“Constantly Being Challenged”: What the Yale Experience Can Be; Dr. Jacob Howland on Fixing the Modern University
Wed Feb 04 2026
On the newest episode of Pod and Man at Yale, Buckley fellows Noah Torrance ’28 and Blake Freeman ’29 talk about their experience with open discourse at Yale.
Noah Torrance: "Maybe not everyone goes through Yale constantly being challenged in some way, but I think I definitely have. And the spaces that I've found in Yale, like the Buckley Institute, do a really great job of that."Torrance: "I was actually doing a campus tour…through one of the protests, through the Beinecke encampment, I was like, what’s going on over here? Somebody sitting? Are they camping?"Blake Freeman: "This is kind of cool because it’s like, okay, we expect our students to be active. We expect our students to be vocal about the things they care about. But we’re…going to set up this framework where they’re able to do it in a very constructive way."Freeman: "When I was growing up, I knew people who thought it was a better idea to be a garbage collector than to go to university.… It’s disappointing to me because universities do useful things and great things all the time.”Jacob Howland, past University of Austin Provost and Dean and former professor at the University of Tulsa, discusses the major issues plaguing higher education and the ways to course correct.
Howland: "The future, from my point of view, always grows out of the soil of the past. You know, if we look at sort of the most creative geniuses in music and literature and so forth, they’re very well acquainted with what came before. "Howland: "We should hold up and celebrate professors who actually create the conditions for real learning, such as I’ve described, open inquiry, civil discourse whose syllabi reflect all positions who privilege the questions."Howland: "I came to the University of Tulsa in 1988, and shortly after I got there, I remember meeting a young woman and she said, what do you teach? And so forth. And I said, well, Plato and Aristotle, ancient Greeks, etc. I said, well, what do you do? And she said, well, I sure as hell don't teach dead white males."Howland: "The AI thing might be the biggest crisis. Because if it is the case, which I'm convinced it is, that many students, perhaps the majority, perhaps in some cases almost all of them, and not just students, by the way, professors too are relying on AI to do their work, then what we're going to have is students graduating essentially from what are now just diploma mills." Subscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com.
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On the newest episode of Pod and Man at Yale, Buckley fellows Noah Torrance ’28 and Blake Freeman ’29 talk about their experience with open discourse at Yale. Noah Torrance: "Maybe not everyone goes through Yale constantly being challenged in some way, but I think I definitely have. And the spaces that I've found in Yale, like the Buckley Institute, do a really great job of that."Torrance: "I was actually doing a campus tour…through one of the protests, through the Beinecke encampment, I was like, what’s going on over here? Somebody sitting? Are they camping?"Blake Freeman: "This is kind of cool because it’s like, okay, we expect our students to be active. We expect our students to be vocal about the things they care about. But we’re…going to set up this framework where they’re able to do it in a very constructive way."Freeman: "When I was growing up, I knew people who thought it was a better idea to be a garbage collector than to go to university.… It’s disappointing to me because universities do useful things and great things all the time.”Jacob Howland, past University of Austin Provost and Dean and former professor at the University of Tulsa, discusses the major issues plaguing higher education and the ways to course correct. Howland: "The future, from my point of view, always grows out of the soil of the past. You know, if we look at sort of the most creative geniuses in music and literature and so forth, they’re very well acquainted with what came before. "Howland: "We should hold up and celebrate professors who actually create the conditions for real learning, such as I’ve described, open inquiry, civil discourse whose syllabi reflect all positions who privilege the questions."Howland: "I came to the University of Tulsa in 1988, and shortly after I got there, I remember meeting a young woman and she said, what do you teach? And so forth. And I said, well, Plato and Aristotle, ancient Greeks, etc. I said, well, what do you do? And she said, well, I sure as hell don't teach dead white males."Howland: "The AI thing might be the biggest crisis. Because if it is the case, which I'm convinced it is, that many students, perhaps the majority, perhaps in some cases almost all of them, and not just students, by the way, professors too are relying on AI to do their work, then what we're going to have is students graduating essentially from what are now just diploma mills." Subscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com. Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst