Dartmouth Given $34 Million For A New Institute For Global Security

Forbes

21-05-2025

Dartmouth College has announced that it will launch the Davidson Institute for Global Security, which will feature several programs focusing on a wide range of international security and defense topics.
Initial funding for the institute has come from a collection of private gifts totaling $34 million from more than 20 alumni and parents. Included in those donations is a multi-million lead gift from the Jim and Julia Davidson family. Jim Davidson is one of the original co-founding partners of Silver Lake, a major private equity firm focused on technology investments. While neither of the Davidsons is a Dartmouth alum, their three children all attended the school.
Dartmouth anticipates that the program will prepare its graduates for leadership jobs in the governmental policy, defense and security sectors, helping address pressing workforce needs in important security fields. As one example, the U.S. is projected to be losing more than a third of its nuclear security workforce in the next five years.
The Davidson Institute for Global Security is an outgrowth of Dartmouth's Initiative for Global Security, a four-year pilot program for which the Davidsons had provided early seed funding.
It will focus on undergraduate education, providing students with both relevant course work and real-world, practical experience through internships, national and international travel experiences, and access to global thought-leaders via a new speaker series and Dartmouth's international security forum held annually in Washington, DC. Through such programming, students will be exposed to policymakers, journalists, foreign service officers, military officers, and other key policymakers.
The institute, in collaboration with the Tuck School of Business and the department of economics, will enable students and faculty to explore the intersection of security and business and will also serve as the organizational umbrella for existing Dartmouth programs in several policy areas. An example is the recent International Security and Economics pilot program, where students and faculty study the relationships of security challenges to economics and business.
It will also house Dartmouth's War and Peace Fellows, which annually brings 80 undergraduate students together from multiple disciplines to learn how social, political, moral, and technological factors affect a wide range of topics such as international conflict, human rights, terrorism, military policy, and climate change.
In addition, the institute will host the E. John Rosenwald Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, named in honor of a former chair of the Dartmouth Board of Trustees. That program is focused on international history and security, supporting leading young scholars from all disciplines to come to Dartmouth to work on research in areas such as the environment, health, and human development. Rosenwald's friends and classmates raised $12 million to endow the program which was named for him in 2021 in recognition of his 70 years of leadership and service to Dartmouth.
Daryl Press, professor of government at Dartmouth and the faculty director for its Initiative for Global Security pilot, will serve as the institute's inaugural director. Included among the faculty who will be associated with the institute are:
Press told me that about 20 Dartmouth faculty are currently involved with the institute, spanning areas like political science, economics, history, and engineering. He expects more disciplines to be represented in the future.
According to Press, a distinctive feature of the institute is that it will promote 'rigorous, politically nonpartisan research on today's most momentous, complex issues' such as China's rise as a superpower, the changing military balance in Asia, nuclear proliferation, prospects for peace in the Russian-Ukraine war, violence against civilians during military conflicts, the control of new dangerous technologies, disruptions to the global trade system, and changes in U.S. foreign policy.
Press said that institute faculty will also continue to influence national and international policy through research-based consultation and advising with senior officials at the U.S. National Security Council, Department of Defense, and Department of State, as well as intelligence agencies and senior policymakers at NATO and in allied countries.
In a recent interview, Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock told me that she envisions the Davidson Institute extending Dartmouth's traditional strengths in preparing students for future leadership roles. 'The rigorous, nonpartisan scholarship being done by our faculty is key to helping students learn how to navigate an increasingly complicated geopolitical landscape,' she said. 'We will focus on issues, rather than political stances, and we will teach students how to think, not what to think.'
The $34 million in private funds will be used to endow the various components of the new institute. Current plans do not call for the addition of any new undergraduate majors or a major expansion of the number of students in the programs. Instead, the emphasis will be on enhancing student opportunities and increasing the quality of the small-group interactions that both Press and Beilock believe are hallmarks of a Dartmouth education.