up, and are now trained in mental health first aid.
We’ve hosted 14,000 sessions at UWill, the new teletherapy service we launched last year.
We’ve provided more tailored care — with same-day crisis availability and our partnership with Therapists of Color New England to expand support for students of color.
We’re showing the world what new solutions can look like. I think of the work of Dartmouth researchers, led by Professor Nicholas Jacobson, on the first-ever clinical trial of a generative, AI-powered therapy chatbot, TheraBot, which has shown significant improvements in reducing symptoms of anxiety and depression — results that were published in March in the New England Journal of Medicine.
And how that in turn has informed the development of Evergreen, a new digital health platform — conceived BY students, FOR students, under the guidance of Nick as well as professors Lisa Marsch and Andrew Campbell. What started with an idea, borne out of deep research, has led to more than 100,000 hours of student-curated, expert-reviewed therapeutic dialogue, that will train the AI language model and power the tool. This is an opt-in platform that will meet young people where they are, taking their own data on exercise, sleep stress and giving it back to them as a tool they can use to support their own mental health. It’s up to our students if and when they use it - which is in line with a long history of Dartmouth students leading their own way.
One additional point on health and wellness, none of the above matters if we can’t address one of the single biggest factors in this space: housing. We’ve taken significant steps forward on the most ambitious housing plan in our history — supporting faculty, students, and staff, and fully paid for by fundraising. This is a tractable problem that we will solve, and we’re well on our way to our 1000 beds goal I laid out at my inauguration. By 2028 we will have built over 700 new beds on West Wheelock for undergraduates, be in a position to return North Park to graduate students and have finished our first of many faculty/staff new developments. Importantly these housing projects are net neutral to our operating budget, meaning they don’t take money away from our salaries and programs.
We are starting to see change happen across our community. Whether that’s housing springing up, or student sentiment. From our Healthy Minds survey we know that the percentage of students at risk for moderate to severe depression has dropped from 33% in 2021 to 24% in 2024. Risk for moderate to severe anxiety has decreased 4%. And also encouraging: the number of students who agree that Dartmouth prioritizes student mental health has risen dramatically - from 44% in 2021 to 73% in 2024, nearly a 30-point increase. We know we have significant work still ahead — but we are on the right path.
On our second area, Climate and the Energy Transition: We set off two years ago with ambitious goals.
Today we can say: We’ve gone from the bottom quartile of the Ivies in our carbon reduction goals, to one of the most aspirational schools in our peer set, led by our $500 million investment in the Dartmouth Climate Collaborative.
We are conducting the research — research that’s informing global climate models, flood risk adaptation, Arctic ice melt, energy transition, and more.
We are modeling the solutions — installing solar above our buildings, drilling geo-exchange wells beneath us and moving from steam to hot water to heat and cool our buildings. And above all we’re thinking about energy and climate in the interdisciplinary way it demands. I see that everywhere:
The Climate Futures Initiative, co-taught by our Earth Sciences professors Carl Renshaw and Erich Osterberg, which is connecting students with local community organizations to address real-world climate challenges.
Our collaboration with the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, CRREL — where faculty members like Jifeng Liu and Emily Asenath-Smith are doing great research on energy materials and ice adhesion, looking to improve energy efficiency in cold regions
And our leadership at Climate Week 2025, just over a month ago in New York — which included a panel led by Institute of Arctic Studies Director Melody Brown Burkins on Indigenous knowledge in the region; as well as a case study, led by Biological Sciences Professor Caitlin Hicks, on our Dartmouth Skiway — and how the broader ski industry can become a model for reducing emissions
On Career Design, or what we call Lifelong Dartmouth — we are poised to create the kind of modern, relevant experience that meets this moment.
One where every undergraduate student — from the second they get here as a freshman — is not just looking for an internship, but is planning their full career, exploring different paths, and understanding the opportunities in front of them.
Many of you already know Joe Catrino, our Inaugural Executive Director of the Center, who is overseeing this work. He recently reported that we’ve seen:
A 23% increase in attendance at Center for Career Design events from 2023
An 11% increase, year over year, in unique students appointments being made at the Center — which tells us we’re bringing in more and more students for the first time, starting new relationships
And the big kicker — we have seen a 350% increase in funded internships for the Fall term, with a parallel increase in the range and variety of careers being explored
With $25 million raised for internship endowments (and 5M to go), we are on the path to an internship becoming a universal part of the Dartmouth experience — no matter what industry you’re interested in, or your financial ability. And we won’t stop until we get there. Our vision is for every Dartmouth student--in all our schools, regardless of background or interests--to be supported as they connect their studies with their next step beyond Dartmouth.
