Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester

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Over winter break I read a book by a journalism student at Brown, Kevin Roose, called The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University.The book is the author’s account of a semester attending Liberty University.

Liberty is a school literally billed as the largest and fastest growing Christian Evangelical college in the world. For Kevin Roose, who grew up in a “crunchy liberal enclave” in the middle of the Lake Erie Rust Belt, the semester he spends away at Liberty is far more foreign than any abroad.

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The Meaning of Empowerment

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Reading the front-page article in the most recent issue of Frankly Speaking, this reader became very perplexed. The article used phrases like “military-industrial complex” and “ultimate institution of disempowerment, of aggression, domination, and death” to describe the U.S. Armed Forces. The article included radical implications – that a nonlethal defense-sponsored project, or even a project sponsored by a company whose customers include the U.S. Department of Defense, is undeserving of Olin students’ time and effort and just plain immoral.

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A Candid Conversation with Brad Minch

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On Star Wars, stained glass, and integrated circuit design.

Brad Minch is one of Olin’s best respected professors. The son of two mathematicians, Minch earned his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering and his PhD in Computational Neural Systems from CalTech.

He came back to the Northeast for a teaching position at Cornell, where he won an award for dedicated and inspirational teaching, and a year later, came to teach at Olin.

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Interview with a Freshman: Cory Dolphin

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Ryan Mitchell: So, Cory, tell us about where you grew up.
Cory Dolphin: I grew up in Weston, it’s about 8 miles over. I was only there until I was 10.
RM: Are your parents engineers?
CD: My father has a masters of engineering, but he’s a biophysicist.
RM: Was he excited about you applying to Olin?
CD: Yeah! I mean, my parents wanted me to do whatever I wanted to do. I played with Legos, I played with Kinex, built cranes, I mean, it was pretty clear what my passions were, what direction I was going in. I loved to visit MIT, and I was pretty sure that’s where I wanted to be.
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Is Our Empowerment Zero-Sum?

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Four SCOPE projects this year (Lincoln Labs, Raytheon, Draper Labs, Parietal Systems) are directly related to the military. Another project (Adsys Controls) is the creation of an advertising tool for a company that sells some of its products to the military. Not to mention the October press release on Olin’s website declaring that our College has been named a subcontractor in two “government-funded defense contracts,” one for the Navy and one for the Air Force (which is now a SCOPE project, as well).

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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

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Ever wondered what The Silence of the Lambs would have been like if Hannibal Lecter had been a 24-year-old 4’11” hacker girl with Asperger’s? And if Clarice Starling had been a fifty-something financial journalist convicted of libel? And if—

Aw heck, I’ll just come out and say it. If you liked The Silence of the Lambs— or any murder mystery, or novel with any degree of suspense or mystery, really— you’ll like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

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College is Inhumane

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Humane design takes advantage of our strengths and mitigates our limitations. Residential colleges are inhumane because (1) we separate students from them from their families and communities, (2) we immerse them in an unhealthy age-segregated monoculture and then (3) we expect them to perform feats of time management we would not reasonably expect from adults.

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