The recent news that the philosophy department at one of America's leading public universities has established a $300,000 fellowship in honour of Ayn Rand offered another reminder - if one were needed - of the growing academic dimension to the international following enjoyed by this rather odd Russian-born novelist-philosopher.
The fellowship, sponsored by the Anthem Foundation for Objectivist Scholarship, has been established at the University of Texas at Austin and will promote the study of Rand's philosophy of objectivism. The funding will be used to educate objectivist doctoral students and help them secure teaching positions. It will also promote the production and dissemination of scholarly works on the late author's anarcho-capitalist ideas.
Rand, a self-styled high empress of the libertarian right, who died in 1982 has long enjoyed wide popularity outside academe. Her coterie extends beyond the 30m (and counting, at a pace of several hundred thousand a year) readers who have purchased her books to include such pop stars as Simon Le Bon and the tennis player Billie Jean King, along with an array of trade union bosses, economists and political insiders on both sides of the Atlantic.
Probably her most influential disciple is the Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan, who has said of his old friend: "She taught me that capitalism is not only practical and efficient but also moral."
Educators have until now largely been absent from the roll-call, though, perhaps not surprisingly given the scorn Rand seemed to reserve for universities and their faculties, which she often viewed as being intellectually corrupt.
Two long-standing exceptions to this general rule have been American-based academic organisations: the Ayn Rand Institute, based in California, and the Objectivist Center, in New York, both of which have produced an impressive amount of material related to her work over the years, particularly a recently published book, The Contested Legacy of Ayn Rand, written by David Kelley, a Princeton-trained philosopher.
Those groups are largely in-house affairs, however, catering more to Rand's popular following than to academe, while at times also being riven by such ill-feeling over what constitutes the true Ayn Rand message that the former group refuses communication with the latter.
Over the past two years, however, a rash of new scholarly books from more mainstream academic sources have appeared on aspects of Rand's aesthetics, moral philosophy, and relevance to such scholarly disciplines as women's studies and the sciences. After years of neglect, in the view of her supporters, her work is finally appearing in a number of general philosophy encyclopaedias and university textbooks as well.
The latest issue of a relatively new scholarly publication, the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, contains papers written by a dozen or more international academics from prestigious universities, including professors from Britain and continental Europe.
Elsewhere on international campuses, if a quick web search is any guide, the list of new student groups from across the world dedicated to Rand's ideas appears to be getting even lengthier than the jumbo-sized neoliberal orations sprinkled throughout her novels and non-fiction. Similar groups now exist in Australia, Canada, Israel, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway and the US.
Ayn Rand never looked the type of person to gather such devotion. A diminutive Russian Jew, she was born Alissa Rosenbaum, in St Petersburg in 1905, the daughter of bourgeois parents.
She loathed socialism, particularly as she experienced it during her own years as a student at the University of Leningrad, and emigrated to the US when she was 21, changing her name en route to Rand, after the typewriter she brought with her to the New World.
She headed to Hollywood and worked as a movie extra and screenwriter, before moving to New York for a succession of jobs for motion picture companies.
In 1943 she published The Fountainhead, the best-seller about an idealistic architect who blows up his construction project when he finds its design has been tampered with by yobbish bureaucrats. Fourteen years later came Atlas Shrugged, a 1,084-page epic about a future decade in which big government and trade unions strangle individualism, leading to a strike by the "men of the mind" and the collapse of future society.
These novels, like her later non-fictional writings, came underpinned by objectivism, the author's world-view prizing the "virtue" of selfishness and its corollary, laissez faire capitalism.
At a sales conference Rand was once asked to systematically define this philosophy while standing on one foot. This she did, defining it thus: metaphysics - reality; epistemology - reason; ethics - rational self-interest; politics - capitalism.
Such gestures pretty much defined her style to the end, and her extremely black and white view of life in general. "In this universe everything, everybody, is either all good or all bad, without any of those intermediate shades which, in life, complicate reality and perplex the eye that seeks to probe it truly," the critic Whittaker Chambers once noted in a brilliantly corrosive review published many years ago in the conservative American magazine National Review magazine.
"This kind of simplifying pattern, of course, gives charm to most primitive storytelling. And, in fact, the somewhat ferro-concrete fairytale the author pours here is, basically, the old one known as: The War between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. In modern dress, it is a class war. Both sides to it are caricatures."
A generation on, the accusation of caricature remains, even at a time when Rand's intellectual reputation appears to be on an upward cultural trend elsewhere.
Heading the school of Randian naysayers is Jeff Walker, author of The Ayn Rand Cult and a sceptic of the deepest dye.
Mr Walker, a Canadian writer, compares Rand to a cult leader, while battering her followers claims about her originality, literary talent and morality. The book contains startling anecdotes drawn from within Rand's inner circle, including descriptions of non-smokers being ostracised from the chain-smoking guru's social gatherings during her lifetime (she later died of lung cancer), and a bizarre love triangle involving Rand and a younger husband and wife team she at one time designated as her intellectual heirs.
As for the scholarly value of Rand's work, Mr Walker might just as well have adapted Edward Gibbon's famous view of Thomas Aquinas - her better ideas tend to be borrowed; the words, alas, are entirely her own. He writes that objectivism's greatest intellectual appeal remains with keen minded yet sadly impressionable youths or else platitudinous dullards with a taste for the cult life.
In the end, Mr Walker's recently published book may be even more hysterical than the movement he seeks to disparage. What's probably most significant about it, in 2001, is that any student or professor with an interest in debating the kinds of issues it raises can now find haven for the debate in a growing number of institutions of higher learning.