Prior to Beets’s study, he says, the most comprehensive list of colleges and universities affiliated with BB&T Moral Foundations program was kept by Clemson University’s Institute for the Study of Capitalism. “But otherwise you can’t find information on website, and that’s one of the major problems - this is not transparent.” And Beets says that, given current discussions over allegations of corporate influence over university research agendas, the Ayn Rand grants need more attention. “This has been reported on ad hoc, mostly by individual universities and their campus newspapers,” said Douglas Beets, the article’s author and a professor of business at Wake Forest University, which has its own BB&T-funded program. The paper says these agreements, which have largely ceased, happen under a veil of secrecy, often without the knowledge of faculty members, and that BB&T’s foundation is set on correcting what it sees as an overly liberal curriculum. That’s the idea behind a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Academic Ethics, called, 'BB&T, Atlas Shrugged and the Ethics of Corporation Influence on College Curricula.' It says it is the first study to track a particular set of donations by the financial services holding company BB&T to colleges and universities stipulating that they teach the works of free-market capitalist Ayn Rand and address the “Moral Foundations of Capitalism.” But are colleges and universities, which receive smaller and smaller shares of their budgets from public funding, and which have struggled to bounce back from the 2008 recession, more likely to accept gifts with ideological strings attached than they would have been previously? Fears of corporate influence on higher education are nothing new.

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