680. Can Universities Win Back Our Trust?

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24:49Can you give me just a quick day in the life of you, the Dartmouth president? I don't need every 15-minute increment, but how is the pie generally divided? Do you want from the very early morning? Absolutely. Okay. At 4.45, I wake up and make my 15-year-old breakfast before she goes to play tennis. Oh my goodness. Then I go back to bed. She plays tennis at five. Why can't she make her own breakfast? You know, a lot of people ask me that. I feel like she's so committed and it's nice to sort of be on the team with her. And I only have her for a few more years and I miss her so many nights when I'm at events or traveling.

25:32And so it makes me feel good to do it, but I still complain about it. Do you have a spouse or partner or something too? No, it's just us home together. So I make the breakfast. Got it. Okay. And she's a very serious, committed, competitive tennis player, plainly. I mean, she has aspirations to play tennis at university, so. How's Dartmouth's tennis team? It's pretty good, but she says she wants to go anywhere but Dartmouth. She's 15 and is growing up on campus, so totally understandable. I think we're in agreement about that. You wake up, make breakfast, go back to sleep. Yeah, I get up around 6.30.

26:07I have a trainer or I go on a run. And then I usually work at home for about an hour and then I'm in the office. It can be anything from meeting with my senior team to every week I hold office hours for students at our dining hall where they just can come up and talk to me. I sometimes meet with faculty. I often meet with donors. It's a big part of what I do is raise the philanthropy to do what we do. Are you pretty good at that? I love it. You do? Tell me why. To get to tell the story of the amazing folks on our campus and what they do, I get such a thrill out of that. We just announced a$25 million gift for Dartmouth Dialogues.

26:49And one of the things I've gotten to do is tell the story of our faculty coming together to model how to have dialogue about Israel and Gaza. Or for Dartmouth actually has the largest rural medical system in the country. I've read that and it shocked me. I know that New Hampshire is mostly rural and Dartmouth is a big deal with a really good medical school and hospital, correct? But does that mean you have many outposts of the Dartmouth medical system, essentially? Yeah, and the most rural VA is down the road from us in White River Junction, Vermont. Our doctors and our clinicians and our researchers are really focused on building an economic model of aging at home.

27:30We have some of the best hospitals and technology in the world and some not as good health outcomes. What we know in rural areas is there's often a mismatch between access to care when people come into the hospital and when they can be at home, how they're supported. And we know that a lot of folks who are aging want to age in place but don't have the structure around it. We also know that home health care workers are very much in need and they don't have a very good career path or workforce training system. And with a lot of the advances in AI and the ability to do technological healthcare over the phone, we think we can really build a model system for how to help folks age in place and come into the hospital when they need to, not take beds when they don't, which saves the hospital, saves insurance companies, and leads to a better quality of life.

28:24Have you been surprised by the anti-AI sentiment on campuses at graduation ceremonies? Because I have, honestly. Anyone that brought up AI seemed to get either heckled or booed off the stage. To me, AI is a technology and a topic that I would think most college students would think about really hard and would see potential downsides and a lot of potential upsides and would maybe have that conversation. But it feels very much like the Luddite response from centuries ago. What about you? Yeah, I don't know if I agree with that. And I haven't been surprised because we've seen this on our campus. So Dartmouth actually was in 1956.

29:02We had a summer conference where the term in the field, artificial intelligence, were born. And so we talk about Dartmouth as the birthplace of AI. And now 70 years later, I believe we have a responsibility to talk about what it means to educate humans in the age of AI. And so we, at the beginning of the year, announced a partnership with Anthropic and AWS, one of the first institutions to do that. And I got a lot of pushback then from folks, so I knew that it was there. I think for young people, from my research, we know that you worry a lot, not necessarily when you're doing the scary thing, but when that scary thing is out there, the what-ifs.

29:40And so I think it's OK to be worried and concerned about what's happening, but at the same time push forward and use it to extend your thinking rather than replace it. But I understand why young people are nervous about AI and where it's going.

29:59Dartmouth is currently piloting a chatbot of its own called Evergreen, which students will be able to use to address their mental health. Evergreen grew out of another project called Therabot, whose lead researcher is a Dartmouth scientist named Nicholas Jacobson. You'll hear a lot more about this in an episode we are producing now about psychotherapy and technology. So the idea is that using hundreds of thousands of hours of clinical data, Therabot was the first clinical trial to show benefits for an AI-powered therapist in terms of really helping rural folks connect with humans when they needed it.

30:38and we're adapting that technology on campus and it's not to replace the humans. We have lots of humans who support students, but we know that, for example, during midterms or finals, one of the biggest indicators of anxiety or depressive episodes is sleeping during the day and being up all night or stopping exercise or not talking to your friends and having technology that can both sense that and help people get to the places they need, we believe can be really helpful to student success. I've read some pushback from students. One person writing in the student newspaper wondered why you need to build your own model when LLMs already exist.

31:21Although I'm guessing if you used an existing LLM, they would complain that it wasn't customized to students or to Dartmouth students. And someone else subjected to the potential big energy consumption costs of running yet another LLM. And, you know, these are kind of the anti-AI arguments you see in a number of places, but it seems like a pretty robust program you've built. And I want to know what effects you've seen it having so far on student mental health, especially. We're still testing it right now. We have hundreds of students working on it, actually helping to build the chats and dialogues that the LLMs will use to develop new responses.

31:57I think it's healthy that some people are skeptical of this technology. I think there's also this concern at first that it was going to replace humans, but it is not. I just watched a student demo of it at a presentation a few weeks ago, and the students were so excited about what it could do. They were showing me technology where it was helping a student pick the right classes during the winter term because they liked to be out in the sun during the day and wanted to be able to get to the skiway certain days for their mental health, but also wanted to take an advanced biology class. It's helping augment people's ability to deal with complex problems.

32:37So you're a psychologist by training and wrote a lot of really good and interesting research, of which I'm a fan. I am curious if you take off the university president hat for a minute and look at the data that I know has been examined by, among others, Danny Blanchflower, who's a professor at Dartmouth, an economist who's looked at happiness and satisfaction across many populations across many years. And the consensus seems to be that there is a significant rise in mental illness over the past few decades. It's natural, I think, to wonder maybe whether the measurement is just different or better or if these are really secular spikes.

33:13So tell me what you know and think about that, especially from the perspective of young people. I think what's been so striking about the work Dr. Blanche Fior has done is that it really changes in young people's anxiety, depression, and happiness. And we're in the business of helping young people reach their potential, so it's something I pay a lot of attention to. I also believe that health and wellness and mental health in particular doesn't sit alongside academic excellence. It is a precursor to it. And it goes back to my push for knowledge and truth and the ability to bring up a heterodox opinion or have a conversation with someone that makes you uncomfortable, from my research, I know that you're less likely to approach those situations if you don't feel okay, if you're anxious.

34:01And so I want students to have the tools so that they can take risks, they can fail. They can enter into a conversation with someone they know thinks very differently than them. They can have those debates in class. And so what I think about on our campus a lot and what our students and staff and faculty have been focused on is setting up the kinds of conditions that allow our students to feel okay about themselves and then thrive everywhere else. I'm about to ask a question that is a terrible question to ask, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Do you think that the current generation of college students is just spoiled to some degree?

34:38I think every older person always says this about the younger folks around them. What I see on campus are students who are pushing themselves really hard and have often been rewarded for getting the next medal or success and sometimes don't step back and think about their potential or what will make them happy or how they live the fullest lives. And I want to help them do that. A lot of those abilities to overcome failure, to be resilient, to sleep and eat well and so on, those feel like things that one should learn by the time one goes to college. Plainly, I'm wrong. So tell me, do you feel that the university is taking on a different societal role than it was meant to in the development of young people?

35:25Because we used to talk about, you know, you want to produce leaders. And that connotes to me, at least, that someone has showed up ready to go. It sounds to me, from what you're saying, that you're needing to do a lot of foundational work. And I applaud that. I don't think anyone would decry that. But I just wonder, it's a lot of time and resources that goes into something that's not what I thought was the primary purpose of the university. I may be different than some other leaders, but I think it's also my background as a psychologist. I don't think you can separate the health and wellness from the academic focus.

35:59And if you want students to push hard in the classroom, which they do, you have to equip them with the tools. And I also believe that developing great leaders is also about developing whole people who can be inside and outside the classroom. It's something that Dartmouth is known for. These skills are part of what it means to lead, especially in a future where knowledge is ubiquitous in many ways. And it is the ability to bring people together, ask questions in different ways. That's going to be the hallmark of what a true leader is.

