The Ayn Rand Institute (ARI), a 501(c)(3) educational organization, was established in 1985 and is headquartered in Irvine, California.
          Ayn Rand (1905–1982) was an ardent advocate of reason and rationality; individualism and individual liberties; and free-market capitalism.
          ARI seeks to promote these principles, spearheading a “cultural renaissance” to reverse the anti-reason, anti-freedom, anti-capitalist trends in today’s culture. The major battleground in the fight for reason and capitalism is the educational institutions—high schools, and above all, the universities, where students learn the ideas that shape their lives.
          Ayn Rand’s philosophy—known as Objectivism—holds that historical trends are the inescapable product of philosophy. To reverse the current political and economic trends in America and throughout the world requires a reversal of men’s fundamental philosophy.
          The cultural renaissance we strive to inculcate will ultimately spell defeat for the widely held, pernicious ideologies which dominate our contemporary culture and threaten our liberty—ideologies such as statism, multiculturalism, environmentalism, racism and mysticism.
 
 

Ayn Rand’s visibility—and interest in her philosophy—have increased dramatically in recent years.

• More than 400,000 copies of Ayn Rand’s books were sold last year alone—more than two decades after Rand’s death. Total sales of Rand’s fiction and nonfiction now exceed 20 million copies.
  
  
• A 1991 Library of Congress and Book of the Month Club joint survey revealed that Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged was the second most influential book among readers polled, surpassed in popularity only by the Bible.
  
  
• The documentary film biography of Rand, Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life, was nominated for an Academy Award in 1998.
  
  
• The U.S. Postal Service issued a special commemorative stamp in 1999 to honor Ayn Rand as part of its American Literary Arts series.
  
  
• Media mentions of Rand’s life and work have increased to levels not seen since her death in 1982; the phenomenon prompted a 1995 Newsweek magazine article that declared of Ayn Rand: “she’s everywhere.”

 

Our strategy for launching this cultural renaissance has four key elements:

Training “New Intellectuals”
This year graduate and undergraduate students from nearly four dozen colleges and universities across North America will be enrolled in the Objectivist Academic Center (OAC).
          Seven instructors direct eight OAC courses, ranging from introductory lectures in logic, the history of philosophy, and Objectivism to advanced graduate seminars in specialized topics in philosophy, teaching and writing.
          Graduates of the OAC are currently teaching at such institutions as Stanford University, the Claremont Colleges (CA), Seton Hall University (NJ), the University of Texas at Austin and Duke University.
          ARI also awards grants to promising young scholars to support dissertations, fellowships and scholarly books and articles in such fields as philosophy, physics and economics.
          Finally, through the Anthem Foundation for Objectivist Scholarship (AFOS), endowed fellowships are being established to support professors and graduate students by funding writing projects, courses and visiting scholars. The first AFOS program was established in 2001 at the University of Texas at Austin.

College Programs
On more than 100 campuses nationwide, ARI-assisted student organizations (known as campus Objectivist clubs) serve as a much-needed antidote to multiculturalism, environmentalism, statism and other manifestations of irrationality that grip higher education today.
          Through programs coordinated by ARI’s speakers bureau, campus clubs sponsor talks on the vital issues of the day—from free markets to post-modernist philosophy, from multiculturalism to environmentalism—viewed from Objectivism’s unique perspective. More than 40,000 students have attended live campus lectures, and another 30,000 have viewed videotapes of these lectures.
          Finally, ARI sponsors an essay contest based on Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, offering $10,000 in prizes annually to college students.

High School Essay Contests
Each year ARI awards more than $60,000 in prizes to 500 students who distinguish themselves in its high school essay contests on Rand’s novels Anthem and The Fountainhead. Since 1986 nearly 100,000 students have entered these contests, and ARI has awarded more than $425,000 in prizes. Lesson plans are also made available to teachers to encourage them to introduce Ayn Rand’s books into the classroom.

Media
ARI devotes considerable resources to introducing our ideas to a broad national audience. The ARI print-media campaign includes a series of hard-hitting editorials challenging such “sacred cows” as environmentalism, multiculturalism and animal “rights.” ARI also provides a strong defense of reason, individual rights and freedom—values espoused by America’s Founding Fathers. Over the past two years more than 100 of these editorials have been published in newspapers around the world—papers with a total circulation of more than 55 million readers.
          ARI spokesmen appear on more than 300 radio talk shows each year, and have made television appearances on Fox News Network’s The O’Reilly Factor, Hannity and Colmes, Your World with Neil Cavuto; CNN’s TalkBack Live; PBS’s Tony Brown’s Journal, and MSNBC’s Alan Keyes Is Making Sense.

Professional Outreach
Professional outreach brings Ayn Rand’s ideas to the attention of entrepreneurs, executives, professionals and managers—providing encouragement for, and a moral defense of, their work. ARI has produced an integrated set of multimedia materials to assist business executives in their moral defense. The ARI speaker’s bureau also provides guest speakers for business, professional and political audiences.

Archives
ARI maintains the Ayn Rand Archives, the collection of Ayn Rand’s papers, photographs, and memorabilia. The Archives is supplemented by an oral history program and research in Russia.