“The Larva Stage of a Death Cult”: Students on Campus Protest Report and Institutional Neutrality; Yale Law Prof. Keith Whittington on Yale’s New Comment Guidelines

Pod and Man at Yale

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.”

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