Hallelujah! An Ivy League president is finally willing to take a stand on free speech, campus sanity, and a return to some semblance of normality in what had become a refuge for lunatics.

Touring the country to explain her vision of “constructive dialogue” and “brave spaces,” Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock is blazing a trail to help lead America’s elite universities out from the depths of the woke fever swamps. The TIAA even gave her a swanky leadership award, earning rare praise from conservatives for breaking ranks with her ineffectual and temporizing peers.

Not so fast, says Professor Mimi Thi Nguyen of Dartmouth’s Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program. The former punk zine author and agitprop activist didn’t ride the DEI train out of obscurity just to be sent back to underground poetry slams.

Appearing at a webinar hosted by MIT as part of the Graduate Consortium in Women’s Studies unintentionally hilarious “Feminisms Unbound” series, she served up copious helpings of impenetrable word salad purporting to explain that beauty is anarchism, vandalism, a riot, an intifada, even a “rock in a cop’s face.”

The last phrase comes from a sticker on Kurt Cobain’s guitar, which Nguyen cites approvingly in her 2024 Duke University Press monograph The Promise of Beauty. The book’s epilogue is titled “In Conclusion, Crime Is Beauty.”

President Beilock inherited Nguyen when she arrived at Dartmouth in 2023, so one can hope she will do her best to make sure such faculty hires become a thing of the past. Cleaning the Augean stables of a women’s studies department is never easy. But when one of your professors is publicly valorizing stoning police officers while you’re on national television defending institutional restraint, the manure has reached the rafters.

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