HANOVER, New Hampshire — Dartmouth College president Sian Beilock was 16 years old and a star goalie on an Olympic development team when she played the worst soccer game of her life, ending her dream of making the United States national team. That failure fueled Beilock’s academic career as a cognitive scientist studying why people collapse under pressure, including the book she wrote titled Choke.
It also helped Beilock avoid the outrage from congressional lawmakers that cost the presidents of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania their jobs for failing to control anti-Israel chaos and antisemitism on their campuses after the October 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas.
Beilock, now 50, didn’t choke this time. Two hours after Dartmouth students pitched an encampment on the Green in May 2024, she called in the police. Eighty-nine people were arrested.
In an interview earlier this month in her office overlooking the same spot, Beilock told me without even a hint of equivocation, “Setting up an encampment on a shared space and declaring it for one ideology, where certain people can’t be or walk through—that’s disrupting someone else’s free speech.”