36:36Bylock's views on leadership are plainly rooted in her time at the University of Chicago. Her move there from professor to administrator was a bit of an accident. I came out of faculty governance. I was on the faculty senate and then something called the Committee of the Council, which is a small group that advises the president and provost. And I spent the whole year as a faculty member arguing with Bob Zimmer. Bob Zimmer, a mathematician by training, was UChicago's president from 2006 to 2021. And at the end of the year, he said, come work for me. And I thought, wow, like, that's so interesting.

37:12What were you arguing about? Everything. I thought he had so many things wrong in terms of the perspective of the faculty. Well, just to step back, the committee of the council, I think it was like 12 faculty. I was, I believe, the only woman on the committee and the youngest by probably 20 years. And I was really pregnant. I remember that there was never enough food at the lunch. I was always kind of hungry, too. So I think I was just ordinary. But I thought they were maybe a little out of touch with the junior faculty and some of the perspectives of young folks on campus. So I pushed back a lot.

37:42Were there changes then because of your pushback? Yeah, I think there were some. I don't remember any specifics. But the idea that the institution should be the place that helps bring critics to the forefront rather than the critic itself was something that I really took to heart. And it was something that I put in practice when I was at Barnard, when we had a referendum around divesting from Israel. I talked about the fact that I did not believe the endowment was a political tool and that it wasn't the university's place to take a side in this sort of debate. And then at Dartmouth, it became very clear that having some sort of policy or idea around when the institution should make statements, when departments should make statements, what the purpose of the institution was, articulating that was important.

38:32And we had a group of faculty and staff work on a policy, and they did not use the term institutional neutrality, but institutional restraint. The whole idea is to get individuals speaking and pushing it against each other, and that we shouldn't be encouraging statements that could potentially suppress or quiet heterodox voices. I talked about creating brave spaces rather than safe spaces. Dartmouth has always been a place where there's different views on campus. We have a conservative student newspaper and a more liberal student newspaper. It's considered the most conservative, small-c conservative of the Ivies, would you say?

39:10I mean, I've always heard it talked about like that. I think people do talk about it that way, and we certainly have had prominent conservative alums come out of Dartmouth. But one of the reasons I was actually interested in it is that I felt like there was the possibility of a more UChicago-like tolerance for different voices on campus. And I don't think I really understand after being at UChicago that not all institutions were like UChicago. Can you talk for a bit about your route from academic researcher to an academic administrator? I know that in this industry, like in many industries, if you do really well at one level, then you get promoted into another level.

39:52But that other level is very, very different because the things that make a great academic researcher or professor are not necessarily the things that would make a university president. And we're all familiar with the Peter Principle that talks about people getting promoted above their abilities. And I'm just really curious how it worked for you. Did you suspect from the outset that you'd be pretty good at being an administrator? Did you want to become an administrator? Yeah. And also, I think in addition to not always having a clear route, I think higher education does a really poor job of training.

40:28I didn't want to say it, but I so agree. It's like here, now you're going to oversee first a department and then a whole school. I mean, many of these people are my friends and they have no idea what they're doing. I hate to say. Yes. Well, look, I mean, I think it's really important that we have a subset of higher education leaders that come through academia, that are faculty. And if we're not training them to think about these next levels, I worry about the viability of those candidates. Did you get training? No. I mean, I apprenticed and a lot of it was trial by fire. And I wish I had more training.

41:05Is anyone working on that? We are thinking about it at Dartmouth. One thing that my CFO does, which is fantastic, is he does a university budget course every year. We have deans, we have faculty. Once in a while, we have undergrads take it. And he basically talks about the entire university budget, the history of it, what it means for different units. A P &L, in my mind, is an instantiation of your strategy. You have to understand that. If you were to eventually, let's say, start a leadership institute at Dartmouth to train university leaders, what would be your motto? That's good. I think it is something about your role is making other people's ideas better or putting them into effect.

41:47For me, going back to the route from being a researcher and leading a big lab of postdocs and graduate students and undergrads is that I actually think that was great training for leading an organization. And you learn you have to manage people very differently. One graduate student, you have to give a deadline. And another, if you give a deadline, they will crumble.

42:13I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We will be right back to finish our conversation with Dartmouth President Sian Bylock.

