December 19, 2007



Dear RIF Institute Supporter,

Think back to when you were 18 years old.

At that age, you were probably seeking your future, your sense of self, and your place in the world.
Where did you expect to find a sense of idealism, a solid grounding in the fundamentals, a rational grasp of world events, and the intellectual tools needed to live a successful life?
Like most people, you probably hoped to find the answers in college.

Today, what do young people encounter during their college years? 

At almost all colleges and universities, especially the prestigious ones, students experience indoctrination in politically correct ideologies and collectivist “groupthink.” Often, those who dare to pose challenging questions are met with insults and moral intimidation.

Further, most institutions fail to teach crucially needed thinking skills and the important knowledge required to function effectively in life, both intellectually and practically. Sadly, at many schools, students never even learn to ask the most important questions.

The result? Many college graduates are afraid, or unable, to think for themselves. Dull-witted conformists are easy prey for statists with scare stories. They readily capitulate to new erosions of our freedoms.

This is a devastating problem for such students, as well as for the rest of us longing for a truly free society and an end to collectivist schemes.

Fortunately, I have a plan to change this situation….
But first, let me give you some background. As you already know, I’m Marsha Familaro Enright. You might call me an educational entrepreneur and activist for a free society.

In 1990, I founded Council Oak Montessori School in Chicago, developing it into a successful and admired school for students from the ages of three to fifteen. In 2006, Chicago Magazine named it one of the city’s top private schools. It continues to thrive. 

I’ve written eleven wide-ranging articles on education, psychology, and culture. In the 1980s and ’90s, I was on the board of the Henry Hazlitt Foundation and the Free Market Society of Chicago, where I taught courses on capitalism.

I have taught fifteen seminars on Ayn Rand’s ideas. For five years at an innovative and acclaimed camp program, I taught older teens the principles of reasoning and capitalism via an original curriculum I created using Montessori teaching methods.

In all these positions, I witnessed first-hand the power of reason, free inquiry and fundamental principles to liberate the mind. I’ve seen the beneficial results on the thinking and judgment of young students. I’ve heard their parents express delight at the results. Now I want to use the same principles and methods to create a comprehensive college-level program.

I’m fortunate to have a remarkable group of trustees, advisors and volunteers working with me. They include highly accomplished business people, professionals, and academics. These notable individuals are helping to ensure that the program will be outstanding and successful in the marketplace.

With your help, we can establish this innovative institution we’re calling The College of the United States. It will be an undergraduate program located on a physical campus, and aimed at developing rational, independent thinkers who are equipped to turn thought into action. They will be armed with the cognitive tools and the knowledge needed to reach their own well-reasoned conclusions.

Encouraged to develop their own voluntary choices and decisions, and with the breadth of information learned through our curriculum, they will have the ability and the “intellectual ammunition” to advance reason, individualism, laissez-faire capitalism and a free society, if they should choose to do so.


Collectivist correctness on campus—it’s worse than you think! 

To develop the cognitive skills and acquire the knowledge to make informed, independent, rational decisions, each student needs the freedom to consider a wide range of ideas. 

But what do young people find on campus today?

Biased speakers are routinely acclaimed, while rational but “politically incorrect” speakers are heckled. For instance, Ward Churchill, who claimed that the 9/11 World Trade Center victims deserved to die, was welcomed at Hamilton College. Meanwhile, David Horowitz, conservative critic of academia, was booed at Emory University.

At Northwestern, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania, stacks of student newspapers that expressed non-P.C. views were vandalized—and the perpetrators suffered few consequences. Cornell University Dean of Students John Ford watched—and did nothing—as students burned 200 copies of the paper, the Cornell Review, because it contained a satire on Ebonics.

This fall, the University of Delaware subjected freshman to a “diversity” training program—using a document which asserted that the term ‘racist’ “applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States…” 

Most frighteningly—because it affects our children’s teachers—many college education departments mandate that professors grade student teachers not only on academic performance but on their political ideology, such as their acceptance of “social justice” dogma. This standard has been required by the council that accredits teacher education, and applied at schools as varied as Columbia University, Northwestern, the University of Kansas, and Washington State.

These are just a few examples of the collectivist biases and political pressures students experience applied to students around the nation.


What they’re teaching—and or not—is even more outrageous.

If the above sounds scary, let’s take a look at what’s happening in college curricula. 

The Great Books, filled with the powerful ideas that have shaped the best of our civilization, have been struck from many courses. Thinkers such as Aristotle, Euclid, Shakespeare, and Gibbon are often casually dismissed as “dead white males.”

To remedy this problem at Yale, businessman Lee Bass donated $20 million for the specific purpose of creating a Western Civilization program under the direction of classicist Donald Kagan. The faculty refused to approve the program, and Bass had to fight to get his money back and stop Yale from using it for other purposes.

