As an eventful year comes to a close, Dartmouth made progress on improving mental health and wellness, facilitating free and open dialogue, advancing sustainability, supporting innovation and impact, and fostering lifelong connections to the institution.
These are the five priorities set by President Sian Leah Beilock at her inauguration in September 2023, and the common thread, she said during her October address to the general faculty, is “the power of the Dartmouth community.”
“Everything we’ve done this past year has been about tending to that community. That is always the goal: To make it easier to live here and succeed here,” President Beilock said.
Below is a sampling of how Beilock’s goals started to bear fruit this year, through initiatives big and small.
Mental Health and Wellness
In February, Dartmouth announced the appointment of its first chief health and wellness officer—one of the actions called for in the Commitment to Care strategic plan launched in 2023. Estevan Garcia, a specialist in pediatric emergency medicine who was previously chief medical officer of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, began the job in March as a member of Beilock’s senior leadership team, overseeing Dartmouth Health Service, the Student Wellness Center, and Employee Wellness.
In October, Garcia announced the launch of a new website for mental health and well-being to help students find needed resources; more free teletherapy services through Dartmouth’s partnership with Uwill; a variety of training opportunities for students, faculty, and staff; and the administration of the student Healthy Minds Survey.
Among other initiatives, Dartmouth is encouraging students to enjoy the outdoors by offering free access to seasonal sporting equipment and physical education classes, from swimming lessons to alpine ski instruction for beginners.
Recognizing the role of housing in mental health and well-being, in September Dartmouth unveiled a $500 million vision for undergraduate housing, including new, apartment-style undergraduate residences on West Wheelock Street, the first of which is currently under construction, and the continuation of the housing renewal program, a staged upgrading of approximately 60% of existing undergraduate residences over 15 years. This fall, Zimmerman Hall and Brace Commons reopened after their comprehensive renewal, and a major overhaul of Fayerweather Hall is underway. Next up: the three residence halls that make up Mass Row.
Dartmouth Dialogues
January saw the launch of Dartmouth Dialogues, a university-wide initiative aimed at fostering connection across political and personal divides. Dartmouth Dialogues includes the Dialogue Project, co-led by Executive Director Kristi Clemens and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Elizabeth F. Smith, which is providing students, faculty, and staff training in collaborative dialogue skills and is partnering with the StoryCorps One Small Step program to bring people with different perspectives together in conversation. The latest One Small Step program was recorded over the course of three days in November.
Dartmouth Dialogues includes the Tuck School of Business’ Real Talk series, conversations aimed at creating a culture of respectful dialogue, discussion, and debate.
Throughout the presidential election year, the campus hosted guest speakers from across the political spectrum, including, among others, former Wyoming congresswoman Liz Cheney; former Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal ’91 and CNN News anchor Jake Tapper ’91; former NAACP Legal Defense Fund President Sherrilyn Ifill; political strategists Kellyanne Conway and Donna Brazile; U.S. Sen. John Fetterman, D-Penn.; and, a few days before Election Day, former Vice President Mike Pence.
Sustainability
On Earth Day in April, Beilock announced the largest investment in sustainability in Dartmouth history. The Dartmouth Climate Collaborative is a $500 million dollar investment over five years to accelerate campus decarbonization efforts, including a target of reducing 100% of campus carbon emissions by 2050. Infrastructure upgrades will include the installation of geo-exchange borefields and high-capacity heat pumps, the continued transition from steam to hot water heating, and improvements to overall energy efficiency.
The plan includes a year-long Climate Futures Initiative, led by anthropology professor Laura Ogden, who is also special advisor to the provost on climate and sustainability. CFI is working to identify how faculty and students can use the Dartmouth campus as a lab for climate scholarship and education as Dartmouth scientists continued to produce research insights into the impact of climate change.
CFI announced its first pilot project—a service learning course, modeled after Thayer School of Engineering’s Senior Design Challenge, that will match students with climate resilience projects and organizations in the local community, beginning this winter. And over the summer, an earth sciences class took advantage of the geo-exchange borefield project to develop a three-dimensional model of Hanover’s underground rock formations.
Dartmouth announced an expanded collaboration with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Engineer Research and Development Center, building on a longstanding partnership with the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Hanover.
In September, Dartmouth Engineering’s undergraduate engineering programs received a Zero Energy Designation from the U.S. Department of Energy in recognition of its project-based curriculum in sustainable design.
Innovation and Impact
In February, Dartmouth announced it was reinstituting the standardized testing requirement for undergraduate applicants, the first in the Ivy League to do so. The requirement was suspended during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, but Dartmouth faculty experts used data to show how scores can be an important predictor of student success, regardless of family income. Several peer institutions have since followed suit.
Over the past year, the EDGE Consortium—a coalition of women-led universities and engineering schools co-founded by Beilock in 2023—continued its efforts to help diversify the semiconductor industry.
Dartmouth also showed its power as an engine of innovation, ranking among the top 100 universities in the country that were granted U.S. patents in 2023. That included 21 from Thayer School of Engineering, 17 from the Geisel School of Medicine, and 13 from Arts and Sciences.
Thayer graduated a record 351 students, including majority female classes in the bachelor of engineering and master of engineering management programs.
Over the summer, Dartmouth hosted the first of its kind Tribal Leadership Academy, bringing together newly elected or appointed officials from 16 Native American tribes to connect with peers and learn from experts about practical approaches to problem-solving.
Faculty and students throughout the institution have continued to explore the potential of artificial intelligence, and Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing James Dobson was appointed to a year-long position as special advisor to the provost for AI.
And this fall, Dartmouth launched a three-year master of fine arts program in sonic practice with a new, custom-built, state-of-the-art sound laboratory that is already being described as a game-changer for faculty and student research and creative development. Tuck and Geisel School of Medicine launched a new master of health administration program—the only MHA program jointly administered by a business school and a medical school. Geisel launched two online master of science degree programs, in health data science and implementation science—the science of effectively moving proven research into clinical health care practice. And the Arthur L. Irving Institute for Energy and Society has joined with the Guarini School of Graduate and Advanced Studies to offer a new master program in energy transition, beginning in fall 2025.
And Tuck’s Executive Education program is helping business leaders adapt to emerging technologies, geopolitical uncertainty, and social change.
Lifelong Dartmouth
In March, Dartmouth announced the largest bequest in its history—more than $150 million for scholarships from the estate of the late Barbara Britt and Glenn Britt ’71, Tuck ’72.
In April, alumni, trustees, and friends of the arts gathered at Lincoln Center in New York to celebrate the future of the arts at Dartmouth and the ongoing expansion and reimagination of the Hopkins Center for the Arts—including the announcement of a $25 million gift from Daryl Roth and Steven Roth ’62, Tuck ’63.
Over the summer, Dartmouth piloted the Summer Scholars Program for talented high school students.
In September, the Center for Professional Development launched a new satellite career center in McNutt Hall, and a search is underway for an executive director to lead the transformation of undergraduate career services as part of a new Center for Career Design. A $15 million challenge gift from an anonymous donor is helping to raise a total of $30 million in endowed funds to make internships financially accessible to all undergraduates and a standard part of the Dartmouth experience.
And in October, Dartmouth dedicated the stadium at Memorial Field to the late football coach Buddy Teevens ’79, who died in 2023. Over Homecoming weekend, Alumni Gym was rededicated as the Lewinstein Athletic Center in honor of Diana Lewinstein and Stephen Lewinstein ’63, whose gift to Dartmouth Athletics is supporting the health, wellness, and competitiveness of Dartmouth’s varsity student-athletes.
Other News from 2024
Far and away the most popular story of 2024—garnering more than 2 million views—was the Commencement address by tennis champion and philanthropist Roger Federer, who debunked the myth of “effortlessness,” telling the graduating class, “The best in the world are not the best because they win every point. It’s because they know they’ll lose again and again, and have learned how to deal with it.”
Among other significant news at Dartmouth this year, following an advisory vote by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Board of Trustees voted in November to bring the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Division of Student Affairs under the same unified administrative unit as a new school of arts and sciences.
In sports, the football team won its fourth Ivy League championship in five years. A student set the Pan Am cycling record, riding from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego in 75 days. And five alumni and one student athlete competed in the Summer Olympics in Paris.
Nineteen students and recent alumni were offered Fulbright Awards. Students also received a Lewis Scholarship, a Keasbey Scholarship, Goldwater Scholarships, a Knight Hennessy Scholarship, a Truman Scholarship, a Udall Scholarship, and a Beinecke Scholarship, among other awards.
Victor Ambros, former member of the biological sciences and Geisel faculty, won a Nobel Prize for the discovery of microRNA. President Beilock was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Earth Sciences Professor Xiahong Feng was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
And three members of the faculty—Kui Dong, Vievee Francis, and Laura Ogden—received Guggenheim Fellowships.
