Pod and Man at Yale

On the newest episode of Pod and Man at Yale, Christian theologian and Grove City College Professor Carl Trueman breaks down the central question and broader implications of his new book, The Desecration of Man: “If you ask somebody, who are you? That question is incredibly complicated today in a way that it wouldn’t have been, say, six or seven hundred years ago.”“If you want to shock people, you have to smash the orthodoxy of the previous generation. And there is no more powerful orthodoxy politically than thinking that Hitler was an evil and bad person. So, the emergence of a Fuentes doesn’t surprise me. What’s fascinating about Fuentes is, of course, is that he really has nothing positive to say…It is a purely flame throwing exercise which absolutely conforms to this pattern of desecration.”“The best way to make somebody realize they’re a human being is to treat them as a human being.”“I would say one of the key applications or key uses of technology, if you like, would be, that which restores those things that as humans, we should have, but which we've lost is good. Example: if a child is born with one leg and somebody develops a way of, you know, allowing that child to grow the leg that they're missing, I would not see that as an obnoxious use of technology. It's restoring what should be there. It's getting rid of a privation.”“Practical advice I might give to somebody who says, ‘well I did this and my friend took real exception’... Even if you find their views obnoxious, listen to what they have to say because the mere act of listening will indicate that you’re taking them seriously as a human being.”For the student panel, Brett Mellul ’29 and Jack Ehlert ’29 discussed their experiences navigating faith on campus:Ehlert: “I think conversations about religion happen in a way at Yale that honestly, maybe they didn't even happen between friends in high school and grade school…I've had a lot of really great conversations with people of the Jewish faith or like non-Catholic Christians or atheists and things—the sort of conversations that I didn’t really have as much before.”Ehlert: “I think I've really been forced to sort of hold myself accountable and take my faith responsibility into my own hands, which has been really a great experience, honestly.”Mellul: “From a mindset perspective, I don’t view it as, oh, I have to keep the Sabbath and therefore I don’t get to study or go to the football game or do whatever it is. I view it as the opposite. I get to keep the Sabbath, and I try to find all the beauty and meaning and connection that there is in the things that I already do.”Mellul: “I think that I’ve had a lot of opportunities on campus, to be an ambassador, so to speak, for particularly Orthodox Judaism. And, so, whether that’s just having lunch with a friend who is not an Orthodox Jew or not Jewish at all, or that’s the way that I answer a question in a class or even just the way that I comport myself while walking to a class on campus, I think is an opportunity to positively, make an impact.” 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, Buckley fellows Noah Torrance ’28 and Blake Freeman ’29 talk about their experience with open discourse at Yale.  Noah Torrance: "Maybe not everyone goes through Yale constantly being challenged in some way, but I think I definitely have. And the spaces that I've found in Yale, like the Buckley Institute, do a really great job of that."Torrance: "I was actually doing a campus tour…through one of the protests, through the Beinecke encampment, I was like, what’s going on over here? Somebody sitting? Are they camping?"Blake Freeman: "This is kind of cool because it’s like, okay, we expect our students to be active. We expect our students to be vocal about the things they care about. But we’re…going to set up this framework where they’re able to do it in a very constructive way."Freeman: "When I was growing up, I knew people who thought it was a better idea to be a garbage collector than to go to university.… It’s disappointing to me because universities do useful things and great things all the time.”Jacob Howland, past University of Austin Provost and Dean and former professor at the University of Tulsa, discusses the major issues plaguing higher education and the ways to course correct. Howland: "The future, from my point of view, always grows out of the soil of the past. You know, if we look at sort of the most creative geniuses in music and literature and so forth, they’re very well acquainted with what came before. "Howland: "We should hold up and celebrate professors who actually create the conditions for real learning, such as I’ve described, open inquiry, civil discourse whose syllabi reflect all positions who privilege the questions."Howland: "I came to the University of Tulsa in 1988, and shortly after I got there, I remember meeting a young woman and she said, what do you teach? And so forth. And I said, well, Plato and Aristotle, ancient Greeks, etc. I said, well, what do you do? And she said, well, I sure as hell don't teach dead white males."Howland: "The AI thing might be the biggest crisis. Because if it is the case, which I'm convinced it is, that many students, perhaps the majority, perhaps in some cases almost all of them, and not just students, by the way, professors too are relying on AI to do their work, then what we're going to have is students graduating essentially from what are now just diploma mills." Subscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com. Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst

In the first episode of the spring semester, Lux et Veritas Leadership Fellows Audrey Bae ’28, Joe Gicante ’28, and Constantine Semka ’28 discuss the value of liberal arts, why they think it's worth it to pay Yale tuition to study the humanities, and what liberal arts can teach us about Trump and Venezuela:Semka: “I think maybe that liberal education sets you back in the first couple years, but it really gives you an advantage later in life because what we learn in liberal education is how to think. How do I acquire knowledge in a faster, more efficient way.”Semka: “Liberal arts gives you a very strong foundation on which you can build later your career and what many people from other countries lack is that strong foundation.”Gicante: “…it’s difficult to teach somebody to be creative. That's not something you can learn in a classroom, right? There’s no creativity 101. That has to come from learning how to think and thinking through different systems, which is what a liberal arts education really is.”Bae: “I would much rather take the time now to seriously reflect on the kind of person I want to be and the kind of life I want to lead, so that I can live my life with no regrets even if in this initial process it seems to be very slow or inefficient.”American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Ben Story discussed the liberal arts, the challenges facing higher education in America, and his current efforts to fix it:Storey: “In Iraq under Saddam Hussein there were plenty of people studying things like engineering, dentistry, medicine, so on and so forth. All that stuff that was fine, uncontroversial….When John started promoting the study of history, study of literature, study of philosophy, that had explosive potential.”Storey: “The overwhelming homogeneity of a discipline such as sociology makes it the case that the kinds of questions that progressives care about just get investigated again and again and again.”Storey: “The polite brush off has been the basic response of colleges and universities to conservative critics for a very long time. Well, you have to hand it to the Trump administration. They’ve actually gotten beyond the polite brush off.”Storey: “People on the right should remember that the new means that Trump has effectively legitimized by using them with respect to the universities, well, they’re probably going to be used in the other direction.”Subscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com. Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst

In the most recent episode of Pod and Man at Yale, Buckley Fellows Nico Sahi SOM ’26 and Toby Neal ’27 talk about being liberal at Yale and as members of the Buckley Institute: Nico Sahi: “I really wanted to learn a little bit more about conservative ideologies, partly because maybe I’ll change my own mind about something, but also that you can’t debate something that you don’t understand yourself.”Toby Neal: “The recent events of the Charlie Kirk assassination were very much on my mind because that kind of—is kind of the reason that I joined Buckley in a sense, that I wanted to join in a space where conversations, even though difficult, were being had and you could have a very democratic debate about it.”Neal: “We are more and more facing echo chambers in our lives. Institutions, higher education are echo chambers. And I think that’s where places like Buckley are important…”Neal: “It is less that my mind has been changed–I tried to reflect on if there was some actual point where I’ve changed my opinion on something and I don’t think I have. But what I think it has is helped me understand where the other people are coming from.”Sahi: “Over the past 10 years, the consistent story has been ‘we need to talk to more people who disagree with us.’ And I think everyone hears that information and goes, ‘yes absolutely’ and then goes back and talks to everyone that already believes [what they do.]”Daniel Flynn, author of The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer, joined the podcast to discuss his book on the largely forgotten ex-Communist who shaped the modern conservative movement:Flynn: “All the way through this story there’s this kind of Forrest Gump quality to it where [Meyer] is around these people at the right time when they are happening, when they are exploding.”Flynn: “He establishes something called the October Club, which, when Frank gets to Oxford, there are zero Communists in the student body. When he leaves, there’s 300.”Flynn: “Do you want to join a movement where the guy’s looking down at his shoes and he’s got a bunch of marbles in his mouth, or do you want to join a movement of a guy who’s a winner? Frank was a winner and people wanted to be around him. That’s why he had such success in England as a Communist organizer. Also, why he had such success in America.”Subscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com. Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst

