Opinion

Yale’s Central Asia Initiative, the centerpiece of its offerings on the increasingly important region, is falling short of its true potential. Luce Hall at Yale, which houses Yale’s MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. (Credit: Buckley Institute) Benjamin NulandContributor, The Buckley Beacon For many Americans, Central Asia remains a distant periphery, a vague space between Russia, China, and the Middle East. Yet this assumption misses its status as of the most consequential geopolitical laboratories of the 21st century. Yale’s Central Asia Initiative (CAI), one of the few institutions of its kind in the United States, is uniquely positioned to transform how students engage with the region, not simply as a historical and cultural relic, but as an...

Why letting go of Professor Feng Zhang was a mistake. 46 Hillhouse Avenue at Yale, home of Yale’s International Security Studies program. (Credit: Buckley Institute) Benjamin NulandContributor, The Buckley Beacon Yale College has long shaped how Americans understand China, with generations of scholars like Professor Jonathan Spence training undergraduates like Joe Tsai and Tim Steinert who went on to influence business and policy. But at the undergraduate level, that legacy feels increasingly hollow, especially in the study of contemporary Chinese geopolitics.  While peer institutions like Harvard and Brown have built accessible ecosystems like the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, at Yale, much of...

The Women’s Center purports itself to be a safe space on campus, but is it doing more harm than good? The Yale Women’s Center is located in the basement of Durfee Hall on Old Campus. (Credit: The Buckley Beacon). Hannah Owens PierreStaff Writer, The Buckley Beacon Recently, the Yale Women’s Center has come under scrutiny by the Yale administration. According to the Yale Daily News, last December the Yale Dean’s Office offered the Women’s Center the option to either represent the political neutrality of Yale’s mission or become a purely student organization, rather than a campus-sponsored organization with a paid student staff. The first question one should ask is what is the Yale’s Women’s Center? If you guessed a space to uplift and represent all women at Yale,...

Yale’s drinking culture is completely out of touch with reality. A Saturday night party on High Street. (Credit: Jack Olson) Jason CaoStaff Writer, The Buckley Beacon Before Yale students step foot on campus as freshmen, all of them complete a mandatory “Work Hard, Play Smart” online course on the dangers of alcohol and the importance of drinking responsibly. Like all mandatory trainings, no one really pays attention to this course, and upon arriving on campus, students newly endowed with personal independence are largely left to fend off the temptation of intoxication by themselves.  As the regular occurrence of ambulances and stretchers on and around Old Campus suggests, many of them fail. The danger of alcohol cannot be understated. Scientists classify alcoh...

Institutional neutrality is a common-sense policy, yet some students still don’t get the point. Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University. (Credit: Buckley Institute) Hannah Owens PierreStaff Writer, The Buckley Beacon On Wednesday, President McInnis sent an email to the Yale community announcing findings from the Committee on Trust in Higher Education, a coalition she convened to examine “declining trust in higher education.” The results are damning: The committee admits that Yale bears responsibility for this lack of trust, due to rising tuition costs, lack of clear standards for admission, and, most importantly, promoting political bias and censorship.  This last point has been the focus of much student discourse, from myself included. To combat the clear ...

Yale should adapt its international security education to reflect the realities on the ground in 21st century warfare. 46 Hillhouse Avenue, where Yale’s International Security Studies program is housed. (Credit: Buckley Institute) Shailen SharmaContributor, The Buckley Beacon In April 2023, Sudan collapsed into open gunfighting in the streets as the state authority evaporated. The U.S. State Department embassy in Khartoum announced that, “Americans should have no expectation of a US government-coordinated evacuation at this time.” Around 16,000 American nationals were left stranded in the gray zone: a lawless space where territory is controlled by armed gunmen, and the U.S. government is incapable or unwilling to intervene.  Over two years later in October 2025,...

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...

When people die in silence, the killing does not stop. It spreads. A woman lights a picture of Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei. (Source: @melianouss via X) Shervin IssakhaniContributing Author I am an Iranian student at Yale. My country is experiencing one of the most violent and systematic crackdowns on civilians in its modern history, and most people around me do not know it is happening. Across Iran, peaceful protesters — students, women, workers, elderly people — have gone into the streets demanding the most basic rights: freedom, dignity, and the ability to live without fear. They are not armed. They are not extremists. They are ordinary people asking for a future. The regime’s response has been bullets. Security forces have fired live ammunition into cro...

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 ...