Why Universities Should Teach Ayn Rand Alongside Karl Marx

FEE's Jon Hersey writes, "Aside from a few writing manuals, the book assigned in more college classes today than any other is Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto. This is a problem.

Studying The Communist Manifesto and the things it led to in practice is monumentally important to understanding the history of the 20th century—not because communism worked, but because it was so destructive. College students ought to learn what ideas animated Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution and led to the deaths of tens of millions under Lenin and Stalin. They ought to learn what ideas precipitated Mao’s 'Great Leap Forward'—and thereby caused the deaths of tens of millions of Chinese people. They ought to hear how these ideas inspired Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge to kill millions of Cambodians. It is urgent that students learn that those acting on Marx’s ideas killed roughly 100 million people during the last century. It is vital they know that those continuing to act on The Communist Manifesto today are still racking up communism’s death count...

This piece is dedicated to the Venezuelan students I recently met, whose schools teach Marxism while their country sinks beneath a tyrant who practices it.https://t.co/kiO76Q0lnp

— Jon Hersey (@jon__hersey) September 3, 2021

If professors want to prepare students for the real world, they should continue teaching The Communist Manifesto. But they should teach it alongside a book that empowers students to see its grievous faults—Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged…

University professors are leading the charge to inculcate more 'diversity' inside and outside the academy. They focus almost exclusively on unchosen characteristics such as gender, sexual orientation, and race...In fact, they are adapting the same old Marxist ideas of class war to instigate race and gender wars.

That’s ironic because, in the context of higher education, the only diversity that matters is that of interests and ideas. And it’s hard to imagine two thinkers more divergent than Karl Marx and Ayn Rand.

So, whether professors want to promote diversity or just better prepare students for life in civil society, they ought to introduce some counterpoint into the curriculum: Teach Atlas Shrugged alongside The Communist Manifesto."

Read the entire column.