In the newest episode of Pod and Man at Yale, Mickey Lin ’26 and Justin Greenman GSAS reflect on their trip to see Hamilton on Broadway with the Buckley Institute and discuss their thoughts on the Founders:Lin: “When I was working on the Hill and I had to give capital tours, I was like, now, looking back, yeah, we never really talked about Hamilton…”Greenman: “I think there’s this perception that, oh, we’ve never been more divided. No, we have been extremely divided, right—you think of Hamilton and Burr, you think of Hamilton and Jefferson—it’s a reminder that, right, history maybe—what was the Mark Twain line, history doesn’t repeat but it rhymes.”Lin: “I think it’d be interesting to see a Founding Fathers course or an early American politics course and for first years to take. I think it’s hard to be a political science major and continue to study politics…without having a strong foundation on the Founding Fathers.”Greenman: “I’ve found that a lot of people are, if not dismissive of the Founding era ideals, they’re just kind of uninformed.”Greenman: “Those ideas, those values, those passions that Mickey talked about, they’re still the foundation of America.”Richard Brookhiser, noted author and journalist, joined Buckley Fellows at Hamilton then stuck around for dinner to discuss the play and the Founders:“The principles under which slavery was finally ended in this country were principles enounced by the founders.”“It is a true point that we also have to realize that [the Founders are] not just talking only to each other or in some kind of rarified common room. They are presenting their ideas to the American public. And the American public is reading them, reacting to them, debating them.”“Good stories just beat bad ones. They beat dull ones and they beat stupid ones. And a smart story of the American Revolution and of the construction of the government that followed, is a dramatic story; it's an interesting story; it's an intelligent story. There’s a lot of intelligence involved by the actors and you have to bring some intelligence to bear to understand everything that was going on. And it's a story that's not that long ago and still affects us today. How are you gonna beat that?”“I remember I was on some panel in New York, at the New School, and this older man came up to me and said, ‘Are you still in touch with Bill Buckley?’ (who’d retired by then), and I said ‘yes’ and he said, ‘Well can you thank him for me? I’m a radical but he was the only place where you got to see radicals talking at length because he’d bring them on to Firing Line and debate them.”Subscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com. Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst

In the first Pod and Man at Yale episode of the fall semester, Will Flanigan '27, Hilda Barragan-Reyes '26, and Stephen Morris '27 discuss free markets, capitalism, and Zohran Mamdani:Hilda Barragan-Reyes: “I think people don’t necessarily disagree with the premise that capitalism is the best system. I think they often don’t understand what capitalism is and what socialism is.”Stephen Morris: “I do think many people have a sense of guilt in that there’s a lot of factors beyond our control that affect how we got into Yale or what careers our parents had, and I think part of the instinct toward Socialism or toward interventionist policies in an economy is seeking either to rectify that or to rectify the guilt that people have about that.” Will Flanigan: “People support socialism vocally because they want to be perceived as caring…at the same time they want to make a lot of money and be seen as very effective and hard working.”Georgetown University's Jason Brennan looks at why the socialism appeals to the young and the misconceptions that have made socialism so popular:Brennan: “Groups will get some power and make decisions. Those decisions will have bad ramifications for everybody but people almost never blame the outcomes on the people who make those decisions.”Brennan: “Especially after the pandemic, the U.S. government spent a lot of money. Governments around the world spent a lot of money. They restricted supply because of how COVID works. And all of a sudden our money is worth less and there’s inflation. And people are like, who could have predicted that?”Brennan: “The profit motive actually gets people to act. People are frankly, they’re just not that altruistic. They like to claim they are…but they’re not.” Brennan: “In the 20th century, we experimented with two fundamental ways of living. About 90 countries went capitalist and about 90 countries went socialist. Capitalism went 90 for 90. Socialism went 0 for 90.” Subscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com. Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst

On the last episode of the spring semester, Pod and Man at Yale brought two military veterans, Valerie Calderon-Meyer ’27 and Galen Jones MPH/MBA '26, to talk about post-military life at Yale: Calderon-Meyer: “Most of my friends are graduates or PhD students who are within my age group. I think I feel deeper connections in that way.” Jones: “The school of management, I’ve had a very, I think, easy time fitting in. 10% of the student body are veterans. So, it’s a very high percentage, and I think it’s increasing.”Jones: “People don’t know oftentimes how to handle the military experience but they’re very open to learning about it. And it doesn’t actually pose a barrier between friendships at all.”Calderon-Meyer: “I think in my experience, Yale College, for the most part, has been really accommodating, with student accessibility and accommodations for one. They welcome veterans. They understand that well…I think Yale’s making some big strides for veterans.”Jones: “I know also Yale has brought in not only new roles but a new office over by Mory’s, and have shown pretty real dedication to increasing the veterans support and community across campus.”Jones: “More often than not, we’re not in situations where (military experience) does add value. But when it does, I do try and make a concerted effort to go outside, I guess, my own comfort zone of saying these things, because it is another perspective that needs to be told and shared. And there are a lot of times that there is a large value add.”Peter Dutton, military veteran and Senior Research Scholar in Law and Senior Fellow for the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School, joined the podcast to talk about his own transition from military to civilian life and to look at the China challenge: Dutton: “The transition from being active duty to civilian, you know, the strongest thing in it was the something I didn’t expect, was the sense of, I just wasn’t responsible for everything anymore. As a naval officer, it’s just sort of ingrained in you that you are responsible for the outcome of the mission of the organization that you are a part of. Period. End of discussion.”Dutton: “Probably the average student in the military is somewhat more conservative than the average student here at Yale or at NYU. But it may in part have to do with age and experiences. Because what you really see in the military is a pretty significant reflection of the diversity of American society.”Dutton: “A lot of people sort of stereotype Yale as leaning hard to the left and I find in the student body so far in my interactions, that’s an oversimplification.”Dutton: “There’s a lot of worry that China is becoming a global military power. I think it’s too soon to begin to seriously worry about that…America has a global military with global focuses. China has a very focused military, and yet China’s military is very strong.” Dutton: “America should be concerned about China and there are senses in which China can be a threat to the United States.”    Subscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com. Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst

On this week’s episode of Pod and Man at Yale, Buckley Beacon Editor-in-Chief Owen Tilman ’27 interviewed climate policy expert Bjorn Lomborg ahead of his talk at Yale: Lomborg: “The world is actually, on pretty much all measurable variables getting better, but there are still lots of problems to fix. But let’s stop fixing them because we think this is the end of the world…let’s be smart and think about what we can do best.” Lomborg: “It’s really really wrong when scientists try to pretend to also be politicians at the same time.”Lomborg: “The U.N. climate panel report, the IPCC is right, there is manmade global warming. The conversation that I have is how bad is it. And I argue, much less bad than what people talk about. And what are the right solutions. And it’ll often turn out that the rights solutions are not the ones that you hear about.”Lomborg: “That’s really the conversation we need to have and we can’t have that if everybody is just running around like chickens without their heads and saying, ‘Oh my god. The world is coming to an end.’”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, Anshul Guha ’25 and Kevin Baisden LAW ’25 talked about what it means to be conservative at Yale: Guha: “I think the most important thing for me, as a conservative on campus at that time, was to make sure that I was continuing to speak out…and making sure that my views were heard just so that there was this opposing view on campus.”Baisden: “I didn’t self-censor. None of my closest friends at the law school self-censored. Even in classes—I’m just thinking back to my federal courts class, which is taught by a very famous constitutional scholar who is definitely liberal—I would have no issue espousing or endorsing a conservative viewpoint leading up to the election.”Guha: “A couple years ago, the whole idea that young people can plausibly be conservative in large numbers was just not a thing and so even the discussion [about conservative policies] wouldn’t happen. So, I’m just happy that the discussion is now happening.”Baisden: “If I’m being candid, I expected more critical thought and critical discussions from both directions before I got to Yale Law School.” Baisden: “As a conservative, I’m defense counsel every time I walk into the law school.”Lawrence Perelman, a close friend of William F. Buckley, Jr., recently published a new bio of the iconic conservative thinker, American Impresario: William F. Buckley, Jr. and the Elements of American Character. He joined the podcast to talk about his new book, his relationship with Buckley, and how music shaped their lives and relationship: Perelman: “I knew of Bill–not only knew of, but he was a hero of mine growing up in the 1980’s as a vehement anticommunist, as a philosemite, as someone had pushed the antisemites out of the conservative movement. And for me and my parents—my parents fled the Soviet Union in 1975, so 50 years ago—he always stood as a beacon of hope and inspiration.”Perelman on Finding a Mentor: “Getting through the door the first time can be tough. But getting through the second time is even tougher. You have to really prove yourself.”  Perelman: “After my parents, he was the most important person in my life. There is no question…In terms of my formative life, to understand generosity, to understand the importance of communication, of staying in touch, of actually responding to someone’s letter, there’s no one that shines brighter for me. Those acts actually changed the course of my life.”Perelman: “He was just a pleasure to be around. He was nice. He was fun. He was warm. He was, for me at that age, probably more grandfatherly…It was just a real grasp and respect for the young people around him.”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, Abhinay Lingareddy ’26, Will Flanigan ’27, and John Byler ’28 discuss the storied Yale Political Union, its conservative bent, and the state of debate on Yale’s campus: Byler ’28: “On the left, in the party of the left, the progressive party, I would be shocked to find a single trump voter. But in the Federalist Party, and I what I presume to be other conservative parties as well, there’s a pretty even split between Republican and Democrat voters.”Lingareddy ’26: “A lot of the conservatives on campus are conservative on campus but not necessarily right wing on a national scale.”Will Flanigan ’27: “Coming to Yale as a conservative, you kind of understand that that’s more unique and so you naturally want to search out opportunities to engage with people that agree with you broadly…There aren’t that many other places to go, one of the few others being the Buckley Institute itself, of which, the vast majority of political union members, certainly on the right, are members as well.”Lingareddy  ’26: “There’s also a perception that the union isn’t the safest space for the left, which I think is sometimes true but not all the time.”Independent journalist Jamie Kirchick ’06 talked about the more censorious new generation of journalists and the decline of campus dialogue: Kirchick ’06: “It seems that things have gone in a bad direction in that there’s less debates going on between people of different opinions, that people sort of cocooned into their ideological corners.”Kirchick ’06: “It’s often the more elite and prestigious the school is, the worse it is when it comes to free expression.”Kirchick ’06: “The mainstream media are usually right. They’re usually reporting the facts. But there have been major stories, major themes that they’ve gotten wrong over the years and they’ve refused to apologize for.”Kirchick ’06: “I do think it is up to leaders in these media institutions to stop bowing down to the 25-year-olds who work for them and are demanding all these radical changes.”Subscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com. Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst

Yale College Council Senators Will Barbee ’26 and David Fleming ’26 join Yale Daily News columnist Joshua Danziger ’28 to talk about the new YCC call for student oversight of the Yale Police Department:Will Barbee’26: “I do think it’s important to keep it in our minds, and, you know, always make sure that we’re giving them the adequate resources they need to keep us safe.” Joshua Danziger ’28: “Students, I think, recognize that the campus needs police, and New Haven needs police, and that it’s important to have a positive relationship with the department.” Danziger: “Students and graduate students and faculty are not law enforcement. They have not been trained in protecting civilian populations. They shouldn’t have oversight over police matters.”David Fleming ’26: “It didn’t work great to have student representatives in the past, not to say it can’t in the future, but I think they should be erring more towards faculty representatives on that board.” Barbee: “…[Police are] people too, and they’re people doing a job that’s important for your life.”The Manhattan Institute’s Rafael Mangual talked about the dangers of the defund the police movement and the hypocrisy of many its biggest proponents:Mangual: “A lot of the resource constraints are often created by people who share this ideology. And the ideology is really rooted in a fundamental disagreement with the idea that a functioning civil society requires institutions of law enforcement to flourish. I think that’s true. Police abolitionists…don’t.”Mangual: “We should take note of the fact that a lot of the people offering the most extreme kind of reforms don’t stand to pay any of the price should things go south…They have no skin in the game.”Mangual: “I always ask people who say police need more oversight, where is the lack of oversight? I never really get a good answer.”Mangual: “There’s no reason to believe that a handful of students and faculty members at Yale, as great a university as it is, are well-positioned to direct or redirect the decisions being made by professional police.”Subscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com. Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst

In this week’s episode of Pod and Man at Yale, Tori Cook ’27 and Vanessa Li ’25 take on Yale’s busyness culture and whether China’s or America’s educational culture is the best path for societal success.Vanessa Li: “It’s good to have this kind of pressure to push you to achieve better. But make sure that you are directing the pressure in the direction that you want.”Tori Cook: “The idea that you’re then going to force someone into sticking with (the career they chose at 18), I think the consequences really can be devastating.” Li: “Under the Hong Kong education system, I wasn’t doing very well. But I excelled in the U.S. education system because I was given a lot more opportunity to do things outside of academics.” Cook: “This is something that sometimes I’ll see in clubs where it gets really ugly with people stepping over people or going behind people’s backs…and to know that this continues after college is concerning.”Li: “If you’re upset over getting rejected from this volunteering club then you are not ready for the real world.”Subscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com. Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst

In the newest episode Pod and Man at Yale, Will Barbee ’26, and Raleigh Adams DIV ’26, discuss being religious on campus, how Yale interacts with and teaches religion, and the ways a religious lifestyle build on and improves the campus experience:Adams ’26: “You kind of are on the back foot in being that minority of being a traditionally religious student.” Barbee ’26: “In terms of just perceptions of religion from the student body, I would say that the biggest problem that I’ve seen with it, is that students view religion as almost like an additional extracurricular rather than something that’s obviously much deeper than just a club.”Barbee ’26: “Speaking specifically to Yale’s campus, I think there is just the plague of too much business all the time with undergraduates… I think a lot of them are looking for a place that religion can offer, which is a place to center yourself, a place to find some sort of deeper connection than just the day-to-day aspects of life.”Adams ’26: “If you have to accept anyone’s truth, it kind of loosens the grip that you have on your own. I think even just being here a semester, I’ve watched multiple people come in relatively firm in their faith practices then kind of just lost a grip on that as they are focused on and forced to kind of grapple with these questions more.”Barbee ’26: “I think [Yale] definitely could prioritize, if not religious conversation or religious inculcation in the students, at least some sort of a sense of a deeper moral and spiritual life.”  University of Notre Dame’s Richard Garnett LAW ’95 talked about religion in the public square, America’s past persecution of Catholics, and Notre Dame’s position as an icon of Catholic life—on the football field and around the country:Garnett: “For long, long time on the Supreme Court, there was this sense that you could have one Catholic justice and one Jewish justice, but no more. The Supreme Court belonged to White guys who have gone to Harvard.”Garnett: “There are people in public commentary who have various theories about how the justices are doing certain things because they are Catholic… I think those complaints are unfounded… they don’t vote to bring about the Catholic legal position any more than Justice Kagan votes to bring about the Jewish legal position.” Garnett: “I think a lot of the attacks on the Supreme Court are unfair and unfounded.” Subscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com. Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst

On the first episode of Pod and Man at Yale of the year, Hilda Barragan-Reyes ’26, Abhinay Lingareddy ’26, and Eric Arabadzhiev ’28  talk about new Yale student survey results pointing to an increase in support for free speech. They also debate the free speech value of shout downs and whether institutional neutrality really matters for free speech. Arabadzhiev ’28: “I think, across the board, that sort of censorious behavior is not one that we should be welcoming onto a campus that supposedly its mission is to seek truth.”Lingareddy ’26: “I’m not endorsing shouting down as productive. I don’t think the form of speech should always be productive. I don’t think that’s the only value of speech. I think speech is often a form of expression.”Barragan-Reyes ’26: “I think it’s hard to discount the consequences of expressing certain views on campus, as we saw during the Israel conflict that’s still going on.”Lingareddy ’26: “Yale has power. Yale has money. What is all that money for. What is all that power for and influence for if we’re just going to be institutionally neutral.”Alec Torres ’13, past speech writer for President Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and Kevin McCarthy walks through what it means and what it takes to write a great speech: Torres '13: “What makes a great speech is the unity of having a moment worthy of greatness and then meeting the moment with something beautiful and something profound.” Torres '13: “In any craft, if you’re good enough at it over time, and devote yourself to it, you’ll hit those flow points where it’s almost like you’re not working… the creative aspect of it can flow through you freely without blockages. The ancients would call it the muse. Maybe an inspiration of the Spirit in more Christian terms.”  Torres '13: “I try to unlock in my own mind why I personally should care about what I’m writing about. Why does it actually matter?” Torres '13: “Too zealously guarding one’s reputation and fearing malign influences of other people is a recipe for unhappiness and, in my opinion, ultimate failure professionally too.”Subscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com. Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst

Arianne de Gennaro ’25 and Owen Tilman ’27 join Pod and Man at Yale to talk about institutional neutrality and how Yale handles free speech. They then look at the Congressional report on Yale’s handling of Gaza protests:Tilman: “I think it’s pretty extraordinary that the free speech conversation on Yale’s campus in the past year has become, is it genocidal to shout ‘from the river to the sea?’ And then say, it depends on the context… The double standard is insane.”De Gennaro: “All of a sudden we care about free speech? What it seems like to me is that we’re protecting speech that we deem to be correct or valuable. Which is basically saying, I’m right so my side gets to speak.”De Gennaro: “I don’t really understand how people can expect to break the law and then not have any consequences. Why? Because their cause is just? We’re not living in a superhero movie.”Tilman: “What I saw in Beinecke Plaza was nothing short of the larva stage of a death cult.”  Yale Law School Professor Keith Whittington talks about institutional neutrality and why he’s optimistic about Yale’s new public comment guidelines:Whittington: “We hear [different ideas] out and then we try to engage with them. And if we can’t do that, then I don’t know what we’re bothering doing on university campuses at all.”Whittington: “What we have found for decades of research on this is that if you ask people do they care about free speech, do they value free speech, left, right, and center, young and old, they tend to say, yes they care.”Whittington: “If you’re going to go out picking fights in political arenas, you should not be surprised if your opposition decides to fight back. And ultimately, universities are going to lose that fight.” Whittington: “Among the battles we should not be picking is how do we make symbolic statements that accomplish no particular purposes except to anger people that we disagree with and make the people who agree with us feel better.”Subscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com. Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst

Pod and Man at Yale hosted its first ever presidential debate! Two teams of two Buckley Fellows each made the case for Kamala Harris and Donald Trump respectively to be the next president of the United States. Will Wang ’26 and Felix Leonhardt ’26 argued for supporting Vice President Kamala Harris. Manu Anpalagan ’26 and Owen Tilman ’27 took the trump side of the debate. Check it out before you cast your vote!Subscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com. Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst

In this week’s episode of Pod and Man at Yale, Arav Dalwani ’26 and John Matthews-Ederington ’27 talk about the state of world politics, covering the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. Matthews-Ederington: “A lot of the failure of October 7th was an intelligence failure on Israel’s part.”Dalwani: “The world is on fire in my opinion… The world is in a much more precarious position than it was four or five years ago.”Matthews-Ederington: “Whenever you’re talking about nuclear weapons, you should always say yes, there’s a possibility that that’s going to happen.”Dalwani: “I think [the two-state solution] is much more unrealistic and I think that’s because of two reasons. One, obviously is the conflict that’s happened with Hamas. But the second thing I think that the Palestinian National Authority… is much more unlikely to accept a peace deal.”For the expert interview, 2024 Donald Kagan Memorial Lecturer and Hilldale College Professor Paul Rahe looks at American foreign policy since the Cold War and how repeating the mistakes of post-World War I international relations is putting America on the path to another world war:Rahe: “And for 30 years, we acted, and we still continue to act to some extent, as if a utopia had been created that made war impossible.” Rahe: “What you’ve got is the makings of another world war.”Rahe: “Richard Nixon has been sort of demonized and he certainly did some foolish things but if you look at his conduct of foreign policy, it was brilliant. He laid the foundation for the end of the Cold War by driving a wedge between China and Russia.” Rahe: “What the Russians did in 2014 was breach is breach that agreement. Why did they do it? They did it because they could. And they did it as a way of humiliating us and humiliating NATO.”Subscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com. Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst

In the newest episode of Pod and Man at Yale, Claire Barragan-Bates ’25 and Owen Tilman ’27 return to the podcast to reflect on the spring protests and the charges against the students who wouldn’t leave. They then discuss the alarming lack of diversity among the Yale faculty in light of a new Buckley Institute report and how it impacts the campus:Claire Barragan-Bates: “It’s crossed the line from just being a normal college experience protest to being disruptive at the point where these protesters broke the law.”Owen Tilman: “You know that’s one of these ridiculous… false premises of the anti-Israel movement, that somehow by setting up encampments, and disrupting traffic and gluing you’re hands to the street, that you’re somehow gonna convince people that your cause is worthwhile.” Barragan-Bates: “The erosion of our free speech rights on campus will be the demise of the university so I think that institutional neutrality is a huge step in the right direction.”Tilman: “That is the most evil component of being in such a politically homogeneous environment. It’s sort of assumed that you agree with all of these incredibly contestable claims about the nature of the other side. And it’s just taken to be true.”Tilman: “The fact that you can only name drop 4 Republicans, maybe, out of 356 people across a bunch of different departments. And then you can have 10 out of these 14 departments with no Republicans, I think is pretty damning.”For the expert interview, Yale Professor of Political Science and Philosophy Steven B. Smith talked about how the protests impacted him—particularly when watching fellow faculty participate—and why he chose to show the protestors that he isn’t afraid to support Israel: Professor Smith: “It was different from previous protests. Many of these had a personal direction to it targeting not only a policy that students objected to or a war that they might have objected to… it seemed to be opposed to the very—in some cases, not everybody of course—the presence of Jews and Jewish students here.”Smith: “It is a shocking thing to know, to think there are people on the faculty—antisemites, real antisemites. Somehow you never quite think these are the people around you who are employed at a serious place like this.”Smith: “There’s a lot of moral intimidation that goes on with this... But I thought it was, to me, important to say there’s somebody on the faculty at least who is willing to push back against this aggressive protest movement.”Smith: “We are in a struggle for the soul of the university. I really do believe that.”Subscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com. Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst

