Interview with Marsha Enright

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.

Welcome to the secular Foxhole podcast.

Today, Martin and I have a great guest with us, Marcia Enright, who is president and

program director at Reliance College, which is in the planning stage, I understand.

Is that correct, Marcia?

Yes, we're hoping to open in 2025.

All right.

Well, that's not too far off, I guess,

obviously, with the recent publicity that many universities, certainly in America and maybe

around the world, are the negative publicity.

That is, at least in my mind.

Do you think Reliance College will hopefully be an antidote to some of that?

Well, I'm sure that the program would be a great antidote to it.

And we actually ran a. What's called a concept test on our program, which is a classic

marketing test.

One of our trustees is a former senior

executive from J. Walter Thompson, which was a huge advertising agency.

And we ran a classic concept test where you ask, you find your demographic, you ask your

market, here's what the concept is of the product, and here's some questions about it.

And what do they think about it? Are they interested?

That's good.

Yeah.

And we got.

I thought maybe we'd have 10% interest.

And the experts said, well, if you got a 40% interest in a product, then you would go to

market with it.

Well, we got an 82% interest.

Wow.

I think there's a lot of.

A lot of people out there, parents and

students, looking for an alternative.

Yes. Yes. I understand many of the western universities have abandoned the great

books, and there's so many, the dead white author kind of thing.

What do you propose will be part of your curriculum?

Oh, it's a core part of our curriculum, because the writers of the great

books are the people who shape the modern world.

They're the thinkers whose ideas are still influencing us till today.

And not only that, they really help you learn how to think well and how to reason well.

So it's very important for people to know about that, to know about the full range of

ideas, you know, not just one ideological side or another.

But if you want to be very well educated, you want to know the full range, and you want to

have thought about it carefully so you can make up your own mind about who you agree

with.

The core part of our curriculum, and we're

going to include important modern works, including those of free society writers of Ayn

Rand, people who aren't normally included, but they should be included as equal to the great

books.

Thank you.

I agree.

I agree.

In conjunction with that, you wrote an essay

called what vision young people need.

Can you expand on that a little.

Well, young people are looking for inspiration.

They're looking for what shape do they want to see their life?

They want to know what's possible in the future.

And today, with all the postmodernist and nihilist influences, they see so much negative

ideas about the future.

You know, I know young people who don't want

to have children because they're afraid that humans are ruining the planet, as if the

planet was a living thing, that they were somehow killing.

And they see so many movies, plays, artistic portrayals, reports in the news about how

terrible human beings are, that it's a very demoralizing vision out there.

But what they need is a positive vision.

So that's why I think that they need works

that show heroic action, show people pursuing important goals, acting with honor and with

integrity.

And that's very important for young people,

because otherwise, I don't know if you realize, but there's been a huge increase in

suicides of young people in the last 1520 years.

Oh, it's alarming.

And Jonathan Haidt, the sociologist who wrote

the calling of the american mind, he's now come out with a book where he places a lot of

the blame for that on the rise in the use of cell phones and the influences that, the

intense influence, social influence that students are, that young people are having

from other people.

And I'm sure he's right that it's contributing

to it.

But I think that what's missing in the

analysis is all of the negative ideas that are out there that are affecting the young people

who are getting them on their phones and videos and from other young people.

I have to agree, Marcia.

I mean, philosophy, the science of philosophy

is basically what moves the world, and for good or ill.

Yes.

And I know, unfortunately, I have experienced some of my family members, my

brother in laws, children rave about how much better Europe is than America.

And one of my nieces will not have children because of the very many things you mentioned.

Really?

Yeah. Me, too.

Me, too.

And, you know, we can't reach her.

Kids can't reach them there because they're

convinced that, you know, anybody over a certain age does, you know, you don't know

what you're talking about, so on and so forth.

The usual.

Yes, the usual.

You know, these kids, they've been exposed to these ideas since they were in

first grade.

That's right.

Yes.

When I founded a Montessori elementary school in 1990, and I ran it for many years,

and at one point, I decided that we could not.

There's a weekly newspaper for children called

Weekly Reader that.

