Print: The Chronicle: 7/13/2007: Advocates of Make ... http://chronicle.com/cgi-bin/printable.cgi?article=http://chronicle.c...

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i45/45a00701.htm

From the issue dated July 13, 2007

Advocates of Objectivism Make New Inroads

By DAVID GLENN It is not every day that a foundation offers to pour tens of thousands of dollars into a humanities department at a small regional institution. But this past spring, the department at the San Marcos campus of Texas State University received such an offer — and turned it down. The invitation came from the Foundation for Objectivist Scholarship, a California-based organization that promotes the ideas of the late , whose much-loved and much-loathed novel will mark its 50th anniversary in October. The foundation offered Texas State a long-term grant to pay the salary of a visiting professor whose specialty would be objectivism, as Rand termed her philosophical system. Since its creation in 2001, the Anthem Foundation has donated roughly $400,000 annually to support research, conferences, and lecture series. Together with similar grants from the BB&T Charitable Foundation — an arm of a North Carolina bank whose chairman is a Rand admirer — Anthem's gifts have been credited with nourishing a small objectivist renaissance. "It's encouraging to see some top minds in different areas of philosophy — , philosophy of science, ethics — taking Rand seriously and, even more, liking some of what they see," says , a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin whose research has been supported by a $300,000 grant from the Anthem Foundation, in an e-mail message to The Chronicle. "That is extremely refreshing, given the scorn with which the very mention of her name has so often been greeted." Skeptical members of the Texas State philosophy department believed that the Anthem Foundation was trying to buy a spot in the philosophical canon for Rand. "It seemed a lot like selling an academic position," says Gilbert E. Fulmer, a professor of philosophy at Texas State. "Some other people in the department objected to that phrase, but as I pointed out, if one party has something that the other party wants and the other party gives money and gets it, it looks an awful lot like selling." Mr. Fulmer and some of his colleagues also had specific worries about the world of Rand scholarship, which has occasionally been marred by schisms and accusations of scholarly foul play. In particular, the , a nonprofit organization with which the Anthem Foundation is closely associated, has sometimes been accused of enforcing rigid ideological conformity — and even of failing to acknowledge the work of scholars associated with rival organizations. Debates surrounding Rand's work often "resemble a religious dogma surrounding a

1 of 5 7/14/07 11:00 PM Print: The Chronicle: 7/13/2007: Advocates of Objectivism Make ... http://chronicle.com/cgi-bin/printable.cgi?article=http://chronicle.c...

sacred text, and not the free give-and-take of ordinary scholarship," says Rebecca Raphael, a senior lecturer in philosophy at Texas State. Defenders of the foundation say that gifts to universities from outside private groups are a natural — and indeed crucial — way to introduce oxygen into airless scholarly establishments. They point out that highly ranked departments at the University of Texas and the University of Pittsburgh have accepted similar gifts from the Anthem Foundation, while and have received smaller grants from Anthem to support conferences and lectures. They also insist that the accusations of dogmatism are seriously overblown. The field has matured, they say, since the last major period of Randian schisms in the early 1990s. "Part of being a better university is that you don't just accept the canon, but you challenge the canon," says John P. McCaskey, the Anthem Foundation's founder and president, who had harsh things to say about the institution that spurned the foundation. "A Princeton, a North Carolina, a Brown — they're willing to accept grants because they want to challenge the canon. That doesn't mean that they're convinced that Ayn Rand is going to be in the canon. But that's OK. They take it as their job to challenge the conventional wisdom. Lesser schools tend not to do that." Ayn and Aristotle Ayn Rand generally held little regard for academic philosophers, and philosophers have tended to return the favor. At one point in Atlas Shrugged, the narrator catalogs the intellectual and moral errors of passengers who are about to die in a train wreck, one of whom is a philosopher: "The man in Bedroom A, Car No. 14, was a professor of philosophy who taught that there is no mind — how do you know that the tunnel is dangerous? — no reality — how can you prove that the tunnel exists? — no logic — why do you claim that trains cannot move without motive power?" Rand saw her celebration of free-market economics and her defense of egoistic ethics as parts of a complete philosophical system. Although she had little formal training in philosophy, late in her life Rand tried to sketch answers to some of the discipline's oldest and most fundamental problems: Do external objects exist independently of human consciousness? What does it mean to say that a proposition is true or false? (Challenged to summarize her ideas while standing on one leg, Rand answered: "Metaphysics: objective reality. Epistemology: reason. Ethics: self-interest. Politics: .") After a long period of indifference or hostility, American philosophers are paying more sustained attention to Rand's efforts. "It used to be the kiss of death to your career to say that you liked Ayn Rand," says Jurgis Brakas, an associate professor of philosophy at Marist College, whose work is not supported by any Rand-affiliated foundation. He suggests that a much broader revival of interest in Aristotle — whose realist and rationalist theories of cognition harmonize with Rand's — is partly responsible for the recent uptick in scholarly interest in objectivism. Before about 1975, Aristotle "was studied as an antiquarian thinker," says , a visiting professor of the philosophy of science at Pittsburgh. "But then people began to return to his work, and more attention was given to his theories of essences and virtues." That interest in Aristotelian epistemology and ethics, he says, has opened the door for scholars to appreciate Rand's variations on Aristotle's models. Mr. Gotthelf studied with Rand during the 1960s and taught philosophy for many years at the College of New Jersey, specializing in Aristotle. After retiring from that post in 2002, he

2 of 5 7/14/07 11:00 PM Print: The Chronicle: 7/13/2007: Advocates of Objectivism Make ... http://chronicle.com/cgi-bin/printable.cgi?article=http://chronicle.c...

was hired by Pittsburgh's department of the history and philosophy of science, under a grant from the Anthem Foundation. The foundation, Mr. Gotthelf says, "is not the central moving force behind the introduction of Rand into academia. What it's doing is facilitating something that was happening long before the foundation existed, when John McCaskey was a little boy." The Gift of Rand Mr. McCaskey, the foundation's 47-year-old founder and president, walked away in 2001 from a lucrative Silicon Valley career to pursue his interest in objectivist philosophy full time. (Last year he completed a doctorate at Stanford University.) The foundation was created in 2001 in the wake of conversations between Mr. McCaskey and his circle of friends in the software industry. "The Anthem Foundation started when a few of us found ourselves in a position to begin some philanthropic work," Mr. McCaskey says. "We looked at our lives and said, Some of the ideas that have most influenced us, especially the ideas of Ayn Rand, we did not get from our teachers. And that seems a shame. We wondered, Is it still the case that she's not taught in the university? Let's look around and see if there are people we might support." Anthem's largest gifts have gone to Pittsburgh, to support Mr. Gotthelf's work, and to the University of Texas at Austin, to support Ms. Smith, an objectivist philosopher who arrived at Texas several years before the foundation was created. Last year Ms. Smith published Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist (Cambridge University Press), one of the first sympathetic treatments of objectivism from a major university press. The foundation also makes smaller-scale grants to support conferences and lecture series. One recipient is the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, whose philosophy department contains no objectivists. The department has also received grants of more than $500,000 from the BB&T Charitable Foundation to hire visiting instructors or postdoctoral fellows whose specialities are "Aristotle and theories of human nature, ethics and economics, social and political philosophy, or objectivity and values." Neither Anthem nor BB&T has meddled in the department's curriculum, says Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, the department's chairman. "They've been utterly nondirective," he says. "They've both been wonderful." Mr. Sayre-McCord has recently traveled to Pittsburgh and to Claremont College for workshops designed to bring together objectivists and nonobjectivists who work on parallel problems in metaphysics and ethics. While he remains unpersuaded by objectivism as a philosophical framework, he says that he has strongly benefited from confronting the work of Rand's followers: "I found both conferences engaging and interesting. It seemed like ordinary high-powered philosophy." Opposed to a Visit Although interest in Rand is growing, most members of the Texas State philosophy department felt queasy when presented with the Anthem Foundation's offer earlier this year. The seeds of the offer were sown in 2005, when the philosophy department approached the foundation to ask for a $5,000 grant to support its "dialogues" program, a near-daily series of public lectures on philosophy and public affairs. (A development director had recently moved to Texas State from the University of Texas at Austin, and she was familiar

3 of 5 7/14/07 11:00 PM Print: The Chronicle: 7/13/2007: Advocates of Objectivism Make ... http://chronicle.com/cgi-bin/printable.cgi?article=http://chronicle.c...

with Anthem from its grants to support Tara Smith's research.) That grant supported a limited series of lectures on objectivism, some of which took the form of debates between friends and foes of Rand's thought. Early this year, Anthem representatives and the department's chairman, Vincent Luizzi, began to discuss an expansion of the relationship via a long-term visiting position whose salary would be covered by a gift from the foundation. Mr. Luizzi says that he was open to the proposal but did not push it hard after the degree of opposition became clear. The department's cultural style is to "avoid actions that are going to be deeply divisive and might lead to ongoing conflict," he says. Much of the opposition was organized by Ms. Raphael, the lecturer in the department, who was disturbed by the notion that money might shape the department's offerings. "Debate about Rand's quality and significance should be pursued — but not by these means," she says. While researching the objectivist world online, Ms. Raphael began to fear that Anthem's grants were given only to a narrow range of scholars associated with the Ayn Rand Institute. No Anthem grants appear to go to scholars associated with , a former philosophy professor who broke with the institute in 1990 amid a personal and ideological dispute that concerned, among other things, whether it is appropriate for objectivists to speak at events organized by libertarians. Mr. Kelley, who now directs the Atlas Society, an objectivist group in Washington, says he can understand that the institute might not want anything to do with him personally. But he believes it is absurd for the institute to demand that its associates "repudiate" any and all scholars who "tolerate" him — a formulation that often appears in objectivist blog posts. Mr. McCaskey, the Anthem president, says that Ms. Raphael's concern about narrowness is unfair and unfounded. Many of the Anthem Foundation's grants, he points out, go to institutions like the University of North Carolina, where there are no objectivists on the faculty. And Mr. Gotthelf noted that he himself has historically had an arm's-length relationship with the institute. In 2000, four of its leaders declared that they felt "morally obliged" to criticize Mr. Gotthelf's book On Ayn Rand (Wadsworth) for being written in inaccessible academic language. Ms. Raphael is correct, however, to note that the foundation has never supported any scholars associated with Mr. Kelley, some of whom have published extensively in objectivist philosophy. Recanting Error Another red flag for Ms. Raphael was an abject apology distributed online in 2002 by , a visiting professor of philosophy at Marist College. Mr. Bernstein lectured on Rand at Texas State this past March, and Mr. McCaskey mentioned his name as someone who might fill the position that Anthem offered to finance. In his 2002 statement, Mr. Bernstein apologized for having contributed a one-paragraph letter to The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, a journal that publishes a variety of approaches to Rand's philosophy, many of which the institute's leaders find false and offensive. (Mr. Bernstein's short contribution was a reply to a negative review of his CliffsNotes of Rand's novels.) "The so-called Journal of Ayn Rand Studies is filled with writings by people with whom I refuse to knowingly associate under any circumstances," wrote Mr. Bernstein in his apology. "I deeply regret my thoughtless decision to contribute to this journal, and hereby irrevocably repudiate any and all association with it. In this regard, the fault is entirely my

4 of 5 7/14/07 11:00 PM Print: The Chronicle: 7/13/2007: Advocates of Objectivism Make ... http://chronicle.com/cgi-bin/printable.cgi?article=http://chronicle.c...

own. This journal does not hide what it is. Its contents are available on the Internet for all to see. In failing to do the requisite research and gather the necessary data, I failed to properly use my mind. I must now suffer the consequences of that. To all who are sincerely concerned with objectivism, I apologize, and recommend a complete repudiation and boycott of this journal. ..." When asked by The Chronicle about his 2002 comments, Mr. Bernstein replied that rejecting The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies was a moral and intellectual obligation. "We are literally in a struggle to save human civilization from the destruction wrought by irrational philosophy," he wrote in an e-mail message. The editors of the journal have been hostile to the Ayn Rand Institute, he said, but "anyone who sincerely supports Ayn Rand's philosophy, and appreciates its indispensable role in promoting cultural renaissance, must, as a logical consequence ... respect ARI's dauntless, indefatigable, gallant struggle on behalf of a rational philosophy." Such talk does little to quell Ms. Raphael's fundamental complaint. The Anthem Foundation might believe in good faith that a certain strain of objectivism is the truest and best, she says, but that means that departments should be even more cautious about accepting its grants. "When the donor expects the hiree to promote certain interpretations of the material," she says, "this removes from competition other scholars in the field whose results, however meritorious, do not meet the ideological litmus test." http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 53, Issue 45, Page A7

Copyright © 2007 by The Chronicle of Higher Education Subscribe | About The Chronicle | Contact us | Terms of use | Privacy policy | Help

5 of 5 7/14/07 11:00 PM