Ayn Rand Sells Magazines

This article about donors who want to give colleges money with strings attached, published in Bloomberg Markets and splashed across a full page of the Sunday Washington Post, leads with the story of former BB&T chairman John Allison’s campaign to get the books and ideas of Ayn Rand into college classrooms and is lavishly decorated with big photographs of Rand.


Most of the story is actually about much less titillating demands — donors who variously want a say in hiring the next football coach, a change in the school’s tuition policy, a rejection of money from other donors. But apparently editors know that Ayn Rand’s name can bring in the readers. So they act in their rational self‐​interest and put her name on the cover and her picture at the top of the page.


At least the Post had the good sense to drop the dumb last line of the Bloomberg story: “As private donors gain more power on campuses, it’s just the kind of shift away from state control that Rand would applaud.” Actually, giving private money to state institutions is not the sort of privatization that libertarians seek. (And Ayn Rand was a libertarian, whether she liked to admit it or not.)