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44:42So, what do you make of this period of history we're living through? By whatever means you want to measure, it's been an unusually chaotic period and a period of great uncertainty. Do you see it as the beginning of something worse and more chaotic, or do you see it as an interregnum between, you know, sanity and prosperity and all that? I am a glass half full kind of person. I do think we learn and get better at what we do. But we have some of our faculty are world experts on misinformation and the ideas that we're getting through social media and others are seeping in as fact sets. And I think we have to get a handle on what that looks like.

45:18Do you have any ideas for how to do that? Education is one way. Teaching people to be discerning and how to think. Are you worried, though, that a college education in particular has come to be viewed by so many as essentially a luxury good? I don't mean that in terms of just the cost, but it's a thing that only certain people want and that most people actually don't want or need. Does that concern you a lot? I am very worried. I think it builds into trust. And if the folks across the political spectrum in our country don't see college as a place for them, it means that we have less diversity in thinking and ideas.

45:54And again, I think that is the basis for getting to the best outcomes. I'm guessing you know a lot more than I do about the literature on social trust, which some people argue is key kind of hidden ingredient to any well-functioning society. And social trust in the U.S. has certainly fallen. They say that certain institutions are quite good at creating social trust. Sports teams are one, the military. And what these have in common is that people come together from very different backgrounds with a common goal. The university is also an institution that was held up as a place that could really build social trust for the same reason.

46:28People coming from different backgrounds working toward a common goal. Do you see the university serving that function anymore? Has it really failed? I think the university has stepped away from serving that function and we have to get it back. And I know from that literature that one of the best ways to get it back is to be very clear about your mission. I talk about this a lot, that our mission is education and knowledge production, and that's it. So if you could create Dartmouth from scratch today, what would you do differently in order to fulfill that mission? In a lot of Dartmouth's history, there were certain groups of people that were excluded from our campus.

47:07We didn't have women as a first graduating class until 1976. There were quotas for Jews. I think I would go back and think about how to bring the best and brightest coming from different backgrounds together from the beginning. The whole competition to get into schools like Dartmouth, though, we all know what that looks like. And most people think it's somewhere between ridiculous and unfair that too many advantages go to the advantaged and so on. Has Dartmouth done anything significant to change that? We really, first of all, focus on financial aid. So now for families making up to$175 ,000 a year, it's free to go to Dartmouth.

47:43We have continued and pushed to focus on first-generation and low-income students as well as rural students. And we're need-blind and meet full financial need for everyone. Here's a question that we solicited from one of your faculty members whose name I will withhold since I don't want to bias the answer. But this person wanted to know, if you had an infinite budget, what would you do with it? It's a great question. One answer is that I would make Dartmouth somewhat bigger because I think what we do is so important. We have a responsibility to serve more students, and that means more faculty.

48:23And would it be bigger in that spot in Hanover? Would you want to open other campuses elsewhere? We have such a sense of place. I would want to really make sure that areas where Dartmouth can have huge impact, whether it's rural health or we are a world leader in polar and ice sheets for obvious reasons. We have the Cold Weather Army Research Lab next to us, that our faculty really had the resources to have the impact. That's a second one. And third, which hopefully we'll be able to do at some point, I would like to take everything we're doing around dialogues and give it to every high school student in the country so that when they get to Dartmouth, they're ready to have the kinds of conversations that are so important to reduce polarization.

49:07Let's talk about college sports for a minute. How is it different now than when you were in college? The power divisions in college sports has changed immensely. One thing I'm really proud of in the Ivy League is that we continue to live by the values that our athletes are students first, that we don't give athletic scholarships, we only give knee-based scholarships, and athletics enhances our academics rather than vice versa. What about the NIL revolution? Name, Image Likeness is a way for athletes to get actual cash for playing in college. But there are many other parts of that as well. How has that affected you?

49:45Our NIL in the Ivy League is pretty small. Certainly, we're competing with teams who have bigger budgets. I think about our ice hockey team who went to the NCAA and played against Wisconsin. Their roster looked very different in terms of the support that their athletes were getting financially. but we held our own. And did any of those players then take an offer through the portal to get an NIL payday? It's really interesting. I just asked my athletic director, not only the portal, but going pro. And our three top players are staying next year, which I think said something so important about the program we're running and our coaches.

