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Thursday, June 12th, 2014

Dave Brat Runs A $500,000 Program To Push Ayn Rand’s Ideas At College

Author:     ERIC LACH
Source:     Talking Points Memo
Publication Date:     June 11, 2014, 12:31 PM EDT
 Link: Dave Brat Runs A $500,000 Program To Push Ayn Rand’s Ideas At College
Stephan:   Having listened to pundits from every political group all day, my sense is that most of the beltway commentators have it wrong. I think Eric Cantor lost because he was an unpleasant man who projected a persona of arrogant superiority, traveled around in his district like a nabob, and that did not sit well with a deeply conservative district in which many people were having a hard time and felt no one was listening to them. So they threw him out. That said it seemed to me the real question ought to be who is Dave Brat and what does he believe? It appears he is an example of a Rightist academic funded and working for the Corporatist Theocratic Right. We are beginning to see these kinds of academics sprouting up all over the country as the uber-rich realize that one way to protect themselves is to fund university programs that teach youth to value priorities that advance the funder's interest.

Dave Brat, who stunned Washington, D.C. by upsetting House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) in a primary Tuesday, is a college professor. At Randolph-Macon College, a small Virginia liberal arts school, Brat chairs the economics and business department.

But he does more than that.

Brat is also the director of the school’s BB&T Moral Foundations of Capitalism Program, a bank-branded program intended to give “free-market principles” — and Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism in particular — a leg up in the classroom.

The program was started by the Branch Banking and Trust Company (BB&T), a North Carolina-based financial services company which currently boasts $184.7 billion in assets. The ideas behind the program were laid out in 2012 in an essay written by former BB&T CEO John Allison.

“About twelve years ago we re-examined our charitable giving and realized that our contributions to universities were not typically being used in our shareholders’ best interest,” Allison wrote in the essay, which was published online by The John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. “At the same time, we were studying the question of why the United States had moved from the land of ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ to the ‘redistributive state.’ We […]

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