Los Angeles, Sept. 2 -- The Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) is continuing its campaign to abolish volunteerism by offering students a unique way to fulfill school service requirements.

ARI's Anti-Servitude Internships are designed for students who object to the forced sacrifice of their time, interests and values. These students can fulfill their volunteerism graduation requirements by fighting against volunteerism.

High school students can apply to ARI to work on projects that reject the self-sacrifice premise underlying service programs and instead promote reason, rational self-interest and the freedom to pursue one's own happiness.

"Volunteerism is a smokescreen for servitude," said Michael Berliner, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute. "Together with the Founding Fathers, we favor an individual's right to his own life and to the pursuit of his own happiness. We reject the view that an individual has a duty to serve others or that service is what makes one amoral person. That's the morality of fascism not of America."

Students accepted into the ARI Anti-Servitude program will have a choice of several internships. These options include: supporting the general work of the Institute through archival research, documenting the impact of volunteerism on the lives and school work of students, writing letters and editorials, or developing a long-range series of personal goals and the steps needed to fulfill them. ARI's first Anti-Servitude intern, Naomi Kenner of Greenwich, R.I., contacted the Institute last spring because of her interest in its moral opposition to all forms of volunteerism, including school requirements.

"School volunteerism requirements are immoral and should be opposed at all times, in any way possible," explained Kenner. "It's wrong to use guilt or force to get students to serve others."

Students are a particular target of the volunteerism effort and are being drafted into service by more and more schools. These draftees are being taught that their lives and future are the state's property.

Since the Presidents' summit on volunteerism in April 1997, the Ayn Rand Institute has been the only voice of moral opposition to volunteerism. The Anti-Servitude Internship Program has been organized to fight the immorality of the premise that the individual should sacrifice his time and life to others. Volunteerism is designed to turn Americans into guilt-ridden indentured servants'a program and morality more appropriate to a dictatorship than to a nation founded on independence and freedom.
 
 
The Ayn Rand Institute, an educational organization established in 1985, seeks to advance novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism and its principal tenets: reason, rational egoism, and laissez-faire capitalism.