Education watchdog organizations such as Accuracy in Academia report that hundreds of courses on the classics have been replaced by fashionable, politically correct classes, such as UCLA’s “The Cultural History of Rap,” and Duke’s “Girl Culture: Black-belted Heroines, Powerpuff Girls, Goddesses, Teenage Fairies, and Witches.”

The University of Connecticut’s Department of Public Policy studied 14,000 students at 50 schools. The group found that students knew less about American history and politics when they graduated than when they first enrolled! Students at so-called top schools such as Princeton, Yale, Cornell, Berkeley, and Duke did the worst on the Civic Literacy test used for the study.

 “Grade inflation” is rampant. Grades at 80 colleges and universities have inflated 15% per decade since 1967. According to Harvey Mansfield, Harvard’s eminent professor of government, “At Harvard, the supposed pinnacle of American education, professors are quite satisfied to bestow outlandishly high grades upon students.” Result: At Harvard, graduating with honors is meaningless because 91% have achieved this “distinction.”

Perhaps some observers assume that science and engineering, at least, are isolated from these damaging trends. But they would be wrong. Students in these domains are not immune from the assault on reason and independent thought.

While visiting my son, an aerospace engineering student at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, I experienced a dramatic demonstration of the results. In a conversation with me, his engineering buddy casually remarked, “Well, nobody can know anything for sure.” 

It was clear to me where he got this notion. In the humanities, such as philosophy, history, and literature, professors and public intellectuals promote ideas that attack the mind and the ability to reason. When these views permeate the campus, what happens to confidence in objective truth? How will these ideas affect my son’s buddy and his fellow students when they design airplanes, cars, and bridges?

As I have traveled around the country speaking about the College, students have told me about the pressure to conform to collectivist moral and political ideas, or suffer the consequences: heckling, bad grades, and ostracism.

Students and parents eagerly listen as I describe our plan for a new college program. The students desperately long for the power to grasp the meaning of events, choose their values and knowledgeably decide what actions to take.

What sort of people do we need in order to turn our culture in a solidly-grounded, pro-freedom direction? We need individuals who are highly informed, independent, and knowledgeable in the arguments for reason, rational individualism and free-market capitalism.

Given the current state of education, would you expect that colleges today are cultivating such individuals?

But you can help change that. Read on to find out how….


A dramatically different approach to higher education.

Young people need a solid education in the classics, but they also need more.

At the College of the United States, we will provide that crucial “more.”

The centerpiece of the curriculum will be the rigorous study of the great works of civilization embracing the humanities, science, and mathematics.

The curriculum will include important works of contemporary science as well as the often-neglected thinkers of classical liberalism and the modern freedom movement. Students will be as familiar with Hayek as with Hegel, with Rand as with Rousseau, with von Mises as with Marx. 

Discovering the often-hidden relationships between disparate fields of knowledge is critical for the creative, rational mind. Our comprehensive curriculum will meticulously draw connections among all domains of knowledge: between science and literature, between mathematics and history, between business and philosophy.

The result is a powerful matrix of learning. Issues such as the surprising role of the market, business, and trade in human affairs will be debated throughout the curriculum, in discussions of art and mathematics as well as history. Simultaneously, the faculty will cultivate outstanding written and spoken communication skills in each student.

But, students require still more. They need to know how to reason and apply logic. With our approach, students will learn to reason about any subject they encounter. This is a powerful tool for every facet of life.

Additionally, students will study the reasoning method that Ayn Rand called “philosophical detection.” They will learn how to “unpack” the basic premises behind any idea they encounter. This process reveals the deepest ideas and values of a thinker’s theories—the ideas and values that determine their crucial practical effects.

For example: Does Marxism lead to peace, prosperity and equality? Is Rousseau’s concept of the Noble Savage influential in the environmental movement? Does Egalitarianism lead to greater equality of opportunity? Is capitalism based on selfishness?
    
To implement this radically new curriculum, we cannot employ the old lecture-and-test methods. Instead, we’ll use principles based on human developmental needs, such as the Montessori Method. While most people think of the educational method of Maria Montessori as applying only to the lower grades, many of her remarkable discoveries and principles are equally relevant at the college level.

Students will gain practical skills and experience by performing internships and research projects throughout their college career, as well as being assigned responsible jobs within the College organization. Further, faculty will guide students in acquiring rational, productive inter-personal skills.

The ultimate aim of our program is to help young people grow into rational, independent thinkers. We won’t advocate any specific set of ideas. We won’t stuff students’ heads with insignificant, useless, unconnected facts and politicized ideologies. Rather, we will equip them with the knowledge and skills to make their own decisions and act on them effectively. Students will be prepared for a life of thought and leadership, in their personal and professional lives.

Knowledgeable in the full range of ideas, and armed with superior independent thinking skills, graduates of the College of the United States will be capable of choosing freely what’s best for their lives.

