Yale "Absolutely" Failing as a Social Institution; Dr. Yuval Levin on Society's Core Institutions and Why They Aren't Working as They Should

Pod and Man at Yale

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.”

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