50:23Interesting. I mean, it doesn't really matter whether Dartmouth wins something in the Ivy League, right? I mean, I know it's pride and all that. It matters to me. Okay. All right, I take it back. But I was told that college athletes are incredibly valuable for the institution as are fraternity and sorority students because those are the types of students who are most likely to become very loyal and generous donors. Can you talk about that for a second? Yeah, there's work in the Ivy League showing that Ivy League athletes go on to be very successful in terms of what they do. On the other hand, you could say anybody who's good enough to be an athlete and be in the Ivy League was going to be successful.

51:05That's right. I'm not saying it's causal, but there's a correlation there. And certainly, I think at a place like Dartmouth, people bleed green. I've never been at a place where there's as much camaraderie and loyalty to the school as Dartmouth. It comes from many different places. Certainly the Greek system, certainly athletics, our musical endeavors, the debate club. And my goal is to create lots of different places where students can get that relationship. It also comes from our foreign study programs where our faculty actually take the students for a quarter. And so it's 30 students together with a faculty member.

51:40The bond there is for life. I'm an athlete. I believe in the power of athletics. And I certainly think it's an important contributor to our community and culture. Talk for a minute about the power of athletics just as an animating force. What is so good about participating in sports or even games? It gives you opportunities to win and lose, to have to often work with other people. It's an amazing way to build character and to learn how to take risks and get up. All right, let me ask you maybe one last question. This is a question I like because it comes from my hero, Richard Feynman, the physicist.

52:15And he liked to ask, what is particularly abundant in a given system and what's particularly scarce? Maybe abundance to the point of a problem and scarce to the point of a problem. So what would you say in running a university is something that's particularly abundant that you maybe wish you had a little bit less of? Oftentimes there's a resistance to change or we've done it this way. So an abundance of tradition, maybe. Yes. Dartmouth is a 250-some-odd-year university. There's a lot of this is how we do it. Can you give an example? Sure. So we just put in place a new school of arts and sciences, which is a big deal in an institutional setting.

52:55And it took a while to get there because people said, why would we need a new structure? And what about scarce, something that is too scarce? I think time, especially I would say among our faculty. Our faculty, we ask them to be really these teacher scholars who are researching or working at the top of their field, but spend a ton of time in the classroom. And I know this because I've now taught at Dartmouth, at Barnard and Columbia, and at UChicago. And I've never spent more time with the students than I did at Dartmouth. It's amazing. It's one of the things that makes this place so special. But it takes a lot of time to do that, and we're asking a lot of our people.

53:35I would think that if Dartmouth, as you said, invented artificial intelligence, that you could come up with a way to make more time. We're working on it.

53:47That, again, was Sian Bylock, the 19th president of Dartmouth College, which is in fact a university but prefers to keep college in the name. My thanks to Bylock and thanks also to some of her colleagues, past and present, who helped us prepare for this interview. Alexandra Horowitz, Bruce Sasserdot, Chris Snyder, Danny Blanchflower, Lydia Chilton, and Susanna Heschel. And thanks especially to you for listening. Coming up next time on the show. It never occurred to me that television wouldn't work. Something just seemed to happen. I had no confidence that it was going to go big. Go big. When a master uses the English language, it's a thrill, isn't it?

54:28Go big. I tracked down Dick Cavett, the legendary talk show host. I wanted his advice on a new show that I'm making. Well, I hope you do it. You're just saying that, aren't you? Yeah. I just wanted to make your friends laugh.

55:10and show notes. This episode was produced by Augusta Chapman and edited by Pete Madden. It was mixed by Jake Loomis with help from Jeremy Johnston. The Freakonomics Radio network staff also includes Dalvin Abouaji, Eleanor Osborne, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Ellaria Montenacourt, Mandy Gorenstein, and Tao Jacobs. Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by The Hitchhikers, and our composer is Luis Guerra. As always, thanks for listening.

55:38It tastes good when you put it on popcorn, but outside of that context, it smells like vomit. Already a really fun conversation.

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56:37Eligible direct deposits and opt-in required for overdraft protection. Fees, terms, and conditions apply. Hey there, I'm Stephen Dubner, host of Freakonomics Radio. If you love the podcasts in the Freakonomics Radio network, I want to tell you about a way you can get even more from us. To hear our shows without ads and get exclusive access to Freakonomics Radio bonus episodes, please subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts Plus on Apple Podcasts or sign up at SiriusXM.com slash podcasts plus. Start a free trial today.