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This is part of my turning Florida Tech, a private university, into The Patrick Henry University from Atlas Shrugged. I easily could have gone the Dr. Stadler route, but then I read Atlas Shrugged.
https://www.newsweek.com/lets-go-bran...
As for colleges having references in course work, has it changed any from decades ago when it was a NO-NO and one was penalized for such a infringement on other students. Around the time that Rand gave her talk on ethics at the University of Wisconsin Madison, I was trying to discuss her philosophy with a philosophy major. All I got was that her philosophy was naive realism and he shut up. W.F. Buckley's ex-communist W. Chamber's review for National Review summed Atlas Shrugged up as something like "From every page comes a resounding call of 'to the gas chambers go'.
In my history course the book The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman gave Rand's work it a very short put down as escapist literature for young people. The 1987 book The Closing or the American Mind by the teacher Allan Bloom says that he asked his classes what books they read. He said, "There is always a girl who mentions Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, a book although hardly literature, which, with its sub-Nietzscean assertiveness, excites somewhat eccentric youngsters to a new way of life."
That seems the way many of the comments that I saw during the last 50 years have gone. Even some who liked the books would stick in some kind of put down of Rand.
Ayn Rand was different in this respect, however. If you didn't agree with her on every nuance of every point, she totally rejected you based on the content of your philosophy. I am sure that this attitude is part of why she got some much negative attention, but without that attitude, she would not have made the great contribution that she did. The best in any field are going to disturb the status quo.
https://fit.instructure.com/files/431...
In that file, shortly thereafter, you will find all aspects of our nanotechnology minor program except my Basics of Making class that I am teaching this term. Students knew how to do the materials synthesis and characterization and knew the correct philosophy, but weren't getting the jobs making the equipment until I developed a class to teach them how.
https://fit.instructure.com/courses/5... is the syllabus for my Basics of Making class. Although not on the syllabus, quite a few of the projects involve spectroscopy. None involve plasma arc engineering this year. That technology will be reserved for jbrenner's Gulch.
In case you forgot, this entire web site was generated to publicize the Atlas Shrugged movies.
Also, I doubt that the people in charge of American universities could be persuaded to make any of Ayn Rand's books part of the curriculum. I do understand, of course, that they are in the libraries of the colleges. But that is different from having them academically endorsed. But so what? As long as you can get the students to read them, won't that move things along for the better?
The big picture question of how Objectivism should be presented to a modern audience is an interesting one, particularly for university students. Conceivably it could be included in a Writing About Literature (2nd semester freshman) or a Civilizations 2 course, but almost certainly it would be in a humanities elective as philosophy courses are required for very few students any more. Because it would likely be relegated to elective status for most students, it is unrealistic for professors in science and engineering to expect that students will have a Hugh Akston experience. So the question really becomes, "How does a non-philosophy professor expose students to Objectivism in a nugget form?" Bringing Objectivism to a wider audience was the purpose of the Atlas Shrugged movies.
Especially now that students' attention spans are much shorter than they were back when Atlas Shrugged was written, digesting the message into a short form is almost as important as the Objectivist message itself.
"Young readers love defiant, nonconformist outsiders. " Indeed, they do. Having a contrarian point of view is an absolute necessity for entrepreneurship and engineering.