Ayn Rand Institute Annual Report 2021

I N S T I T U T E

ANNUAL REPORT

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© Leonard Peikoff (Ayn Rand Archives)

Our Mission

© Leonard Peikoff (Ayn Rand Archives)

The Ayn Rand Institute fosters a growing awareness, understanding and acceptance of Ayn Rand’s philosophy, Objectivism, in order to create a culture whose guiding principles are reason, rational self-interest, individualism and laissez-faire capitalism—a culture in which individuals are free to pursue their own happiness.

“The present state of the world is not proof of philosophy’s impotence, but the proof of philosophy’s power. It is philosophy that has brought men to this state—it is only philosophy that can lead them out.”

—Ayn Rand, “For the New Intellectual,” For the New Intellectual

Cover photo: Portrait of Ayn Rand, c. 1931, taken on the grounds of her Gower Street apartment in Hollywood. The building was across the street from RKO Radio Pictures, a film studio where she was employed as a supervisor in the wardrobe department. At the time, she was writing her first novel, “Air-tight,” later renamed: We the Living.

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

From Our Executives

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2021 Sees a New Strategy and Growing Success for ARI

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Training the New Intellectuals: Ayn Rand University

Speakers Visit Classrooms 15 ARI

by Jonathan Divin and Polarization 21 Credibility

by Ayn Rand, reprinted from The Ayn Rand Letter Rand’s Musical Biography 29 Ayn

by Michael S. Berliner, excerpted from New Ideal When and How 35 “Capitalism”: Ayn Rand Embraced the Term

by Shoshana Milgram, excerpted from New Ideal

41 A Week to Remember 43 Meet Our Staff and Associates 45 Join Us for Inspiration and Connection 47 The Ayn Rand Institute Board of Directors 49 Fiscal Year 2021 Financials

From Our Executives Upon returning to Apple, Steve Jobs famously slashed Apple’s sprawling product line to four items. He believed that success requires laser-like focus on the products that truly serve the company’s mission and its competitive advantage. So do we.

ARI’s competitive advantage is identifying and training the next generation of Objectivist intellectuals. That’s why this year we announced Ayn Rand University (ARU), our most ambitious initiative to date. ARU will take our decades of experience helping people understand and advocate Rand’s philosophy and dramatically improve and expand those efforts. We already offer the world’s best training in Objectivism—now we’re going to do it at scale. (See page 7.)

To see how ARU helps us integrate our activities so we remain relentlessly focused on our competitive advantage, consider how a few of the programs we highlight in this report fit together to produce the next generation of Objectivist intellectuals.

To ensure the future intellectuals among today’s young students are reading Ayn Rand, we’ve reinvigorated our Free Books program. We added ebooks to facilitate distance teaching and sent 380,000 books to teachers—well over double our annual average the past five years. Now that teachers have the option of distributing digital copies of Ayn Rand’s novels, more teachers can take part in the program and we can lower the cost to donors of the books we distribute.

To attract the best minds to ARU, we’ve been building a dynamic marketing machine to make sure that everyone interested in Ayn Rand knows that ARU is the go-to place for an in-depth education in Rand’s thought.

One of the most important ways we do this is through highly

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relevant public content, from our regular webinars to our online publication New Ideal. Helping people see the power of Rand’s thought and letting them know they can tap into that power by joining ARU is the most effective marketing tool possible. (See page 13.)

Once students enroll in ARU, they’ll receive the best undergraduatelevel education in Objectivism through our two-year Objectivist Academic Center (OAC) program. If they choose to pursue an intellectual career, they’ll continue to our advanced training program: the Objectivist Graduate Center (OGC). (See page 11.)

As students continue their intellectual journey, some will also have opportunities to work directly with our leading intellectuals. For example, we’ve expanded our Junior Fellows Program, which allows young intellectuals to work with and be mentored by our senior ARU faculty. (See page 12.)

In the pages that follow, you’ll find details about all these efforts.

You’ll also find celebrations of Ayn Rand’s life (see pages 29 and 35) and ideas (see page 21).

We’d like to conclude by offering our sincere appreciation for the hard work of our entire team at ARI. We also would like to recognize the support you and our other contributors provide, which makes that work possible. We hope the progress we’ve made so far encourages you and that the vision we’re moving toward inspires you.

Sincerely,

Tal Tsfany Chief Executive Officer

Onkar Ghate Chief Philosophy Officer

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2021

SEES A NEW STRATEGY AND GROWING SUCCESS FOR ARI

ARI’s Free Books program put more than

380,000

copies of Ayn Rand’s novels into the hands of students in the 2020-2021 school year,

more than doubling the previous 5-year average.

In October 2020, as a complement to the Free Books for Teachers program, ARI began offering classroom talks with ARI intellectuals.

By January 2021,

63% OF TEACHERS

were actively requesting more information.

In 2021, we’ve conducted 45 classroom talks and are expecting to give almost 200 in the 2021–2022 school year. .

Read more about ARI speakers visiting classrooms on page 15.

YOUNG INTELLECTUALS new to Ayn Rand’s fiction meet weekly to discuss her nonfiction essays; these small, intimate reading groups provide an initial introduction to Ayn Rand’s philosophy in a welcoming environment. We expect these groups to drive a quarter of next year’s enrollments to OAC.

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This is Ayn Rand University.

Read more about the ARU initiative on page 7.

Student conferences in

Europe, the United States, and Latin America in 2022 will create a pipeline of young intellectuals interested in Ayn Rand’s ideas that will feed into increasing the number of qualified Ayn Rand University applicants.

We’ve seen a nearly

60% increase

in the number of students enrolled in the Objectivist Academic Center, from 63 total enrolled students in 2020 to 100 in 2021.

Most significantly, first year student enrollment increased from 27 in 2020 to 53 in 2021, nearly doubling.

We’ve reestablished the Objectivist Graduate Center and increased the number of OAC graduates enrolled in advanced courses by 125%, from

8 students in 2020 to 18 in 2021.

The number of junior fellows at ARI increased from

2 in 2019 to 8 in 2021.

With this focused student journey into and through the new Ayn Rand University, we’re laying the groundwork for a massive expansion of the number of highly trained, highly impactful Objectivist intellectuals. 2021 was a watershed year.

But we expect next year to be even better.

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TRAINING THE NEW INTELLECTUALS:

AYN RAND UNIVERSITY Objectivism At Scale

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RI’s mission is to promote Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Reason, Individualism and Capitalism. We know that only this philosophy—Objectivism—can bring about a renaissance of individualism and liberty that will result in unimaginable prosperity and human flourishing.

But how do you change a culture’s philosophy?

Ayn Rand on how to change a culture Ayn Rand argued that philosophy determines the direction of a culture, and a culture’s philosophy is determined by professional intellectuals who disseminate philosophic ideas. As she said in an interview with James McConnell: The professional intellectuals are, in effect, the field agents of the army whose head or commander-in-chief is the philosopher. The philosopher, the man who defines the basic, fundamental ideas of a culture, is the man who determines history. And professional intellectuals are all those whose professions deal with the humanities, the studies of man as against the physical sciences.

The professional intellectuals, in all their various professions, carry to the rest of the culture, to the rest of society, the philosophical premises, the ideas which have been defined by the philosopher.

Therefore they are the transmission belts.

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This perspective on cultural change led Rand to a distinctive view of how to change a culture. Cultural change, she held, doesn’t start at the voting booth and it isn’t primarily a numbers game: In an intellectual battle, you do not need to convert everyone. History is made by minorities—or, more precisely, history is made by intellectual movements, which are created by minorities. Who belongs to these minorities? Anyone who is able and willing actively to concern himself with intellectual issues. Here, it is not quantity, but quality, that counts (the quality—and consistency—of the ideas one is advocating).

ARI’’s 30 years of success Rand’s analysis of cultural change has shaped ARI’s strategy since its inception.

Because today’s education system doesn’t train people in pro-reason, pro-freedom ideas, and because mastering Rand’s philosophy of reason and applying it to life’s vital issues is enormously challenging, ARI has for nearly thirty years invested heavily in training Objectivist intellectuals. We are proud of the results.

• We helped train Yaron Brook, Onkar Ghate, Elan Journo, Keith Lockitch, Ben Bayer, Aaron Smith, and the other individuals who are part of ARI’s intellectual and education team.

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• We helped train Tara • We helped train Adam Smith, Robert Mayhew, Mossoff, Alex Epstein, Don Darryl Wright, Greg Watkins, Amesh Adalja, and Salmieri, and other other intellectuals who are Objectivist philosophers writing books, testifying in academia. before Congress, appearing on TV and radio, and making sure that Objectivist ideas are part of the debate on issue after issue.

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ARI’s vice president of education, Keith Lockitch, elaborates on the impact of our training programs: I learned about ARI by participating in The Fountainhead essay contest as a high school student, and in college I led an ARI-sponsored campus club. Later, in the late ‘90s, I took classes by teleconference in the Objectivist Graduate Center (OGC), the precursor to our current Objectivist Academic Center (OAC) program.

Without the training I received from ARI as a student, I certainly could not be in a position today where I’m now an instructor in those same programs.

ARI has created the world’s best training in Objectivism. Now we’re taking the next step with our biggest initiative ever: Ayn Rand University.

“History is made by minorities—or, more precisely, history is made by intellectual movements, which are created by minorities.”

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What is Ayn Rand University?

According to ARI’s CEO, Tal Tsfany, “Ayn Rand University is going to take ARI’s core competency— developing New Intellectuals—and do it at scale.”

The university will have four major elements:

A team at ARI that will execute a robust and sustained effort to create greater awareness of Objectivism, with programs designed to attract the very best intellectual students.

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An undergraduate-level education program for the study of the philosophy of Objectivism. ARI’s existing program that serves as the foundation for ARU’s expansion.

An advanced training and mentoring program, preparing students for an intellectual career. The center will offer an array of courses that will be open for auditing by advanced students of Objectivism.

ARI’s intellectual faculty will be expanded to allow for increased educational capacity and the expansion of ARI’s depth and breadth of philosophical expertise. Promising intellectuals will be offered fellowships at ARI with the intention to accelerate their development.

We’ve done a number of these things in the past, but to bring Objectivist training to scale, we’ll be dramatically improving and expanding every element.

According to Lockitch, “The plan is to build on our current programs by adding more students, more faculty, and more courses—and scaling the program up year after year. This year’s incoming OAC class is double the size of last year’s, and we’re adding a number of new course offerings at the ‘OGC,’ or ‘Objectivist Graduate Center,’ level.”

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Spotlight on ARU’’s Junior Fellows expansion Let’s look in detail at one aspect of our new strategy: a major expansion of ARI’s Junior Fellows program. We currently have a cohort of more than half a dozen junior fellows working part-time for us from all over the world. The purpose is to invest in the training and intellectual development of aspiring intellectuals by using them as teaching assistants and junior instructors who will work closely with ARI’s senior faculty. This will allow us to grow our teaching capacity while training the next generation of Objectivist educators.

“One year in the OAC writing course probably did more to improve my writing ability than all my years of secondary and collegiate education combined.”

Lockitch elaborates on the benefits of the Junior Fellows Program: “We want to create a high level of engagement with the most promising young Objectivist intellectuals. Hiring them to work for us while they’re still in graduate school or working in academia gives them a strong, mutually beneficial connection to ARI.” ARI Junior Fellow—the first recipient of ARI’s Conceptual Education Fellowship—Samuel Weaver, for instance, is applying Ayn Rand’s ideas to the field of education and acting as a teaching assistant in the OAC. Weaver credits all ARI’s programs, especially the OAC, with helping to improve his thinking and communication skills. “One year in the OAC writing course,” he says, “probably did more to improve my writing ability than all my years of secondary and collegiate education combined.”

Those benefits have only increased as he’s become more engaged with ARI as a junior fellow: My understanding of Objectivism advanced dramatically while I was a student in the OAC and now in new ways as an OAC teaching assistant, approaching the same material but with an eye toward teaching it. As a direct result of understanding Objectivism more and more, I’ve learned how to define and pursue my career goals far more clearly and rationally.

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Looking forward Ayn Rand University will be transformational. In the years ahead, we’ll bring this world-class education in Objectivism, and support for Objectivist intellectuals, to hundreds and ultimately thousands of the world’s best minds—minds who will produce cutting-edge, high-impact intellectual content in field after field.

This is rational philosophic ideas at scale, which has the power to change the trajectory of our culture.

And the best part? Everyone can participate in this effort. Though Ayn Rand University’s core focus is on training New Intellectuals, we are opening the doors to more auditors in more courses, so they can see firsthand the immense value we’re creating and use that knowledge to improve their own thinking and lives.

As Tsfany notes, “Ayn Rand University is designed to give people the education needed to live a full, prosperous and thriving life—and the principles, the moral guidance and the thinking tools required in any career path they will choose for themselves.”

If you would like to audit this program, please visit university.aynrand.org.

And if you would like to help us increase Objectivism’s impact on the world by orders of magnitude, consider increasing your support of our efforts.

