Alert commentor Felanius Kootea brought our attention to The Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Cautionary Tale of a Short-Lived College”. I had not previously heard of Founders College, but then, it seems very few people ever did:
… Founders certainly started with high aspirations. It was the inspiration of Gary L. Hull, a longtime visiting professor of sociology at Duke University and director of its Program on Values and Ethics in the Marketplace. Mr. Hull has long been a high-profile proponent of objectivism, the philosophy of Rand. And he had wanted to shake up the college market for years. Where most colleges saw degrees, he saw a hodgepodge of classes and incoherent goals. He hoped to create an objectivist college where all students would have the same academic foundation and be taught to think rationally.
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However, not all of the students who would end up at Founders knew that. English Tong, who was home-schooled, found out about the college through a friend who had heard Mr. Hull promote Founders as ideal for home-schoolers. “Not until I arrived did I realize it was an objectivist school, so I was thrown into that without really agreeing with it,” Ms. Tong says. “It was kind of weird. They had advertised the college to everyone differently.”
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Jade Fogg was sold on the college because she was told it would have an equestrian center. Josh Walsh was intrigued by its business focus and the opportunity to learn hospitality management firsthand at the inn on the property. Several students came because of Mr. Hull. Upon arriving, they were disappointed to learn that he had abruptly pulled out of Founders’ day-to-day operation.
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And none of the students expected to find so few peers. There were supposed to be around 100 students, but the college came up 90 short. Those were the first of many surprises….
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None of the students at Founders, with the exception of Ms. Tong, were paying anywhere close to full tuition or room and board. Some were on full scholarships, they say, and others simply weren’t paying, or paying very little, until they heard more about their eligibility for federal aid. Still, in the beginning, the students were living in resort-style rooms and eating gourmet meals.
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“Friday nights were jazz nights, and we were able to sit with the public and order filet mignon and scallops,” says Ms. Tong.
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The college also had an enviable faculty-student ratio: six professors and, at the high mark, 10 students. Four of the faculty members had Ph.D.’s, and most had extensive teaching experience, according to college records. None wanted to be interviewed for this article—but their former students universally said that their teaching was a highlight. “The professors were fantastic,” says Ms. Fogg. “I don’t think I realized that until I left.”
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The faculty, however, was paid inconsistently, according to students and local news reports. And the college’s bills were mounting. The inn on the property had not been profitable for years, and it remained in the red after Founders purchased it, say former employees and students.
Citizen Alan
So what you’re saying is that objectivism fails utterly when it involves real human beings rather than ludicrously contrived cartoon characters.
Well, duh.
arguingwithsignposts
@Citizen Alan:
Silly Citizen Alan, objectivism can’t fail, it can only be failed.
jl
“Where most colleges saw degrees, he saw a hodgepodge of classes and incoherent goals.”
With a curriculum that featured equestrian studies, hospitality management, hot air ballooning, jazz nights, and marathon economics courses, I see that problem was solved with the cold blooded rationality and strict geometric reasoning for which Objectivism is famous.
I searched the article text for ‘bankrupt’ but didn’t find anything.
Is this story a spoof? It’s in the Chronicle of Higher Education, but maybe November 23 is their April Fool’s day.
asiangrrlMN
Oh my god. I had only skimmed the article in the other thread. The poor students. I was going to make some snarky comment, but I ended up feeling really bad for them.
But, an unaccredited college? Not a good idea. And the state? What the hell were they thinking? A mess all around.
@SiubhanDuinne: Ha! Nicely played.
SiubhanDuinne
This was my favourite bit:
This whole story just makes me laugh and laugh.
ETA: And yes, of course, asiangrrlMN, I do feel a bit sorry for the students. I hope they were all able to transfer to the MBA program at the University of Central Florida.
Nutella
You’d think those bold Galtians wouldn’t have bothered with accreditation by the state.
But they needed accreditation in order to get federal loans for the students and of course bold Galtians didn’t want to miss out on any government subsidies they can get their hands on.
Ash Can
The triumph of Objectivism.
Nutella
@SiubhanDuinne:
Yes, that was the best bit.
slag
@asiangrrlMN:
One thing home-schooling doesn’t do is teach someone how to navigate an academic system. Hard lesson for this kid, I guess.
SiubhanDuinne
Oh, and since this is an Open Thread, I wanted to mention that Prince William and his Kate announced that they are getting married on April 29.
