http://emac.blogs.foxbusiness.com/2008/03/05/which-banks-could-fail/
RightSide.com's Suttmeier says he's worried about BB&T Bank, a Winston-
Salem, NC bank with $128bn in assets that "continues to increase its
exposure to C&D loans to $19.5bn from $19.2bn," Suttmeier says. "BTT
has a risk ratio of 182% of risk-based capital."
http://www.twincities.com/business/ci_8901570
Schools to teach Ayn Rand, for a price
Bank pledges more than $1 million to three universities
By Matthew Keenan
Bloomberg
Article Last Updated: 04/12/2008 03:16:07 AM CDT
Ayn Rand's novels of headstrong entrepreneurs' battles against
convention enjoy a devoted following in business circles. While
academia has failed to embrace Rand, calling her philosophy
simplistic, schools have agreed to teach her works in exchange for a
donation.
The charitable arm of BBT Corp., a banking company, pledged $1 million
to the University of North Carolina Charlotte in 2005 and obtained an
agreement that Rand's novel "Atlas Shrugged" would become required
reading for students. Marshall University in Huntington, W.Va., and
Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, N.C., say they also took
grants and agreed to teach Rand.
The author, who died in 1982, used her self-righteous heroes to
promote objectivism, a philosophy that embraces reason and
individualism while rejecting religion. Rand, an advocate of free
markets, would sup****t a university's getting paid to teach her works,
but the idea riles academic ethicists.
"A cor****ation crosses a line and a university is complicit in
crossing the line if it accepts money" and accedes to a request to
assign specific books, said Jonathan Knight, director of the program
on academic freedom, tenure and governance for the American
Association of University Professors, in Wa****ngton. "It's unique in
my experience." Knight has worked in the field for 31 years.
As universities seek ways to bolster finances, such as with top level
s****ts teams, donations to dictate curricula are rare. Yaron Brook,
executive
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director of the nonprofit Ayn Rand Institute, in Irvine, Calif., which
promotes objectivism, said some professors are re-evaluating Rand.
"We're definitely seeing more of an interest in the academic world,"
Brook said. He said he senses a softening of opposition from academics
and sees more conferences and articles about Rand.
"Ayn Rand has a kind of absolutist ethics," Brook said. "She believes
in right or wrong, good and evil, but based on secular principles, not
religious principles, and I think there's an appeal for that now."
Former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan was among Rand's
early disciples in the 1950s. Mark Cuban, billionaire owner of the
National Basketball Association's Dallas Mavericks, calls Rand's "The
Fountainhead" one of his favorite business books. John Allison, chief
executive officer of BBT, deems "Atlas Shrugged" the best defense of
capitalism ever written and requires managers to read it.
Rand believed American universities had been taken over in the 20th
century by thinkers who rejected her notion that many of life's
questions have one right answer, said Judith Wilt, an English
professor at Boston College.
"Universities as places for discourse and argument and a kind of
searching tend to be more interested in what Rand would call
vagueness," said Wilt, 66, who teaches a seminar on Rand and
contem****aries such as John Steinbeck and Arthur Miller. "Universities
tend to be interested not in closing the argument but in keeping it
open."
Rand was born in Russia in 1905 and emigrated to the U.S. in 1926.
Businessmen guided by their own consciences or self-interest were the
heroes of her novels. "The Fountainhead," published in 1943, tells the
story of architect Howard Roark, who blows up a housing project he
designed rather than compromise his vision.
"I love it because it's so motivating," Cuban, 49, said in an e-mail.
"It's about an individual standing up for and believing in himself,
ignoring what others think."
In "Atlas Shrugged," Rand describes the collapse of the U.S. economy
when the most productive industrialists, led by John Galt, withdraw
from society. "Atlas Shrugged" has sold 6 million copies since its
first printing in 1957. After sagging to an average of 77,000 a year
in the 1980s, sales climbed steadily and topped 185,000 last year, the
Rand institute said.
In March, Allison's BBT, based in Winston-Salem, N.C., pledged $2
million to establish the first U.S. chair in the study of objectivism
at the University of Texas at Austin.
That school and 27 others have accepted an aggregate $30 million from
the bank's foundation in the past decade.
"These gifts are really about the study of capitalism from a moral
perspective, and all we want is to make Rand part of the dialogue,"
said Bob Denham, a spokesman for BBT, parent of Branch Banking & Trust
Co.
The BBT Charitable Foundation made a five-year, $1 million commitment
to UNC Charlotte in January 2005 after a dinner meeting between
Allison and Claude Lilly, then dean of UNC Charlotte's business
school. The grant agreement described "Atlas Shrugged" as "required
reading" in a course about the fundamentals of capitalism.
BBT donated $500,000 last year to Johnson C. Smith University to help
endow a professor****p on capitalism and free markets, with lessons
including "Atlas Shrugged." It's the fourth endowed chair at the
historically black college.
Marshall announced in January that it received $1 million to establish
the BBT Center for the Advancement of American Capitalism. As part of
the curriculum, an upper-level course will focus on "Atlas Shrugged"
and Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations."
Many scholars believe Rand's ideas are too shallow to build an entire
course around her.
"Rand could not write her way out of a paper bag," said Harold Bloom,
a professor of humanities and English at Yale. Bloom, 77, is the
author of "The Western Canon: The Books and School of the
Ages" (Harcourt, 1994), an examination of the most im****tant works in
Western literature.
Rand isn't on the list.
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