The future has never looked brighter. 

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ARI SPEAKERS VISIT CLASSROOMS Expanded Initiative Drives Stude nt Impact

BY JONATHAN DIVIN

Dr. Aaron Smith and Sam Weaver discuss the value of Anthem with high school students and relate some of their experiences visiting middle-school and high-school classrooms. aynrand.org/antheminschools

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tudents are raving about one of ARI’s newly expanded educational initiatives: virtual talks with Q&As in which our intellectuals engage directly with high-school and middle-school students about their experience reading an Ayn Rand novel. Here’s a taste of what students are saying about our speakers:

“He had so much positive energy while speaking and I could tell that he was truly passionate about what he does!”

– 10th grader at Fountain Valley High School, CA

“I loved how easy it was to talk to him and how welcoming he felt about questions.”

– 12th grader at JP Keefe Technical High School, MA

“I liked how he wanted us to ask questions and interact rather than just listen.”

– 9th grader at Orthopedic Medical Magnet High School, CA

“I thought it was very insightful and provided an amazing explanation of some of Ayn Rand’s ideas as well as a perspective that was unique from the perspective of those in my class.”

– 9th grader at Lincoln Charter School, NC

“It was very helpful to see the perspective of a person who understands the book and the author better than I did.”

– 9th grader at Lincoln Charter School, NC

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The talks started as an extension of one of ARI’s oldest and most successful initiatives—the Free Books to Teachers program, which began in 2002. Over the past two decades, this program has given away more than 4.7 million copies of Ayn Rand’s novels to teachers of middle- and high-school students. Throughout this period, ARI provided talks to classes if explicitly requested by the teachers, but it wasn’t until October 2020 that we decided to offer them as a full-time complement to the Free Books program. This sprang from the pandemic moving classes online and teachers becoming increasingly more familiar with videoconferencing, allowing for seamless connection with students at no cost to either the teachers or our intellectuals.

ARI Fellow and instructor Dr. Aaron Smith conducted a number of virtual sessions, and the positive response from both teachers and students was a proof of concept showing the large opportunity available to grow the talks.

While the Free Books team worked to promote the program and to simplify and streamline the process for teachers to request a speaker, Dr. Smith worked with Education Programs Coordinator Jonathon Brajdic to manage the logistics of growing the number of events and took the lead on conducting the talks. Other ARI intellectuals who have given talks so far include Dr. Onkar Ghate, Dr. Ben Bayer, and ARI junior fellow Sam Weaver.

By the end of January 2021, 63 percent of our Free Books teachers were requesting more information about hosting a virtual talk. Since then, ARI has worked to meet the growing demand and has gone on to give more than thirty talks to Free Books students this year. With another 30+ scheduled to take place before the end of the year (12 in one week alone!), the talks are quickly becoming one of ARI’s most popular initiatives. And we’re not the only ones thrilled with the results:

“I particularly liked that he did not ‘talk down’ to the students, but used academic vocabulary and language to address their questions.”

– Barbara, teacher at Florida SouthWestern Collegiate High School, FL

“There were aspects taught by Dr. Smith that I had no way of knowing and the students consumed it all.”

– Xavier, teacher at Lincoln Charter School, NC

“As I continue to teach Anthem in years to come, I will definitely access this resource.”

– Kathryn, teacher at JP Keefe Technical High School, MA

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Many teachers and students send “thank you” letters to our intellectuals and to the Institute for sharing books and classroom talks with them.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Smith and ARI junior fellow Sam Weaver about their experiences visiting classrooms. In addition to his role as a classroom speaker, Dr. Smith teaches in ARI’s Objectivist Academic Center (OAC) and writes and speaks regularly for the Institute. Sam Weaver, in the wake of graduating from the OAC and winning the Atlas Shrugged essay contest in 2019, joined ARI in the spring of 2021 as a junior fellow under the Conceptual Education Fellowship. He now acts as a teaching assistant for the OAC and conducts research in the field of education reform.

Sam Weaver explains why teachers love welcoming our intellectuals into their classrooms: “Most teachers are not specialists in Rand’s works and ideas, so it’s helpful for them to invite experts from ARI to interact directly with their students.

This allows the students to get a deeper perspective on the novels and on Rand’s philosophy than they might not otherwise get in their classes.”

Dr. Smith adds: “Having speakers in the classroom who are fluent in philosophy and philosophical issues makes possible a whole new level of engagement and discussion about such issues with the students, and in terms they can understand.

Get students asking questions, and you can get momentum going in the classroom.

They will ask questions if some of what I’m saying clashes with the conventional views that they’ve been told.” For example, students who read Anthem are often unsure how to classify the character Equality 7-2521. Is he selfish or unselfish?

He’s clearly pursuing his own goals in spite of his society’s demand that he live for others, but he’s not doing so at the expense of others. By helping students think through intellectual challenges like this one, our speakers get them to think critically about ideas they may never have considered or even encountered before.

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One of the challenges—and greatest rewards—in the talks is getting the students to see how the ideas in the novels relate to their own lives. Asking them the right kinds of questions can help students grasp this connection. For example, “What is selfishness? What does it mean to think for yourself? What do you want out of life?”

These are questions related to issues they will encounter in their teenage years and need to think about over the course of their lives, which genuinely pique the students’ interest. Dr. Smith has even been asked to extend his session into the lunch hour because students were still brimming with questions, a request he was happy to accommodate.

“[The workshops] help open the door to philosophy and philosophic thinking, not as an airy academic matter, but as something directly related to their lives, goals, and futures.”

ARI’s goal when talking to these students is to introduce them to the view Rand passionately shared: that ideas matter. In fact, Dr. Smith says that one of the greatest values of these visits is that “they help open the door to philosophy and philosophic thinking, not as an airy academic matter, but as something directly related to their lives, goals, and futures.” And this impression of the role of ideas in life is one of the key takeaways for many of the students. Sam Weaver summarizes: “Over time, they are not going to

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remember many of the details of what we say, but they will come away with a sense that there are things in this book that are important to life.”

You can hear Dr. Smith and Sam talk more about their experiences in classrooms in this New Ideal Live! podcast episode: aynrand.org/antheminschools.

These talks often act as the first stepping stone for students who want to learn more about Ayn Rand and her ideas. And with the creation of the new Ayn Rand University (ARU), the resources available to these students are only expanding. ARI is developing book clubs and webinars that will be a part of the new ARU and will help bridge students from their first encounter with Ayn Rand to our indepth training. Sam Weaver sums up the point: “Our high school events make it clear to the students that this is not just a book you read in high school—there is substance here, and if you want to know more about it, there is an organization that can help you.”