[clears throat] Do you know who ELSE got married on April 29?
Thass right.
MikeJ
@asiangrrlMN: Don;t call it unaccredited. Try about “self-accredited”, like Rand Paul’s eye-doctorin’.
mslarry
Atlas flunked
slag
@SiubhanDuinne: You’re kidding. No. Wait. You’re not kidding.
That’s just weird.
asiangrrlMN
FYWP!
@slag: Yes. This may be true. At least in her case. And, I do feel sorry for the kids.
@jl: Here’s a summing up of what happened. Sounds like stupidity, ideology, and incompetence all rolled up into one.
asiangrrlMN
FYWP II!
@MikeJ: This is true. It has accredited itself. What else matters?
Evolved Deep Southerner
Not saying that it doesn’t sound like this college was a cruel joke of a thing – it certainly does – but not all innovative, short-lived institutions are jokes.
Black Mountain College.
Now there was a great idea whose lifespan was far too short. Or maybe it was just right. I don’t know.
But Founders College? Sounded like it lasted about as long as it deserved to. But like asiangrrl, I do feel bad for those students.
SiubhanDuinne
@mslarry: Wins the thread. Maybe the day.
bemused
If wishes were horses is not a substitute for a business plan.
Andre
Are you suggesting that a proponent of Randian Objectivism might not succeed as an entrepreneur and pedagogue in the real world?
I refuse to believe it.
Roger Moore
My favorite bit:
Who cares whether the state would register a place like that. Objectivists don’t need a nanny state telling them which universities are worth attending and which ones are a scam. That’s for the market to work out.
The Bobs
He hoped to create an objectivist college where all students would have the same academic foundation and be taught to think
rationallyjust like him.fixed
Dennis SGMM
I don’t understand it. All Hull had to do was visit all of those other highly successful Objectivist colleges and adopt their model.
Martin
Amazing how hard it is to get a system running when rational self-interest is the only rule.
Next experiment: a dating service for sociopaths. The first 20 signups get a bottle of GHB as a door prize.
delosgatos
Well, give ’em credit – all they were missing was the Magic Free Energy Machine.
lamh32
I’m enough of a science geek/mythbusters fanatic that this made me squee a little!
MythBusters – President’s Challenge | December 8, 2010
Evolved Deep Southerner
Link fail. I did it better when I was +something the other night.
Let’s try this again.
Black Mountain College
John - A Motley Moose
No wonder our economy is in the crapper.
“It was the inspiration of Gary L. Hull, a longtime visiting professor of sociology at Duke University and director of its Program on Values and Ethics in the Marketplace. ”
Could someone explain to me the values and ethics in objectivism, besides “I’ve got mine. Screw you.”?
Martin
@lamh32: My son has watched every Mythbusters. It’s literally the show he’s grown up with. He’s excited beyond measure.
Andre
@Dennis SGMM:
Win.
jl
I was also relieved that the students could transfer most of their credits. The story is funny, except that if the students had totally wasted a year and lost all the money they paid to the school, that would be a disaster for them, especially in these unforgiving times (unforgiving if you are one the ‘lesser people’).
Sounds like the students did get some good instruction in some courses, and can salvage some of their work.
Now, what will the instructors put on their resumes (Edit, sorry, I mean CV’s, i should use the pompous terminology)? I hope no one was a full timer, or they will have a funny gap to explain. Academics can be very stuffy about that sort of thing, with no sense of humor at all, especially if you are a ‘lesser’ academic, or young one.
Martin
@John – A Motley Moose: Nope, that’s it. If only everyone said ‘I’ve got mine, screw you’ then everyone would be fully employed, educated, with inexpensive, high quality healthcare and a pony.
The underpants gnomes have nothing on objectivists.
jwb
@Roger Moore: “That’s for the market to work out.” The market judged and Atlas shrugged. “I’ve been failed again.”
Andre
@John – A Motley Moose:
It’s “values and ethics” for people who don’t think Gordon Gecko was meant to be a parody.
Evolved Deep Southerner
@SiubhanDuinne: Hey, only so many days in the year. And no football on that day. At least no real football. Damn if I know if that other kind of football is on that time of year or not.
Comrade Dread
@John – A Motley Moose: Sure:
1. Selfishness is a virtue. Charity holds men back and makes them weak.
2. Religion is for the weak. Especially those that teach selflessness and giving.
3. The businessman fighting to get more for himself is inherently virtuous. Employees are lazy parasites feeding off of his genius.
