Author: Ari Shtein

Reflections on Passover and the Yale regime. Hillhouse Avenue in New Haven, Conn. (Credit: Buckley Institute) Ari ShteinOpinions Editor, The Buckley Beacon Passover is upon us, the Jewish holiday which celebrates the Exodus narrative. As flowers burst forth from their buds, and throngs of Yalies pour out of the library onto Cross Campus in celebration of the muggy 65° overcast afternoons, we Jews spend a week remembering that only through the grace of God did we go free from slavery in Egypt 3,000 years ago. Indeed, we are told to remember that we went free — us, personally, not our ancestors. Why is this? The first answer I ever heard was a simple counterfactual: if not for God’s intervention, we would still today be slaves in Egypt. The point, then, is to dri...

The moral characters of David Gelernter and Nicholas Christakis are better judged by every other aspect of their respective careers. Professor Nicholas Christakis (left) and Professor David Gelernter (right). (Credit: Yale School of Medicine; Yale Engineering) Ari ShteinOpinions Editor, The Buckley Beacon On Friday, January 29, the US Department of Justice released millions of pages of new documents related to its investigation of Jeffrey Epstein. According to reporting in the Yale Daily News, somewhere in those millions of pages, correspondences between Epstein and two Yale professors could be found: David Gelernter '76 of the computer science department, and Nicholas Christakis ‘84, a Sterling professor with his primary appointment in sociology. Gelernt...

Reflections on former associate attorney general Vanita Gupta’s visit to Yale. ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ Vanita Gupta and Dr. Beverly Gage answer an audience member’s question at a Committee on Trust in Higher Education event on December 2, 2025. (Credit: Corinne Cowan) Ari ShteinStaff Writer, The Buckley BeaconOn Tuesday, the Committee on Trust in Higher Education held an event with Vanita Gupta (YC ‘96), a civil rights lawyer and former associate attorney general. She was to speak on “The Future of Higher Education.”Something ...

Are we ready to fight it? ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ Branford College at Yale University. (Credit: Owen Tilman) Ari ShteinStaff Writer, The Buckley BeaconOn October 26, the Board of Directors of The Harvard Salient, a conservative campus outlet, announced they were suspending the publication. It was the culmination of a weeks-long controversy, kicked off by a passage printed in The Salient’s September edition which had language echoing a speech given by Adolf Hitler in 1939.In the course of arguing that “Islam et al. has absolutely no place in Western Europe,” a contributor to The Salient...

An ode to Yale’s administrative bureaucracy. ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ Memorial Quadrangle Gate on High Street near Yale University’s Old Campus. (Credit: Owen Tilman) Ari ShteinStaff Writer, The Buckley BeaconPick one person, at random, off Yale’s New Haven campus. Keep your eyes closed—don’t peek!—and ask them what it is they’re doing here. Incredibly, it’s just about as likely they’ll tell you they’re an administrator as an undergraduate student.Yale has got a lot of non-academic staff on payroll. Some do important IT work, or clean the halls or feed...

The American university has never been more reviled. And the way we’re trying to fix it is wrong. ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ Pauli Murray College at Yale University. (Credit: Buckley Institute) Ari ShteinStaff Writer, The Buckley BeaconIn April, Yale University President Maurie McInnis convened a Committee on Trust in Higher Education, which would “undertake a process of reckoning and reflection … to better understand public perception and envision ways of strengthening trust.” Per an early-September report in the Yale Daily News, the Trust Committee had spent its summer “conducting background research and holding preliminary conversations,” but found itself unsure of w...