The OAC serves as a launching pad for students who intend to make careers as professional intellectuals. Since the Ayn Rand Institute began its academic programs in 1987, more and more of our alumni have embarked on intellectual careers—both inside and outside academia:

• Professors and university instructors who have studied at ARI are today teaching at major universities and colleges in California, Alabama, Texas, Ohio, Vermont, New Jersey, Illinois, North and South Carolina, Michigan, Pennsylvania—and that list is growing. A number of these scholars have authored or are now working on books applying Objectivism to their areas of expertise. [Read an interview with Dr. Robert Mayhew.]

• Thanks to the support of The Anthem Foundation for Objectivist Scholarship, there are now fellowships for the study of Ayn Rand’s ideas at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Pittsburgh. The foundation is a nonprofit organization that sponsors teaching, writing and research on Ayn Rand’s philosophy through fellowships at universities and colleges at both the graduate and undergraduate level. Several of our alumni have been beneficiaries of these fellowships. (Anthem is independent of the Ayn Rand Institute.)

• Several of our former students are full-time writers, working on books and articles addressed to the nonacademic reader. One is editor and publisher of a magazine that seeks to analyze the culture from an Objectivist perspective; another is working on a book on the intellectual decline of modern physics. Still other ARI alumni have written editorial articles that have been published in newspapers such as The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, New York Sun, Houston Chronicle, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Washington Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle.

• The Ayn Rand Institute itself is one source of career opportunities for New Intellectuals. ARI’s senior resident fellow, Dr. Onkar Ghate, who works as a writer and OAC Dean, was a student of our training programs for advanced students—as are the fellows who are on our staff. The Institute’s executive director, Dr. Yaron Brook, is also an alumnus.

• Our programs have also helped other professionals, such as doctors, lawyers and businessmen, by teaching them objective methods of thinking and writing and giving them the philosophical skills necessary to help them understand and defend what is good in their chosen fields.

• Several of our alumni have made careers of teaching in elementary, junior high and high schools.