Jennifer Burns: evaluation

Transcript context

…Oh, can you just linger on that? When you said that you’re doing that and doing a dissertation on Ayn Rand, was there… Did people get upset? No. I did have a friendly critic who took it upon himself to throw at me everything he thought the outside world would throw at me. I think maybe 5 or 10 years earlier, it wouldn’t have been possible. But the most important thing I had to… The person I really had to convince this was worth doing was myself, because I knew it was an unconventional choice for the field and for a dissertation. But once I convinced myself, I just said, “Well, I’m going to do this and see.” And because it was unconventional, it ended up standing out. And it really was the time… I started it during second Bush administration, George W. Bush, second term. People were interested in just conservatism in general. No matter where they stood on the political spectrum, felt like objectively we don’t know enough about this and this is a problem, so they were open to learning more. I really caught that wave in scholarship and caught that wave in American culture where people wanted to know more. We should probably say that Ayn Rand at the very- Probably say that. Ayn Rand is, at the very least, as you’ve mentioned, a kind of gateway to conservatism.…

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