And I said, we can't have this anymore,

because every week it had some disaster story about the environment in it.

Relentless.

And this is a newspaper that first graders are

reading.

So, you know, and they're getting this in

school, in the books that are written.

So many of the young adult novels which are

for, you know, middle school children are about children that come from families that

are drunks or they're drug addicts or the child is cutting themselves.

And it's just such a. Such a horrifying view of the world.

I understand that the reason why they do those, or they say that their motive to write

these is so that children who are going through that problem feel understood.

Oh, dear.

But, you know, it's not an inspiring point of view.

No, no. I think one of the few positive things that have come out of the COVID

disaster, if you will, was that I think a lot of people, certainly a lot of Americans, woke

up about the horrors of public education.

And I think homeschooling increased like 20 or

30% here in these, here in the states, which I think is a very positive sign.

Oh, I agree with you.

I think it's probably the best thing that came

out of that disaster.

That disasters.

They got to see what was actually going on in school, and the parents were horrified.

I think, of course, the battle is still far from over.

I mean, homeschooling has a long way to go, but I've been a homeschool advocate for since

the 1980s, especially ending the public government and education.

What's the word I want?

Hegemony.

Yes. Yeah, that's a good word.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Now, as far as Reliance college, I know that

you have hosting a fundraiser for it next month.

Can you delve into that?

We are.

I was wondering if you wanted me to describe

the program a little more.

Well, yes, please do.

Please do.

Okay, so we have a uniquely designed, very rigorous enlightenment liberal arts

program.

Nice.

That all the students would take.

And this is so this kind of education, what

people don't understand is that the term liberal arts comes from the idea that what

kind of education do you need to be a free person?

That's why liberal is in there, because it's the same route as liberty.

Right.

When you think of the founding fathers, they were very powerful thinkers,

partly because they had gotten this enlightenment education of all the best

thinking beforehand and very strong reasoning skills.

They were explicitly schooled and strong reasoning skills.

And this is going to be a great part of what we're doing.

And not only is it the content of what we're studying, but the way that we're going to have

the students work, because you can't learn how to be a free and autonomous person if you

don't experience it.

And if you're in a classroom where somebody's

sitting there and they're just lecturing to you and you are supposed to take the

information in as if they're an expert and then spit it back to them to get your credit,

are you really examining that information? Are you really incorporating it into your

thinking? So what I find is if we use this very special

form of collaborative seminar in which the students, the teacher is basically the text

that we use, and the living teacher is a guide to the discussion, and then we use principles

where if you are going to make a comment about the text, you have to use reason and evidence.

So the discussion is driven by the questions of the student about what does this text mean

and what are its implications and what are its relationship to other things that they've read

and to what's going on in the world.

And what happens is that the students end up

being the directors of their own learning in the classroom, but the teacher keeps them on

track by always focusing on, well, what are we learning from this text and how is it related

to other things that we've learned and to the world and to your life?

That's wonderful.

We've used this and thank you.

We've used this in our summer program.

We've been running a summer program since 2009, a week long summer program called the

great connection Summer seminar.

It's July 20 to the 27th this year in Chicago,

and I put everything I knew about optimal education into it.

But I have been amazed at the results.

The results have been far greater than I

thought.

The end of one week, I get about 75% of the

students telling me my life has been transformed.

That's wonderful.

I can judge anything for myself, and they keep

in touch with me and some of them have worked for me and they keep in touch with each other.

It's really interesting what's happened.

Yeah. Marcia Martin, is that why you have picked or choose the word for the school,

reliance?

Because. Yeah, I'm sorry.

Yes, because our aim is to help young people

become self reliant, to become the entrepreneurs of their own lives.

And I forgot to tell you that.

So in addition to this very rigorous liberal

arts program, every student every year will do some real world will find a problem in an area

of their professional interest and do a research project on that, trying to find a

solution to that problem and trying to implement it.

We are going to connect them up with accomplished mentors.

So if they want to go into an art, we'll find somebody to help them with that.

If they want to go into finance, we'll set them up with somebody in finance, in physics,

you know, whatever they're interested in.

