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RADICALS FOR CAPITALISM 201
assigned coursework. No one who quailed at a novel in the thousandpage
range would get very far into the Objectivist world.
Once engaged with Rand, students often attempted to bring her into
the classroom, with uniformly disastrous results. A Brown University student
described how his grades plummeted after he began relying heavily
on Rand for his schoolwork. First came the term paper on Franklin
Roosevelt, analyzing him as a “social metaphysician” under the authority
of Nathaniel Branden. Then followed his turn toward Romanticism after
reading Rand’s essay “The Goal of My Writing.” The student recounted:
“It just hadn’t occurred to me, until then, that I had been writing rather
realistic, naturalistic stuff. Ayn Rand made that sound like part of the
international Communist conspiracy. Treason to Tarzan. I was just
bowled over.” Formerly the star of his creative writing class, the student
now began to churn out derivative, Rand-style Romantic stories on the
level of “C grade movies.” His instructor despaired at seeing his prize
pupil’s creativity and talent disappear overnight, but the student remembered:
“It never occurred to me that what was happening to me was anything
but Howard Roark banished by the Dean.” 30 Feeling marginalized
or discriminated against was no burden to Objectivists; indeed it indicated
that they were acting as honorable, independent individualists.
Students pressed onward in their quest to share Rand’s ideas, often
becoming the bane of their college instructors in the process. One student
at Montclair State in New Jersey described his battle with a political
science professor: “One day after class I recommended your books
and repeated the Oath of Self Allegiance. He winced.” 31 Rand bedeviled
college professors of all stripes. Some took preemptive action: The
Objectivist Newsletter reported on a philosophy professor who automatically
failed any student who wrote a paper on Objectivism. Arriving at
Wellesley College, Nora Ephron was whisked to an orientation seminar
where the evils of Rand’s philosophy were stressed. “How pleased I was
to read your excellent book review!” a professor of French at Columbia
University told Sidney Hook, recounting a recent run-in with a student
who had “exuberant enthusiasm about Ayn Rand’s ‘philosophy.’ ”
Exhausted and exasperated by the effort “to make this student realize
that logical analysis ought to be applied when judging Ayn Rand’s statements
properly,” the professor was grateful to Hook for offering a defi nitive
rebuttal of her ideas in the nation’s most respected newspaper. 32
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