Why Does the Ayn Rand Institute Hate Your Professors?

by Patrick Crosby waveletsurfer@netscape.net December 12, 2002

Not far from Saddleback College, about 10 miles north on the 5 Freeway, in Irvine, is a place called the Ayn Rand Institute. Recently, I saw posted on an outdoor bulletin board at here at Saddleback a short essay by the Ayn Rand Institute’s Robert W. Tracinski, entitled “Why do they Hate Us?” Initially, I assumed “they” were going to be the followers of Osama Bin Laden; but as Mr. Tracinski explains at the outset, “they” are your teachers here at Saddleback, as well as college professors at every other university and community college in the U S.

What is it that Mr. Tracinski says is the problem with your professors here at Saddleback? Well, first of all, he says that they are mostly all “postmodernists,” which means, according to him, that they are “anti-enlightenment.” More specifically, Mr. Tracinski claims that a postmodernist is one who:

“condemn[s] science and reason as oppressive agents of the "dominant power structure" and screams that it is "racist" to regard a free society like America as superior to Third World dictatorships.”

As if that weren’t enough, Mr. Tracinski further accuses your professors of “allying themselves with the Taliban,” and of having “betrayed that sacred trust” of “transmit[ing] and to defend[ing] the intellectual achievement[s] of 2,500 years of Western civilization.” Wow. My music teachers have all been guilty of all that? If you’ve taken any courses at all here at Saddleback, you know that this is just plain nuts. Being somewhat new at Saddleback, I’ve only had personal contact with a relatively small number of the teachers here, but every one of them has been that polar opposite of what Mr. Tracinski and the Ayn Rand Institute want you and me to believe about them. My hunch is that your experience here has been similar. So who are these people, who are not only outright lying to us, but evidently expect us to be naive and stupid enough to believe them?

Basically, they’re followers of novelist Ayn Rand (1905-1982) who wrote the novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and essay collections with titles such as The Virtue of Selfishness and Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal. In her novels and essays, she developed a supposed “philosophy” which she called “Objectivism.” It is impossible to adequately explain Objectivism in a few lines— even though there’s really not a whole lot to it. But basically, Rand held that selfishness was the ultimate moral virtue, and that charity was, if anything, a sign of moral weakness. She saw nothing wrong with poor people or their children starving to death or dying for lack of medical care. Truly, Rand was a woman far more deserving of scorn and contempt than any sort of blind adoration. Ayn Rand Institute founder, and former Rand Associate, Leonard Peikoff, is every bit as cold and heartless as Rand was. In a published NY Times Op Ed piece, he made it clear that the fact that 5000 civilians in Afghanistan needlessly and pointlessly died from US Bombs didn’t bother him one little bit. Just as individuals ought to be selfish, so should nations and corporations. In fact, if a corporation can get desperate people to work for 31 cents/hour in El Salvador, making $200 Liz Claiborne designer jackets, that’s right and proper. You and I are immoral if we seek to use the democratic process to improve the plight of these people. We’re just as base and immoral if we form labor unions, or contact our representatives to try to improve our own working conditions. Still worse, we’re “irrational.” Sure Ayn!

But the question still remains: why does the Ayn Rand Institute hate your professors? The answer is really quite simple. Educated people, people with critical thinking skills, will not fall for the kind of lunacy they want to sell. Rand herself, if you read her biographies, was an utter control freak. She preached liberty, but dominated everyone around her. Still worse her philosophy was one that if implemented, could only lead to the domination of the vast majority of the world’s people by a small, ruling, corporate elite. This is exactly what the Ayn Rand Institute and its financial backers are seeking— all in the name of “the profit motive,” free trade, and reason.

A good teacher, a really good one, teaches you not only the answers to certain questions, but how to raise and figure out the answers to new questions for yourself. This is exactly what the Rand Institute doesn’t want you to learn to do. They want you to simply accept dogma, their dogma. Last but not least, they want you to “know” that Ayn Rand was “the greatest thinker who ever lived.” Just about any teacher now at Saddleback who knows anything about her can explain to you why that’s just ludicrous. And Mr. Tracinski explicitly states at the end of his essay that he wants most of them fired. If that were ever to happen, just who do you suppose Mr. Tracinski would recommend replace them? 

Afterward August 25, 2005:

    This idea that most philosophers and professors are

"filled with hatred" is  a notion that runs throughout 

the writings of Ayn Rand. According to Rand, every

major philosopher  except Aristotle just hated the whole

world (for evidence of this, see her essay, For the New

Intellectual).

     Perhaps here she is echoing Nietzsche of  The

Genealogy of Morals which says that Christian morality

is a "slave" morality, based on hatred of the the former

masters.Whatever the source of this notion which seems

to have so obsessed Rand through most of her writing career, 

the truth of the matter is that if there ever was a writer that

viewed the larger part of humanity with  hatred and contempt,

it was Ayn Rand herself.  It has long been my hunch that this had

something to do with the Bolsheviks seizing her father's pharmacy

in Czarist Russia, when Ayn was 12 years old. But this, of course,

is mere speculation on my part.