In the mid-2000s, Atlas broadened its academic ambitions. Through the Teach Freedom Initiative (TFI), Atlas helped a select group of professors to sponsor speakers, craft workshops, and find adequate fellowships and internships for their students. Through TFI, Atlas organized conferences to showcase the contributions of free market oriented academic centers—hoping to help along their ultimate transformation into think tanks. The Fund for the Study of Spontaneous Orders (FSSO) was oriented to research designed to support and reward academic scholarship in the tradition of Austrian methodological individualism.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 569