ARI is engaging with students like never before, which means ARI is expanding its cultural reach in a deeper and more impactful way. And further, by connecting our student engagement with ARU, we are setting the stage for a more widespread, long-term impact.  Jonathan Divin is the Online Community Specialist for the Ayn Rand Institute.

ARI instructor and fellow Dr. Aaron Smith teaches and develops educational content for the Institute’s intellectual training and outreach programs.

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CREDIBILITY AND

POLARIZATION

BY AYN RAND, REPRINTED FROM THE AYN RAND LETTER

We are pleased to reprint, with permission, the entirety of Ayn Rand’s essay “Credibility and Polarization,” which first appeared in The Ayn Rand Letter, Vol. 1, No. 1, October 11, 1971.

© Leonard Peikoff (Ayn Rand Archives)

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The very first issue of The Ayn Rand Letter, the twicemonthly newsletter Rand launched in 1971, featured the article “Credibility and Polarization.” It bears the hallmarks of Rand’s approach to commentary: original philosophical material (the “anti-concept”), trenchant analysis of current issues (complaints about “polarization” and the “credibility gap”), and compelling illustrations of philosophy’s role in shaping events. As 2021 draws to a close, we hear frantic calls for “unity” everywhere from a nation that is—to use Rand’s words from exactly fifty years earlier—“splitting into dozens of blind, deaf, but screaming camps, each drawn together not by loyalty to an idea, but by the accident of race, age, sex, religious creed.” Read on to learn Rand’s solution for achieving national unity on a rational basis.

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ntellectual confusion is the hallmark of the twentieth century, induced by those whose task is to provide enlightenment: by modern intellectuals.

One of their methods is the destruction of language—and, therefore, of thought and, therefore, of communication—by means of anti-concepts. An anti-concept is an unnecessary and rationally unusable term designed to replace and obliterate some legitimate concept. The use of anti-concepts gives the listeners a sense of approximate understanding. But in the realm of cognition, nothing is as bad as the approximate. If, loaded with too many approximations, you find yourself giving up the attempt to understand today’s world, check your premises and the words you are hearing. To understand what one hears and reads today requires a special translation.

Now to introduce myself, in this context. Philosophically, I am an advocate of reason. Practically, my task is to demonstrate that man needs philosophy in order to discover the proper way to live on earth. Journalistically, part of my task is to serve as a translator by identifying, whenever necessary, the meaning of the worst anti-concepts in our cultural smog. Colloquially, in this respect, call me a bromide-buster.

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Philosophically, I am an advocate of reason. Practically, my task is to demonstrate that man needs philosophy in order to discover the proper way to live on earth.

One of today’s fashionable anticoncepts is “polarization.” Its meaning is not very clear, except that it is something bad—undesirable, socially destructive, evil—something that would split the country into irreconcilable camps and conflicts. It is used mainly in political issues and serves as a kind of “argument from intimidation”: it replaces a discussion of the merits (the truth or falsehood) of a given idea by the menacing accusation that such an idea would “polarize” the country— which is supposed to make one’s opponents retreat, protesting that they didn’t mean it. Mean—what?

“Polarization” is a term borrowed from physics; a dictionary defines “polarity” as: “the presence or manifestation of two opposite or contrasting principles or tendencies.” (Random House Dictionary, 1966.)

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Transplanted from the realm of physics to the realm of social issues, this term means a situation in which men hold “opposite or contrasting” views or ideas (principles), and goals or values (tendencies). When used as a pejorative term, this means that men should not differ in their views, ideas, goals and values, that such differences are evil, that men must not disagree.

This notion is propagated by the same intellectuals who denounce conformity, decry the status quo, clamor for change, and proclaim that the right to dissent includes the right to implement it by physical force.

But—the anti-polarizers might protest— they do not object to all disagreements: the key term in the above definition is “principles”; which is true. It is principles—fundamental principles—

that they are struggling to eliminate from public discussion. It is a clash of fundamental principles that the term “polarization” is intended to hide and to avert. Fundamental principles, they feel, must be accepted uncritically— on faith, by “instinct,” by implication, by emotional commitment—and must never be named or questioned. No, they do not mind dissent and differences— such differences as between St. Peter and St. Paul, or Auguste Comte and Karl Marx, or Senator Muskie and Senator Kennedy. But do not dare bring up the differences between Aristotle and Marcuse, or Adam Smith and J.M. Keynes, or George Washington and Richard M. Nixon. This would polarize the country, they cry. And it sure would.

claim, are “simplistic” (another anticoncept); myopia is sophisticated. “Don’t polarize!” and “Don’t rock the boat!” are expressions of the same kind of panic.

The most timid, frightened, conservative defenders of the status quo—of the intellectual status quo—are today’s liberals (the leaders of the conservatives never ventured into the realm of the intellect). What they dread to discover is the fact that the intellectual status quo they inherited is bankrupt, that they have no ideological base to stand on and no capacity to construct one. Brought up on the philosophy of Pragmatism, they have been taught that principles are unprovable, impractical or non-existent— which has destroyed their ability to integrate ideas, to deal with abstractions, and to see beyond the range of the immediate moment. Abstractions, they

The leaders of today’s intellectuals are probably aware of the fact that the injunction to avoid polarization means that unity—a nation’s unity—must be given priority over reason, logic and truth, which is a fundamental principle of collectivism. But the rank-andfile intellectuals are not aware of it: it is too abstract a conclusion. Like children and savages, they believe that human wishes are omnipotent, that everything would be all right if only we’d all agree on it, and that anything can be solved by cooperation, negotiation and compromise.

It is doubtful—even in the midst of today’s intellectual decadence—that one could get away with declaring explicitly: “Let us abolish all debate on fundamental principles!” (though some men have tried it). If, however, one declares: “Don’t let us polarize,” and suggests a vague image of warring camps ready to fight (with no mention of the fight’s object), one has a chance to silence the mentally weary. The use of “polarization” as a pejorative term means: the suppression of fundamental principles. Such is the pattern of the function of anti-concepts.

This has been the ruling doctrine in our political, academic and intellectual life

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for the last fifty years or longer, with no noteworthy dissenters but one: reality.

The ideal of “consensus” did not work.

It did not lead to social harmony among men, or security or confidence or unity or mutual understanding and good will. It has led us to a general sense of hostility, of fear, uncertainty, lethargy, bitterness, cynicism, and a growing mistrust of everyone by everyone.

The same intellectuals who advocate non-polarization, are now deploring the “credibility gap.” They do not realize that the latter is the unavoidable consequence of the former.

