Pod and Man at Yale

In the newest episode of Pod and Man at Yale, Isaac Oberman ’26 and freshman Jacob Tyler ’27 talk about the cultural disconnect between not only their home towns in the Midwest and the Yale culture dominated by the coasts, but also between Yale and the rest of the country. Tyler: “They don’t believe me when I say that inflation is bad right now and it’s kind of hilarious but it’s also sad because these are the future leaders of America…it’s a little worrying, the disconnect.”Oberman: “It’s always vocationally focused, and everything’s so fast-paced, and everybody talks about their job instead of what they want and what they actually value in life.” Tyler: “It’s really hard to convince people otherwise, that maybe [white privilege] isn’t a thing, because every single white person they know here is extremely privileged.” Oberman: “I do think the urban necessity to have something to do, always, is a bit harmful, actually.” For the episode’s expert interview, author Rob Henderson ’18 talked about his childhood in foster care, what luxury beliefs are, and how luxury beliefs are impacting campus and country: Henderson: “Most people don’t even know that the vast majority of American adults don’t have bachelor’s degrees.”Henderson: “The more educated and affluent you are… the more likely you are to say we should defund the police; the more likely you are to say we should decriminalize hard drugs; the more likely you are to agree that having two married parents is unimportant for kids. And, ultimately, they have detrimental consequences for the rest of society.” Henderson: “If you are a graduate of an elite university, and if you belong to this very privileged segment of society, you have a duty to give your beliefs and policy proposals and ideas a very thorough analysis before you start promoting them.” Henderson: “For a lot of, I’ll just say the word, elites, their only exposure to poverty is kind of the most… apparent and visible and kind of provocative parts of poverty… They don’t necessarily see people who clock into their job, make a minimum wage living, and then go home and try to pay their bills and take care of their kids.”Subscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com. Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst

On the newest episode of Pod and Man at Yale, our student panel examines how Yale, and higher education more generally, is failing to fulfill their expected role in society Aron Ravin ’24: “I think Yale should be making people into better people, like in the value sense, but it’s not — and I think that disappoints me.”Owen Tilman ’26: “...These institutions are not meant to take a political stance. I don’t want to know what Yale as an Institution thinks about Israel and Palestine. I just want to rest assured… that I’m able to have an open and honest dialogue on Yale’s campus.”Claire Barragan-Bates ’25: “The enforcement of rules needs to come back to universities… spaces like classrooms need to be respected as places that people choose to be to learn from that professor and not used as political marching grounds.”Ravin ’24: “I think increasingly all the reasonable people in America are fed up with what’s coming out of the Ivy League.” We also spoke to the American Enterprise Institute’s Yuval Levin about the importance of institutions in society, what happens when they fall apart, and what Yale needs to do to right the ship:Levin: “We’re facing a crisis of the personal – whether that’s rising suicide rates, or an opioid abuse epidemic. It seems though, that something is breaking down.Levin: “By beginning from what’s my role here, we begin with a sense of responsibility.”  Levin: “I think there’s a tendency to think of liberating as removing all constraints. Do whatever you want. The fact is ‘do whatever you want’ isn’t actually liberating. It’s terrifying. And what institutions do for us is they allow is to be free in a way that is empowered.” Levin: “A lot of times the university, when it has strayed from its purpose, has done that by means that are frankly authoritarian, by uses of administrative power that constrain the range of who’s allowed on campus or that force people into kind of incantations of statement of belief that they don’t actually share.”Subscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com. Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst

In the newest episode, Trevor MacKay ’25 and Avi Feinsod LAW ’24 discuss the way pro-Israel speech is treated on campus and how pro-Palestinian voices are constantly complaining that their free speech is being suppressed, then putting in every effort to shut down other speech:MacKay: “If you truly do believe in the value of a liberal arts education and the value of education at all, you should want to be uncomfortable with the things that you learn.”Feinsod: “Right now, being anything pro-Israel is considered like a cardinal sin. And, if you’re doing that, it’s the same as doing all of these terrible things. Being pro-Israel is associated with being genocidal, being racist, supporting an apartheid state.” MacKay: “That kind of hypocrisy is part of the reason why especially people on the right are so annoyed and angry at the institutions of the universities. Because they see instances like the Christakis incident or other instances throughout the last decade of people who don’t toe the party line and they are punished for it…”Feinsod: “They can do events without being stopped. And still yet, they invoke, ‘people are stopping our speech,’ as they try to stop other people from speaking.” Yale Sterling Professor David Bromwich discussed free speech on campus, a new faculty effort called Faculty for Yale that is hoping to restore it, Edmund Burke, and William Shakespeare:Bromwich: “I think there’s been a tendency at universities … to make sure that speech is of a kind that all students and all faculty feel comfortable with. That’s a mistake about the nature of free inquiry and the nature of speech, which isn’t all polite conversation, isn’t all about comfortable.” Bromwich: “Faculty for Yale means to reassert the importance of free inquiry, the search for truth, and the transmission of knowledge as what’s essential to university life.” Bromwich: “What was remarkable about the scene of higher education [in the 60s and 70s] including Yale University and UCLA – I took courses at both places – is that universities seemed the freest places with the most wide-ranging and controversial discussion that you could find in the United States. I don’t think anyone would argue that they are that now.”Subscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com. Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst

The Buckley Institute is pleased to release the newest of episode of Pod and Man at Yale. In the most recent episode, Arav Dalwani ’26 and Sabrina Guo ’27 debate legacy admissions, whether it should exist and whether they would want their own kids to benefit:Dalwani ’26: “If I’m someone that’s spent 4 years studying at Yale, I’d also like to have some sense of reciprocity where the college or the school is treating me like I’m a part of the community.”Guo ’27: “I think most of my friends would say, ‘yes, let’s get rid of legacy admissions…  it’s the right thing to do, morally.’”Dalwani ’26: “The way an admissions officer gives preference to someone on the basis of race is very different from giving someone preference based on whether their parents went to a school.”  Guo ’27: “If these two kids are at par, I just wouldn’t want legacy to be the drive over factor of yes, let’s accept that applicant.” Dalwani ’26: “If it’s a legacy versus just some other standard, nonlegacy … if both applicants have the same score… then I think legacy can be sort of the push factor as to whether that student should be admitted.”Yale Dean of Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid Jeremiah Quinlan ’03 joined the podcast to present Yale’s defense of legacy admissions and explain Yale’s reinstated test requirement for applicants:Quinlan ’03: “There is a lot of talk about legacy admissions being an impediment to diversifying student bodies but our experience at Yale is not that.”Quinlan ’03: “And once we get into the nineties and the two-thousands, which of course was when I was at Yale, we’re talking about a radically diversifying student body. And now would be the time that we would no longer be able to consider legacy? Once we have a much more diverse alumni body?”Quinlan ’03: “Students without test scores were putting themselves at a disadvantage in our process, particularly students from diverse backgrounds, high schools that we had never seen applications from.”Subscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com. Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst

The newest episode of Pod and Man at Yale, the Buckley Institute’s official podcast, is now available. Ariane de Gennaro ’25 and Will Wang ’26 join the podcast to share their thoughts on the presidential search, the impact of the resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay, and how Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is defining the search for Yale’s next leader: Ariane de Gennaro: “I think it’s in some ways the silver lining [of Gay’s resignation] is that we’ve seen what happens when you don’t consider merit as the fundamentally most important quality for people in these positions.”  Will Wang: “I think everyone on principle believes in free speech. In practice, when there’s a speech that offends you terribly, then, that’s when you toe that line. But no one comes out and says, ‘I don’t believe in free speech.’” De Gennaro: “I think it would actually be good to lay down some values that we’re going to align with.”Wang: “Yale has been in a bunch of free speech scandals and they may perceive it as, ‘if we defend free speech writ large, we may be giving some credence to some of these scandals and us not doing anything about it.’” De Gennaro: “Free speech, for some reason, is more of a trigger issue, especially in the universities, I think, that people associate with the right, in a way that the mainstream, leftist side of the university is really uncomfortable with.” Princeton University’s McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions Robert George sat down for an interview about the illiberal free speech culture on campus, his forty-year career in the middle of it, and his estimation of the current campus climate: Prof. Robert George: “The fundamental problem has been, throughout my entire career, the dearth of dissenting voices from the standard liberal secular orthodoxy on college campuses.” George: “The lack of viewpoint diversity easily creates a milieu in which dissent is not only unusual, but is interpreted as unacceptable; in fact, interpreted, even experienced, as a kind of assault on the fundamental values of ‘our community.’”George: “It’s a matter of leadership. I’ll tell you another important ingredient: courage… It’s the courage of people who are willing to defy the groupthink and the conformism.”George: “You see that public pressure can make a difference. That should be an encouragement.”Subscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com. Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst

This episode features a special panel of Lux et Veritas Leadership Fellows discussing why go to college in the first place and why colleges and universities, Yale included, should focus more on living a good life than just being busy. Plus, what it’s like to be conservative at the Yale Women’s Center:Claire Barragan-Bates '25: “I took a class this last semester… It was a class about feminism where we talked about anything but women.”Emma Ventresca '26: “There are some really wonderful classes at Yale with professors who care more about the academic content, rather than maybe current events or certain ideologies… Seeking out these pockets through friends that you trust and through professors and their mentorship is a really great opportunity that Yale has presented.”Sabrina Guo '27: “There’s not much promotion of the understanding that a good life is unique to each individual student.”Isaac Oberman '26: “There’s definitely an immortalization of the ‘Grindset,’ and the idea that, if I’m not doing something, I’m not doing anything.”Claire Barragan-Bates '25: “I used to direct the Yale Women’s Center, which is one of the wokest places on campus. I definitely feel like I got cancelled quite a few times for specific things that I believed while working there.”American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Ben Storey, an expert on living the good life, walks through what it means to live a good life and how to can find your own path:Dr. Ben Storey: “It’s not emphasized enough… There are very few people over the course of human history that have the kind of possibilities and options that a modern American college student has.”Storey: “For people who want to begin that conversation, the author I always turn to first is Plato. And I turn to Plato because … he asks these questions with a kind of immediacy it’s hard to encounter in later authors.” Storey: “One of the things, I think, we saw in the aftermath of October 7th is that a simplistic oppressor/oppressed dichotomy, through means of which people interpret almost every phenomenon in the political world, has become adopted by a very large number of people on campus. And, in my view, it leads them to profoundly misjudge what’s happening in Israel at present and many other phenomena about modern political contests.Subscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com. Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst

Aron Ravin ’24, Noah Riley ’24, and Trevor MacKay ’25 discuss the challenges that come with being conservative on Yale’s campus and how campus political bias can come out in surprising places:Noah: “If being a social conservative is like being a Nazi, then being a Trump supporter is like being Hitler himself. It is the worst of the worst that you could be.”Trevor: “Being prolife is definitely something that is very far outside the mainstream of Yale’s campus.” Aron: “In my first class in the directed studies program, my professor and my classmates started comparing the violence in the Iliad to the death of George Floyd… During parents’ weekend, my parents came to town and it started with a land acknowledgment…”Aron: “…the Buckley Institute [is] more associated with being welcoming to people that are liberal and, a lot of people on this campus, even left-leaning people, are very dissatisfied with the culture of speech here… The way that they’ve seen the conversations permeate on campus around these issues has really been dissatisfying to them, and it’s kind of led to a new respect for the Buckley Institute.”For the episode’s interview, we sat down with inaugural Lux et Veritas Faculty Prize Winner Mordechai Levy-Eichel and discussed why he goes out of his way to stimulate open discussion in the class, and why so many faculty and administrators avoid debate at all costs:“Our current culture in general, and our college campus culture as a reflection of our larger culture, is so tame and so worried about offending people or saying the wrong thing, that students, when they’re confronted with a serious back and forth… they actually really usually enjoy the intellectual exercise.”“I think its healthier and better to have a more freeform and open discussion where you talk about what you’re really thinking because there’s no reason you can’t… When we’re worried about holding things back, we’re cheating ourselves.”Subscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com. Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst

The Buckley Institute was joined by Yale undergraduates Aaron Schorr ’24 and Mitchell Dubin ’25 who spoke honestly and frankly about what it's like to be a Jewish student at Yale: Mitchell: “Since October 7th, being on campus has been, I think, nothing short of a nightmare for me… I spoke with my dean just a couple days ago about the prospect of graduating early. I wouldn’t have said that a month ago or six weeks ago.”Mitchell: “I do not feel as if there is any kind of desire or will or clarity on the part of the leadership of the university to stand with its Jewish students during this time.”Aaron: “There are people walking around campus celebrating the murder of people that we know, celebrating the murder of people who could have been us, and the university has refused to do anything about it.”Aaron: “I hope that anyone who can apply pressure on the university to do something about this, will apply pressure on the university to do something about this. All the warning lights are on right now.”Kenneth Marcus, founder and chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and a participant in the Buckley Institute’s Supreme Court Review panel in September, joined the podcast fresh off testimony before Congress to discuss antisemitism on America’s college campuses:Marcus: “Certainly, the volume of intake increased by much more than tenfold from those record levels… So this situation is now is not just historic, record-setting, and unprecedented within certainly our lifetimes, but it is exponentially higher than the record level that we had reached in the period leading up to October 7th.”Marcus: “There was a period of time when people would ask me, ‘what are the hotspot campuses that are having problems that you need to focus on.’ And I would be able to give them an answer… Nowadays, there really is no campus where we would be surprised to find problems because the situation, the degree of antisemitism on college campuses, has reached a far greater saturation level.”Subscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com. Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst

Aron Ravin ’24 and Anshul Guha ’25 discuss President Biden’s blocked student loan forgiveness program, how colleges benefit from and exacerbate the student debt problem, and why universities like Yale can charge so much. Ravin: “That’s exactly why the idea that the federal government needs to step in because college is getting too expensive is an oxymoron; because the federal government is the reason why college has become so expensive.”Guha: “The intentions matter and the government had good intentions, at least, of trying to get more people to college, whereas universities really did not have those noble intentions in mind.”Ravin: “I’m not even just saying it’s unfair for the people who didn’t go to college to have to subsidize people who did go to college to become wealthier than they are. But it’s even more unfair to the people who went to college and actually paid off their debt.”Guha: “I’m really afraid that we won’t learn from our mistakes. And we won’t learn how to be fiscally conservative. And that we’ll just find ourselves in a different debt bubble of some other kind in the future.”Pod and Man at Yale was joined by The Economist Washington Correspondent Adam O’Neal who was serving as Executive Editor at The Dispatch at the time of the interview. O’Neal talked about why so many Americans distrust the media and shared insider insights on how to get an op-ed published. O’Neal had spoken with Buckley Fellows as part of the Buckley Institute’s Lux et Veritas Leadership Program.O’Neal: “Most journalists that I’ve met in, let’s say, the ‘legacy media’ or the ‘mainstream media,’ they’re not necessarily activists but they just come from that milieu where they all sort of think the same way.” O’Neal: “I don’t Tweet… I’d much rather let the work itself speak for me than some Tweets, which may or may not reflect what I’m actually thinking a week later.”   O’Neal: “There’s no conservative who you guys are gonna bring in or person on the right who hasn’t been touched by [William F.] Buckley in some way.” Subscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com. Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst

In this episode, Yale students Noah Riley ’24, Isha Brahmbhatt ’24, and Trevor MacKay ’25 talk COVID and how Yale’s response made campus life miserable. The student panel discusses the long-term effects of those policies and how the college campus still hasn’t recovered from the damage done:Noah Riley: “I think it was the worst semester of school that I’ve ever had… It was just very suffocating.”Isha Brahmbhatt: “I don’t think Yale did a good job at all. They didn’t seem to be really caring about what students wanted and how they could make a better experience for everyone.”Trevor MacKay: “Making friends was so difficult because of COVID that it was almost like an act of resistance to Yale’s COVID regime as we’ve been describing it.”Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Scott Atlas talked about the censorship he faced – even as a White House official – for sharing the data on masking and lockdowns, and highlighted how the lockdown policies too cost lives. Watch Dr. Atlas’ full eventSubscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com. Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst

In light of the horror that Hamas terrorists inflicted on innocent Israeli civilians, the Buckley Institute pulled together a special podcast episode on how the campus has responded. Isha Brahmbhatt ’24, Noah Riley ’24, and Trevor MacKay ’25 talked about Yalies4Palestine celebrating the atrocities over the weekend, what it means to share dorms and classrooms with those who celebrate violence against anyone deemed a “colonizer,” and the psychology of those who support Hamas’ acts of terror.Yale School of Medicine Professor and outspoken critic of antisemitism at Yale Evan Morris talks about the campus response to the weekend’s atrocities and what the administration needs to do to demonstrate its commitment to fighting antisemitism. Subscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com. Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst

Libby Snowden ’24 and Will Wang ’26 return to reflect on the alarming results of the Buckley Institute’s Ninth Annual College Student Survey:Libby Snowden: “If your response to hearing something that you disagree with or something that you find offensive is, ‘I’m gonna go tell the teacher,’ you’re still in the kiddie pool.”Will Wang: “We make up most of Yale. We make up most of elite institutions. And because we’re complacent in our current environment, we don’t have to do any reaching out. We don’t have to listen to ideas that differ from ours. But that isn’t supposed to be the point of an education. It’s supposed to challenge you.”University of Chicago Department of Physical Sciences Associate Professor Dorian Abbot talks speaking out about fairness in the university admissions process and the cancellation of a science lecture at MIT. Subscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com. Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst

Yale sophomores Will Barbee '26 and Will Wang '26  joined Pod and Man at Yale to share their thoughts on the Buckley Institute's Report on Faculty Political Diversity and what the 83% to 3.5% Democrat to Republican ratio among Yale faculty in key departments means for education at Yale. The two panelists then discussed President Peter Salovey's legacy in light of his resignation announcement and what they are looking for in Yale's next president. Cornell University Professor, Hoover Institution Fellow, and classicist Barry Strauss discussed why America still needs the classics and what has been lost in the modern rejection of the study of Western Civilization. Professor Strauss then reminisced about his experience as a student of former Yale College Dean and long-time professor Donald Kagan.Professor Strauss delivered the inaugural Donald Kagan Memorial lecture titled, "How to Win a War? Ask Thucydides." Subscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com. Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst

In this episode, panelists Libby Snowden '24, Trevor MacKay '25, and Will Barbee '26 talk about the state of free speech at Yale and the affirmative action decision. Former Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney discusses the day-to-day of running the White House and Office of Management and Budget, and how and why to run for Congress.Mulvaney is speaking at Yale on Tuesday, September 12th on "Civil Discourse in the Age of Incivility." See more details here: https://buckleyinstitute.com/events/mick-mulvaney-lecture/Subscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com. Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst