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

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

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