If clear-cut principles, unequivocal definitions and inflexible goals are barred from public discussion, then a speaker or writer has to struggle to hide his meaning (if any) under coils of meaningless generalities and safely popular bromides.

Regardless of whether his message is good or bad, true or false, he cannot state it openly, but must smuggle it into his audience’s subconscious by means of the same unfocused, deceptive, evasive verbiage. He must strive to be misunderstood in the greatest number of ways by the greatest number of people: this is the only way to keep up the pretense of unity.

If, in such conditions, people are urged to cooperate, negotiate or compromise, how are they to do it? How can they cooperate, if their common goal is

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not named explicitly? How can they negotiate, if the intentions of the various men or groups involved are not revealed? How can they know, when they compromise, whether they have made a reasonable deal or sold out their future? Since there is no way to do it— since concrete problems cannot even be grasped, let alone judged or solved, without reference to abstract principles— men begin to regard social relationships not as a matter of dealing with one another, but of putting something over on one another. And the worst of it is not that this policy turns the men who act in good faith into easy prey for the frauds and the manipulators. The worst of it is the genuine misunderstandings between honest men who take the loose verbiage to mean two opposite things. If there is a surer way to breed mistrust and bitterness, I do not know of it.

In politics, the intellectuals profess their desire “to make democracy work” and their devotion to the will of the people as expressed by vote. How are people to choose or trust their representatives in an age of non-polarizing language?

A parliamentary system stands or falls on the quality—the precision—of public communication (and its precondition: the freedom of public information). A program, platform, promise, or forecast of the future cannot be offered except in terms of explicitly defined principles— and such principles are the people’s only means of ascertaining whether a

The country is splitting into dozens of blind, deaf, but screaming camps, each drawn together not by loyalty to an idea, but by the accident of race, age, sex, religious creed, or the frantic whim of a given moment. . .

candidate has kept his word or not. In the last decades, people have become cynically accustomed to ignoring the empty catch phrases of campaign oratory and to voting on the basis of implications. But this does not work— as has been demonstrated definitively

by Mr. Nixon, who made a U-turn on a dime (or on a paper dollar), discarding overnight every approximate principle he was approximately believed to stand for. (I shall discuss Mr. Nixon’s performance in a subsequent Letter.)

Whatever our politicians now talk about, they had better not talk about reviving anyone’s “faith in the democratic process” or about credibility.

In the absence of intellectual polarization, we are witnessing the growth of the ugliest kind of divisiveness or existential polarization, if you will: pressure-group warfare. The country is

splitting into dozens of blind, deaf, but screaming camps, each drawn together not by loyalty to an idea, but by the accident of race, age, sex, religious creed, or the frantic whim of a given moment—not by values held in common, but by a common hatred of some other group—not by choice, but by terror.

When men abandon principles (i.e., their conceptual faculty), two of the major results are: individually, the inability to project the future; socially, the impossibility of communication.

Trapped in a maze of immediate problems, with no means of grasping the context, causes, consequences or solutions, men seek a way out by ganging up on one another, which means: by accepting brute physical force as the ultimate arbiter of disputes. A shrunken, range-of-themoment mentality sees other men as

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What this country needs above all is the clarifying, reassuring, confidence-andcredibility-inspiring guidance of fundamental principles.

the immediate cause of its troubles; it can see no further; forcing its demands on others is the only answer it can grasp. But these others, acting on the same non-principle, gang up to retaliate and to force their demands, which leads their intended victims to gang up, and so on. Who is the ultimate victim? The smallest minority on earth: the individual—which means: every man qua man.

Is there a solution? Yes. In its present state, what this country needs above all is the clarifying, reassuring, confidenceand-credibility-inspiring guidance of fundamental principles—i.e., in modern parlance, intellectual polarization.

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This would bring to our cultural atmosphere an all-but-forgotten quality: honesty, with its corollary, clarity. It would establish the minimum requirement of civilized discourse: that the proponents of ideas strive to make themselves understood and lay all their cards on the table (including their axioms). It would leave no significant audience or influence to those who specialize in the unintelligible, or preach blatant contradictions, or proclaim ends with total unconcern for means, or hold fundamental principles they would not dare name openly, or disseminate anti-concepts. It would enable men to know their own stand and that of their adversaries. It would enable them to

© Leonard Peikoff (Ayn Rand Archives)

make conscious choices and to take the consequences—or to change their course, when proved wrong. What they would regain is the power to understand, to consider, to judge—and to communicate with one another. What they would lose is the sense of suffocating in a smog of impotent bewilderment.

What if men disagree, you ask? No open disagreement can be as destructive as the secret, nameless, virulent hostility now splintering this country.

But isn’t unity desirable, you ask?

Unity is a consequence, not a primary. The unity of a lynch mob, of Nazi storm troopers or of the Soviet press is not desirable.

Only fundamental principles, rationally validated, clearly understood and voluntarily accepted, can create a desirable kind of unity among men.

But such principles cannot be defined, you say? Check your premises and those of the speakers who told you so. There is a science whose task is to discover and define fundamental principles. It is the forgotten, neglected, subverted and currently disgraced base of all the other sciences: philosophy. 

AYN RAND’S HARD-TO-FIND PERIODICALS AVAILABLE NOW Did you know that you can get all three of Ayn Rand’s periodicals in the ARI eStore?

Available in hardcover bound volumes, The Objectivist Newsletter, Newsletter, The Objectivist and The Ayn Rand Letter contain unanthologized material you won’t find elsewhere. Buy all three at a discount!

ESTORE.AYNRAND.ORG/ BUNDLE 2021 EDITION //

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AYN RAND’S

Musical Biography

BY MICHAEL S. BERLINER

To hear the musical recordings, navigate to the full article on New Ideal, the Ayn Rand Institute’s journal, using this link:

AYNRAND.ORG/MUSICALBIO

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A

yn Rand never wrote an autobiography (though she sat for many hours of biographical interviews in 1960 and 1961). She did, however, prepare her “musical biography.”

What can we discover from it?

We know that music was an important part of Rand’s life. We know this from her discussions of music in biographical interviews, from her large record collection, from the accounts of friends who observed her enjoying music, and from the significant place of music in her novels (see, for example, my essay “The Music of We the Living” in Essays on Ayn Rand’s “We the Living,” edited by Robert Mayhew).

We also have her discussion of the esthetics of music in “Art and Cognition,” an essay from her book on esthetics, The Romantic Manifesto. Music, she held, is a form of art that communicates emotions and is like a direct line to one’s “sense of life.”

“Sense of life” is Rand’s term for each person’s “pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics, an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence.” One can think of it as a person’s appraisal of man and his place in the world, held on an emotional level rather than on the level of explicit philosophic beliefs—which, in fact, many people never formulate.

Because she organized the list according to her own age at the time each selection became a favorite, she obviously intended it to convey something about her own development. But we don’t know exactly how she thought the music resonated with her own sense of life, a difficult enough problem with respect to any of the arts, but

According to Leonard Peikoff, sense of life was the standard by which she selected the favorites listed in her “musical biography.”

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Meet Michael S. Berliner SENIOR ADVISOR TO THE AYN RAND ARCHIVES

Mike Berliner’s lifelong fascination with Ayn Rand’s writings began in college with The Fountainhead, which was recommended by his future wife, Judy. From 1985 until 2000, he served as the Ayn Rand Institute’s founding CEO. Under his leadership the Ayn Rand Archives was established, a collection that provided the source material for Letters of Ayn Rand. That volume, published in 1995, features more than five hundred letters supplemented by Berliner’s commentary.

In retirement, Berliner has spent hundreds of hours as senior advisor to the Archives.

“I’m especially proud of my role in providing an authoritative guide to Ayn Rand’s papers,” he says, “so that scholars can better access the riches of this unique repository.” He continues to draw upon Archives resources for New Ideal articles like “Ayn Rand’s Musical Biography” and (forthcoming) “How Music Saved a Life: Ayn Rand and Operetta.”

even more difficult with respect to music—because music expresses its ideas by means of sounds only, no words, no ideas expressed, no shapes, no human beings, no landscapes, no entities. Moreover, Rand held that it’s extremely difficult for one person to name another’s sense of life— impossible unless one knows the other intimately. Thus we cannot say precisely what these selections reveal about Rand’s own sense of life.

Nonetheless, there are some things we can say about the music she selected. There’s a wide range of types, from popular songs to classical, though the latter has many fewer entries than light, less serious music. The music varies in complexity, and there’s a range of

The world as Rand experienced it through her favorite music was a world that contained joy and triumph.

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© Leonard Peikoff (Ayn Rand Archives)

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BECOME A FRIEND OF THE

Ayn Rand Archives The Ayn Rand Archives exists to preserve and share the evidence of Ayn Rand’s life, creative work and thought—and to document her growing cultural impact.

As part of that mission, ARI is investing heavily in upgrading the physical and digital infrastructure of the Ayn Rand Archives. This not only ensures that you’ll be able to enjoy articles, books, videos, talks and OCON lectures informed by the Archives—it also means we’ll be able to share never-before-seen collections and artifacts with the public.

Now you have the opportunity to help support and improve the Archives through our Friends of the Ayn Rand Archives program. This is a monthly membership program that will help us accelerate our Archives upgrade—and will give you preferential access to updates about the Archives from Digital Archivist Audra Hilse and our Physical and Analog Archivist Jeff Britting (pictured below), as well as other benefits.

With your help, the study of Rand’s life and thought—including the preservation and unlocking of documentary evidence—will shed new light on a philosophy that has begun to change the world.

JOIN FRIENDS OF THE AYN RAND ARCHIVES TODAY AT

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emotions from bright and spritely to contemplative and serene.

But clearly all the selections are in the category of “emotionally positive,” with many variations within. Importantly, none holds even a hint of fear, chaos, malevolence.

The world as Rand experienced it through her favorite music was a world that contained joy and triumph. What it did not contain was Russia. From the time that she was able to think in such abstractions, she despised both the mystical fatalism of Czarist Russia and the political collectivism of the Bolsheviks. She considered her homeland an “accidental cesspool of civilization.” And her musical choices all implied at some level a rejection of the Russian view of life. She became, in fact, a dramatic example of her view that “man is a being of self-made soul.” She was not a “product” of Russia or life under Soviet communism. She shaped her own soul by reaching outside Russia for values in the arts. This was a self-confident endeavor by which she reinforced her own benevolent outlook on life. Foreign artworks—not just music but films and works of literature such as the novels of Victor Hugo—became the lifelines that would sustain her until she could escape the country of her birth.

As a child, Rand enjoyed listening to band music in the parks, and she also listened avidly to her family’s extensive record collection, her grandmother having purchased one of the first record players in St. Petersburg. But Rand brought no records with her from Russia, nor did she write about what a particular song meant to her at a particular age.

So that you can listen to and appreciate the music that Ayn Rand loved, we have compiled some background on each piece and provided links to the actual recorded versions that Rand herself owned. It turns out that friends of hers created a gift in the form of an LP (long-playing) record containing all seventeen items on Rand’s “musical biography” list, compiled from her own records. Although we don’t know how similar those versions are to the ones she heard at any specific age, these versions are the closest we can come to experiencing what Rand herself enjoyed. 

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“CAPITALISM”: When and How Ayn Rand Embraced the Term

BY SHOSHANA MILGRAM

Ayn Rand was an intransigent advocate of laissez-faire capitalism: “When I say ‘capitalism,’ I mean a full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism—with a separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.” But when did Rand begin using the term “capitalism” to designate her political ideal?

Shoshana Milgram offers a biographical answer, drawing extensively on materials in the Ayn Rand Archives, in an essay published recently in New Ideal, the journal of the Ayn Rand Institute. Dr. Milgram, a scholar of Rand’s life and work, is associate professor of English at Virginia Tech. Below we are delighted to feature an excerpt from that essay, and we invite you to read the whole essay online.

To read the whole essay, which includes citations, please visit

AYNRAND.ORG/MILGRAMCAPITALISM

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C

apitalism, wrote Ayn Rand, is “the only system geared to the life of a rational being.” She was an outspoken, enthusiastic, uncompromising advocate of capitalism, a self-described “radical for capitalism.” Her 1957 best seller, the novel Atlas Shrugged, celebrates production and business. She is known for eloquent articles on the topic (e.g., “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business”), many of them collected in the 1966 volume Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

© Leonard Peikoff (Ayn Rand Archives)

But at what age did she first come to view business itself positively? When did she recognize free enterprise as not only an efficient economic system, but as the only moral political system?

When did she begin to make salient use of the term “capitalism” and think of it as naming her political ideal? The present article is a biographical answer. I begin with her youth, continue through her university education and her early Russian publications, cross the Atlantic with her to the United States, follow her reading and writing about individualism in politics, and examine the advocacy in her private and public writing of the principles of free enterprise—and the appearance there of the word “capitalism.”

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Where did it all start for her? As a young person, she valued reason and individualism, and she opposed the Soviet state, specifically the idea that the individual’s life belonged to the state. But at the time of the Russian Revolution of 1917, when she was twelve, she did not yet think of

through a single course in her high school in the Crimea, she saw America as “almost an incredible thing”—as the “country of individualism, in whichever primitive terms I would have had it.” She ultimately came to regard the United States as the opposite of Russia, as the representative of individualism versus collectivism. But she had not, during her youth in Russia, identified capitalism itself as being related to individualism or to her objections to the Soviet regime.

She saw America as “almost an incredible thing”—as the “country of individualism, in whichever primitive terms I would have had it.”

America or its political or economic system as constituting a principled alternative to the statism of Soviet Russia. When she first gained specific information about the history of the United States a few years later,

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Her family background, to be sure, supported a generally positive view of business. Her father, she recalled, had started his own pharmacy business, and was proud of his success; he had sent seven of his siblings through college. He was proud mainly of being productive, of being a self-starter, of having

created his work for himself. He had, moreover, “very firm convictions on ethics, and they would be strictly his own”; these convictions pertained to “free enterprise and fair trade.”

She believed, though, that he did not particularly like the field of his work; because there were quotas for university subjects and he had been allowed to study chemistry, his choice of field was a “forced choice,” rather than a distinctly personal goal.

His business, then, was a way to be independent, a “self-made man,” although he did not (as far as she could tell) love the particular business in which he was engaged.

Her university education at the University of Petrograd did not provide her with historical, economic, or philosophical information about the positive aspects of the world of business. On the contrary. Her courses did not describe capitalism in any depth or detail; the term was simply a name for that which had,

according to Marx and Lenin, needed to be discarded or superseded, one way or another. Her studies included required subjects such as Historical Materialism, History of Socialism, and General Theory of the State Structure in the USSR. “Historical Materialism,” she said, “was the history of the Communist philosophy. . . . They had an official textbook—which was sort of like the Bible for all students, and everybody had to know it. . . .

It started with Plato, the next big stopping point was Hegel, then Marx and Lenin.” The likely textbook was Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin’s Theory of Historical Materialism: Popular Textbook of Marxist Sociology, the standard textbook for the course in historical materialism. It was published in 1921. To read it is to see how the young Ayn Rand would have seen capitalism handled (or mishandled).

In We the Living (1936), her first novel, she included references to the popular version of Bukharin’s

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book Azbuka Kommunizma, or The ABC of Communism, co-written by Bukharin with Evgenii Preobrazhenskii and designed for workers, or for rank-and-file Party members. The reference makes clear that the book is well known, and that it had become a cliché to see “capitalism” as an outmoded economic system. For example: At a meeting of the Marxist Club in the library of the “House of the Peasant,” Kira Argounova, the protagonist, reads aloud her thesis on “Marxism and Leninism”: “Leninism is Marxism adapted to Russian reality.

Karl Marx, the great founder of Communism, believed that Socialism was to be the logical outcome of Capitalism in a country of highly developed Industrialism and with a proletariat attuned to a high degree of class-consciousness. But our great leader, Comrade Lenin, proved that . . .”

(Notice that the passage ends with an ellipsis, as if to imply a familiar formula, or the Russian equivalent of

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yada-yada-yada.) The novel’s narration then explains: “She had copied her thesis, barely changing the words, from the ‘ABC of Communism,’ a book whose study was compulsory in every school in the country. She knew that all her listeners had read it, that they had also read her thesis, time and time again, in every editorial of every newspaper for the last six years.”

Decades later, Ayn Rand recognized the same clichés and intonation in an answer given by Nikita Khrushchev in 1959 about “the grounds of his faith in communism.” Khrushchev, she wrote, “began to recite the credo of dialectical materialism in the exact words and tone in which I had heard it recited at exams, in my college days . . . the same uninflected monotonous tone of a memorized lesson, the same automatic progression of sounds rather than meaning. . . .”

From her education, Ayn Rand herself, like Kira, was familiar with “capitalism”

as the economic system Marx expected to see replaced by socialism. But other than recognizing it as a target of Marx and Lenin, she had learned little about it. From the standpoint of vocabulary, she was accustomed to seeing “capitalist” as a synonym for factoryowner, rather than as a term that might be used to describe an opponent of statism in principle, or an enemy of Communism, or, say, someone like herself. Her education had identified capitalism as the enemy of her enemies, to be sure, but this fact was not sufficient to justify its becoming the marker of her personal cause. 

Dr. Shoshana Milgram, associate professor of English at Virginia Tech, specializes in narrative fiction and film. Her scholarship includes introductions to Victor Hugo’s novels, a study of Ayn Rand’s life up to 1957, and articles on Dostoevsky, George Eliot, Nabokov, and others.

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Photos by Mark DaCunha

A WEEK TO REMEMBER After the pandemic forced us to move OCON 2020 online, it was thrilling to spend a week in Austin this year celebrating the thirty years since the publication of Leonard Peikoff’s Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. Thank you to the hundreds who joined us—virtually and in-person—for an incredible lineup of speakers, a dazzling performance of the play Monna Vanna, and ARI’s annual Gala. We hope to see you all at OCON 2022 in Washington, D.C.

TO REGISTER FOR NEXT YEAR’S CONFERENCE AND GALA, VISIT

AYNRAND.ORG/ OCON2022

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2021 EDITION //

42

MEET OUR

Staff and Associates Meet our incredibly dedicated and passionate team of intellectuals, creatives, archivists, managers, accountants, and specialists, who work to advance ARI’s mission of changing the culture. This year, we spotlight some of the newest additions to our team, who share what it means to them personally to work at ARI.

Mohamed Ali Junior Fellow

Kirk Barbera

Development Account Manager

Ben Bayer

Instructor and Fellow

Tom Bowden

Research Fellow

Jonathon Brajdic Education Programs Coordinator

Jeff Britting

Physical and Analog Archivist

Kathy Cross

Senior Legacy Giving Manager

Marilee Dahl

Information Technology Manager

Aaron Fried

Intellectual Development Product Marketing Manager

Onkar Ghate

Chief Philosophy Officer and Senior Fellow

Ziemowit Gowin

Tristan de Liège Junior Fellow

Keith Lockitch

Vice President of Education and Senior Fellow

Stewart Margolis Development Account Manager

Jennifer Minjarez

Junior Fellow

Student Community Coordinator

David Gulbraa

Zane Mitchell

Donor Services Specialist

Jeff Janicke

Content Analytics and Data Manager

Business Operations Coordinator

Donna Montrezza

Elan Journo

Matthew Morgen

Vice President of Content Products and Senior Fellow

Copy Editor

Director of Development

Lucy Rose

Development Account Manager

Elizabeth Judge

Marketing Project Manager

Director of Content Production

Ezra Drake

Krissy Keys

Romy Salgado

Marketing Manager

Simon Federman

Archives Coordinator

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Vinny Freire

Business Operations Manager

Duane Knight Grants Manager

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Staff Accountant

Gregory Salmieri Guest Instructor

Jonathan Divin

Online Community Specialist ARI is the beacon of knowledge guiding my goals in life. I would love to be a teacher of philosophy one day, particularly Objectivism, and ARI is making that happen—especially now with the new Ayn Rand University.

Audra Hilse Digital Archivist

As a career archivist, I’m deeply interested in preserving important records for the future.

I’m also passionate about Objectivism and ARI’s mission of spreading the philosophy.

This job is where those two interests converge, and because of that, it’s a dream job.

Rachael Mare

Director of Marketing

Daniel Schwartz Visiting Fellow

Jeff Scialabba

Director of Education Programs

Anu Seppala

Director of Cultural Outreach

Carla Silk

Chief Operating Officer

Alex Silverman Visiting Fellow

Aaron Smith

Instructor and Fellow

Nikos Sotirakopoulos Visiting Fellow and Director of Ayn Rand Institute Europe

Anna Steinberg

Legacy Giving Manager

Tal Tsfany

President and Chief Executive Officer

Alex Wigger

Content Production Specialist

I’ve been passionate about ARI’s mission for a quarter-century. My mission for ARI’s growing marketing team: tell stories that move people, connect and inspire by integrating reason and emotion, and demonstrate the impact our work is having—so we can continue to change the lives of even more people for the better.

Mike Mazza Associate Fellow

I’ve been involved in ARI’s education programs for almost 20 years. I started in the OAC in 2003 and now, in 2021, I’m teaching for the newly launched ARU. At ARI, I have the opportunity to work with colleagues and students who share my passion for Objectivism.

Agustina Vergara Cid Junior Fellow

For me, there’s literally no better place to work than ARI. It’s the only place where I can defend my values to their fullest extent and do my part to advance Rand’s ideas. And getting to work with some of the best minds in the world is priceless.

Sam Weaver Junior Fellow

I’ve always been passionate about the goal of changing the culture, and for a while, I wanted to pursue that through education.

In the last year, ARI offered me an opportunity to study the field of education.

To study educational philosophy, while spreading Objectivism, and continue my intellectual development that started in the OAC–it was way too good to pass up.

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JOIN US FOR

Inspiration and

ARI Member Roundtables Spotlight the Life-Changing Power of Objectivism Every month ARI Members from around the country (and around the world) attend our exclusive online Roundtables. These events feature inspiring guest speakers, Q&As, and hosted breakout rooms for socializing. Roundtables are an opportunity to meet and talk with the guest speakers—intellectuals, scientists and business leaders—and a vibrant community of like-minded individuals.

Some of our Roundtables offer artistic experiences you won’t see anywhere else—for example, last March, director Ann Ciccolella and a cast from Austin Shakespeare performed an evocative reading of scenes from Atlas Shrugged.

Would you like to participate? A complimentary benefit for current ARI Members, the Roundtables are one of the ways we express our gratitude for your support. Visit ari.aynrand.org/events to learn more and help us build a thriving Objectivist community.

And recently, at OCON 2021 in Austin, we had our first in-person Roundtable, which featured the world premiere of “Ayn Rand Q&A”—audio of an informal Q&A that Ayn Rand held in her apartment in 1979.

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Connection Here are some of the speakers we’ve hosted this year: • Psychologists Ellen Kenner and Edwin Locke on the impact of Objectivism on their careers and the subject of their book The Selfish Path to Romance: How to Love with Passion and Reason • John Opfer on his career as a research psychologist and the significant impact Ayn Rand’s philosophy has had on his intellectual development • Michael Berliner, Jeff Britting and Audra Hilse, who each gave us an exclusive, in-depth insider’s look into the Ayn Rand Archives

ARI Members support the Institute’s work through automatic, regular contributions.

The recurring nature of these contributions dramatically improves our ability to plan and budget long-range—which results in a greater impact than we would have if we were to rely on one-time contributions of the same amount.

DONATE TODAY AT

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2021 EDITION //

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John Allison Executive-in-Residence at the Wake Forest University School of Business and retired Chairman and CEO of BB&T. Member of the Cato Institute’s Board of Directors.

Yaron Brook Chairman of the Board of Directors of ARI

Tim Blum Managing Partner, Citadel Property Advisors, Chicago, IL

Harry Binswanger

Jim Brown

Philosophy professor and associate of the late Ayn Rand

Financier, businessman, U.S. Air Force pilot and former CEO of ARI

THE AYN RAND INSTITUTE

Board of Directors 47

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Onkar Ghate Chief Philosophy Officer and Senior Fellow at ARI. He is the Institute’s resident expert on Objectivism.

Larry Salzman Litigation Director, Pacific Legal Foundation

Robert Mayhew Professor of philosophy at Seton Hall University

Tal Tsfany President and CEO of ARI

Tara Smith Professor of philosophy at University of Texas at Austin

2021 EDITION //

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STATEMENT OF

Activities YEAR-END SEPTEMBER 30, 2021 (in thousands)

As part of our effort to develop new intellectuals at scale, ARI provides a wide range of support to promising students enrolled in our training programs.

Pictured from left to right are Austin Dolphin, Larry Harper, and Anne-Marcelle Kouamé, three OAC students who received scholarships to attend OCON 2021.

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Contributions

99%

Program Revenues

1%

REVENUES 99% $16,917 – Contributions 1% 0%

$166 – Program Revenues $5 – Investment Returns and Other Revenues

$17,088

– Total

REVENUES

Revenue

EXPENSES 51%

$4,114 – Education Programs

25%

$2,071 – Outreach

4%

$301 – Other

Total Program Services

Management and General

80%

8% Fundraising

80%

$6,486 – Total Program Services

12%

$972 – Fundraising

8%

$664 – Management and General

$8,122

– Total

$8,966

– Change

12%

EXPENSES

Expenses in Net Assets

The financial statement reflected represents preliminary figures only.

2021 EDITION //

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© 2021 The Ayn Rand Institute. All rights reserved. Objectivist Conferences (OCON) and the Ayn Rand Institute eStore are owned and operated by the Ayn Rand Institute. Payments to Objectivist Conferences or to the Ayn Rand Institute eStore do not qualify as tax-deductible contributions to the Ayn Rand Institute. Ayn Rand ® is a registered trademark and is used by permission.