5 Reasons to Run a Taped Lecture Series For Your Club

Dial back the clock twenty years to 1989. There was no internet. OPAR had not been completed. How did people learn about Objectivism and meet other Objectivists? They came together to listen to Leonard Peikoff's taped lecture courses, which were then available for group rental.

These courses are still crucial for teaching Objectivism to young Objectivists. The top four foundation classes are (in my opinion):

--Philosophy of Objectivism (12 lectures, 32 hours)
--Understanding Objectivism (11 lectures, 26 hours)
--Founders of Western Philosophy: Thales to Hume (12 lectures, 33 hours)
--Objectivism Through Induction (12 lectures, 18 hours)

Despite their value, these classes may get overlooked simply because of the quantity of material now available. Here are five reasons to consider devoting a term to listening to one of them:

1) Leonard Peikoff is perhaps the best teacher you will have in school. His "chewing" of the material and answers to questions are tremendously clarifying. If you listen to all four of these courses during your college years, you will develop a solid understanding of the philosophy.

2) With the exception of "Philosophy of Objectivism" (which is covered in OPAR), most of the material in these classes is not available elsewhere.

3) While you're in the campus club program, you can borrow them from ARI for free.* Afterwards, they'll each cost you hundreds of dollars.

4) Listening to these classes in a group has many advantages. You stick to a definite schedule, and you have someone with whom you can discuss the material.

5) If you have severely limited time to plan meetings (as I did as a graduate student running a club), a lecture series is easy to schedule. You set up a dozen meetings at once, and then you're done with them! This guarantees that the most committed club members meet weekly, with very little further planning on your part.

(Ideally, you will also hold some--or many--standalone meetings during the term to add variety and attract visitors to the club.)

Listening to Leonard Peikoff's taped lecture courses is still a crucial way for young Objectivists to learn about the philosophy. I strongly encourage you to plan a tape series into your program for next year.

*ARI loans taped courses to campus clubs to listen to at meetings. Visit: http://tinyurl.com/lhtuej  for more information. (For some reason, Founders of Western Philosophy is missing from the list, but I suspect it could be made available if there were sufficient interest.)

Jean Moroney is President of Thinking Directions (http://www.thinkingdirections.com). She teaches thinking tactics to managers and other professionals grappling with the pace and complexity of business. As a graduate student, she ran the campus club at Carnegie Mellon for one year. Since then she has run a local Toastmasters club for many years, a task which poses similar challenges.