Category: The Atlasphere

All things Atlasphere can be found here, columns, podcasts, interesting anecdotes, and more.

Ayn Rand & Capitalism Grant at Univ of South Carolina

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The Associated Press reports (via The Mercury News) that the University of South Carolina has received a $1 million grant from Branch Banking & Trust Company (BB&T) to promote the study of capitalism:

USC will get the funds over the next couple years, said business school dean Joel Smith III, and will use the money to create a capitalism ethics class, a capitalism-focused professorship, a lecture series and a room in the business library dedicated to the works of authors that support free enterprise such as Ayn Rand.
John Allison, chairman and CEO of BB&T, said USC and the bank jointly developed the focus of the endowment.
“If you look at a lot of business education programs, they do a good job of teaching people the technical part of business,” Allison said. “But they don’t often explain the philosophical foundations for capitalism, and anybody can make better decisions if they understand the context.”
Smith said the study of ethics has become more common in recent years but the way USC will study “the moral defense of capitalism as a mechanism is fairly unique.” […]
Smith said recent business ethics scandals have brought to light the need for a program of the ethics of capitalism.
“What’s more important is that the leaders of the future and the practitioners of the future understand the difference and practice properly,” Smith said.

See the full article in The Mercury News for additional information.
UPDATE: “USC also will dedicate an Ayn Rand reading room as part of the renovated Springs Library at the business school and launch a BB&T speaker series.”
UPDATE (3/25): This story just doesn’t quit. Now they’re adding a graduate course to study Atlas Shrugged, too.

Fountain Head Primary School in India

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India appears to have more admirers of Ayn Rand’s novels than any country but the U.S. And India’s first female astronaut is on public record as a fan of Rand’s novels.
So when college graduate Vardan Kabra turned down a prestigious offer from Procter & Gamble so he could start a primary school to train new fountainheads of human progress, it’s not altogether surprising that he decided to name his school after Ayn Rand’s novel:

A school with a difference, that’s his dream. He’s so sure of his dream that even the lure of lucre has failed to tempt this IIMA passout.
Vardan Kabra declined to accept the Rs 7-lakh pre-placement offer made by Procter and Gamble to realise his dream of building a primary school that will churn out leaders for a better tomorrow.
Kabra, whose talents have been chiselled by teachers at Delhi Public School (DPS) R K Puram, Delhi and IIT Mumbai, has no dearth for inspiration. He dreams of a school of thinkers. “Ideas: That’s what we want children to come up with. For that, it’s best to catch them young. That’s why we are planning a primary school,” says Kabra.
Objectivism got him thinking about this concept. So what else could he have named the school but Fountain Head, inspired by Ayn Rand’s book on objectivism. “The name is ideal for a school as it means source of knowledge,” says Kabra.

Read the full story at Express India.

Ayn Rand in Fortune Magazine

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Here is the first paragraph from a new article in Fortune magazine, the full version of which is available only to Fortune subscribers:

“Please listen carefully, Mr. Roark,” newspaper mogul Gail Wynand instructs the architect hero of Ayn Rand’s 1943 novel, The Fountainhead. “I wish to undertake the construction of the Wynand Building at once. I wish it to be the tallest structure of the city.”

The article is accompanied by a photo essay of some impressive skyscrapers.

Joan Baez and The Fountainhead

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While apparently not influenced much, or enough, by Ayn Rand’s political principles, 1960s leftist activist Joan Baez credits The Founainhead with influencing her own trenchant approach to politics:

A little music, a little politics. It’s always been that way for Baez, but only now is it a comfortable balancing act. The woman whose silver soprano held audiences spellbound at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival has occasionally seen her career buffeted by her commitment to social causes. While Baez helped turn “We Shall Overcome” into a civil rights anthem, she also devoted an entire side of an album to a listener-proof account of a U.S. bombing raid on Hanoi.
“Dark Chords” is the singer’s coming-out party of a sort, and she’s celebrating her newfound confidence after a 15-year break from activism, during which she focused on her inner folk star.
“For the first 20, 25 years, I was steadier in my politics than I ever was in my image of myself musically,” she said. “Nobody could trip me up politically, and that came before the music. That started when I was 10 years old and reading Ayn Rand’s ‘Fountainhead’ while living in Baghdad.

See the full profile in TCPalm.com for more info about Baez’s development as a woman, singer, and songwriter.