This is all part of a larger effort across our institution. At Guarini: This past year we launched GuariniGRAD, a new initiative to support our graduate students and postdocs — bringing everything together into one centralized platform, and offering more opportunities for alumni connection, mentorship, and career exploration. At Tuck, experiences like the First-Year Project continue to push our MBA candidates to explore careers across industries, with myTUCK offering the same kind of centralized platform. And at Thayer, Career Services continues to prioritize diversity of experience and perspective in helping our engineering students find their best path forward. Across Dartmouth: Our goal is to set students up for the widest possible range of careers.
Our fourth area, Dialogue, is one you have heard me speak about since my earliest days on campus.
Dialogue is what happens in your classrooms everyday. I truly believe our teacher/scholar model creates the conditions for faculty to push students to think from different angles, perspectives, histories and frames. And, our campus and community is eager to engage. Over the past year, we’ve had nearly 15,000 people attend a Dartmouth Dialogues event on topics from the Middle East, to immigration, to polarization in America, to Democratic socialism vs. capitalism. We’ve welcomed speakers from Mike Pence to Anita Hill to John Fetterman. We’ve created space for students with different backgrounds to come together, get to know each other, and see the other’s point of view. Last year we reached one million people globally, as we spread the word about our Dialogues programming.
We adopted our policy of institutional restraint — a policy recommended by a faculty/staff working group and our steering committee of the general faculty. I know it's easy to think about restraint as silence, but I believe this policy promotes the opposite. The policy compels us to speak when it comes to our core values and our mission. We have done that time and time again and again this year, as we have joined ongoing legal efforts to protect federal funding for transformative research and the decades-long partnership with the government, joined an amicus brief in support of Harvard, and also been clear that we don’t believe a compact with universities and the federal government - whether it is a republican or democratic led white house - is appropriate. We must be responsible for our path, trajectory and outcomes.
Yet on issues which do not affect our core academic mission, we recognize that the institution has a different role to play. To be a place of intellectual inquiry that allows for broad questioning and dialogue and to not tip the scale in one direction as it could silence others.
I want to thank all of those who participated in our Dialogues efforts in so many ways — whether that is leading a Dialogues event yourself; suggesting a topic or session; modeling these skills in your own lecture halls and classrooms; or participating in the faculty group, led by Jennifer Rosales, last year, which paved the way for this work.
What’s truly incredible about what we’re seeing thus far is the positive cycle that is being created. In a recent all-campus survey for undergraduates (with 845 undergraduates responding, over a 20% response rate), 85% of Dartmouth students express confidence in their ability to engage respectfully with differing viewpoints. 66% of our incoming students said our approach to dialogue was a significant reason why they chose Dartmouth over elite institutions.
And, we want to make sure that everyone who chooses Dartmouth can come. It's why we are putting affordability across all our programs front and center. At the undergraduate level, we are one of a handful of schools that is universally need-blind. 1/3 of Dartmouth students have free tuition. The average Dartmouth grant is $71,000. And at a time college tuition costs are soaring nationally, it is now actually cheaper than it was a decade ago for lower- and middle-income families to attend Dartmouth. In our last several undergraduate classes:
- 22% of eligible U.S. citizens are Pell Grant recipients, an all-time high
- 20% are from rural backgrounds
- Almost half of all students receive need-based scholarship aid (47%)
And, we are seeing increased support at other schools as well. At Tuck, for example, they have recently succeeded in raising $125M for scholarships.
Our goal is to create a diverse community on campus because diversity, in all its forms, is essential to our academic mission. This comes by ensuring one’s finances are not an impediment to attending Dartmouth. It also comes by supporting different perspectives, cultures and people. In May, we publicly launched our Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life — a place that will be one of the most important hubs in all of higher-ed for Black scholarship, culture, and thought with different perspectives, courses, artists, and research that helps us understand our imperfect history. The Institute brings voices to the table that aren’t always heard to ensure a better present and future.
This summer, we celebrated the second year of our Tribal Leadership Academy — which is not just honoring Dartmouth’s founding commitment, but is training Indigenous leaders — and we have stated our goal to establish a new Tribal Sovereignty Institute at Dartmouth over the coming year.
And we continue to build out Dartmouth Next, our cross-university initiative focused on bringing the broadest range of talent to STEM disciplines. Whether it’s endowing the Dartmouth Science Teaching Fellows founded by Lee Witters or the Emerging Engineering program in Thayer as we did this summer, we are committed to ensuring that students who have interest in STEM can thrive.
Which brings me to our fifth and final area — Innovation to Impact.
We are standing on the same ground today where some of the world’s great academic, medical, and technological breakthroughs have occurred.
Go back to 1956, when we coined the term “artificial intelligence” or the 60s, when a mathematician named John Kemeny changed the world from the basement of College Hall, developing BASIC programming language alongside brilliant students or the 1980s, when Dartmouth immunologists paved the way for the antibody research we do today or when our professors and researchers discovered the spike protein that would lead to the mRNA vaccine, and save millions of lives.
