Notes

REASON's masthead gains several additions this month. Lynn Scarlett, a student of political economy and international relations and a reviewer of these topics in our pages, joins us in a part-time position as Book Review Editor. Lynn is completing her Ph.D. in political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and worked with the Foundation in preparing our book Instead of Regulation for publication.

I also welcome Bruce Bartlett to the ranks of our contributing editors. The author of Reaganomics and other books, Bruce is an economist and historian who is presently deputy director of the Joint Economic Committee.

Contributing Editor David Brudnoy gets a new assignment as REASON's theater critic—an upcoming new feature of our Arts & Letters section. The popular talk-show host, writer, and critic will report on major productions in Boston and New York.

With the return of senior fellow Tibor Machan, the Reason Foundation's conference activities have moved back into high hear. First on the agenda was the Seminar on Economics and Philosophy, cosponsored with the Foundation for Advanced Studies in Liberty and the Institute for Humane Studies and directed by Machan. Designed to bring together experts in economics, law, and philosophy, the seminar took place at Pepperdine University on March 27.

The second event will be a Liberty Fund symposium, "The Contributions of Natural and Positive Law to an Understanding of Liberty." The codirector with Machan is Ernest van den Haag, and the symposium will be chaired by J. Roger Lee, a former Reason Foundation summer fellow currently at the Center for the Study of Public Choice at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. The three-day event will take place in Santa Barbara April 29 through May 1.

Finally, to inaugurate the Foundation's fourth annual Summer Research Seminar, in June we will conduct a four-day conference on Culture and the Free Society, the theme of this year's 10-week summer session.

In January I attended the inaugural conference of what could become a very important institution. Called the Shavano Institute, it's the brainchild of George Roche, president of Hillsdale College—the determinedly independent college that has succeeded in warding off federal regulation by refusing to take government money (see "The College That Told Uncle Sam Where to Go," REASON, Aug. 1972). What Shavano aims to do is to market the research products of free-market, limited-government think tanks (for example, the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Pacific Institute, and the Reason Foundation).

Roche has two primary target audiences in mind and corresponding channels of distribution. The first target is groups of key opinion leaders and decisionmakers, and the medium will be executive seminars, to be held in restful surroundings in the Colorado Rockies. I've been invited to lecture at one of the first of these, in May. The other target audience is much broader: cable-TV viewers. Roche has made a deal with Ted Turner's "superstation" WTBS to produce a series of one-hour debate programs on current public policy issues. Called "Counterpoint," the program is expected to debut in May with a debate on the nuclear arms race, followed by another on what's happened to the bottom rungs on the ladder of economic opportunity. You can get more information on Shavano by writing its executive director, John Andrews, at Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, MI 49242.

Ludwig von Mises fellowships in the humanities and social sciences are now available for Ph.D. candidates and postdoctoral researchers. Named after the dean of the Austrian school of economics, the fellowships are a project of the Center for Libertarian Studies. Information is available from Dyanne Petersen at CLS, 200 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10003.

We are very pleased to announce the creation of the Reason Foundation Endowment Fund, launched with a $1,000 donation from one of our supporters. The idea is to build up an ongoing pool of assets, with the principal kept intact and the earnings providing income to the Foundation. Nearly all universities and some of the more well-established research institutes have such endowments. We welcome contributions earmarked for the Endowment Fund—a long-term investment in the future of our work.