That would be the normal libertarian point of view, but in Randianism, all forms of charity and in particular all grants disbursed on the basis of need are by that token evil.

Alas for her (= the president, but also the late Ms. Rand) the faculty, uppity liberals that they presumably are, voted to reject the stipulation on the readings, despite the president’s dire warning that they would thereupon lose the whole grant.

So FWIW unfettered capitalism can’t quite purchase academia outright yet, even at a small liberal arts college for women.

Also, there’s nothing wrong with people deciding for themselves to fund/support a grant or financial aid. It’s funding them through taxes that is considered wrong.

The last major poll of historians on good and bad presidents was conducted by Arthur Schlesinger in 1996 (you can see results of it here). Historians were asked to rate presidents as Great, Near Great, Average, Below Average, or Failure. Hoover ended up as the fifth worst president behind Harding (the worst), Buchanan, Andrew Johson, and Nixon (of course Dubya was not yet in the running). But among the seven presidents rated as overall failures in the poll, Hoover received the fewest historians ranking him as a failure (10 of 32). Nine historians ranked him as Below Average; eleven ranked him average (two historians apparently didn’t rank him at all).

If anything, Hoover’s reputation has improved moderately since then. The current line on Hoover (to the extent there is one) is that while he failed to respond effectively to horrendous economic events that were largely out of his control, he was not the hidebound ideologue that his older reputation might suggest (though after his presidency, Hoover became more ideologically rigid). See, for example, David M. Kennedy’s fairly sympathetic portrait of Hoover in his history of the Great Depression, Freedom from Fear.

What if Professor Peikoff were playing the role of Karl Rove?