Rand Could Not Write Her Way Out of a Paper Bag

So says Harold Bloom, a professor of humanities and English at Yale, in response to an interview about the increasing number of grants from various titans of industry making grants requiring the study of, or chairs in, the studies of the works of Ayn Rand.

I would have to agree. I took an elective course in high school, Philosophy of Literature, and as a part of an extra credit assignment, I read, The Virtue of Selfishness, which I found to be less comprehensible, and more poorly written than Emmanuel Kant.

I've come to realize that in addition to piss-poor writing, it was incomprehensible because it was piss-poor thinking.

I recognized it as bullsh#@ as a 16 year old, and it was painful enough that I wanted nothing to do with her fiction.

Full disclosure, to the degree that I place myself in a philosophical school, and I try not to, I find it a waste of time, I consider myself to be a Jewish Existentialist Utilitarian with a rather Deist view of the universe.

As Daniel at Crooked Timber notes:

Although the Ayn Rand Institute is quoted as being basically approving of the trend, I think that a decent case can be made to the effect that the article is wrong to say that “While Rand, an advocate of free markets, would support a university’s getting paid to teach her works”. This is essentially a bribe to the university and as far as I can see, taking a bribe to compromise your own vision of an undergraduate reading list doesn’t fit in particularly well with Rand’s particular ethics of self-reliance and independent thought. I don’t even really think that having a university professorship endowed by a charitable foundation is particularly consistent Objectivism but there you go.

I'm a bit more cynical though.

She was a self parody in life, and now her philosophy is a self parody.

FWIW, the Chronicle of Higher Ed has some names and programs their report.