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    The donor intent of strategic philanthropic investors must be protected

    Quite a morning on Facebook. First, someone posted a link to this NDPR review, which prompted this reflection on my part: 

    The choice of doing a review or not on Objectivism entails a bit of a double-bind: "sunlight is the best disinfectant" (or less obnoxiously, "let's let the marketplace of ideas* do its work") vs "recognition lends legitimacy." The choice of reviewer is equally problematic: with a highly polarizing topic the choice of a friend or a foe stacks the deck and neutral observers are difficult to find. The Stanford EP article on Objectivism was discussed critically along those lines a while ago if I'm not mistaken.

    Subsequent discussion led me to this Forbes column on (often privately funded) university centers for "free market oriented policy research." 

    Among the striking passages: 

    For centuries universities have been the traditional centers of learning and the diffusion of learning. They should also be the place for studying policy and liberty. Efforts to promote liberty studies continued…. Other strategic philanthropic investors increased their funding and helped start new university and college-based programs. They include: industrialist Charles Koch; Jack Miller, who sold Quill Corporation to Staples; and banker John Allison, now president of Cato. Today there are approximately 150 such efforts. They range from well-structured centers to research projects and honors program.

     And

    Given the ideological and managerial challenges at universities, as well as their reliance on government funding, their environment will not be ideal for market-oriented think tanks. But with well-designed safeguards several will succeed. Some of the centers mentioned above receive most or all of their funding through separate non-profit entities, which are independent from the university. This protects donor intent in case these centers and efforts lose favor with the authorities.

    But with the private funding issue we're back to the double-bind I think, as we can see that taking the "Marketplace of Ideas" or "Republic of Letters" position may simply be playing into the hands of those (mixed metaphor alert) taking the Road from Mont Pelerin, i.e., another "long march through the institutions." 

    —-

    * See what I did there?

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    8 responses to “The donor intent of strategic philanthropic investors must be protected”

    1. John Protevi Avatar
      John Protevi

      Benny Goldberg asked me to post this comment from him:
      Ok this is a pet peeve of mine: we need to treat people who study Rand with the same respect we give to those who study other marginal figures in philosophy, like Wittgenstein. (Rand, in that comparison, has certainly had a much wider and deeper impact on the world, if not academic philosophy). Further, the history of philosophy demonstrates that a lot of philosophy is just thinly veiled ideology. So pick your poison! I think it’s extremely bad form and hypocritical to exclude Rand’s work from the conversation, especially since some of the most influential and powerful people on the planet take it very seriously. And the start of any criticism has to be taking the other side seriously and figuring out the most charitable, strongest way of characterizing that position. We should be therefore thankful for volumes like this, which serve as the best arguments from the Randian position. Instead of complaining about NDPR reviews (yes this one is from someone sympathetic, but a lot of reviews on NDPR are from very sympathetic readers), just criticize the ideas in the volume.

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    2. Stefan Heßbrüggen Avatar
      Stefan Heßbrüggen

      Disclosure: I was the person ranting about the review on Facebook.
      I think that there is a difference in how Rand is perceived in the States and in Europe, where objectivism leads an academic Randexistenz (bad pun, I know). Most people simply have never heard of it, or they don’t care. This may have to do with certain cultural peculiarities, e. g. the absence of libertarians from the political sphere, but whatever… Yet, I do think that the European neglect of Rand gives us a first indication of how an effective marketplace of ideas would deal with her writings. In the States, as far as I can guess from far-far away, this market place is being rigged. Organisations in favor of objectivism fund courses e. g. on ethics and economics under the provision that Atlas Shrugged is part of the curriculum:
      http://www.tampabay.com/…/billionaires-role-in…/1168680
      So money can buy a place for objectivism in a university syllabus. But as of now it is more difficult to buy ‘academic respectability’. Why is such respectability so important? Why does the objectivist camp strive so desperately for the canonization of Rand as a serious philosopher? (Footnote: this does not mean that I qualify Benny as an objectivist!)
      My guess is that a canonisation of objectivism as truly and seriously philosophical is supposed to lend it even more credibility in the public arena. I think that the suspicion is not completely meritless that any vindication of objectivism as serious philosophy will contribute in the long run to the impact of unmitigated neoliberalism on the system of higher education most of us deplore.

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    3. Jonathan Avatar
      Jonathan

      No one in the United States takes her ideas seriously, except for those who are spending millions and millions of dollars making it look like people take her ideas seriously. Thus the philosophy department of the University of Texas at Austin, a leading department in a flagship state university, has on its faculty a chaired professor bought and paid for the Ayn Rand foundation to teach courses on Rand’s philosophy. It’s bizarre. And pernicious.

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    4. Mark Lance Avatar
      Mark Lance

      I’m sorry. Anyone who thinks that Rand and Wittgenstein are on a par philosophically – or within several orders of magnitude – is simply not worth taking seriously philosophically. Rand is on a par, philosophically, with Carlos Castaneda – while the latter is vastly more humane and decent. Rand is a caricature of philosophy. The only way that Rand deserves to be taken serious philosophically is as an object lesson for a critical thinking class. (That is an example of taking her seriously.) As Jonathan points out, most of her popular reputation is bought and paid for by people who have an obvious interest in justifying her ideas. And in any event, it is hard to believe that anyone thinks that popular reception entails that we ought to take someone seriously as a professional interlocutor. If the goal is to take the general views of libertarians seriously, there are plenty of serious philosophers who can be engaged with. There is no need to dredge up this terrible novelist.

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    5. Patrick S. O'Donnell Avatar
      Patrick S. O’Donnell

      Years ago, while working as a carpenter with no thought whatsoever of returning to the academic world, I recall browsing through the “Philosophy” section in my favorite local independent bookstore and seeing a couple of Ayn Rand titles. I was shocked, thinking to myself that there must be a Randian working in the store or, more likely, given my knowledge of the store’s staff, someone slavishly following the marketing suggestions of a publisher. At the time I had no inkling whatsoever that Rand was taken seriously by some professional philosophers, whatever her pretensions or those of her acolytes. (I would have been just as scandalized had I seen works by Lenin in that aisle.) In those days I had many passionate arguments with “Randians,” as I dismissed her as a second-rate novelist, at best, worthy of study insofar as the study of ideology and worldviews more generally should be examined in the social sciences. As an undergraduate, the libertarians I came across in our school’s Philosophy Dept. were always quoting Nozick, I cannot recall any of them daring to cite Rand on any topic in philosophy, political or otherwise. Imagine my surprise when I learned of the SEP entry on Rand: it’s akin to discovering someone (a philosopher?) believes Wittgenstein is a “marginal figure” in philosophy!

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    6. Rebecca Kukla Avatar
      Rebecca Kukla

      I hope a few of you don’t know about this so that I can be the one that gives you the gift of knowledge:
      http://www.theatlasphere.com/dating

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    7. John Protevi Avatar
      John Protevi

      I call Poe’s Law on this one: “Hi, my name’s Roman. I am a Eupsychologist and therapist. I had independently achieved self-actualization (Ayn Rand’s Egoism) a while before I had read Ayn Rand, or Maslow for that matter. Then I read the Fountainhead, and it further fed the flame of my already exalted sense of life…”

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    8. Mark Lance Avatar
      Mark Lance

      Thanks Rebecca. Now I have to wash my eyes out with bleach.

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