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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsBB&T spent millions 'persuading' universities to teach Ayn Rand...
Fears of corporate influence on higher education are nothing new. But are colleges and universities, which receive smaller and smaller shares of their budgets from public funding, and which have struggled to bounce back from the 2008 recession, more likely to accept gifts with ideological strings attached than they would have been previously?
Thats the idea behind a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Academic Ethics, called, "BB&T, Atlas Shrugged and the Ethics of Corporation Influence on College Curricula." It says it is the first study to track a particular set of donations by the financial services holding company BB&T to colleges and universities stipulating that they teach the works of free-market capitalist Ayn Rand and address the Moral Foundations of Capitalism.
The paper says these agreements, which have largely ceased, happen under a veil of secrecy, often without the knowledge of faculty members, and that BB&Ts foundation is set on correcting what it sees as an overly liberal curriculum.
This has been reported on ad hoc, mostly by individual universities and their campus newspapers, said Douglas Beets, the articles author and a professor of business at Wake Forest University, which has its own BB&T-funded program. But otherwise you cant find information on [BB&Ts] website, and thats one of the major problems -- this is not transparent. And Beets says that, given current discussions over allegations of corporate influence over university research agendas, the Ayn Rand grants need more attention.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/10/16/new-paper-details-extent-bbt-banks-ayn-rand-inspired-grant-program
hunter
(38,263 posts)Blue_Tires
(55,445 posts)Still has the same sting it did when it first came out...
hifiguy
(33,688 posts)what a guy with a broken kazoo is to the Vienna Philharmonic playing Beethoven's Ninth.
gwheezie
(3,580 posts)Brat won against Eric Cantor and was funded at Randolph Macon U by bb&t running their program. He got 500k from them to push the rand agenda on students. And the right claims the left runs high ed.
Bb&t can now get their people blatantly elected to Congress with not even pretense they aren't doing it.