Ayn Rand College Grant Program Should Be Applauded For Breaking Through The Anti-Reason, Anti-Capitalist, Far-Left College Echo Chamber
From Inside Higher Ed:
Fears of corporate influence on higher education are nothing new. But are colleges and universities, which receive smaller and smaller shares of their budgets from public funding, and which have struggled to bounce back from the 2008 recession, more likely to accept gifts with ideological strings attached than they would have been previously?
That’s the idea behind a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Academic Ethics, called, “BB&T, Atlas Shrugged and the Ethics of Corporation Influence on College Curricula.” It says it is the first study to track a particular set of donations by the financial services holding company BB&T to colleges and universities stipulating that they teach the works of free-market capitalist Ayn Rand and address the “Moral Foundations of Capitalism.”
How awesome of BB&T under former BB&T CEO John Allison to expand the diversity of ideas available to college students.
Such actions should not be condemned but applauded.
I wish there were such a program when I went to college — sadly the bulk of what I heard in the ivory tower was left-wing, progressive, anti-corporate ideology. Sadly, I did not learn about Ayn Rand until after college. I am thankful I did.
John Allison, ran a successful bank that was basically untouched by the financial crisis and did not need a bailout (read his book The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure for how the government caused the financial crisis and how BB&T prevented itself from being damaged by it). Allison also credits the moral code of Ayn Rand’s philosophy Objectivism — a philosophy for living on earth — in large part, for his and BB&T’s success.
Ayn Rand is such a great writer and profound thinker. Here is a link to quotes that demonstrate the breadth, clarity and depth of Ayn Rand’s thought — in her own words — so you can judge for yourself.
Like her or not — Ayn Rand is important and influential — she is, and should be, part of the college canon. Any proper business school that does not expose their students to the works of Ayn Rand is committing education malpractice.
The real disgrace are the college professors, journals and bureaucrats – funded by the government — who blackball professors who could expose students to Ayn Rand’s ideas. (Perhaps one day Inside Higher Ed could publish something about that.)
Sounds like the regressive Left is scared of their monopoly on young minds coming to an end. It’s about time.
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Related: CISC Executive Director C. Bradley Thompson speaks to the incoming class of Lyceum Scholars at Clemson University on the nature of a liberal arts education.