And they'll also be getting a lot of work in

economics, personal finance, the arts, and in self awareness, self understanding.

So in this way, we have an all required liberal arts program, but then the student

picks certain things that they want to study on their own, and we can individualize what

we're doing that way.

So I don't know if this makes sense, but this

is the things we put all together, and it's, the summer program is kind of a compressed

version of what we're going to do in the college, so I know it works well.

Now, do you have many, your summer program, do you have repeat students or are

they all new every year?

Oh, no, I've had some that have come four times.

Four or five times.

Let's see.

Okay. Yeah, let's do.

That's great, though.

Is there, what is the cost for that, by the

way?

Well, the list cost is $2,500, but right now we have a special discount.

I think it would be 800 if you sign up now.

And we also offer scholarships for people that

can't afford that.

I see.

Martin, we have to remember to put that, their

link in the notes for that.

Yeah.

Now, again, this is really fascinating.

I'm very happy to hear this, Marsha.

I appreciate the work you're doing.

I know some of that is there has to be

extension from Montessori as well, I would imagine.

Yes. Yeah. I'm very well learned in the Montessori philosophy, which is, of

course, developmentally oriented.

In other words, what kinds of learning, what

format of learning works best for each level of development?

And so I'm very focused right now on what do young people need?

So your question about the vision, that's one part of it.

The other part is they're looking for their place in the world, and they're looking for,

well, you brought up philosophy.

They're looking for answers to the question of

how should I live my life? You know, how should I live with other people?

Those are all philosophical questions, and those things are well incorporated in what

we're going to have them study.

That's great.

Wow. That's great.

Oh, to be young again, anyway.

Well, let's see again.

So you said in our green room that next year this green lights college will be underway.

So when exactly?

Well, we're hoping to open in September of 2025.

Okay. Okay.

And right now we're, what we're doing is we're raising the money to make that

possible.

And that's one of the reasons why we're having

the dinner in New York in May 16.

Thursday, May 16.

It's to inform people about what our program is like and then also to hopefully get more

supporters for it.

And that will be like physical campus in Chicago.

How big will it be? How many students and teachers and faculty?

Could you talk about your plans there?

Sure. Sure. So it definitely is going to be in person because young people need

that.

They need that desperately.

I was reading in the Wall Street Journal a few months ago about these young employees who

had, you know, gone to college during COVID and they were used to all this remote work.

And now they were back in the office and they were having anxiety attacks about going to

lunch with each other.

But, you know, you, you really need to learn

how to interact with other people and knowing what they're like in person.

And you can't have that kind of very detailed discussion about things with person when

people, when you only do it remotely.

It's just very difficult to have those after.

You know, you could have students who are in the same class together, but then how do they.

They don't have that when you went to college.

They don't have those incidental conversations

where you pick up on something.

Yeah.

And you get to know each other really well and you do things together.

It's just a whole different experience.

So it's going to be in person.

We're looking to start with 50 students and they will be in discussion classes of, at

maximum, 17 each.

And we've got some tutors.

We call them tutors, the teachers.

Okay.

Lined up already.

Every class would have one or two tutors in it

to help guide the discussion.

And then they'll also be working very closely

with each individual student on that students goals.

And what did you ask me? What else did you want to know?

I forgot.

Yeah. How many students and if about the faculty and also about the campus and so

on.

And.

Yeah.

The plan, what you have?

Well, right now there's, we're planning to rent space in downtown Chicago.

Downtown Chicago has about 60,000 college students there in different, in different

schools down in the downtown area.

So it's a good place for young people to be.

There's, of course, lots of things to do.

There's great transportation.

And so if you were starting a small school this way, the students would have a larger,

you know, excuse me, social environment in that way.

And we want to expand to, at most 1000 for any, for one particular college because that's

the best social environment for learning.

But what we envision in the long run is to

have multiple colleges with slightly different flavors on the same campus, kind of like

Oxford and Cambridge.

Okay, you get the advantage of the small, the

small school experience, but you have a larger environment if you want to go do other things,

you know, if you want to learn other things.

So that's the vision.

