The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom (1998)

The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom (1998)

Acording to Bloom, democracy creates its own power structure, weighted toward public opinion, regardless of how wise or foolish public opinion might be. He explains how the Left have sought to destroy academic freedom in the 20th century. This started when universities listen to the demands of violent student protests during in the 1960s over “alleged” racism. Bloom witnessed a protest at Cornell in 1969, and believes these black students demanded unequal advantages that scared professors and led to the degrading of our academic system.

Moreover, Bloom writes, three factors have led to the “decomposition of the university” (347). First, the major disciplines have become isolated from one another, fragmenting knowledge and leaving no sense of the unity that the old philosophers (Plato, Socrates, Aristotle) imagined. Also

* Bloom blamed high technology, the sexual revolution, music, and the introduction of cultural diversity into the curriculum as the problem.

* American democracy has led to the demise of morals.

* “'God is dead,' he said. Man, who loved and needed God, has lost his Father and SaviorEquality, Power, and the University:

A Book Review of The Closing of the American Mind, by Allan Bloom

Jacob D. Gerber

Allan Bloom's modern classic, The Closing of the American Mind, opens with an observation of

a trend that was all-too-common in the 1980s, but which has only solidified by 2010—namely, that

students “are unified only in their relativism and in their allegiance to equality” (25). Bloom's concern

goes beyond the obvious logical problems in relativism to a deeper issue, which is that students no

longer come to the university with any hope to learn about what that is true, noble, or beautiful,

because they do not believe that somethingcould be truer, more noble, or more beautiful than another.

Bloom's goal, then, is to restore the university to its original task: teaching students...