The Battle of Ideas: A Dispatch from the Frontline
“The innovative strategy followed in…Retaking College Hill reminds me of the ingenious strategy of the strike by John Galt and his band of ‘men of the mind’ in Atlas Shrugged.”
That is a comment (from a review of Retaking College Hill) that lifts the spirit. Prof. Edward Younkins of Wheeling University, who posted it, is an accomplished scholar of Ayn Rand. His most recent book, Exploring Atlas Shrugged: Ayn Rand’s Magnum Opus, is the most promising, targeted strategic tool we have for getting Objectivism into the college curriculum. It is reviewed in Savvy Street.
No scholar of Prof. Younkins’s stature, whose book in my experience uniquely comprehends the masterful integration of ideas, characters, incidents, historical context, and wealth of detail in Atlas Shrugged, is at risk of being misunderstood in linking Atlas Shrugged to Retaking College Hill.
Exploring Atlas Shrugged makes clear that the alternate world of Atlas Shrugged can illuminate almost anything—including a few aspects of Retaking College Hill. No one is equating this 2021 novel of the American university as a training camp for “social justice warriors” with the twentieth century classic, Atlas Shrugged.
The characters in Retaking College Hill who band together to oppose domination by postmodernist philosophy, neo-Marxism, and political correctness of the university they love are committed to Ayn Rand’s ideas, or discovering them, or awakening to them. “Even as you and I…”
No, these are not “knock offs” of the irreplicable heroes of Atlas Shrugged. They are me, and perhaps you, at our best: afire with the new knowledge of the power of philosophy to change the world, with the imperative to speak what we know.
Retaking College Hill becomes a thriller--“action-packed” and “suspenseful” as reviews say--because of the resort to character assassination, intimidation, and outright violence now justified by the self-righteous leftists on campus. Musician, writer, and Objectivist scholar Roger Bissell begins his review: “I’ve been ensnared for…decades by special ops and alternate history novels, full of intrigue, sex, and violence. Then along comes this book, with all of those…and ideas!
“You can thank Ayn Rand for that.”
The protagonists of Retaking College Hill intend to wage a battle of ideas, but they find themselves fighting for their reputations, positions at the university, freedom to speak—and their lives. Retaking College Hill is an expose of the violent suppression of dissent on campuses today and a projection of what we see coming.
Jose Antonio Lopez, associate professor at la Universidad Francisco Marroquín, Guatemala, writes in his review: “...Retaking College Hill is an open-ended novel. We long for a happy ending, where reason prevails, but that would be naïve. Just as Damian puts it: ‘…if the onslaught here, at this university, is permitted to succeed--an onslaught on what it is to be civilized men of reason and free--then all that the legions of freedom fight and die to defend is gone.’"
Retaking College Hill is the engrossing, constantly surprising story of people—from a college dean to a Navy SEAL to a brilliant and beautiful Israeli girl--who pursue their loves, their ambitions, even as they are drawn into the battle of ideas upon which their future, and ours, depends.
Atlas Shrugged and its philosophical revolution have inspired the work of generations of readers. Retaking College Hill could not have been written without the insights of Ayn Rand.
Perhaps Retaking College Hill will illustrate how Atlas Shrugged, well over half-a-century its publication, still leads the battle of ideas. Today, it is the battle against those who would silence ideas. In prescient essay after essay, such as “The Cashing In: The Student Rebellion,” Ayn Rands told us would be the battles of lifetimes. That essay has had a part in inspiring two of my novels (the other is The Way the Wind Blew, about the ‘Sixties New Left criminality).
Retaking College Hill is another urgent dispatch from the battlefield.

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