Tal Tsfany on Building the Ayn Rand University

At last summer’s Objectivist Conference, Tal Tsfany announced the founding of the Ayn Rand University. What progress has been made in ARU’s development? In his talk at this year’s Objectivist conference, Tsfany told the story of one year of building the ARU.

Tsfany stressed ARU’s goal of educating new intellectuals who are going to — in Rand’s words — “determine the goals, the values, and the direction of a culture.” To achieve this goal, future intellectuals need to acquire more than knowledge; they also need to learn how to practice the ideas that they advocate.

To fulfill these needs, Tsfany identifies three pillars of the ARU approach: knowledge, guidance, and experience. In addition to being able to acquire knowledge of philosophy and other fields, ARU students will be offered mentors in their professional fields and be given the opportunity to seek internships or employment with a network of businesses. 

Other ARU staff also joined the presentation to explain how they’ve helped build ARU’s pillars. Jeff Scialabba talked about ARU’s intellectual focus and its expansion to new courses in literature, the physical sciences, law and government, work and business, history, economics, and psychology. Don Watkins presented his vision of mentorship as guiding ARU students “in the act of self-creation.”

How will ARU find students to pursue these opportunities? Aaron Fried joined the stage to explain how ARU can enroll more students by interacting with them during earlier stages of their exploration of Rand’s books. 

You can check out ARU’s 2022–2023 courses here.

Tsfany’s talk is the second of this summer’s talks to be released publicly. Over the course of the next year, we’ll regularly release more OCON 2022 talks. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel and click on the bell icon to receive notifications whenever we post new content.