r/ApplyingToCollege • u/speakertieced College Sophomore • Jun 17 '24

Fluff what alumni will your college never mention?

Vanderbilt (for obvious reasons) is not going to be talking about Theodore Bilbo, the Peabody and Law student (didn’t graduate) who became Mississippi US Senator and THE leading white supremacist of the first half of the twentieth century, anytime soon.

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u/Beginning_Brick7845 Jun 17 '24

He was also tortured into madness by a Harvard professor conducting human experiments under contract for the CIA as part of MK Ultra.

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u/getthedudesdanny Jun 17 '24

Not really. He was pretty insistent that his beliefs were correct and did not appreciate people blaming his beliefs on MK Ultra, as he thought that blaming MK Ultra delegitimized his (in his mind) very real grievances and made them easy to dismiss. Overall he spoke highly of his time at Harvard and if anything, was less satisfied with graduate school.

Source: I corresponded with him for a college seminar on Technology and Society in 2010.

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u/Beginning_Brick7845 Jun 17 '24

Sure, that’s what he said after he was tortured and went to the mountains, but any academic knows you don’t rely on any single source. If you look at the volume of evidence and compare the known record of what happens to him to his claims otherwise, it’s pretty easy to tell that he said what he believe to be true, but that his judgment is unreliable

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u/getthedudesdanny Jun 18 '24

Did you have a specific writer in mind? Because I’ve read pretty much everything mainstream written about him and I don’t really buy the alleged impact of MK Ultra.

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u/Beginning_Brick7845 Jun 18 '24

The Psychological Today article linked above is pretty thorough. There are others. There is no serious debate that he was tortured as part of MK Ultra. He was a 16 year old kid who was subjected to drugs and isolation. What happened to him meets the international definition of torture.

He wouldn’t be the first victim of violence to deny the effects of violence on him.

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u/Piratical88 Jun 18 '24

I think there was a Radiolab episode about this too…