Posted on 12/13/2024 8:00:43 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Luigi Mangione is officially the “suspect” in the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, but he is plainly the culprit, and public discussion has moved on to his motives. Why would a young man possessed of intellectual gifts, friends, family, good looks, a winning personality and, apparently, lots of money, gun down a man he had never met?
This isn’t the kind of question my organization, the National Association of Scholars, normally takes up. We concern ourselves more with academic standards and questions of state and federal policy. But I’ve been nudged several times with questions about Luigi’s academic background. This has two parts: Luigi’s high school and Luigi’s college.
Luigi was the 2016 valedictorian of Gilman School, an elite, all-boys high school in Baltimore. Did Gilman turn him into an incipient anarchist? In his graduation speech he said his class was “challenging the world around it.” This sounds like a graduation bromide, not a summons to terrorism, but who knows? The young man who eight years later would use a 3-D printer to make a “ghost gun” and who fabricated a fake ID, went on in his speech to praise the willingness of his class to venture off the usual paths: “The class of 2016’s inventiveness also stems from its incredible courage to explore the unknown and try new things.” Yes, he was inventive, and he definitely tried new things.
But we have yet to see any evidence that Gilman School (“The Pursuit of Excellence Begins Here”) introduced him to the writings of his idol, Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, or that it marinated him in the study of Mikhail Bakunin, Franz Fanon or Herbert Marcuse. The Gilman School’s current “Course of Study” for grades 9-12 sounds like a standard-issue college-prep curriculum amped up with advanced placement courses. AP Computer Science Principles. Computational Creativity. Machine Learning.
In view of Luigi’s later fury at “capitalism,” perhaps Gilman School’s course for seniors, “History of Capitalism,” deserves a closer look, though the course description raises no red flags: “Students will explore a series of case studies in economic history, including Adam Smith’s original argument against Europe’s mercantilist economies, the post-World War One hyperinflation in Weimar Germany and the Great Depression and New Deal in 1930s America.”
The Gilman School’s tenth-grade elective course, “Becoming Human,” sounds a bit woozy: it “digs deeply into life’s biggest questions about meaning, transcendence and happiness and provides skills to realize answers in one’s own life.” And it goes about this by mixing evolution, neurobiology, human, development, psychology with Western and Eastern philosophy and theology, to provoke “mindfulness.” Awakening young minds to the search for abiding truth is surely a worthy educational goal, but is jetting over the whole landscape of scientific, humanistic and theological inquiry the way to do that? Might it rather plant the seeds of nihilism?
Luigi completed his studies at Gilman School seemingly no worse for wear. He arrived as a bright and ambitious young man from a privileged background, and he left with those qualities intact.
Did the University of Pennsylvania change that? Not that I know. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in engineering in 2020. He seemingly thrived at the university, where he was inducted into the university’s Eta Kappa Nu honor society for excellence in electrical and computer engineering. He also received a master’s degree in computer engineering from Penn.
Could an Ivy League education turn a brilliant young man into a sociopathic killer who hates capitalism, views global warming as the great crisis of our time and adores the wisdom of the Unabomber? The question seems absurd — but not entirely so. A University of Pennsylvania professor, Julia Alekseyeva, wrote concerning Luigi, “Have never been prouder to be a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.” She can be seen on TikTok, sporting ultramarine hair and waving her finger in time to the choral version of “Do You Hear the People Sing?” from Les Misérables.
Do you hear the people sing?
Singing the song of angry men?
It is the music of the people
Who will not be slaves again!
Professor Alekseyeva is of course only one of thousands who have expressed admiration for Luigi, whom she also calls “the icon we all need and deserve.” She stands out solely because of being a professor at the institution that granted him his undergraduate and master’s degrees. I have no reason to think he was her student. Her first book, Antifascism and the Avant-Garde: Radical Documentary in the 1960s, is forthcoming. If anything, she is a buoy floating on the surface of Penn’s radical undercurrents.
All we can do at this point is guess that while attending the University of Pennsylvania, Luigi Mangione learned nothing that impeded his progress towards self-aggrandizing hatred of those he deems capitalist oppressors. Some observers have written about Penn’s transition to “hard-left“ politics, where “ideology trumps analysis and intellectual rigor.” The public had an opportunity to see some of this in Penn’s hapless responses to pro-Hamas activism both before and after the October 2023 massacre of Israel civilians and in President Liz Magill’s blundering testimony to Congress in December of that year and her subsequent resignation. Broadly speaking, Penn has become a victim of its own enthusiasm for radical causes.
Professor Alekseyeva just happened to have the boldness to make this explicit.
For those who want me to say that Luigi Mangione embodies the deep-seated hostility to American culture and American freedom that is rife in our schools and colleges, I have to decline. That deep-seated hostility is indeed there, but at this point no one knows whether Luigi drank from that well before, during or after college. The most we can say is that a Penn education did nothing to stay his progress towards contempt for civilized norms. And I do worry that higher education plays a part in fostering such abhorrent behavior.
Isn’t that the goal of the ivies??
stay his progress?
LMAO
the IVY’s made him like this!@!!!
Did Luigi get his Engineering degree in four years? If so, then he did not have time to take a lot of extra classes. It would be mostly technical stuff.
The medical industrial complex has to become more efficient and cheaper.
Elon and Vivek need to work on making Medicare, Medicaid and private health cost coverage affordable.
All-the-doctors prescribe must be the basis of medical imaging and pharmaceutical coverage, with co-pays about the cost of incremental manufacture of drugs, contrast agents and radioisotopes plus radiation co-insurance amounts.
If the need for “advanced imaging” is debatable, you might have to wait a few hours to get it.
Perhaps the students such as Luigi should have studied the value of human life and conflict resolution.
Sometimes people confuse education with intelligence. You can have a degree and still be a full blown idiot
Most problems [single mother household poverty, refugees...] are due to a lack of relationship skills.
Prep schools and colleges are filling these kids with CRAP about anti-capitalism and climate change - it’s basically all these kids learn. So to coin a phrase from Liz warren, what do you expect, some will take matters into their own hands.
Let’s play the (false) attribution game:
“Luigi Mangione bad ethnicity: Being Italian did nothing to stay his progress towards contempt for civilized norms”
RE: Sometimes people confuse education with intelligence
Actually many people confuse intelligence with wisdom.
Intelligence refers to the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills. It’s often associated with factors like cognitive ability, learning capacity, and problem-solving skills. Intelligence allows us to process information, analyze situations, and make decisions based on that analysis.
Wisdom, on the other hand, is more about the quality of one’s understanding and judgment. It involves the ability to discern what is true, good, and beautiful. Wisdom is gained through life experiences, self-reflection, and moral reasoning. A wise person is able to apply their knowledge and experience in a way that promotes harmony, fairness, and balance in their actions and decisions.
In essence, intelligence provides the tools for understanding, while wisdom determines the proper application of that understanding in a meaningful and beneficial way.
A person can be highly intelligent without necessarily being wise, or vice versa. True wisdom requires a combination of intelligence, compassion, and moral discernment.
Tragically, Luigi Mangione was an intelligent BUT FOOLISH young man. I’m also afraid that our schools are educating a lot of intelligent but UNWISE young kids.
Isn’t Biden’s fake school memories?
I get it with the Unabomber being radicalized as a 16 year old sophomore at Harvard. This guy as far as I’ve heard wasn’t close to being tortured in purposely brutalizing psychological experiments or made to practice as a human guinea pig in enhanced interrogation studies run by the the CIA’s sinister Project MK-Ultra.
You mean the schools that are beating up Jews?
Ping
I mean contempt for civilized norms
THIS CRIME DESERVES THE DEATH PENALTY,
SHOOTING AN UNARMED MAN IT THE BACK AND MURDERING HIM.
Gilman, an elite prep school, and then the University of Pennsylvania. He certainly go the best education available. I do think he is mentally ill.
I wonder what the final exam is like.
That he has smarts there is no doubt.
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