Word: rand
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...BACK corner of the basement of the Science Center Library, Rand Corporation reports fill 130 feet of shelf space. At one end of the shelves are technical reports from the early '50s, when the new corporation was essentially a research and development arm of the Air Force. At the other end are sociological studies done for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in the spring of this year. Between 1950 and now, Rand researchers seem to have studied subjects as diverse as any in the world, as well as a few beyond this world at NASA's request...
...remaining hundreds of thousands of pages on the shelves. Neither does the prospect of learning the arcane contents of "An Annotated Bibliography of Dynamic Cloud Modeling" set the pulse racing. Yet there are many striking and subtly disconcerting papers tacked away in the stacks. For example, how did Rand researchers get the extensive bibliographical data they included in a profile done in the late '60s of an elite six-man Vietcong guerilla unit fighting in the Mekong Delta? The report doesn't say, but it does outline each man's background, psyche and personal beliefs. The extent of the researchers...
Harvard libertarians also split with Ergo over its frequent sallies beyond the realm of politics. "Randians are too moralistic. They believe in absolute standards--Rand's absolute standards--and sometimes they get a little too strident," Donal Rucker '78, a member of the Sons of Liberty, says. In the thousands of pages Rand has written, she carries her philosophy of "rational self-interest, egoism,. individualism, and capitalism" beyond its obvious application to social structure, into fields like art and personal conduct. Ergo holds that only romantic art is good art, for example. A recent display of neon sculpture by Boston...
...interpretation of the correct libertarian line is so rigid that to other libertarians break with the paper. Lawrence White '77, president of Sons of Liberty, Harvard's libertarian group, calls the paper "too right wing." He explains that Ergo founds its philosophy on the thought of novelist Ayn Rand. As a youth, Rand saw the Bolsheviks take over Russia. Before she emigrated to the United States, the Bolsheviks killed both her parents, leaving her with a virulent anti-Communist streak...
...active member of Sons of Liberty who wished to remain anonymous said Ergo is "too dogmatic. They adhere religiously to Rand's senile ideas." He and White agreed that Ergo represents a fraction of the libertarian spectrum, even though the spectrum claims only 40 to 50 members at Harvard and MIT combined. Perhaps for this reason there has been little interaction and co-operation between libertarians at the two campuses. Several Harvard libertarians contacted said they had never heard of Ergo...