Print: the Chronicle: 7/13/2007: Advocates of Objectivism Make New Inroads
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Print: The Chronicle: 7/13/2007: Advocates of Objectivism 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 philosophy department at the San Marcos campus of Texas State University received such an offer — and turned it down. The invitation came from the Anthem Foundation for Objectivist Scholarship, a California-based organization that promotes the ideas of the late Ayn Rand, whose much-loved and much-loathed novel Atlas Shrugged 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 — epistemology, philosophy of science, ethics — taking Rand seriously and, even more, liking some of what they see," says Tara Smith, 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 Ayn Rand Institute, 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 Princeton University and Brown University 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: capitalism.") 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 Allan Gotthelf, 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.