Reality is on our side. We’re confident that, once they are armed with the right tools and the full spectrum of knowledge and ideas, most young people will conclude that reality, reason, rational individualism, and a politically and economically free society are the values to advocate.


Why this ambitious goal is realistic.

At this point, some people might say:  “This project makes sense, but is it feasible?” 

Yes, it is. 

We have researched and written a solid business and curriculum plan for the College of the United States. Because Illinois law precludes the incorporation of a college before securing its capital funding, we have created the Reason, Individualism, Freedom Institute as the foundation developing the College.

We will begin modestly in rented quarters and build the school into a strong, accredited liberal arts and sciences institution. Looking even further ahead, we intend to grow the program into multiple small colleges on the same campus and then around the country. 

We’re seeking highly knowledgeable, well-credentialed faculty who are capable of implementing our content and innovative methods successfully. We’ve received serious interest from many highly qualified prospective faculty members currently at Harvard, Columbia, the University of Arizona, and the State University of New York, among other places. Young instructors and tenured professors alike are eager to escape the destructive culture they now endure in contemporary academia.

As a matter of principle, we will refuse all government funds and scholarships. This means we depend on private donations from people who support our goals—including you.

What kind of students will be attracted to the College of the United States? We’re convinced that there’s a vibrant niche market for our fledgling college.  Our students will be drawn from people in the following groups:
Students already interested in the ideas of freedom, free inquiry and independence. Recent estimates from Pew and Gallup data indicate about 26 million American adults have libertarian views, while around two million of those are college age.

Montessori students, disillusioned by traditional education. There are more than two million former Montessori students from over 4,000 U.S. schools.
 
Home-schooled students seeking an excellent college education. Between one and two million students are home-schooled—and their numbers are growing.

Students of all backgrounds who are looking for an exciting, superior, innovative, individualistic approach to learning, with great content.

We’ve already heard from them.

Consider two parents from opposite coasts: Laurie Alexiev of Templeton, California and Wayne Anderson of Concord, New Hampshire. Their children attended my summer camp classes. Both families were so pleased with the results that they are eagerly waiting for the College to open. They told me that they would enroll their kids tomorrow, if they could. 

Moreover, about 50 students and families have contacted us about enrolling or transferring. These numbers will skyrocket after our marketing campaign is launched.


Join us—and be part of a revolution in higher education.

I began this letter by asking you to think back to when you were 18.

Would you have seized the opportunity to attend a college such as this? What will be available for your children—or the children in your life? Whether you are a parent or not, you have a stake in this issue.

Every year, billions are donated to institutions that promote statist ideas. Now, you can be among the visionary men and women who help to create an alternative. This college will nurture independent young individuals. As leaders and professionals, they will be competent to turn our culture towards reason, individualism, and freedom. 

For me, this is a full-time job that I’ve been pursuing with a fierce passion. I’ve been working salary-free, but I don’t lack compensation. I’m working to protect and propagate the values I cherish. My hunch is that you share these values, too.

I’m convinced that the best way to change education is by creating a totally new institution. To succeed, the project requires money.

Here’s how you can help. 

Please go to the RIF Institute website and make a generous contribution to support our efforts. Alternatively, email me with your address at This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it and I will send you a contribution form and stamped reply envelope.

You’ve probably heard the expression “It takes money to make money.”  We’re contacting foundations and wealthy individuals to contribute the capital we need: four million dollars. This figure is a realistic but modest budget to launch our new college.

These funders must be cultivated on a face-to-face basis, and that takes travel, meetings at hotels, booths at conferences, seminars, literature, audiovisual equipment for presentations, website renovations, and many other business activities. And I need administrative help to get the job done.

I’m seeking individuals who can make large donations, of $1,000 or more. The bigger the better. 

But every donation—of any size—is useful, needed, and gratefully accepted.

If you cannot make a $1,000+ donation, please become a monthly donor—pledging $10 or more per month—and that commitment will be enormously valuable to us. That’s less than the cost of monthly DVD rentals. $20 or $50 or more per month would be even better.

Every donor responding to this letter will receive a certificate as a Charter Donor to the College of the United States. As explained earlier, all donations must be made to the Reason, Individualism, Freedom Institute, a 501(c)(3) corporation that is developing the College. All contributions are tax-deductible as allowed by law. Please make your check payable to “RIF Institute.”

Please use the enclosed response form and envelope. Thank you for showing your support for this ambitious, world-changing venture.

                Sincerely,
               
                Marsha Familaro Enright
                President
                Reason, Individualism, Freedom Institute


P.S. Your immediate response—ideally within the next ten days—will allow me to plan our full Campaign strategy. We would especially appreciate a donation of $1,000 or more—or whatever you can afford—so that our planning can take into account your generous gift. All donors to this campaign will be honored with a certificate as a Charter Donor.