Bankers Mandate Atlas Required Reading

[Wolf DeVoon]

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=206...&refer=home

April 11 (Bloomberg) -- Ayn Rand's novels of headstrong entrepreneurs' battles against convention enjoy a devoted following in business circles. While academia has failed to embrace Rand, calling her philosophy simplistic, schools have agreed to teach her works in exchange for a donation. The charitable arm of BB&T Corp., a banking company, pledged $1 million to the University of North Carolina Charlotte in 2005 and obtained an agreement that Rand's novel "Atlas Shrugged'' would become required reading for students. Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, and Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina, say they also took grants and agreed to teach Rand. ...

Scholars scoff at the Rand bounty, saying her ideas are too shallow to build courses around her. "Rand could not write her way out of a paper bag,'' said Harold Bloom, a professor of the humanities and English at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

[John Dailey]

~ Apparently, per Bloom, Rand influenced anti-Socialistic thinking by some means other than writing.

~ Bloom IS a noted 'cultural and literary' critic, but, what thinking of anything has HE influenced (other than amongst his self-styled intellectually-ethereal down-the-nose-looking scholastic peers)? -- Maybe he should get a paper bag, start writing inside himself, and see what he could accomplish that's worthwhile for us common masses to cogitate upon...besides poetry and vanity-criticizing.

LLAP

J:D

Edited April 11, 2008 by John Dailey

[Brant Gaede]

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=206...&refer=home

April 11 (Bloomberg) -- Ayn Rand's novels of headstrong entrepreneurs' battles against convention enjoy a devoted following in business circles. While academia has failed to embrace Rand, calling her philosophy simplistic, schools have agreed to teach her works in exchange for a donation. The charitable arm of BB&T Corp., a banking company, pledged $1 million to the University of North Carolina Charlotte in 2005 and obtained an agreement that Rand's novel "Atlas Shrugged'' would become required reading for students. Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, and Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina, say they also took grants and agreed to teach Rand. ...

Scholars scoff at the Rand bounty, saying her ideas are too shallow to build courses around her. "Rand could not write her way out of a paper bag,'' said Harold Bloom, a professor of the humanities and English at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

You mean she didn't love me? I gave my money to a whore?

--Brant

[tjohnson]

scholars disgusted, take the money anyway

"I don't believe I have to advocate that people accept Ayn Rand's philosophy,'' said Patricia Roberson-Saunders, who holds the chair. Roberson-Saunders, who will present Rand with other texts, said students will benefit from reading about a world view held by ``people with whom they will have to work and for whom they will have to work."'

I think it's the Philosophy scholars that think poorly of Rand - there seems to be ample support from the proponents of free markets.

[Reidy]

Whoever wrote the Bloomberg story needs to get out more. The best date for Rand's ascendance into the academic big time would be 1987, when some APA members organized the Ayn Rand Society (or maybe the following year, when it held its first meeting).

[Robert Campbell]

The core of this story appeared a few days ago in the Charlotte Observer. When it became widely known at UNC-Charlotte that Atlas Shrugged was required reading in an undergraduate course, as per the deal with BB&T, some professors complained.

The reporting in this Bloomberg story is extremely shallow and there is no historical perspective at all.

It's true that the Leonard Peikoff Institute likes to underplay the presence of Randians in academia. After all, from its point of view, only its loyalists, trained in the Objectivist Graduate Center, actually count.

Yet the Ayn Rand Society is, as Peter Reidy noted, over 20 years old. I think the ARS is somewhat of a spent force, as the ARIans increasingly dominate the Steering Committee and the non-ARIans are gradually losing interest in it. There is some danger that it will survive only as a forum for members of the Leonard Peikoff Institute. All of that said, obviously if the ARS is a satellite group of the American Philosophical Association, this is prima facie evidence that Ayn Rand is not getting locked out of every Philosophy department.

Meanwhile, the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies will be 9 years old in September.

BB&T has been funding programs like the ones described for close to a decade. There must be 25 of them now. Too many of the BB&T grantees are Orthodox acolytes, IMHO, but BB&T is not the Anthem Foundation--John Allison does not phone Irvine, California, to get his candidates approved. Stephen Hicks and Ed Younkins are among the independent scholars who are receiving BB&T funding. I don't know who they brought in at UNC-Charlotte but I haven't seen any ARIans named in connection with it.

We have a BB&T funded program at Clemson that none of the recent stories even mention. It was started in 2005. The guy who was brought in with BB&T money is Brad Thompson, a moderately well known ARIan. He teaches a couple of courses, brings in one or two outside speakers a year, and otherwise keeps an extremely low profile on campus. An undergraduate course, with or without Atlas Shrugged on the reading list, was not part of the deal at Clemson.

Since Claude Lilly has subsequently become Dean of our College at Clemson, I will confine my remarks about him to this one: the Chancellor (top official) at UNC-Charlotte told the Observer that Dean Lilly did not inform him that Atlas Shrugged would become required reading as part of the deal. On this issue, I strongly suspect that the Chancellor is telling the truth.

Robert Campbell

PS. Did the reporter ask Harold Bloom what, if anything, by Ayn Rand Dr. Bloom had ever read? Or was he so eager for the sound bite as not to bother?