Contact: Larry Benson
Media Relations Manager
Phone: 310-306-9232 (ext. 213)
Fax: 310-306-4925

The Ayn Rand Institute
Suite 406
4640 Admiralty Way
Marina del Rey, CA 90292

On April 26, the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) launched the nationwide Campaign against Servitude to battle President Clinton's call for "the ethic of service. . . . The sense of duty. . . all of us owe to one another."

Student protesters from 13 states confronted the advocates of service who had gathered in Philadelphia for the Clinton-Powell summit on volunteerism.

At 160 campuses throughout the country, high school and college students papered their campuses with 20,000 anti-servitude posters.

Professors and professionals manned microphones and explained on op-ed pages their opposition to what General Powell praised as "voluntarily sharing the wealth."

By the end of three days, from coast to coast, newspapers, radio and TV stations had printed or broadcast more than 90 times the Campaign against Servitude's moral stand.

"Volunteerism is immoral. The Founding Fathers wrote a declaration of independence, not a declaration of servitude," says Dr. Michael Berliner, ARI's executive director. "The proposals for national service are an inversion of the principles on which this country was established: an individual's right to his own life, liberty and pursuit of happiness."

ARI's Campaign against Servitude will continue during the upcoming months, culminating in a special July 4 event at which its "Petition against Servitude" will be presented to the White House. Any American citizen wishing to be a petitioner can do so on ARI's website at: http://www.aynrand.org/no_servitude.

The Ayn Rand Institute, an educational organization established in 1985, seeks to advance novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism and its principle tenets: reason, rational egoism and laissez-faire capitalism.

For further information, contact Scott McConnell, Director of Communications, at ARI, phone: (310) 306-9232, fax (310) 306-4925