I could not be more proud of what we’ve done these past two years, in applying that same spirit of innovation and impact across our entire institution.
Professors Peter Orner, Vievee Francis, and Thomas O’Malley — who put together a bold vision to connect writers across genres, and spearheaded the launch of our new Literary Arts Bridge — which is going to foster collaboration, lead to new programs, and enrich our Arts District for years to come that is innovation and impact.
Professor Daryl Press, and everyone in the departments of government, history, economics and Tuck and The Dickey Center who contributed to the creation of the Davidson Institute for Global Security — leveraging the incredible relationships our faculty have, putting our students in the shoes of the world’s most important decisionmakers, across international diplomacy, economics, and politics that is innovation and impact.
Professors Ash Fure and César Alvarez, and the team at Guarini, creating our first-ever Master of Fine Arts Program, an MFA in Sonic Practice, which is a game-changer — giving composers, artists and scholars three years to deeply explore sound, and a new, custom-built studio to do it in that is innovation and impact.
And I want to highlight our entire team at Rocky — including Professor Jason Barabas for their work and creativity in fostering cross-cutting dialogue, in their speaker series, ongoing programming efforts, and Law and Democracy Series around the nation’s bicentennial. That work, too, is innovation and impact.
We are creating a culture of innovation and impact in all we do. The question I want to be front-and-center for everyone in this room is: Where do we need to lead next?
I want to tell you about three topics under the innovation to impact area of focus that are on my mind right now.
The first is research.
We are in a rapidly changing landscape, as you all know. For three quarters of a century, the federal government has partnered with academic institutions — especially elite ones like ours — to fuel discoveries that have changed the world and saved lives.
That model is now being rethought. There are those on all sides of the political spectrum who have their opinions on this shift, as a matter of public policy.
What I can tell you is what I believe it means for us — and what I believe we’re called on to do at this moment.
That begins with making clear what we have said from Day One, and I said again earlier: That government overreach into our academic mission is not acceptable. That no one — not a Republican Administration, not a Democratic Administration, not anyone — should dictate what we teach or research.
At the same time we can recognize that we, too, must evolve to meet this moment. We can build a more nimble, more dynamic system — one that is supporting our scholars, researchers, and innovators from early ideation to achieving significant impact.
This means better connecting every part of our community — supporting basic research that sparks inventions and, where appropriate, taking these inventions to licensing and commercial markets. It means creating a virtuous cycle — where revenues from past innovations are then reinvested to help create the next great discovery right here.
We are well-positioned to create exactly the type of system I’m describing. In Pitchbook’s ranking of the most entrepreneurial alumni bases, based on start-up founders and companies created — Dartmouth is fourth nationally and sixth globally, for schools under 15,000 in enrollment. We are second in the Ivies and 23rd in the world for research cited in patent applications, and rank especially high in development of high-impact patents — for global universities of any size.
Now is the moment to go further - on basic research that leads to innovation and impact as well as areas where we contribute to society by leading in thought, policy and creation. Working with your deans and the provost, here are some of the research areas we see Dartmouth planting a flag and investing in over the next 5 years:
- Rural Health and Society
- Economy, Democracy, and Security
- Neuroscience and Mental Health
- Biomolecular Design
- Cultivating Creativity - across the arts and humanities
- And: Climate, Energy, and Cold Regions
To expand on just one of these areas, take Rural Health and Society: We have been shaped by the rural communities around us in the Upper Valley, where so many of our co-workers, students, and neighbors call home. The CDC tells us, plain and simple: people in rural areas are more likely to die from heart and respiratory disease, stroke, cancer, accidents — you name it. It is a crisis — and it is one Dartmouth has always played a direct role in addressing.
We are proud to be the most rural academic medical center, caring for patients in 5 states. As of right now, among all U.S. medical schools: Geisel is in the top 10% of medical schools in terms of percentage of recent graduates who start their practice in rural areas. Our National Cancer Institute-designated cancer center is the only comprehensive care center located in a rural area. We also run one of the few federally funded clinical and translational science institutes dedicated to improving rural health and healthcare. And through our Levy Health Care Delivery Incubator today we are on the forefront of building a more equitable system, focusing on improving outcomes and reducing costs, while tackling the most difficult challenges in delivery. But there is more to be done.
Building on our deep engagement in rural northern New England and capitalizing on our ability to work across divisions and schools because of our size and scale, we have an opportunity to be at the epicenter of the intertwined challenges of health, economics, and social well‑being across rural America. Whether it's work like that of professors like Michele Tine or Emily Walton, in our Sociology Department, who have helped the world better understand the dynamics and challenges in rural communities. Or renewed collaborations with communities and policymakers that can help us generate evidence to narrow health gaps and strengthen civic trust. Or the fact that ⅓ of our Thayer faculty are focused in the medical fields. We want to do more.
