Last August, the FBI filed a criminal complaint against a former UChicago student. Aram Brunson, referred to by current students familiarly as the “Woodlawn bomber,” was charged with trying to conceal bomb-making activities for Armenian nationalist causes. Though it escaped much attention at the time, the story was grotesquely fascinating for several reasons. 

On a surface level, for one, it’s shocking to think that while you were doing homework at your desk, someone on the other side of the wall was building a bomb at his. Reading your classmate’s name in a headline for federal crimes is jarring—especially for ties to a foreign nationalist terrorist group. That’s another reason the incident stands out: Federal crimes are kind of a big deal, and college students aren’t accused of them every day. 

When you read the details of the story, though, what stands out most is the sheer intellectual arrogance. How the hell did he think this would go? You’re confronted by an astounding gap between what Brunson cleverly believed he could get away with and the reality of his situation. 

The juxtaposition of Brunson’s imagined reality with the investigative evidence is, at times, ridiculous. But, intriguingly, it’s not unprecedented for a UChicago student. 

While you were doing homework at your desk, someone on the other side of the wall was building a bomb at his

This is the context of Brunson’s case. The FBI’s timeline begins on January 2, 2023, around 4:00 p.m., when a fire was reported on the sixth floor of Woodlawn Residential Commons in Brunson’s dorm room. The fire started from his homemade bomb-making equipment, but the police didn’t know that yet. They also didn’t know that Brunson acquired the bomb-making equipment to make video tutorials for fellow aspiring Armenian terrorists. 

Brunson fled the scene when the building was evacuated, received a call from a UCPD officer at 4:45 p.m., and was told to come back to Woodlawn— which he didn’t, for several hours. This is understandable; if I were planning covert terrorist operations for a foreign nationalist group, and those plans were no longer covert because I (quite literally) blew my cover, I probably wouldn’t go back to my dorm either. Around seven hours later, Brunson finally returned to Woodlawn— with his mom, for some reason—and sat for questioning. 

Sitting in a Woodlawn conference room next to his mother after midnight, the police asked Brunson how the fire started. Brunson gave a ludicrous excuse: He was trying to replicate a YouTube prank. To fully appreciate the intellectual arrogance I’m talking about here, however, you need to understand two things: first, how flimsy Brunson’s lie was; and second, how much heavy lifting he needed it to do. 

Brunson’s alibi was weak from the start because he’d already given a contradictory one. When the UCPD officer called him at 4:45 p.m., Brunson nervously said he started the fire accidentally by cooking on a contraband hot plate. Despite his earlier statement, and despite having seven hours with his mom to come up with a better story, Brunson somehow ended up contradicting himself. The federal complaint records the interview as follows: 

BRUNSON said that he was building a “flare” in his room based on techniques he learned from a YouTube video. […] He said his purpose in experimenting with black powder was to replicate this flare during a weekend trip with friends at a cabin outside Boston, Massachusetts. BRUNSON showed agents a YouTube video titled “25 Pounds of Black Powder vs. iPhone 7 EXPERIMENT!,” that he claimed he had previously researched on his electronic devices, suggesting that his plan was only to mimic an Internet prank.

Here, regrettably, it gets harder to empathize with Aram. Beyond the self-contradiction, we see another two reasons that the lie was flimsy. The first is that it was an obscure YouTube video from 2017, and the content makes Brunson’s excuse seem absurd. The federal complaint records Brunson saying that “the flare was larger than he thought it would be, but this was the first time he attempted to create one.” This might be believable if the video’s explosion wasn’t clearly over twenty feet in the air. But the last reason Brunson’s lie was weak was ultimately the decisive one: it was too easy to invalidate. 

Brunson’s lie to the feds met its tragic end in the form of a search warrant, which brings us to the last piece of the story: everything Brunson needed the lie to cover up. 

A review of the laptop revealed no search history reflecting that BRUNSON searched for, or downloaded, the prank video “25 Pounds of Black Powder vs. iPhone 7 EXPERIMENT!,” […]. However, among other things, the laptop contained approximately 10 videos in which BRUNSON is the narrator discussing how to form, fund and arm a revolutionary group.

The document proceeds to expose the extent of Brunson’s aspirations, which in fact went beyond homemade terror tutorial videos. Unfortunately for Brunson, the evidence was incriminating almost as much as it was ironic. For example, the complaint notes that in one of his terror tutorials, Brunson maintained adamantly that “‘the language of terrorism is Armenian, not English,’ because intelligence agencies will find it more difficult to monitor communications in Armenian.” Apparently, that advice did him little good. 

Though the prank YouTube video wasn’t in Brunson’s search history, lots of other incriminating searches were. “For instance,” the federal investigation found, “several days before he made the video tutorials discussed above, BRUNSON searched for ‘how does a pipe bomb mailbox work.’” A week before the Woodlawn bombing mishap, too, “BRUNSON conducted the following search: ‘if you shoot someone whos [sic] inside an embassy from outside of the embassy what country do you go to jail in.’” 

On the whole, the sixteen-page federal complaint paints an overwhelming caricature of intellectual arrogance. Brunson’s lie to the feds was ludicrous at every stage. When taken together with the extent of his crimes, however, it’s clear that Brunson really thought he was smart enough to get away with it—and justified in doing it, in the first place. 

The Woodlawn bomber case is harrowing, not only because of its proximity but because it’s a disturbing distortion of UChicago’s ideals—and not one without precedent. University President Paul Alivisatos has said that UChicago’s “distinctive culture” is “suffused by a genuine love for ideas and a conviction in the power knowledge holds to shape society for the better.” In a perverted way, that’s what Aram Brunson intended: to shape society for the better through knowledge. Nearly a century ago, Leopold and Loeb attempted something similar when they murdered fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks. 

The borders of intellectual arrogance aren’t as far away as you might think 

In 1924, UChicago students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb conspired to get away with the “crime of the century” to prove their intellectual superiority. Driven by an obsession with Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of morality, as UChicago Professor Russell Johnson explains, Leopold and Loeb’s crime “was a sort of experiment—killing a random person, testing the limits of their intellectual abilities, trying to learn through experience what it’s like to live unbound by what Nietzsche calls ‘slave morality.’” By attempting to get away with murder, Leopold sought liberation from the traditional morality that Nietzsche believed was limiting humanity. 

The phrase “the life of the mind” encapsulates the distinctive pursuit of knowledge that characterizes UChicago. Without grounding, however, our university’s history tells us that adulatory views of ideas and power are destructive. As Leopold once chillingly told a reporter, “A thirst for knowledge is highly commendable, no matter what extreme pain or injury it may inflict upon others.” 

Leopold and Loeb kidnapped Bobby Franks less than ten blocks north of Ratner, and Aram Brunson lived on the sixth floor of Woodlawn. The borders of intellectual arrogance aren’t as far away as you might think.