Pod and Man at Yale

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]

Subscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com. 

Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst