Ayn Rand comes to U.N.C. - The New Yorker

BY JEDEDIAH PURDY




Republican politics in North Carolina are characterized by a tight interweaving of elected officials with think tanks and advocacy groups. At the center of this network is Art Pope, who funds the Pope Center for Higher Education as well as several other conservative think tanks. Pope, a discount-store magnate, with his family reportedly gave almost a quarter of a million dollars in support of North Carolina Republican candidates in the 2010 election; advocacy groups with close ties to Pope gave more than two million dollars to those candidates. (Jane Mayer wrote about Pope’s political activism for the magazine in 2011.) After Pope’s family donated a reported two hundred and nineteen thousand dollars to Republican candidates and political groups in 2012, and his companies gave a reported four hundred and fifty thousand dollars, contributing to the party’s takeover of the governorship and the state legislature, Pope served as co-chair of Governor McCrory’s transition team and then as his budget director. Pope, who has served as a board member of Americans for Prosperity, is also a link between North Carolina’s Republican Party and leading national conservatives.

The Pope Center defines its mission as to “increase the diversity of ideas” on campus and “encourage respect for the institutions that underlie economic prosperity,” including “private property,” “competition,” and “limits on government.” It also deplores, as McCrory did in his speech at Chapel Hill, that “universities allow teaching to become shallow and trendy, failing to challenge students intellectually and disparaging traditional principles of justice, ethics, and liberal education.” Much of the center’s work is producing strategic documents setting out a conservative model of higher education.

The most interesting Pope Center materials sketch a two-pronged attack on public higher education as currently practiced. On the one hand, Pope Center researchers say that higher education should be regarded as an economic good like any other, and that low tuition rates “subsidize” it and distort the market. Based on this theory, the Pope Center argues for raising tuition in the U.N.C. system and shifting public funding to tuition grants for students attending private colleges, eroding the distinction between public and private institutions. Of course, increasing the financial burden on students in the U.N.C. system would likely cause them to cluster in safe pre-professional majors. This would be just fine, according to higher education’s market reformers, because those are the programs that provide returns on investment.

The other reformist front is a call to revive the Great Books model of humanities education: literature and philosophy as a source of eternal truths, dating back to Plato, passing through John Locke, and perfected by Ayn Rand and the libertarian economist Friedrich Hayek. A Pope Center research paper published this year describes a “renewal in the university” through privately funded programs dedicated to teaching the great books untainted by relativism. The report devotes a great deal of attention to programs dedicated to “the morality of capitalism,” which have been founded at sixty-two public and private colleges and universities. Many of these programs, which are often housed within business schools or economics or political science departments, were funded over the past fifteen years by North Carolina-based BB&T Bank, under its former president John Allison, who is now the C.E.O. of the Cato Institute. In a 2012 statement, Allison explained that he funded the programs to “retake the universities” from “statist/collectivist ideas.” He also noted that training students in the morality of capitalism is “clearly in our shareholders’ long-term best interest.”

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/new-politics-at-the-university-of-north-carolina?intcid=mod-latest


"The morality of capitalism". Jesus. I'd like to ship Art Pope off to a charter city in Honduras.