Lead Great Discussions with Oclubs Meeting Plans

OCN has a great new resource to help Objectivist club leaders hold weekly philosophic discussion—meeting plans!

Weekly studying of Ayn Rand's writings should be a central activity of Objectivist campus clubs, so we have prepared a recommended reading list with a detailed meeting plan for each reading. These meeting plans will save you hours of time preparing and will help result in a more enjoyable discussion for all members.

Why should you use these meeting plans?

1. The recommended reading list is a unique ordering of discussion topics, all from *The Ayn Rand Reader* and other online sources, so club members only need to purchase a single book. We begin with “Philosophy: Who Needs It” and proceed to ethical topics. After students grasp the Objectivist ethics the readings move on to metaphysics, epistemology, and questions about human nature. With this background, they will then delve into politics and culture. The motivation behind this order is to grab members’ attention with familiar topics closely related to everyday life (and to Ayn Rand's fiction), then to give them a brief sense of the deeper philosophic roots of these topics, and finally to return to broader applications of Ayn Rand’s ideas in a societal context.
2. Not everyone has time to read an essay in advance, and some people may read it and not quite understand it. For this reason, some groups choose to read the entire essay aloud at the meeting—we’ve kept all the selected essays short enough to make this possible. In addition, we’ve included links to audio and video versions of Ayn Rand’s own presentation of the material that you could play at the meeting.
   
   For those groups whose members do read the essay in advance, we’ve included a condensed outline of the essay that you can read aloud before the meeting to refresh everyone’s memory of the main points.
3. The questions you ask aloud are key to leading a great discussion. We’ve included suggested questions that will help focus the discussion on the most important parts of the text and encourage students to understand Rand's meaning before subjecting it to evaluation in light of personal experience.
4. We’ve pre-written an email you can send out announcing this meeting. The emails are designed to perk members’ interest and motivate them to want to read the essay.

Although we tried to be complete and thorough in the preparation of the reading list and in each individual meeting plan, if you have a different agenda in mind feel free to pick and choose from our reading list and adapt the individual material as you see fit. And as you’re using the meeting plans, please let us know how they work for you! If you ask new discussion questions that work well, discover that some of our questions are confusing, or learn anything else valuable, we welcome the feedback so we can improve the meeting plans for the benefit of all clubs.

This resource is free, but we ask only for an email address in return so that we may contact you to solicit feedback about the list and plans. We look forward to hearing from you!

This article is based on ideas and feedback shared by Ben B., a former president of the University of Illinois Objectivist Club and of the Lawrence University Students of Objectivism. He is currently a philosophy professor.