Bloom, Allan 1930-1993

BLOOM, ALLAN 1930-1993

Professor

Prophet of Doom

Each era has its prophets of doom, critics who diagnose the ills of their society in apocalyptic terms. During the 1980s Allan Bloom emerged from academic obscurity to become America's best-known advocate of a return to a classical model of higher education, a back-to-the-basics approach that saw many of the changes that had occurred in the universities since the 1960s as misguided. His critique, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (1987), was a surprise best-seller that generated a storm of controversy about such issues as cultural literacy and political correctness.

Scholarly Career

No one could have been more surprised by the success of the book than Bloom himself. His previous publications had been translations of works by Plato and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Shakespeare's Politics (1964), written with Harry V. Jaffa. Though he had been a professor of political philosophy since 1955 at the University of Chicago, Yale University, Cornell University, the University of Toronto, and again at the University of Chicago, before the 1980s he was hardly known as a scholar, let alone as a major social critic.

Protest

Popular with students, Bloom was known by his colleagues as a classical humanist—a stance that, as political theory evolved during the 1960s, cast him in the minds of many of those colleagues as a political conservative. One of the key events in his career occurred in 1969, when administrators at Cornell submitted to the demands of armed students that the curriculum be expanded to include programs of study reflecting current social concerns. Bloom resigned in protest and taught for nine years in Toronto before joining the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, where he had earned his Ph.D. twenty-four years earlier.

Best-Seller

At Chicago he met and became friends with the Nobel Prize—winning novelist Saul Bellow, who was also on the faculty. In 1982 Bloom wrote an article for the conservative journal National Review in which he critiqued American universities; Bellow encouraged him to expand it into a book and helped him to get it published by Simon and Schuster. The Closing of the American Mind was widely reviewed and became a best-seller, igniting a controversy about higher education that lasted for months. Bloom had touched a nerve.

What Is Wrong with Higher Education?

To be sure, The Closing of the American Mind was not a typical best-seller; filled with erudite arguments drawing on such thinkers as Plato and Friedrich Nietzsche, it was hardly beach reading. Its main points were simple enough, however. Bloom claimed that higher education had abandoned its traditional devotion to reason and the free marketplace of ideas in favor of programs that catered to the demands of women and minorities and that reflected trendy ideas rather than a grounding in great books and timeless issues. As a result, he wrote, students learned more about themselves than about the world around them and saw "truth" as an ideological construction based on race, gender, or economic status rather than as a universal and immutable ideal that one aspired to attain through study and debate. Today's students, he said, are "practical nihilists" whose minds have been closed rather than opened by their educations.

Reaction

The initial reviews, in the mainstream media, praised the forcefulness of Bloom's argument, even if the reviewers did not agree with him on every point. Academic criticism of the book, however, was vitriolic, attacking Bloom as an educational fundamentalist who failed to see anything good in curricula that did not praise the accomplishments of "dead white males." Many professors and administrators dismissed the book as nostalgia for an outmoded and misguided ideal. On the other hand, some sided with Bloom, decrying what they perceived as an appalling lack of basic knowledge on the part of contemporary college students and calling for an emphasis on the importance of "cultural literacy."

Other Voices

Bloom eventually returned to his previous obscurity as the battle in academe shifted to such related issues as the nature of the literary canon, multiculturalism, and political correctness and as other voices entered the arena. He completed two more books—the essay collection Giants and Dwarfs (1990) and Love and Friendship (1993), an exploration of the treatment of these ideas in canonical literary and philosophical works—before his death in 1993.

Sources:

Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students, foreword by Saul Bellow (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987);

William McWhirter, "A Most Uncommon Scold," Time, 132 (17 October 1988): 74-76;

Clifford Orwin, "Remembering Allan Bloom," American Scholar, 62 (Summer 1993): 423-430.