The Oberlin College Series
credit: Dale Preston.
Contents — Oberlin College Leap Day
Posted May 22, 2020 at 12:21. Revised Jun 9, 2021 at 19:47.
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Closing the barn door
JD saw an opportunity to buy an internet-of-things (IoT) door controller to avoid accidentally leaving the barn door open. Installing this device proved to be a more significant challenge than was expected. Setting up the internet and WiFi support for the controller involved briefly tripping on incomplete instructions. The improvising needed to mount and physically wire the device was by far the hard part.
The ChaosFarm barn door is now operating correctly as part of the IoT. Using the IoT was a somewhat unexpected development since JD has roundly cursed the IoT for its many security issues. Sometimes there are reasons for needing to bend a little.
Leap Day at ChaosFarm
It seemed like the 25o F Leap Day temperature at ChaosFarm was in line with March’s slowly warming temperatures. Leap Day seemed like an ordinary day, but it became clear in the subsequent days that it was the inflection point on a leap into an abyss from which there will never be a full return. On this day, the first US COVID-19 confirmation occurred in Seattle.
ChaosFarm has been a great place from which to contemplate the longer-term patterns affecting Oberlin College. We all know the great things about Oberlin and are proud to have been part of that picture. There nevertheless were rough times along the way that have faded into the mists of time.
College Seal
OSCA
Old Barrows
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Alumni group raising relief money for the College's Union workers because the college bargained with them in bad faith.
Complexity
Exploring the context of complexity and its effect on Oberlin College.
Gibson's Bakery
Terrell Library, 2014
Oberlin Sexcapades
BOT Chair Now
BOT Chair Then
President Ambar
Oberlin and King George III
On the day that his subjects were ratifying the Declaration of Independence, King George III supposedly wrote in his diary, “Nothing of importance happened today.” A few years ago, NPR discovered that George never kept a diary.
The King George story apparently came from a 1789 diary entry by French King Louis XVI. Louis was probably right in a more narrow sense, even though there were unforeseen, dark clouds on his horizon. Leap Day this year has its similarities to that day when nothing of importance happened.
On August 3, 1914, Sir Edward Grey made his famous quote: ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’ Looking out from his window, across St. James’ Park, it was dusk, and the first of the gas lights along the Mall were being lit. The next day Grey would have to face the Cabinet and persuade them that the time had now come to declare war on Germany.
Is history repeating?
A key complexity role
A central feature of growing complexity is that it produces increasingly disconnected and fragmented dealings with the rest of the world. Increasing specialization occurs concurrently with increased complexity. Increasing specialization adds optimization to the system. The increasing ignorance of things beyond a person’s primary specialty progressively removes resilience toward unexpected developments, which makes things more brittle. The people who can keep the growing complexities working are worth progressively more economically, while those who can’t keep up become less valuable financially.
Leap Day 2020 may prove to be the culmination of centuries of growing complexity. Someday, people may celebrate Leap Day as the day when complexity began to fall apart, and things began to simplify.
JD has written extensively elsewhere about the impact of growing complexity on all aspects of modern life. These articles will be available to OberlinChaos readers later.
The school of hard knocks
Most alumni have had experiences wherein Oberlin College was not a psychologically peaceful place, albeit differently for different students. In retrospect, it is an intellectual boot camp that pushes students almost as hard as a military boot camp pushes recruits. JD would never have imagined this similarity unless he had experienced both types of boot camps.
Oberlin did a magnificent job of preparing us for success in a world that does not exist. Upon graduation, many of us were still virgins in the cat house of life and were soon introduced to the school of hard knocks to complement our educations.
Education is a gift. Photo credit: Dale Preston.
Education is indeed a gift when it is not deceptively packaged
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