Students Have Little Hope for Civil Election Debate; Dr. Collins Talks Real Learning In The Classroom

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.”

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