Over a period of six days last month, Yaron Brook, ARI’s executive chairman, spoke to more than 700 students at seven of the most prestigious schools in Great Britain. This speaking tour comes on the heels of the announcement in February that the 2017 UK curriculum for A-Level Politics taught in secondary and pre-university schools includes Ayn Rand as a key thinker. In the schools that adopt the new curriculum, students will study Rand and her ideas for the first time.
Occasionally, in a blog post, we will highlight important parts of the Ayn Rand Institute’s Annual Report. For 2016, our focus is on the Institute’s Free Books to Teachers program from the perspective of Shoshana Milgram, associate professor of English at Virginia Tech and long-time supporter of the program.
Paul Ryan has claimed that the American Health Care Act (also known as Ryancare), which is intended to replace the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare), is a return to a “free market” in health care. And various commentators and politicians are suggesting that Ryan’s plan is inspired by Ayn Rand’s philosophy. For example, Rep. John Yarmuth, D-Ky., went on CNBC’s Squawk Box to say that “It’s not really a health-care bill. This is an ideological exercise to basically satisfy Paul Ryan’s Ayn Rand tendencies.”
Today, March 23, BBC Witness broadcast an interview with Leonard Peikoff, Ayn Rand’s foremost student and today’s leading expert on Objectivism, on Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged.
Unlike other essay contests out there, ARI’s essay contest programs award cash prizes that you can spend any way you want, whether to pay for school or to fund your dream trip around the world. This year, ARI’s contest on Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged will award $20,000 to the first-place winner plus more than eighty cash prizes to the finalists.
This year it’s not only Atlas Shrugged’s 60th anniversary; it’s also the 55th anniversary of The Objectivist Newsletter, Ayn Rand’s first periodical. With essays on topics such as the evil of antitrust laws, the totalitarian nature of nonobjective laws, the application of the Objectivist ethics, the history and morality of capitalism, and other, Rand’s newsletter provided a penetrating philosophical dissection of the events and ideas dominating our culture.
Yesterday, The American Spectator published Elan Journo’s reply to Arnold Steinberg’s contention that Donald Trump’s “America first” foreign policy is “an unintended reincarnation of Ayn Rand.”
This panel event celebrates and discusses two new scholarly works related to Objectivism: Tara Smith’s Judicial Review in an Objective Legal System and the multi-author volume A Companion to Ayn Rand, edited by Allan Gotthelf and Gregory Salmieri.
Here was the scene recently in the ARI parking lot — employees with dollies and carts unloading boxes from the back of an 18-wheeler. The boxes contain books — copies of Ayn Rand’s works, like Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead and Philosophy: Who Needs It.
Maria Asvos has been an English teacher in the Chicago area for seventeen years. She has participated in ARI’s Free Books to Teachers and essay contest programs for fifteen of those years. Here she explains why.
