Where Is Dave Brat’s Paper on Ayn Rand?

dave-brat-297x300Recently I wrote a blog post for TOS Blog about Dave Brat’s views (specifically, I compared and contrasted his views and those of Ayn Rand).

In that post, I quote from a summary of a 2010 paper coauthored by Brat about Rand. That four-page summary is available through Southwest Informs, under “2010 Proceedings,” “Papers Listed by Track.” (The summary was not available there until June 11, when I contacted the organization and its representatives made it available.) Unfortunately, I have not been able to locate the full paper.

Lynn Stuart Parramore also went looking for the paper:

We tried to find that paper, which was “presented and published in the proceedings of Southeast Informs, Myrtle Beach, SC, October 6, 2010,” but that publishing venue evidently doesn’t quite make the cut for Google scholar and JSTOR, so we can only guess at its contents.

But Parramore’s remarks are imprecise. Whereas Brat’s college page claims the 2010 paper was “published in the proceedings of Southeast Informs,” the paper was not actually made publicly available. When I asked Ali Nazemi of Southeast Informs if the organization has the full paper, he replied (in a June 11 email), “That [the summary] is all we have. The authors may have the full paper and may have tried to get it published in a journal.”

I have contacted Brat via email, both through his campaign and his college email address, but as of yet I have had no reply. Obviously I’m interested in reading the paper, and when and if I get my hands on it I’ll write about its contents.