4. Government is an oppressive tool whereby the parasites try and suck more blood from the geniuses.
5. If you’re a real man, she really does want it even if she says she doesn’t.
SiubhanDuinne
@Evolved Deep Southerner:
Oh, I know. Most dates have something awful associated with them if you go back far enough. In the case of my own wedding date, it was the anniversary of the day a patent was granted to the man who invented the accordion.
//shudder//
Dennis SGMM
Making certain that no unemployed layabout, no parasite single mom, no hungry child gets the money that you deserve for your Objectivist genius constitutes “values.”
Objectivist “ethics”, on the other hand, consists of waiting until your grandmother is pronounced dead before you chisel out her gold teeth.
Jager
“Where most colleges saw degrees, he saw a hodgepodge of classes and incoherent goals.”
That’s exactely the program I was on my first 3 semesters!
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
Who hates Obama more, the Firebaggers or the Teabaggers?
I was looking up an article on larry summers, and google listed a diary on point at GOS. The diary and comments were fine, but then out of nowhere about 15 people hijacked the comments and posted completely off topic/unrelated rants about how much they hated obama. “he’s the worst president in history”, “he’s done nothing”, “McCain would have been better”, “he doesn’t care about america”, and a lot, lot worse.
I mean really, the diary was about summers, obama wasn’t even mentioned. I can only imagine how crazy it gets when the diary is specifically about obama.
You don’t have to like obama, far from it, but where does the Pavlovian venom come from?
Any ideas.
John - A Motley Moose
@Comrade Dread: I’ll give you props for trying, but can’t give you a passing grade.
John - A Motley Moose
@John – A Motley Moose: FYWP
Roger Moore
@John – A Motley Moose:
Are any more values and ethics necessary?
jl
Objectivist economic analysis is crazy, also. Maybe ‘arational’ is a better term for it. They simply don’t know how to do rational analysis or what it is, but think they are doing it. I think frank irrationalism would be an improvement.
I remember reading a popular objectivist analysis of government regulations on product quality. The only analysis was a few rambling thoughts about how the customer always knows best, which supposedly led, logically, to the conclusion that if the government enforced minimum product quality regulations, that would place a ceiling on quality. The free market would be prevented from providing something better. That earns a Brad DeLong “Department of Huh?” award.
Also read one on the evils of public health, It was long diatribe asserting that any public health measure was totalitarian nanny state interference with individuals who always knew what was best for them, and no collective decision making could ever improve on decentralized free market decisions in every single aspect of life. If there was any trace of a rational argument in that article, I missed it.
Objectivism is a parody of itself, and I find it hard to believe any grown up who had any background in critical thinking could believe for a second.
I think of myself as an optimistic person with a preference of moderation, who tends to think that the Very Serious People cannot really be as frivolous as they seem from their past work. And I have until recently assumed that holding positions of authority and responsibility would reform them.
In other words, I may well be a fool.
For a long time I had persuaded myself that Greenspan really really must have moved beyond the nonsense of objectivist economic thought. But then he gave his astonishing Congressional testimony that he thought all unregulated free markets, any unregulated free market, whether for doorstops, soda pop, gravel, complicated financial products, high tech medical care, paper weights (anything) would magically force business people to behave in society’s long run interest. That put my foolish hopes to rest.
The Fed had been lead for years by a person who in some ways was an expert and experienced technician, but underneath that, was lead by a loony philosophy which was foreign to any rational and careful analysis. Greenspan was an objectivist, flying by magical objectivist economic analysis during his tenure at the Fed.
Davis X. Machina
Stone democratic socia1ist am I, so the whole Objectivism thing has a peculiar emetic quality for me. There is, however, no gainsaying that there’s something attractive in this “Let’s build a college” game, if not in this iteration of it.
As Brad DeLong is fond of saying, the only educational model that can’t be improved upon, that is known to work, is a log with Socrates on one end and a student on the other. So there are lots and lots of other untried, interesting, potential failures out there somewhere…
Create two, three, many Black Mountain Colleges!
If I were mad rich, I think I would be inclined to indulge…
Michael G
I picture the college looking like Rapture in Bioshock.
Jay in Oregon
@lamh32:
It would be awesome if the President’s Challenge was to prove that he was born in Hawaii. :)
Evolved Deep Southerner
I don’t know why I keep hanging on this thread, but I guess teaching at a (very) traditional “institution of higher learning” has me thinking here.