And we plan to start a continuing education program fairly soon after we start the college

because we know that there are a lot of retired people who are, in some respects

asking the same questions of themselves as young people and who are looking to discover

what's their next career.

And we want to create a nice, we want to

create a cultural mecca for people who are looking for inspiration.

Great, wonderful art, good learning, great other great people to interact with.

Well, here's a question out of left field, so to speak.

Do you have any germ of an idea for an athletic program like volleyball or track and

field or anything like that? And down the road?

Well, yeah, sure.

I'm sure we'll want to expand, right?

I mean, if we start in the rented quarters, we'd probably use Chicago park district.

And because they're quite extensive, Chicago has an amazing park district itself.

So with volleyball, tennis, pickleball is very big these days.

Track, you know, all those things.

And I think, you know, part of it will be to

try to see, well, what are students most interested in doing kind of sports, especially

if you're starting small, you want to find sports that that's good for a small cohort of

people.

So.

True, true, true.

Now, are you a native Chicagoan by any chance?

I am.

Yes, I am.

Obviously, the only news we see out of Chicago

is negative.

And I know that there's some beautiful museums

there.

What else can you.

What other positive aspects of Chicago can you enlighten our audience with, if you would?

Sure. Just to put this out there.

So there's a famous italian jewelry company

named Buselatti.

I don't know if you've ever heard of it, very,

very high end jewelry.

And the head of that company said that Chicago

is the most beautiful city in North America.

And interestingly, it's one of the most man

made because it was originally, the reason it was founded was because the Chicago river goes

into the Lake Michigan, and Lake Michigan is connected to all the other lakes and then to

the St. Lawrence Seaway and to Europe, basically on the west.

It was connected.

You could portage from the Chicago river to

the Illinois river very easily and then go to the Mississippi and down to New Orleans.

So it was really always been a great transportation area, but it was a scrubby,

kind of a scrubby beach with a flat plain.

That's all it was.

Right.

And over the years, the city, different groups

in the city have just done an amazing job on building it so that now we have 29 miles of

beaches, mostly from sand.

That was from the sand dunes that they took

down to build the Gary steelworks.

We have a gorgeous layout of the city that was

designed by Daniel Burnham, who was the architect of the world's fair in 1893.

Wow.

And they did things like raise the reverse, the flow of the river so that sewage

would not go out into the.

Into the lake, raise this downtown area by

20ft so that it would be away from any problems with the river.

It's just an amazing city.

And it has some of the most beautiful

architecture in the world because we had a fire here in 1871 and the people here were

very.

A lot of go getters and they sent word out to

the east that there was a lot of work to be done.

And this is one of the reasons why people like Frank Lloyd Wright and Daniel Burnham and

Frank Lloyd Wright's mentor, Louis Cameron, not Louis.

Louis Sullivan.

Yeah.

So we have some of the most interesting architecture here.

And the city's really, really beautiful because of the Burnham plan.

Well, good.

That's great to know.

I just want to mention one other thing.

And unlike some of the more sprawling, more modern cities, it's got a kind of concentrated

area downtown.

So you have a lot of museums and parks and

music and restaurants and all kinds of things to do.

Very easy to go their way.

The great transportation system, the loop.

Yes, exactly.

Okay. Well, that's cool.

I see.

I didn't know about some of those things.

That's great to know.

My wife briefly worked there in Chicago for a long back in the day, so to speak.

Let's, if we can do a little more personal exploration with you, Marcia, you were

involved in the early days of objectivism, perhaps with NBI and so on.

Could you relate some of that to us?

Sure. Actually, not NBI.

I got interested.

I had a high school teacher who had the Nolan chart.

Do you know what that is? That's that graph that shows personal freedom

on one side and economic freedom on the other side.

I do know that, yeah.

Then you plot, you know, authoritarians are at the zero zero line, and

the old style democrats were high on personal freedom and lower on economic freedom, and the

old style conservatives were high on economic freedom and low on personal freedom.

And at that time, the only person in the total Freedom quadrant was Ayn Rand.

And he wanted us to read a novel from two of the quadrants.

So I read the fountainhead, and I said, wow, this is what I've always thought, but

explained a lot better than I could.

