CLAY: Buck, I know we probably shouldn’t be surprised that our nation’s “smartest” (and I’m saying that in quotation marks) universities are among the most Draconian when it’s come to covid. If you remember, the Ivy League shut down sports for a couple of years. That was before they allowed men to start competing against women. They were shutting down all their sports.

And now I’m looking at some of the stories that are coming out. Princeton, Buck, is not allowing students to leave the county of Princeton where they’re located for the semester. This is madness. Yale is requiring all students to quarantine alone in their dorm rooms when they return despite the fact that all of the university is double vaxxed and boosted. And they said that if you go off campus, you cannot eat at any restaurant, including outdoor seating.

I talked about yesterday, Stanford has eliminated all crowds for its sporting events indoors other than family members. There’s no data, there’s no science to support this at all. How do we get to a place, Buck, where ostensibly the universities filled with the smartest kids in our country are making the dumbest decisions when it comes to covid?

BUCK: Honestly, universities really aren’t that filled with smart kids these days. There is a lot of kids who are box checkers, a lot of kids who have some “in” and understand the system. And, yeah, there are brilliant kids with amazing boards and all that. But what about leadership and judgment and character? Those are things that are laughable now at the university level. They certainly don’t try to gauge that in the admissions process.

But even more importantly, they don’t even try to bring it out of kids when they’re there. They have speech codes. They have all of this touchy-feely, “Do what we say or else?” left-wing authoritarianism. For a school like Yale University to tell them right now — and really it’s essentially a hedge fund with some classes attached to it, as people say. This is true of a lot of these schools now.

For the Boomer generation, those who went to the super fancy schools, they have really great memories. College really helped them, helped their lives. I know plenty of kids — I grew up here in Manhattan — who went to the fanciest of the fancy schools. Some of them did fine. Some of them didn’t. It’s not the great ticket to greatness that people once thought it was maybe 30 or 40 years ago and beyond.

But to tell kids at Yale right now that you can’t sit outside at a restaurant and come back to campus when you are fully vaccinated? I even hate that term “fully vaccinated,” ’cause really no such thing, right? Vaccinated or not, at this point, you got the shot, okay? So who knows how long you’re even fully vaccinated for. No reasonable person would look at this policy and say, “This makes sense, this will do anything.”

Anything! In the beginning of this, Clay, we were being forced to deal with tyrannical overreach on the promise that would least save people or stop the spread or shut it down. Now we have tyrannical overreach despite the fact that it will not — and we all see it — do any of those things that it promises. All we get is downsides from those idiots.

CLAY: What’s also disappointing to me, Buck, is if you think about historically what college represented, it represented an opportunity to rebel, right? If you think back to the sixties and the seventies, it’s wild to even contemplate the Vietnam protests came, to a large extent, out of universities. People didn’t want to be in Vietnam. They didn’t want to get drafted. They didn’t think there should be a war there. They were fighting the system.

They were opposed to the larger culture that was trying to force them to undertake actions they did not believe were justified. There are no kids, to my knowledge, on any of these campuses that are saying, “Wait a minute. We listened to you and got double vaccinated. We got boostered. We’ve worn masks around for months on this campus. The promise that you sold us was rooted in fallacy.

“It is a lie. We are no safer from covid on this campus after all these things have done than we were beforehand.” Yet none of these kids to my knowledge are willing to stand up to authority at all. They’re terrified still somehow that they’re gonna die of covid and they’re acquiescing to the power of authority figures.

BUCK: This is true also with a lot of the problems that we saw with the U Penn swimmer situation whereby these kids at these elite institutions — and they’re young adults. These are adults. They’re 18 plus. So these are young adults. They are trying to leverage the system themselves, and look, I went to the best school that I thought I should go to and, Clay, you went to a fancy law school.

I’m not saying that people shouldn’t do that, but what I am pointing out is that people will not stand against the system when they’re within it and hoping to benefit from it. So at Yale, you want to be the kid — or at any of these schools, you want to be the kid — who says the administration’s policies on covid are moronic? You might not get that Goldman Sachs interview next fall, and this is what ends up happening. They’re in these places not for the education, not for the certainly moral and ethical training. They’re there to be a part of the system that has embraced this lunacy.

CLAY: I’m just so disappointed, Buck, that more of them are not smart enough to look at the data and make their own decisions, and it is really disappointing to see — maybe more so than anything else — how many people not only are comfortable being sheep, how many people are trying to constantly ensure that there are as many sheep as possible in this country. Maybe I’m just a natural skeptic and a natural person who wants to not to accept what authority figures tell me. But if you’re not doing that at 18, 19, 20 years old, when are you ever gonna do it?