I’m not at all convinced that my university’s (or any other accredited university’s) model is exactly right. I know no model is “exactly right.”
Having said that, I’m not at all convinced that the “traditional model” is the only model upstart (and we need those) models of American higher education should emulate. Not saying I’m smart enough to know what those models should look like exactly – they would likely vary depending on one’s intended discipline/vocation – but I am saying I’m smart enough to recognize that the current “university model” doesn’t work for every student, and I am saying that there are alternative models that have been pretty damn successful in their own ways.
Founders College sure as shit didn’t help the cause for innovation in higher education. But innovation is needed there, for sure, because the current model is rapidly ossifying past the point of redemption. That ossification is, in fact, a contributing factor to the state we’re in currently.
John - A Motley Moose
@Roger Moore: That depends. Are we playing marbles or ordering a functional society?
geg6
@jl:
Understand, though, that the only credits these kids are gonna get credit for anywhere else are the ones they got from the community college. No respectable accredited college or university will accept the Founders’ credits. I know for sure that the university I work for would never accept them.
This story is hilarious and sad, all at once. The state of VA should be ashamed and the poor students have lost at least a semester of work, if not a full year. But the inevitable failure of any Galt worshipper’s attempt to apply their fairy tale “philosophy” and the utter incompetence of Randian supermen never fails to make me laugh with derision before I cry over the lives they ruin in their juvenile and self-centered quest to prove that sociopathic fantasies are superior to real world solutions.
Felanius Kootea (formerly Salt and freshly ground black people)
@lamh32: Ooh. I will definitely be recording that on my DVR.
Just Some Fuckhead
From the article:
That is some funny shit there. Objectivism in hindsight.
Just Some Fuckhead
Ponies!
lamh32
I’ve got a long drive ahead of me tomorrow. Hope everyone has a good holiday break. No recipe to swap, but I’m looking forward to going home to NOLA for Thanksgiving and Bayou Classic (it’s a big deal in LA, look it up) weekend. 5 years in DFW, and I still can’t bring myself to call it home…lol!
Being New Orleans, I’m looking forward to the distinctly New Orleans fare along with traditional foods. I’m all for Turkey, but one thing I’m gonna have to have before I head back to Dallas, is a Shrimp Poboy, dressed; with a bag of Sour Cream & Onion Chee-Wees, and a Big Shot Pineapple soda! Ask any “real” New Orleanian, and they’ll know what I’m talking about!
.
Davis X. Machina
Off to Pittsburgh in the AM. Mohammed (or the CMU student) can’t go to the mountain, so the mountain (or the Coleman full of Thanksgiving dinner) must go to Mohammed.
mslarry
@SiubhanDuinne:
Why thanks… couldn’t believe it when it popped into my brain :)
Jeff R.
I stayed at the inn (it’s called Berry Hill Resort) when I went to a wedding in May of 2008. I had now idea it was a college, too. The faculty had probably all quit by then. The inn’s is very nice, but I can understand why it hasn’t been profitable.
frosty
@Jager: Ha! That describes my BS degree!!!
El Cruzado
@Michael G: It certainly was underwater for the duration and eventually sunk without a trace.
hilzoy
@Evolved Deep Southerner: Innovation is good. But having met Gary Hull, I’m fairly confident that he’s not the person to provide it.
gocart mozart
@efgoldman:
linky no worky
bjacques
@jl:
Alan Greenspan: America’s Lysenko.
@Jeff R:
Is the house band just a clarinet player and do the bellboys chase scantily-clad maids really fast?
I’ll get my coat.
Felanius Kootea (formerly Salt and freshly ground black people)
@Evolved Deep Southerner: I hear you. One of the new approaches to teaching undergraduate engineering that I’ve been watching is Olin College‘s (established in 2002). I know at least one MIT faculty member who went to teach there. It’ll be interesting to see how their graduates fare over the long term.
Jeff R.
@bjacques:
I’m sorry, I’m missing the reference. Nevertheless, the couple are professional musicians and here’s a song they recorded after they bought a house and met all their new neighbors while walking the dog:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiJJwH5uZ5U
Rorgg
You have to admit, though, “Jade Fogg” is a perfect Randian name for the naive but capable heroine.
HyperIon
@Davis X. Machina wrote: If I were mad rich, I think I would be inclined to indulge…
You mean like Domino’s Pizza University?