Hudgins on Kerry's Racial Appeals

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Ed Hudgins, TOC Washington Director, attacks the subtle racism of John Kerry’s appeal to African American voters in his latest Report from the Front and he explains why African American leaders rejected Kerry’s clear pandering to racial politics. Lastly, Hudgins reflects on Ayn Rand’s thoughts on racism:

[T]his episode points to the moral and political bankruptcy of those who, as Ayn Rand wrote in her essay “Racism” over four decades ago, “Instead of fighting against racial discrimination … are demanding that racial discrimination be legalized and enforced… Instead of fighting for equal rights … are demanding special racial privileges.” But she also observed that, “the smallest minority on earth is the individual.” Individuals should not identify first with accidents of birth such as their race or social class, nor should they see these circumstances entitling them to other people’s money. Rather, their self-esteem should come from what they make of themselves through their own efforts to realize their own dreams, whether in the face of old-fashioned Southern-bigot white racism, which thankfully is disappearing from America, or the more subtle but equally dangerous version that is perpetuated by Clinton, Kerry and much of the black establishment.

Read the full article….

Howard Roark and 'My Architect'

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In a review of the movie My Architect for the Grand Rapids Press, reviewer John Douglas reports shades of Howard Roark in the movie’s lead character:

Nathaniel [Kahn] also went to see the structures his father designed. As the film progressed, Kahn began to remind me of Howard Roark, the uncompromising architect in Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead.” Thus he became a very interesting character in my eyes, because I loved [Roark] when I read the book.

See the full review for additional details. (And please send us your own comments, if you’ve seen the movie.)

David Strom and Ayn Rand

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David Strom, president of the Taxpayers League of Minnesota, counts Ayn Rand as a significant influence on his thinking. From a profile of Strom at the Star Tribune:

In recent weeks, Strom, president of the ardently conservative Taxpayers League of Minnesota, triggered an angry backlash over his provocative assertions that the strike-idled Twin Cities bus system does nothing to relieve congestion and that taxpayers would be better off buying used cars for low-income folks who are dependent on transit.
The voice of a dominant advocacy group in Minnesota, Strom has been mounting similarly scalding attacks on government spending and liberal thinking since 1997, shortly after the League was founded by a group of wealthy entrepreneurs.

See the full article for the scoop on how and why he made a “right turn on the ideological highway.”

Prescription Drugs and Atlas Shrugged

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In today’s LATimes.com, James P. Pinkerton has a commentary titled “Reining In Prescription Prices Is a Seductive Idea. But It Might Kill You.” [registration required]
From his comments:

Why not have price controls on pharmaceuticals? That’s a tempting idea for the federal government, which is desperate to restrain its spending and the size of its deficit. But a closer look ? and a look back at history ? shows that price controls are the falsest of false economies. […]
The Kennedy-Pelosi effort has gained momentum. Sen. John Kerry, the apparent Democratic presidential nominee, has added his oomph, promising that he will do everything to make sure “the American people have affordable medicine available to them.”
That all sounds innocent, doesn’t it? What’s wrong with negotiation? And surely there’s nothing wrong with affordable medicine.
The problem is that it won’t be a real negotiation. The federal government is so big and so powerful, as former head of the Medicare program Gail Wilensky said, that “government doesn’t negotiate prices; it sets them.” And so medicines will be affordable ? for as long as they are available. But as in some present-day addendum to Ayn Rand’s classic novel “Atlas Shrugged,” price controls could cause capitalists and their capital to go on strike; they could pursue more profitable ventures elsewhere in the free market, leaving the rest of us alone with our illness.

See the full article for further analysis.

T.J. Rodgers and Dartmouth College

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Cypress Semiconductor CEO T.J. Rodgers has a reputation for standing up for rational principles, and has been known to require his managers to read Atlas Shrugged.
In the mid-90s, Rodgers “rebuked a nun who had criticized Cypress for its lack of women or minority board members, saying it would be immoral for him to pick directors based on criteria other than merit.”
More recently, an article for the San Francisco Chronicle reports that he’s decided to run for office. In particular, he’s running for the board of trustees for his alma mater, Dartmouth College, in a bid to reform its politically correct and educationally destructive policies:

Rodgers, class of 1970, said he’s concerned that his alma mater, long a bastion of traditional education, is wasting scarce money “in the diversity area.” He wants the college to stop adding ethnic studies classes and refocus its resources on the fundamentals, such as civics, science and history.
“I could live with (the spending) if it was for academics,” said Rodgers, who is running on a platform of fiscal prudence and a return to basics.
He was urged to undertake this diversion from running Cypress’ $863 million business by another Bay Area iconoclast — former legislator and Superior Court Judge Quentin Kopp.
“He is a man of convictions, unafraid to express those convictions, and a believer in Dartmouth,” said Kopp, class of ’49 and an active member of the college’s 62,000-member alumni association.
Clara Lovett, president of the American Association for Higher Education in Washington, D.C., said Rodgers and Kopp are not the only prominent alumni trying to counter “what they see as too much political correctness on campuses.”
“You can argue about their opinions or disagree with them, but they are people whose education has served them well,” Lovett said. “They can think, they care, and they can make an argument.”

See the full article for more details.

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