One Million Dollar Gift to ARI!
July 25, 2005

IRVINE, CA--At the opening banquet of the annual Objectivist Conference (OCON), Dr. Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI), announced receipt of a gift to ARI of one million dollars from a donor who prefers to remain anonymous.

"This gift is for ARI's high school book project, which we began a couple years ago to provide free copies of The Fountainhead and Anthem to high school teachers that wanted to assign the books in their classes but could not afford it," said Dr. Brook. "The book project, which has distributed more than 165,000 books to schools all over the country, has allowed our donors to contribute free books to their own neighborhood schools--or to schools in their city, county or state. Now, with this wonderful new gift, we will be able to double the number of books distributed and make it possible for hundreds of thousands of additional high school students to discover and learn from the fascinating characters and ideas in The Fountainhead and Anthem.

"The increased availability of these books will undoubtedly give a tremendous boost to the number of entrants in our annual student essay contests, already among the largest in the world," said Dr. Brook. Each year ARI awards more than $70,000 in prizes and receives more than 16,000 essays for the contests it conducts. The top prize is a check for $10,000 for the winning essay on The Fountainhead (grades 11 and 12). The Anthem contest (grades 9 and 10) has a top prize of $2,000. Both contests include scores of additional monetary prizes.

Many high school teachers report that reading and studying Ayn Rand's challenging but captivating novels have dramatically improved their students' reading, writing and critical-thinking skills. "And that," said Dr. Brook, "is all the 'payback' our million-dollar donor desires."

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Dr. Yaron Brook is available for interviews. To interview Dr. Brook or book him for your show, please e-mail media@aynrandcenter.org

For more articles by Yaron Brook, and his bio, click here.