Will Manidis Profile picture
Dec 23 14 tweets 5 min read Read on X
I went to Olin College, a tiny engineering school outside Boston.

Olin was once the top engineering college in America, now its in free fall. The actions of the board and administration are unacceptable; Olin was a powerhouse, and it still can be.

Here's what's really going on Image
Olin was founded in 1997, fueled by a $460 million gift from the Olin Foundation, as an experimental hub for reimagining engineering education.

It championed hands-on, project-based learning. The approach worked, and scaled up at many top universities.
Olin decided to stay small, giving every student a full scholarship and housing, never expanding beyond a few hundred students.

Admissions selectivity soared, and the college quickly ranked among the top in the nation.

It was an incredible place.
I was fortunate to attend Olin for 2 years, which changed my life as it did for many others who have done incredible things in tech.

You may know some of them, from critical employees at OpenAI that pioneered the LLM, to the founders of many large venture backed companies
In July of this year, Olin reduced their scholarship from covering 51% of tuition to just $10,000 a year.

This is on top of a 50% cut made years ago ago in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, when it was promised Olin would eventually cover 100% of tuition again. Image
Information about the exact state of spending and the endowment has become noticeably sparse over the past few years.

The annual reports detail "financial challenges," but seem almost entirely written by ChatGPT.

For such a pressing issue, why is so little care taken? Image
Image
I reached out hoping to understand the decision and make a significant financial contribution to ease the strain.

My emails and calls received no replies.

News of the scholarship change has never been widely disclosed, despite all the PR that celebrates it still going out. Image
Weeks later, the curtain lifted on a big change:

Dr. Gilda Barabino, just the second president in the college's not-even-three-decade history, was stepping down just four years into her term.

Once again, this news was never disclosed to the public. Why?
With the scholarship gone and a president stepping down, students began to ask valid questions.

One student penned an open letter in the campus paper, requesting answers

They were threatened with disciplinary action if the letter wasn't removed in 24 hours. no answers given. Image
The cat was seemingly out of the bag, fearful that this news would leak more broadly they sent this to alumni, shamelessly defending their actions and demanding criticism stay behind closed doors.

Cosigned by the President and the Board Chair

Why choose to attack free speech? Image
Why is the board and administration so afraid of public disclosure of the truth?

Why have they routinely silenced calls for accountability and threatened students who spoke up?

Why is the removal of the scholarship and resignation of the President missing from any public news?
It's possible these questions have reasonable answers.

However, with a pattern of threatening students for exercising free speech, delaying and suppressing disclosure, and circling the wagons around a failing admin, a good outcome is increasingly hard to imagine.
Olin can be fixed.

I have had a team working on a recovery plan for months, the solution is simple -- stop the bleeding, get back to basics, and cut admin overhead.

You can return Olin to full scholarship within 10 years without outside dollars if you're smart and aggressive Image
Image
Other alumni are organizing efforts as well, but, like mine, their calls are ignored. The administration prefers to fail privately rather than admit their path is unsustainable.

To save the institution, we need transparency and the resignation of those responsible.

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More from @WillManidis

Oct 21
In 2020, an explosion rocked Satartia, Mississippi.

A thick cloud engulfed the town as 911 calls flooded in. One mother begged for help as her daughter gasped for air. Residents passed out standing up

Satartia is the most important infrastructure failure you've never heard of. Image
Satartia, Mississippi is a small community on the banks of the Yazoo River in western Mississippi.

Most residents were unaware that a 24-inch CO2 pipeline ran near their town-- part of a system the White House sees as key to defeating climate change.
The pipeline was part of a carbon capture and storage effort.

CCS captures CO2 emissions at the source and transports them to long-term storage in pockets deep underground.

The Biden administration poured an initial $251 million into funding CCS in 2023. Image
Read 12 tweets
Aug 16
Every week, a dozen new companies boasting "tech-enabled healthcare for the rich" announce massive funding rounds.

I think nearly every single one fundamentally misunderstands the business of high end medical care.

Here's how to build a real executive physical killer:
over the last two years I've done basically every single executive physical.

I've flown to the Mayo Clinic in the middle of winter, five times, I met a referral only infusion clinic in an empty warehouse filled with buddha statues, I've done every variety of full body MRI
Image
Image
more important, I've interviewed patients of each.

academic medical centers pull in tens of millions a year to serve these patients, and techniques used here are a leading indicator for what the rest of care will look like.
Read 18 tweets
Mar 27
five thoughts on choosing who you work with/for:
1) moral alignment matters more than incentive alignment

people focus too much on aligning incentives. incentives are messy and can hardly be aligned. find people you share convictions and faith with, and keep working with them for long amounts of time. it'll work out.
2) even on long days, it should be fun

there's a difference between challenging and exhausting. the best people are extremely challenging, but never exhausting, and always in enough control of their emotions to know when to step back after a long day.
Read 6 tweets
Feb 2
within months you will be able to buy genomics data from 14 million americans for +/- $200m?

the inevitable fire sale of this mess to an overseas PE firm is going to be a national security matter on the scale of which we haven't seen in healthcare in years Image
in general, hhs has left open a dangerously large hole around healthcare data sales

the reg we have now are so deeply embedded in precision oncology/2010s-RWD that they are completely unprepared to address what post-LLM healthcare data sales will actually mean
ONC should build federal data lake, incentivize state funded systems to contribute, allow companies to access these data for training/benchmarking but not directly touch/view the data.

use this as a backdoor to build a non-SAMD regulatory pathway for healthcare AI.
Read 4 tweets
Nov 25, 2023
what’s the best truly banned book?

not like 1984 banned — I mean PDFs that are literally unprintable, truly arcane knowledge
the McKinsey internal firm history is an obvious one though easy to get these days

the sequoia history that mm wrote is an obvious one (unless @shaunmmaguire 🤝)
@shaunmmaguire the nick sleep letters were great and esoteric for a while but now easily available as well
Read 5 tweets
Nov 17, 2023
The AI/healthcare discourse has reached new levels of insane this week

A close friend, a MD at a prestigious medical center, recently shared the following memo with me. He asked me to share this anonymously.

"What we don't talk about when we talk about AI/medicine"
1. Standard of Care isn't Standard Care

Novel modalities of care (AI-assisted, etc.) are measured against a platonic ideal of SOC that doesn't exist in clinic

Medicine is as much of an art as a science, providers are overworked, tired, and often veer dramatically from SOC.
Novel care modalities are killed in the cradle as they can never measure up to the textbook provider with infinite knowledge and time.

This isn't what most patients receive. Less efficacious care that scale to many more patients are an obvious moral good but are difficult today
Read 12 tweets

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