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More oxford books @ www.OxfordeBook.comFore more urdu books visit www.4Urdu.comBIG SISTER IS WATCHING YOU 179fashion as a vehicle for serious ideas. Atlas Shrugged was a throwbackto Socialist realism, with its cardboard characters in the service of anoverarching ideology.But the most significant obstacle to Rand’s joining the ranks ofthe intelligentsia was her antagonistic attitude. The caricatures of TheFountainhead had made her feelings clear. In Atlas Shrugged she rarelymissed a moment to attack “those parasites of subsidized classrooms,who live on the profits of the mind of others” (941). With her focus onthe mind, Rand blamed contemporary intellectuals for every evil in theworld, particularly the expanding welfare state. It was true that manyprominent intellectuals had supported Communism and socialism, butRand went far beyond standard conservative rhetoric about traitorouseggheads. She was particularly enraged by college professors, the “soft,safe assassins of college classrooms who, incompetent to answer the queriesof request for reason, took pleasure in crippling the young mindsentrusted to their care” (923). She seemed particularly offended thatAristotelian logic and rationality were no longer dominant in Americanclassrooms. Even scientists, in the form of Robert Stadler, came in forcriticism. It was not clear if there were any living intellectuals whoseendorsement Rand would have accepted.Rand was fighting against a powerful current, not so much politicallyas intellectually. Atlas Shrugged was published just as a great era of systembuilding had passed. Weary from Communism, fascism, and two worldwars, intellectuals were above all uninterested in ideology. Daniel Bell’sbook The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the 1950scaptured the mood well. Rand’s Objectivism, a completely integratedrational, atheistic philosophical system delivered via a thousand-pagenovel, was simply not what most established intellectuals were lookingfor in 1957. 23 Those curious enough to investigate it were repelled by herattacks on college professors and the intellectual classes.Desperate for anything to cheer her up, Nathan convinced Rand toendorse a series of public lectures about her philosophy. If universitieswould not teach Objectivism, then Nathan would establish his own sortof Objectivist University. If intellectuals scorned Rand’s ideas, then hewould raise up a new generation fluent in her thought. His creationof the Nathaniel Branden Institute (NBI) was intended to circumventthe intellectual establishment that was so hostile to Rand’s ideas. Not