Crisis on Campus_ A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities - Mark C. Taylor [12]
Bloom announced what he saw as the most pressing problem in the first sentence of the book. He began, “There is one thing2 a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.” This commitment to relativity in the name of democratic equality, Bloom argued, was the result of the permissiveness ushered in by the cultural and sexual revolution that began in the 1960s. Sounding an alarm calculated to provoke, Bloom repeatedly drew parallels between America in the late twentieth century and the conditions in Germany during the Weimar Republic that allowed Nazism to take root. He declared that the infatuation with popular culture and growing multiculturalism on campuses had led to an intellectual and moral breakdown that threatened the very fabric of American democracy. Far from addressing urgent social and political problems directly, Bloom, who was an unapologetic elitist, argued that misguided faculty members made matters worse by preaching the gospel of relativism and encouraging and promoting immoderate hedonism. “The students’ wandering and wayward energies finally found3 a political outlet,” Bloom wrote. “By the mid-sixties universities were offering them every concession other than education, but appeasement failed and soon the whole experiment in excellence was washed away, leaving not a trace. The various liberations [e.g., women’s liberation and the movements for African American, Latin American and gay and lesbian rights] wasted that marvelous energy and tension, leaving students’ souls exhausted and flaccid, capable of calculating, but not of passionate insight.” For America to recover its greatness, he said, young people must turn away from the culture of permissiveness, excess and difference, and colleges and universities must return to their proper responsibility of teaching the great books of the Western tradition.
The Closing of the American Mind is an odd mix of scholarly analysis and political manifesto. Its pages are filled with fighting words, and fights broke out. The book was widely praised by conservative commentators, but liberal voices within and beyond the academy vehemently attacked Bloom and his argument. Writing in The Times Literary Supplement, David Rieff proclaimed Bloom to be “an academic version of Oliver North4: vengeful, reactionary, antidemocratic.” His book, Rieff continued, “is one that decent people would be ashamed of having written.” But Bloom’s ideas quickly began to circulate through the conservative corridors of power in Washington. Several of his students went on to play important roles in policy and political debates. Francis Fukuyama, the author of the widely influential book The End of History, and Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, who would hold important positions in the administration of George W. Bush, were all his students.
Bloom’s analysis exposed the widening fault lines between the university and society at large as well as the growing divisions within the university. His book appeared the same year the stock market crashed. While the nonacademic world always harbors suspicions about what goes on behind closed college and university doors, tensions seem to increase during times of economic hardship. In 1987, as in our own time, growing uncertainty about financial security led to increasing impatience with an educational system whose practical benefits were not clear. Bloom’s insistence that the excesses of faculty members still high on the sixties led to a decline in moral and cultural values made higher education an easy target for critics. But with the economic turnaround and the dot-com boom of the