OGC: Oral Communication

Keith Lockitch is the vice president of educational programs and a senior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute. He oversees all of the Institute’s educational programs, including its free books to teachers program, its essay contests on Rand’s novels, its campus clubs program, ARI Campus, the Objectivist Academic Center, ObjectivistConferences.com and others. Dr. Lockitch is a senior instructor for ARI’s Objectivist Academic Center, where he has been teaching distance-learning courses on written and oral communication skills for more than ten years. He also teaches classes on Ayn Rand’s novels and ideas in a variety of settings, from high school and college classrooms to ARI’s internship program to ARI Campus. As an Institute fellow, Dr. Lockitch writes, speaks and serves as a senior editor for ARI. He specializes in the application of Ayn Rand’s philosophy to scientific topics, in particular to environmental issues such as energy and climate. His writings have appeared in such publications as The Daily Caller, Washington Times, Orange County Register, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Canberra Times, San Francisco Chronicle and the science policy journal Energy and Environment. He is also a contributor to Why Businessmen Need Philosophy: The Capitalist’s Guide to the Ideas Behind Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.” Dr. Lockitch received his PhD in physics from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and prior to joining ARI he conducted postdoctoral research in relativistic astrophysics.

Aaron Smith is an instructor and fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute. He is an instructor for ARI’s Objectivist Academic Center, ARI Campus and ARI’s internship program. He teaches and designs educational content for the Institute’s intellectual training and e-learning programs. He writes, speaks and gives interviews for the Institute and provides intellectual and editorial support to a variety of ARI’s programs. Dr. Smith received his PhD in philosophy from Johns Hopkins University where his research focused on Aristotle’s theory of knowledge. Prior to joining ARI in 2013, he was a visiting assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where he taught courses in ancient Greek philosophy, moral theory and epistemology. He is also a graduate of the Objectivist Academic Center and an alumnus of ARI’s Advanced Education Program.

Ben Bayer is an instructor and fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute. He brings to ARI more than a decade of experience in teaching a wide range of philosophy courses at colleges and universities around the United States. He was a visiting assistant professor at Loyola University New Orleans for seven years, and previously taught at Metropolitan State University of Denver, Colorado College, Loyola University of Chicago, and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. In his time as a professor, Dr. Bayer’s research focused on epistemology and metaphysics (especially, free will and determinism). He has published scholarly articles in American Philosophical Quarterly, Synthese, Philosophia, and Acta Analytica, among others. He has also contributed essays to Concepts and Their Role in Knowledge: Reflections on Objectivist Epistemology and Essays on Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead.” Dr. Bayer was one of the two co-founders of the student publication The Undercurrent, for which he served as an editor and contributor between 2005 and 2016. He edited checkyourpremises.org, the blog of the Ayn Rand Society (a professional association affiliated with the American Philosophical Association), from 2016 to 2017. Dr. Bayer received his Ph.D in philosophy from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 2007. He also completed the program of coursework in ARI’s Objectivist Graduate Center, a forerunner of the Objectivist Academic Center.

Onkar Ghate is the chief philosophy officer and a senior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute. He is the Institute’s resident expert on Objectivism and serves as its head trainer and editor. He has taught philosophy for over ten years at the Institute’s Objectivist Academic Center. Dr. Ghate is a contributing author to a number of books on Rand’s fiction and philosophy, including Essays on Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead”; Essays on Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”; Why Businessmen Need Philosophy: The Capitalist’s Guide to the Ideas Behind Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”; Concepts and Their Role in Knowledge: Reflections on Objectivist Epistemology; and “A Companion to Ayn Rand (Blackwell Companions to Philosophy).” His op-eds have appeared in venues that range across the ideological spectrum, from Huffington Post to CNN.com to Foxnews.com and Businessweek.com. He’s been interviewed on national and international radio, including NPR and BBC Radio, and has appeared as a television guest on CNBC, KCET, Fox News Channel and the CBS Evening News. A Canadian citizen, Dr. Ghate studied economics and philosophy as an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto and worked in the financial industry prior to joining ARI in 2000. He received his doctorate in philosophy in 1998 from the University of Calgary.

Elan Journo is a director and senior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute. He writes and speaks for ARI; he is a senior editor at New Ideal; and he is an occasional guest instructor at the Objectivist Academic Center. In 2012, he launched ARI’s Junior Fellows Program and led it until 2018. Mr. Journo specializes in the application of Rand’s ethics of rational egoism to public policy issues, and his research and writing focus on American foreign policy. His 2009 book, Winning the Unwinnable War: America’s Self-Crippled Response to Islamic Totalitarianism, analyzes post-9/11 U.S. foreign policy from the perspective of Rand’s philosophy. He is co-author, with Onkar Ghate, of Failing to Confront Islamic Totalitarianism: From George W. Bush to Barack Obama and Beyond. He is a contributor to Defending Free Speech. His latest book is What Justice Demands: America and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. His articles have appeared in a wide range of publications, from Foreign Policy and Middle East Quarterly to The Hill and the Los Angeles Times. He has been interviewed on numerous television and radio programs, and he often speaks at conferences and universities. Mr. Journo holds a BA in philosophy from King’s College, London, and an MA in diplomacy from SOAS, University of London.