Well, yeah, I know what you mean.

I know what you mean.

So then I got.

So that was 1969, and I got very interested in

her ideas, and then ended up reading everything that she wrote.

And in the seventies, I moved to with my husband.

Well, he wasn't my husband at the time.

With my partner, too, New York City to go to

graduate school.

And at that point, Peekoff and Blumenthal were

giving lectures at the Stantler Hilton, where NBI had been.

I see town, New York.

Ok. We attended those, and Ayn Rand was always

there.

She was in the audience.

Nice.

Yeah, it was fairly easy to go up to her.

Like, a lot of people were not going up to her to talk to her, you know, so.

So I just went up and was asking her questions all the time.

And I had a wonderful experience with her because she would listen very carefully to my

questions, and then she would try to answer them.

I asked her questions about everything from do the higher animals have a kind of free will?

Because it seemed like she was implying that in one of her essays, or how should we cast

Atlas Shrugged? And when that up, she.

She said, now, this is the kind of conversation I like.

Yeah.

And I talked to her about my cats.

She looked pictures of my cats.

We talked about jewelry.

We talked about, oh, I had discovered that the first novel written by Victor Hugo when he was

19, is called Hans of Iceland.

The hero of the book becomes the first of the

counts of Danischld.

Okay.

So I said to her, oh, I saw that you named Ragnar after this character in the book.

And do you know what she said to me? Well, there really were counts of danish gold.

Okay.

Know how I took this? I took it as she didn't want to.

Looked like she was riding on Victor Hugo's coattails.

I took it as she was giving a tribute to him.

Right.

But she was very concerned about whether she did the right thing.

And she was like that.

That was my experience of her.

You know, I never felt like she was talking to me as if she was the great thinker, and I was,

you know, just a nobody.

It was always mind to mind.

She was very serious and very.

But fun, too, to talk to.

Yeah.

And so I had a great experience with her.

Oh, and there was one time when I was waiting to talk to her, and she was sitting in a row

with her husband.

Frank was on the outside.

I was in the aisle.

She was next to Frank.

And then she was talking to somebody on the right side of her.

Now, Frank had obviously something.

She had had a stroke or something because he

was aphasic at this point, which means that he could understand what you were saying, but he

had a hard time talking.

That's typical.

Is a very common stroke that men can get.

Especially.

That leaves you like that.

And so I was making conversation with him, and

I was asking him about his paintings and things like that, and she was very protective

of him.

I wanted to bring this up because I could tell

every time I saw her with him, she was very protective of him because of his condition.

Okay.

I assumed it was because of his condition.

So I was talking to him, and I was making conversation about asking him about his

painting and that kind of thing.

And she kept looking over at me and getting

madder and madder.

And then all of a sudden she says to me, don't

bother him.

He's not an objectivist.

He's my husband.

And I thought, oh, well, she didn't know what

we were talking about.

And she knew that I was somebody to always be

asking her questions about philosophy.

So she thought.

Probably thought I was pestering him about that, you know?

So I walked away.

And during the next break in the lecture, she

came over and found me.

And she said, please, darling, forgive me.

I didn't know what you were talking about.

Okay. That's nice to know.

She wasn't acting like I'm the great person that, you know, she wanted to make sure

that she did the right thing.

Well, I never.

I've never considered her a, you know, an

ogre, if you will, or a, you know, like, I wish.

She struts around thinking how superior she is to everyone.

I've never.

I've never thought of that.

Of her.

She doesn't come across like that in any of the interviews.

I don't?

No, of course not.

No, I just wanted to confirm my experience with her.

Well, I appreciate that very much.

So, yes, thanks for sharing.

It's.

It's adding value, and it's like taking stories from a facets of rand.

So.

Yeah. Oh, and, you know.

Oh, that reminds me of something.

So I have three other stories, if you don't mind, please?

Yeah, please.

One is that she had some plastic jewelry on and I was admiring it.

We talked about jewelry, and she said, oh, that was, that was designed by Joan

Blumenthal.

And another time I brought a copy of the

fountainhead to have her autograph it.

