The Yale Political Union and the Death of Debate on Campus; Jamie Kirchick on the Failure of the Media and the New Censorious Generation

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.”

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