Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,941

This is the grave of Paul Olum.

Born in 1918 in Binghamton, New York, Olum grew up in a Jewish immigrant family. His father had been over for quite awhile, having fled the pogroms himself as a small child. Olum grew up fairly well off and was very good at math. He went to Harvard, graduated with a degree in physics in 1940, and then completed a master’s degree at Princeton in 1942. That meant instant recruitment into the Manhattan Project. He went to Los Alamos as a relatively minor member of the staff. But his officemate was Richard Feynman. They became close friends for the rest of their lives. Feynman would later talk that Olum was a quite skilled physicist, but Olum thought that compared to Feynman, he was not. The implications here is that Olum would move into mathematics as his primary field of study after the war. The other thing Olum picked up from the war is that the atomic bomb was horrible and no nation should control it. So he joined many other scientists to urge global control of atomic energy. That did not happen.

Olum went back to Harvard after the war and got his PhD in mathematics in 1947. He got a job at Cornell, where he remained for the next 25 years, rising the ranks. I know as little about math as I do about physics, but evidently, he was an important mathematician. He worked heavily in the field of algebraic topology, which is actually what it sounds like, using the principles of algebra in geometric questions. But don’t press me for more than that. He also worked on obstruction theory, which doesn’t make sense to me even when I read about it. But that’s OK, it doesn’t have to.

I may not know about physics or math but I do know about the history of left-liberal politics in this nation and Olum was one of those Manhattan Project lefties who never went back on his principles or ideas. Olum remained a sharp critic of the American right and used whatever power he had to push forward decent policies, which was not a lot given he was an academic, but you do what you can. Among them was openly calling for the abolition of House Un-American Activities Committee. During the Vietnam War, he actively supported students trying to get ROTC off the campus. Suffice it to say, he thought the Vietnam War was outrageous and unlikely a lot of liberal faculty who thought the students were a little too dirty for them to get involved, allied himself with them.

Olum also became trusted enough by Cornell students that he was involved in a kind of student-faculty alliance that is hard for me to wrap my head around today. See, Olum was trying to rejuvenate faculty governance at Cornell and make it more democratic, with more faculty participation. OK, that makes some sense. He wanted a campus senate that would not only include administration and faculty but also student participation, as well as a student on the Board of Trustees. Students actively got behind this and then the students elected Olum the first ever faculty member on the Board of Trustees at Cornell. This is all simple enough at one level, but given my own experience of academia, it’s hard to imagine students getting behind anything like this. For example, on my school’s BOT, there is a faculty representative, and a quite decent one imo, who I actually respect a lot. But the students who are involved in this kind of student politics? Let me tell you this–there is no more hack vote for whatever the university president and the richest people on the BOT want than the student representative. The reason is obvious–they are sealing their meal ticket for the future. Since about 1% of students care about student governance on campus and those are heavily dominated in the Greek system, you get a very specific kind of student who cares anyway. Of course it does not have to be this way and was not at Cornell in the early 70s.

Olum never turned back on his regrets around the Manhattan Project and his belief that nuclear weapons must be eliminated. He was quite active in the anti-nuclear movement. At a 40th anniversary celebration of the Manhattan Project, in 1983, he circulated a petition among attendees calling for the elimination of nuclear weapons from the world.

What’s interesting is that Olum then moved into academic administration. It’s just a different world here–it’s almost as if it’s not inevitable that academic administrators be the most craven cowards one could ever invent who just do the bidding of the rich and powerful, as we are seeing today with Ivy League presidents caving to Trump, in no small part because the billionaires who control the universities agree with Trump and Rufo and Miller about destroying the American university of the last half-century. Wanting a new challenge, though evidently not really compromising on his principles of how to live, Olum took a job in 1974 as the Dean of the College of Natural Sciences at the University of Texas. There, he got caught up in protesting the removal of the university president, siding with faculty who boycotted all meetings with the new president.

That did not stop Olum from getting hired farther up the administrative ladder. He went to the University of Oregon as provost in 1976 and then became president in 1980. He worked in that position until 1989. So I remember seeing his name in the papers all the time when I was growing up. He certainly did extend the ties between the university and super rich people in these years, most notably Nike founder Phil Knight. This is unfortunate, though I suppose Olum didn’t see what this would lead to, which, again, is the billionaire control over the university. Knight could be seen as something of a Trojan horse here because he was already a beloved Oregon alum, former track star, and creator of the iconic shoe that would revolutionize track in conjunction with his coach, another beloved Oregon legend, Bill Bowerman. In any case, he got Knight to put up a bunch of money to redo the Oregon library, which is today the Knight Library and where I have spent an inordinate amount of time in my life.

Oh also, as president Olum pushed for disinvesting in apartheid South Africa and pushing to separate any ties with the nuclear world. This is literally impossible for a university president to do today. He’s just be fired. In fact, Olum was pushed out in 1989 due to a retirement age requirement. Some students actually protested to keep him. This is also unimaginable today.

Olum’s last years were not pretty. He contracted Lewy’s body dementia, a truly horrible way to go. He died in 2001, at the age of 82.

Paul Olum is buried in Rest Haven Memorial Park, Eugene, Oregon. I actually have a story about this. I went there trying to find the grave of Wayne Morse. But despite searching that cemetery up and down, I am determined he is not there. But then I looked at someone put GPS coordinates in. So I went back. Those coordinates did not lead to Morse. But they did lead me straight to Paul Olum. Somehow this all makes sense since at the time, literally everyone in Congress, regardless of political party, hated Wayne Morse personally.

If you would like this series to visit other Manhattan Project scientists, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Glenn Seaborg is in El Cerrito, California and Ernest Lawrence is in Oakland. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.