On the first episode of the second season of Pod and Man at Yale, Will Barbee ’26, Isaac Oberman ’26, and Marco Nino ’24 talk about the presidential election and what it will mean for campus civility and debate:Will Barbee: “People are very willing to forget things that they don’t like about one person if they even think that there’s a slightly better chance that they’ll win.” Isaac Oberman: “I think that there will be a lot of animosity towards anybody even thinking about voting for a conservative. I don’t see very civil discussion happening any time soon.”Marco Nino: “People can only hate on you so much before they just realize, ‘this guy does not care.’”Oberman: “There’s no actual care about policies or anything. It’s just, ‘you’re the other color, red or blue, you’re the other color, you’re weird.’ And that’s what our political scene has devolved to.”2024 Lux et Veritas Faculty Prize winner and Yale Lecturer in Ethics, Politics, and Economics Dr. Gregory Collins discussed what it takes to support real discussion in the classroom, analyzed conservative themes in Home Alone, and shared his predictions about the 2024 presidential election:Dr. Gregory Collins: “First and foremost, at a university, our responsibility as instructors and as students is to retain, discover, and transmit knowledge in pursuit of the true and beautiful.”  Collins: “Practically speaking, today, I think we’ve lost the ability to disagree in a firm but civil manner. And that is one quality I do try to promote in the classroom.”Collins: “One guideline I ask of my students is at some point in the paper, pause… and consider what are the strongest counterarguments to my thesis.”Collins: “You can still retain your argument but nevertheless acknowledge that yes, this point of view does highlight weaknesses of my logic.”Subscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com. Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst

In the final Pod and Man at Yale episode of the academic year, Tori Cook ’26 and Claire Barragan-Bates ’25 talk about the Yale Women’s Center and how it has failed to support Yale women in favor of Marxist causes:Barragan-Bates: “It wasn’t just about furthering women in their career prospects. They were in fact against that which is why they didn’t want to partner with The Women’s Network and Women’s Leadership Initiative.”Barragan-Bates: “[The Yale Women’s Center has] become about pretty much anything except traditional feminism.” Cook: “It very much frustrates me that women’s center means only women of a particular bent and a very particular area with very particular ideology…and yet it’s supported by Yale funding.”Independent Women’s Forum Vice President Andrea Bottner, who has served in official positions focusing on women’s issues at the state, federal, and international level, discussed how women are treated by women’s organizations, on campus and around the world:Bottner: “When I hear a group like the Yale Women’s Center, I would never think that I would be welcome there.”Bottner: “What happened on October 7th was…brutal, sadistic murder. Rape was used as a weapon of war—that should not have any sort of political attachment. But all of our big women’s groups…they had nothing to say. It’s just egregious. The silence was deafening.”Bottner: “Campuses all over have shut down conservative women speakers, in the name of what? Of politics.”Bottner: “How have we gotten to this place where if you say, ‘I believe women deserve a fair playing field and to compete with other women, period,’ you are immediately labeled as a horrible transphobe, an evil person.”Send your thoughts on this episode or the new reports on the Yale Women's Center to [email protected] to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com. Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst

In this episode, Yale faculty members Edward Kaplan, Evan Morris, and Roya Hakakian discuss how Israel is treated on campus, the hypocrisy of academic boycotts of Israel, and their recent trip to the country. Roya Hakakian: “That doesn’t just reveal the hypocrisy of boycotts but also the impossibility of separating human beings and human inventions from one another.”Hakakian: “A lot of Arab Israelis, almost everyone that I interviewed with, [said] we don’t feel like second[class] citizens.”Dr. Ed Kaplan: “This is not a series of seemingly spontaneous independent realizations at campuses across the country. This was extremely organized. Somebody built a big button and pushed it on October 7th.”Dr. Evan Morris: “This is a war on reason—it’s a war on reason and civility.” American Enterprise Institute’s Samuel Abrams talks about antisemitism on campus and the recent student encampments:Dr. Abrams: “The schools absolutely have a right to say ‘you can' t camp here, right here right now...it's creating a real threat, it's a disruption...’ and they're choosing not to do it.”Abrams: “It’s very clear that it was only the question of when was [DEI] going to turn on the Jewish community and on issues of Israel.” Abrams: “I marvel and just stay up at night in bed, almost daily now, wondering what a strange world I live in where I have to defend Israel's right to self-determination and to defend itself against those horrific attacks because logic and reason [have] fallen apart.”Subscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com. Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst

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