Getting Ayn Rand on Campus: Expensive

Today I was forwarded an article from The Times Higher Education, "Ayn Rand revival gathers pace in US universities, despite detractors." It starts off:

On a warm July evening on Boston's waterfront there are surely far more alluring distractions than a lecture on "The Lethal Destructiveness of Non-Objective Law".

Yet last week young people turned out in their droves for a summer conference of Objectivists: people who study the teachings of the philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand, who preached radical free-market capitalism, the purity of selfishness and the profit motive and the immorality of altruism. She also championed limited government intervention in the economy.

With stories on the financial news pages reading more and more like her seminal novel Atlas Shrugged, academic interest in Ms Rand, who died in 1982 aged 77, is booming.

"It's just so topical," said John McCaskey, who is introducing a course at Stanford University this autumn called "The Moral Foundations of Capitalism".

From the beginning of the article one would think it's these uncertain economic times that are driving students in droves to Rand's libertarianism propertarianism. But continue on, dear reader:

The surge in interest has also been propelled by the millions of dollars given to 25 universities by the charitable foundation of banking giant BB&T, run by one of her adherents. But even this funding, handed out so institutions can teach and study Ms Rand and to establish centres for the advancement of American capitalism, has been controversial.

The faculty at Meredith College in North Carolina rejected a $420,000 (£260,000) grant because it came on the condition that Ms Rand's work be taught there, and there was a similar uproar at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Even many of the professors who now teach Rand, Dr McCaskey said, "will preface their presentations with, 'I don't agree with this, but you should hear it'".

Ohhhh. That makes much more sense now. Does anyone see the irony of a giant bank pouring millions into pushing Ayn Rand in an economy wracked by deregulated banks? Wait, that's not ironic at all. It's actually really clever on their part. At the very point people are ready to blame the ultra-rich for the economic crisis, whip out Rand to shift the blame to the poor "leeches."

Unfortunately, we don't get much by way of hard data in this article - the alleged rise of Rand on campuses is entirely unquantified. In the larger picture, a lot of people are looking for answers these days: some are turning to Rand, but that is likely a small slice of all the books people are reading/buying (for example, last year it was reported that sales of Marx were way, way up). Ayn Rand Institute's program of giving free Rand books to high school classrooms has been going on for years now (they claim to have doled out over a million). Perhaps they'll have better luck through procreation?