The Buckley Institute’s fifteenth annual conference will host several high-profile political figures, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and CNN commentator Scott Jennings.
Lucas Miller
Staff Writer, The Buckley Beacon
Registrations for the Buckley Institute’s fifteenth annual conference on Friday, November 14, have ballooned to over 400 registrants this year, up from last year’s 310 registrations, The Buckley Beacon has learned.
In spring 2025, the Buckley Institute recorded 820 student fellows, or around 12 percent of the Yale College student body, according to Lauren Noble (YC ‘11), Buckley’s founder and executive director. At its 2024 conference, the Buckley Institute hosted former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy (LAW ‘13) as its keynote speaker. Ramaswamy is currently the leading Republican candidate in the Ohio governor’s primary.
This year, Republican Governor of Florida Ron DeSantis (YC ‘01) will deliver the keynote address at Buckley’s conference. DeSantis has repeatedly made national headlines in his gubernatorial tenure, including for his championing of Florida’s 2022 Parental Rights in Education bill, which limited classroom instruction on issues of sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third grade. More recently, DeSantis’ administration caused controversy by scrapping immunization requirements for state schools.
Like Ramaswamy, DeSantis also ran for the Republican presidential nomination in the 2024 primary. “It’s events like these with speakers such as DeSantis that change the campus conversation and raise Buckley’s profile,” Noble told The Beacon in an email.
Noble attributed the increase in event registrations to the organization’s continued growth. “Since 2011, Buckley has been the main—and sometimes the only—source of prominent conservative and heterodox perspectives on campus,” she told The Beacon. “Our goal is not only to provide different perspectives, but to acculturate the campus to hearing challenging views, a necessary ingredient for the pursuit of truth.”
Noble also thanked the speakers for their willingness to come to Yale and highlighted many of their connections to the university. “Thankfully, many of them have felt it important to come to campus to challenge the progressive echo chamber themselves. Several of our conference speakers are Yale alumni and have a natural interest in our mission.”
The conference is being held just over a year after the election of President Donald Trump. Since January, several Ivy League institutions have been the targets of a federal crackdown, primarily over allegations of campus antisemitism and the schools’ DEI programs. In April, the Trump administration froze $2.2 billion in research grants to Harvard University after the university refused to satisfy federal demands for audits and changes to administrative practices.
In her speech during Yale’s September “Family Weekend” for undergraduates, Yale President Maurie McInnis alluded to the Yale Political Union and the Buckley Institute as possible reasons why Yale has fared better against the Trump administration’s legal actions against universities, though she admitted she remains unsure.
“Whether it is that long tradition, the long tradition we have of encouraging open debate from something like Yale Political Union or the Buckley Institute, or whether it’s we’re at the end of the alphabet, I don’t have that answer,” McInnis said in the speech.
At Friday’s conference, DeSantis will be joined at the conference by other high-profile political and media personalities, including CNN senior political contributor Scott Jennings, Director of Domestic Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute Matthew Continetti, and editor-in-chief of the Washington Free Beacon Eliana Johnson. In the same email to The Beacon, Noble described the conference’s guests as an “all-star lineup of speakers from start to finish.”
The Buckley Institute’s annual conference will take place at the Omni New Haven Hotel.