What happens when someone who never went to college decides to open a college himself (and even run the admissions board)? A debacle, that’s what happens according to this article at The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Cautionary Tale of a Short-Lived College.
Founders College, in rural South Boston, Va., was pitched as a sort of Great Books college for devotees of Ayn Rand. And while the for-profit college was never accredited, it operated with authorization from Virginia to issue degrees.[…]
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.
Somewhere in this article, there is a movie as entertaining as The Social Network (but with more schadenfreude and Ayn Rand inspired smugness) waiting to be written.
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