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This is some very good news for a thinker like me who is outside the academic area. Before I found this website, I was temporarily active on another general philosophy forum. I was so shocked at the posts of university students on this other website. It seemed like they got to the study of Hume, or Ayers, or Wittgenstein, etc. and could not get out of a hole created by an idea that was new to the student and seemed interesting on its face. All of them seemed to be unaware of Ms. Rand beyond her fiction and were emotionally bitter or angry about the ethics they learned in that fiction. The

During my time as an undergraduate philosophy major, Rand was mentioned several times. One of my ethics classes used James Rachels' The Elements of Moral Philosophy, which takes Rand seriously but presents a misrepresentation of her argument for egoism. (The professor in this class also presented mistaken interpretations of several other parts of Rand's philosophy.) Another ethics class mentioned Rand but only to assert that she was a nihilist in the sense that she did not believe in ultimate value. I also heard a student say that Ayn Rand was an example of a philosopher who was a logical posi

Objectivism is doing better in academia now than it ever has, IMHO. There are a number of tenured Objectivist philosophy professors, and several more working in academia who are not tenured. (Some of the untenured ones, like Andrew Bernstein, are untenured by choice. Some, like Allan Gotthelf at UPitt, are in extended visiting scholar posts. And some, like Greg Salmieri, are simply at the start of their careers.) Tara Smith at UT Austin holds the BB&T Chair for the Study of Objectivism. Her last book, Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics was published by Cambridge University Press, one of the