Technical Prowess and Impotence
The all-administrative university Read against the machine 15% of my brain
I have always felt an impotence associated with technical prowess. Quite apart from whatever truth there may be in the Dilbert-style “tech-weenie” comments, my experience of MIT led me to feel like we were rural compared to the students at Harvard.
They were part of the political class, the lawyers and humanities majors who ran the world, and we weren’t even technocrats. Brian was a material science major with interests in Shakespeare. I was a biology major with plans to be a scientist or go to medical school, and perhaps relatively well read for an MIT student. We were destined to be back room boys. We would build the bombs or design the vaccines or perhaps manage some research and development project in the world.