What's the quality of Ayn Rand scholarship?

[Eiuol]

By scholarship, I am speaking of interpretation and understanding of Rand's ideas. I'm excluding anything building on her ideas, which is a different type of thinking and technically speaking not Objectivism. For instance, OPAR is part of Rand scholarship, while a lot of Tara Smiths work like Viable Values is doing philosophy with a lot of Rand influence is not Rand scholarship narrowly speaking.

What got me thinking is a paper by Robert Campbell who I know posts on Objectivist Living. In it, he criticizes editing done by Robert Mayhew of posthumous works. Looking at the editing done from original recordings by Mayhew, it looks like a subtle but significant change in meaning or tone. That is, sometimes Rand is shown making a stronger statement than otherwise by going as far as to write questions that weren't asked as shown, or cutting out whole paragraphs of long answers. Sometimes he'd change words to ones Rand never used, which is editing the very way she spoke. Read the paper for specific details. Now, it's easy to get the gist of Rand's answers, but what good is that for scholarship if this is the only format available?

I'm not sure what to make it, except deeming any works edited by Mayhew as poor sources for interpreting Rand or studying Rand. But it brings a wider concern of availability of quality scholarship. For instance, Peikoff claims to be Rand's intellectual heir, but no record of Rand saying so. That itself is poor scholarship, an expression of vanity. From that alone, it makes me wonder if even OPAR is as reliable as claimed. It's good, yes, but can we label it as -Rand- scholarship?

Perhaps I'm overly skeptical about OPAR, as it is interpretation of Rand anyway, but I'm wondering about how fairly/properly Rand scholarship is done. How much meticulously careful scholarship exists? Is the issue bigger than Mayhew, or does it only extend as far as him?

[Plasmatic]

Louie, you can compare OPAR to the 1976 lectures it was based on and see where the differences lay. Ms. Rand was present for these lectures. Dr. Peikoff explains in OPAR that it is not to be considered "Official Objectivist doctrine" since she was not alive to review it. I have found differences I think are important.

[Reidy]

Mayhew is not the only member of the Peikoff / ARI circle who has messed with Rand's words.  Peikoff says he did this to the writings in The Early Ayn Rand.  He doesn't say what those changes are.  Sciabarra found differences between journal excerpts as published in The Intellectual Activist and as published later in the book.

 

I'm a minor contributor to this literature myself.  Before Rand's letters were published I got copies of the letters between her and FLl Wright from the Getty Center, which has Wright's archives on microfiche.  I found numerous copyediting touchups and one material alteration of her meaning.

 

Eventually it will all come out, though probably not during Peikoff's lifetime.

Edited November 2, 2014 by Reidy

[Eiuol]

Louie, you can compare OPAR to the 1976 lectures it was based on and see where the differences lay. Ms. Rand was present for these lectures. Dr. Peikoff explains in OPAR that it is not to be considered "Official Objectivist doctrine" since she was not alive to review it. I have found differences I think are important.

Can you post some differences here? I'm very interested!

[Jon Southall]

I am too.