<p>Any current or soon to be students reading this book? I’m about 3/4 of the way through, don’t feel like posting my opinions untill I see that others have read it.</p>
<p>catholic background, unaware scholar athlete........I personally didn't put much credence in the book other than it was a singular experience.</p>
<p>What is the book?</p>
<p>This guy has absolutely no shame. He has spammed Brown students' inboxes and the Jolt forum multiple times in order to get people to buy his book. It also seems that he has posted multiple positive reviews at Amazon.com -- if you look at them, they're all pretty similar. From the passages I've read, he's just looking to misrepresent Brown students and administration, and to be as condescending and whiney as possible. His perspective seems to be that any attempt at increasing awareness of female sexuality or cultural diversity constitutes a radical feminist or political correct-ist attack on all that is good and sacred with the world, and he seems to draw no distinction between the vast majority of Brown students and the few "out there" encounters which he blows out of proportion.</p>
<p>He's looking to anger the Brown community, and add fuel to the "academic freedom" fire of people who basically claim that even though Conservatives currently control all three branches of our federal government, their values are somehow terribly challenged by the horrible "liberal bias" in American university classrooms, and therefore students with conservative opinions should be protected and professors with liberal opinions should be persecuted.</p>
<p>If you do read this book, take it with a grain of salt.</p>
<p>Yeah, it's incredible. He talks about how Brown tried to shove its liberal propaganda down his throat, and then he spams the whole community many times over in an illegal fashion. The book is a self-published piece of trash...</p>
<p>"Within the book, I try to stress the fact that I arrived at Brown with very little political knowledge or interest. I was a straight-A student, but I was an athlete more than anything else. I was equipped only with the values I had learned through Catholicism and athletics, but my personal belief system was something that I had never really thought too much about. I was never really forced to defend it, but at Brown that's exactly what I found myself doing. In many ways, my alma mater endorses the exact opposite of everything I was brought up to believe in. Being so politically and intellectually ignorant on so many popular campus topics, I was forced to sit back and keep my mouth shut-which was difficult for me because I was also a very opinionated and competitive individual. Somehow I ended up as a controversial opinion columnist for the university newspaper, and I thought my story would make for a pretty interesting book. I was a young, opinionated, right-minded athlete who was unexpectedly thrown into one of the nation's most passionately liberal institutions. Out of Ivy is not only an inside look at elite academia, it's also a microcosm of America's ongoing culture wars. It's an opportunity for people to better understand the sharp contrast between liberalism and conservatism."</p>
<p>Ahahaha, what Jamie Glazov said right there makes me want to go to Brown even more.</p>
<p>Ahh i saw that book in the brown store, read a page, and hated the author more than I've hated anyone else in a long, long time. His conservative ideas didn't bother me - it was his obvious lack of thoughtfulness that really got at me. Granted, though, it's probably harsh to judge someone based on one page...</p>
<p>I want to read it, but I refuse to spend money on it now that he spammed all of us several times. Boo!!</p>
<p>If you really want to read a good book that involves a brown student then read "A Hope in the Unseen" by Ron Suskind. I'm not trying to spam, it really is a good book.
Here's a link for a short description:
<a href="http://www.ronsuskind.com/newsite/hopeunseen/%5B/url%5D">http://www.ronsuskind.com/newsite/hopeunseen/</a></p>
<p>Yeah, that's a really interesting book, although Brown has changed in the last 10 years since he wrote it.</p>
<p>when did he spam us? I only heard about the book once, and I think it was in an e-mail from the Brown Bookstore.</p>
<p>ILoveBrown, I definitely agree that he has a problem of making sweeping generalizations about people left of center, based on those who are too far to the left. I feel that alot of his points are valid, but that when he tries to make that final analysis, he fails a little. I'm not saying this applies to you, but one of the things that has annoyed me with this book is that many people are reading it with an agenda to find faults in his arguments. They will then read one point they disagree with, and then stop reading because "I refuse to read the writing of someone so ignorant." I myself would even criticize him untill I would finish the segment, and realize that his arguments were alot more valid than they initially seemed. I think this should be the book they have to read for orientation, like we had to read Philadelphia Fire.</p>
<p>I didn't read it with an agenda to find faults. In fact, I didn't read it at all. I said that I had only read passages, and then criticized the passages that I had read.</p>
<p>I got the email from the bookstore, and I got two other spam emails about the book. I guess not every Brown student got them, but I talked to a lot of people who did.</p>
<p>Sure, the guy has a point -- there are certainly some people at Brown who are "knee-jerk" liberals, who don't really think about their positions but are quick to lash out at anyone who disagrees with them. It is also true that the administration doesn't feel the need to censor tableslips with the word "vagina" on them or what have you. But if he wanted to make this point, he should have written a book that was calmly reasoned, as opposed to inflammatory and condescending, and then he should have embarked on a legitimate advertising campaign, instead of spamming students' inboxes and possibly posting multiple fake reviews on Amazon.com.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Yeah, that's a really interesting book, although Brown has changed in the last 10 years since he wrote it.
[/quote]
ilovebrown,</p>
<p>How has it changed?</p>
<p>There is a lot more economic (and a bit more racial) diversity since Brown has become need-blind. Also, Brown has become significantly more selective in the past 10 years.</p>
<p>I read the book over winter break, so I've forgotten a lot of the details that I thought were different. I think those two things are the main ones, though.</p>