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BIG SISTER IS WATCHING YOU 179
fashion as a vehicle for serious ideas. Atlas Shrugged was a throwback
to Socialist realism, with its cardboard characters in the service of an
overarching ideology.
But the most signifi cant obstacle to Rand’s joining the ranks of
the intelligentsia was her antagonistic attitude. The caricatures of The
Fountainhead had made her feelings clear. In Atlas Shrugged she rarely
missed a moment to attack “those parasites of subsidized classrooms,
who live on the profi ts of the mind of others” (941). With her focus on
the mind, Rand blamed contemporary intellectuals for every evil in the
world, particularly the expanding welfare state. It was true that many
prominent intellectuals had supported Communism and socialism, but
Rand went far beyond standard conservative rhetoric about traitorous
eggheads. She was particularly enraged by college professors, the “soft,
safe assassins of college classrooms who, incompetent to answer the queries
of request for reason, took pleasure in crippling the young minds
entrusted to their care” (923). She seemed particularly offended that
Aristotelian logic and rationality were no longer dominant in American
classrooms. Even scientists, in the form of Robert Stadler, came in for
criticism. It was not clear if there were any living intellectuals whose
endorsement Rand would have accepted.
Rand was fi ghting against a powerful current, not so much politically
as intellectually. Atlas Shrugged was published just as a great era of system
building had passed. Weary from Communism, fascism, and two world
wars, intellectuals were above all uninterested in ideology. Daniel Bell’s
book The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the 1950s
captured the mood well. Rand’s Objectivism, a completely integrated
rational, atheistic philosophical system delivered via a thousand-page
novel, was simply not what most established intellectuals were looking
for in 1957. 23 Those curious enough to investigate it were repelled by her
attacks on college professors and the intellectual classes.
Desperate for anything to cheer her up, Nathan convinced Rand to
endorse a series of public lectures about her philosophy. If universities
would not teach Objectivism, then Nathan would establish his own sort
of Objectivist University. If intellectuals scorned Rand’s ideas, then he
would raise up a new generation fl uent in her thought. His creation
of the Nathaniel Branden Institute (NBI) was intended to circumvent
the intellectual establishment that was so hostile to Rand’s ideas. Not
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