And she said, to whom should I autograph it?

And I said, John Enright.

And she says, that's a nice name.

And I thought that was funny because of Roger Enright.

Of course, you know that she liked that name.

Gosh, what was the last one?

Oh, oh, yes.

So she and I had had these various

conversations about cats, and I brought her these pictures of my cats and things like

that.

And it was funny because at one point I teased

her and I said, oh, I'm going to bring my cats to the next lecture.

She says, oh, no, darling, you can't do that.

And one day this was in between periods.

The lectures were in the fall and maybe this was in the winter when no lectures were going

on.

So I saw this pin of a cat that was arching

his back, hissing and kind of, and it was all jeweled and everything.

So I bought it.

It was $3, and I wrapped it up.

And for her birthday, which is in February, went to her office and I went to drop it off.

And her secretary, I think it was Elaine Kalberman, said, oh, no, she doesn't accept

any gifts.

And I said, it only costs dollar three.

So the secretary took it.

Well, the next fall, when there were some more

lectures, I saw she was wearing the pin.

So I said, oh, I gave that to you.

And she says, oh, it is the essence of cat.

Thanks for sharing that, Marsha.

We have here a support, how you could support

our show.

And in a way I created, you could call it like

boostogram, like a number.

And that's 221905.

So that rand's birthday in status.

So then, now we could make a clip of this and

share it and see if listeners value that and they want to donate and support.

And then we could make a split of that.

So that's great with sharing with sunlight

universe.

So could you go back a little bit with your

bio and your, you have done lots of writing and papers and so on.

Could you tell us a bit more? You talked about one about, you said about

animals, higher animals, and you have done a recent study there in a paper.

Could you tell a little bit about that?

Yes. Well, after many years of reading and thinking about it, I wrote a paper, a

philosophy of biology paper.

Recently it was published in the Journal of

Ayn Rand Studies.

And it's called life is not a machine or a

ghost.

And it's about the naturalistic basis of

life's ability to pursue goals, to have consciousness, to have free will, and to have

meaning.

And what I do is talk about the fact that the

way that biologists and philosophy of biology people have approached life has been through

the lens of mechanoreductionism, which is the idea that we can reduce everything to physics

and chemistry.

And consequently, they've had a hard time

explaining many of the unique characteristics about living things.

So what's happened is then you get, if you can't explain it that way, people just kind of

throw up their hands scientifically, then you have other people saying, well, it must be

that there's a life force or there's a mystical force that's enabling life to follow

goal, to have goals and to have consciousness.

So what I do in the paper is discuss these

issues and then show a way to understand how life can have in itself the ability to pursue

goals and how consciousness is related to that ability, how it arose, what it is in the body,

and how free will arises out of the same ability.

So that's, that's what I'm trying to answer in this paper.

I see.

Well, that's something, though, obviously,

we'll link to, and I'll have to read myself.

Okay. Well, it's, you know, it's basically what I'm trying to do is give a

naturalistic account for where these powers of human life, of not human life, of life itself

come from.

Okay, great.

All right.

Well, Marcia, we've enjoyed having you on the show, and we wish you well with your endeavor

with, as program director and president of Reliance College.

And ladies and gentlemen, Marcia enright.

Thank you so much for having me.

I really appreciate it.

Yeah. And Blair, I want to add a little bit at Andy here.

You had in the show notes about your future plans and also where the listeners could find

your writings and also things about college.

And, yeah, if you want to apply for something,

for example, the dinner, the details there and so on, you can.

Find information about the college at Reliance, reliancecollege.org, comma reliance,

like self reliance.

Okay.

And also there is where you can find out about the Jefferson dinner, which is going

to be in New York.

We're also going to hold one in California in

September.

And the summer seminar.

If anybody is a young person who'd be interested in coming, please look up our

summer seminar on the same website.

It's under participate now.

And all the links to all these things are there.

And my writing website is Marsha, M A r S H A.

Famolaro, f a M I l a r o dash enright.

Enright.com.

All right.

I think very good.

Very good.

Well, Marcia, thanks for manning the foxhole

with us.

Thanks for having, thank you very much.