For each of the six research areas I mentioned above, we have an opportunity to connect across the university, invest more, and have a greater impact on the world
The second topic on my mind under our innovation to impact area of focus is A.I.
As we enter into a year that will mark 70 years since the term “artificial intelligence” was coined right here at a summer conference at Dartmouth. Now we have an opportunity to define what the next 70 years of these technologies look like — in our classrooms, labs, worksites, and society at large.
Under the leadership of our new provost, Santiago Schnell, who many of you have already gotten to know: We have formed an A.I. Faculty Leadership Committee, whose members will consult with their peers, students, and staff to determine a coordinated, strategic approach to A.I. and harnessing its potential in ways that directly support our mission. I want to thank our faculty Co-Chairs, Adam Breuer and Peter Chin, for taking on a leadership role — as well as all 16 members of that Committee, who are forging our path forward. As these technologies evolve every day, we will stay ahead; anticipate where they are going; and make sure we are implementing them - and holding back where appropriate - in a way that directly plays to our strengths. I believe we can center our most essential human talents at Dartmouth while also preparing our students for an increasingly A.I.-present future. We need our faculty to outline what that looks like.
To help in this work, as you know, we have chat.dartmouth.edu that is getting over 20,000 visits a month. It has all the platforms free of charge. Tuck is working with Open A.I., and Thayer has a partnership with Nvidia. We also have a new partnership with Anthropic which we will announce later this year. This non-exclusive partnership gives us an opportunity - our teachers, scholars and students - to learn what Anthropic is working on and also help shape human-centered AI that is empirically grounded, transparent, and safe. For those who think AI has no place on a campus, I encourage you to work with this committee to dialogue and push on your concerns. For those who want to embrace it, engage as well. Just as we did 70 years ago, Dartmouth has the ability to shape the future.
Finally: a third topic under our innovation to impact area that is on my mind is the Arts, where we are embarking on a new era at Dartmouth. We are making the arts more alive, more accessible, and more resonant than they have ever been. That is true at the new Hop — which will give students and visiting performers more space to push boundaries, challenge conventions, and help all of us engage with new perspectives, directly tied to our mission. It is true at the Hood — where we will continue to reimagine, the same way John Stomberg has, what art can be. And it is true all across our campus, where we’ll continue to integrate academics and performance in new ways — creating leaders who are capable of wearing many hats at the same time: whether that is through athletics, or playing in a band, or doing improv all at the same time. That kind of well-rounded skill-set is what Dartmouth does best — and it is essential to creating the kind of leaders that no one else is right now.
In a moment where many are questioning the value of higher education, I believe we have a tremendous opportunity to lead; to step into areas of challenge, directly tied to our strengths, where no one can do what we do. I see incredible work happening all across our community right now:
At our new School of A&S, where we are already seeing new collaborations, with a truly integrated system that has deans, faculty, and staff in the same room, discussing shared issues and enhanced scholarship and student learning.
At Tuck, where we have teacher-scholars like James Siderius and Ron Adner putting forth critical research on the issues of the day, from A.I.’s growing impact on consumerism to corporate experimentation and we continue to expand Tuck’s reach, whether through our Executive Sprint programs or Tuck Bridge, now with hybrid offerings with schools that include Colby, Trinity, Colgate, and Bates.
At Geisel, where students and faculty are using A.I. and the latest technologies to do everything from mitigate brian tumors, to support the mental health of EMS clinicians nationwide.
At Guarini, where our grad students are winning awards for finding vulnerabilities in Google’s security system where professors like Bala Chaudhary are doing phenomenal research into soil microbes and where we have researchers standing up modular robots, just off of campus, that can organize themselves and create a shelter when needed.
At Thayer, where Professor Colin Meyer just received the National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award — the most prestigious honor it has for young teacher-scholars — so he can continue groundbreaking work modeling sea-level rise, and inspire the next generation of Engineers to make a difference.
All of us have a role to play. Together we are building something special. Something that looks different than anywhere else in higher education right now.
An institution where freedom of expression is still protected and essential — where 85% of our students say they’re confident engaging with differing viewpoints, and more than 90% believe “engaging with challenging perspectives” is essential to their education.
An institution where we know diversity is not at odds with meritocracy.
Where we teach people of all ages, from our undergraduates to our adult lifelong learners in programs like the Master of Health Care Delivery Science.
Where we have trust and faith in what we do, and the leaders we produce.
That is special. it is rare.
It is only possible because of the hard work of everyone in this room; the way you have collaborated and challenged me; each other; our students; and yourselves.
We have put ourselves in this position to lead. Let’s go do it together.
Thank you all for your partnership and teamwork. It’s a privilege to get to work with you and represent this community. And I cannot wait to see what we can do together in the many years that come. Thank you.