 "Photo: Bond Nickels, USC Media Relations")
In light of recent corporate scandals, USC's Moore School of Business received $1 million from BB&T Wednesday to set up a faculty position to teach and research the moral foundations of capitalism.
In addition to creating the BB&T Chair for the Study of Capitalism, the donation will fund undergraduate and graduate courses to study Ayn Rand's 1957 novel "Atlas Shrugged," establish a speaker series on capitalism and add an Ayn Rand reading room to the business school's Springs Library.
John Allison, CEO and chairman of BB&T, said the corporation donated to USC for several reasons.
"We have a big presence in South Carolina," he said. He added that BB&T actively recruits from the Moore School, so the gift doubles as an investment in the future of the holding company, which operates out of Winston-Salem, N.C. and has more than 1,350 banking offices in 11 states and Washington, D.C.
Business school Dean Joel Smith said it's important to concentrate on the ethics of capitalism in an era when corporate scandals seem to be running rampant.
"Practiced properly, capitalism is a pure system," Smith said.
According to Allison, Ayn Rand's unique ability to depict the purity of capitalism is the reason a new course will be devoted to her book.
Rand, an influential writer and thinker born in the Soviet Union, witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution before moving to America in 1926. She included capitalism as a main tenet in her philosophy of Objectivism, which rejects collectivist movements like socialism and government regulation of the economy.
USC President Sorensen said he is intrigued by the idea of the new course and that he hopes to sit in on one of the lectures.
"Every gift to the university is an investment in the state and in its people," he said. "This gift is an unmistakable example of what we can achieve working with private institutions."
The donation is the first major gift to the business school since USC's bicentennial celebration and the second gift from BB&T, which donated $350,000 to the business school in 1997. It is the latest in a series of public-private partnerships that have yielded plans for the Inn at USC, the construction of the USC/Gateway Child Development and Research Center and a naming-rights agreement between USC and Colonial Life and Accident Insurance Co. of Columbia.
The addition of the Rand reading room will come as part of a building-wide renovation program. The Springs Library was built in the early 1970s, and the building hasn't been renovated since the 1980s. Smith said renovations are scheduled to begin as early as fall 2005.
Be the first to comment on this article!