The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students

In Chapter 14, Bloom pivots to the critical years of the 1960s, when American universities faced a similar moral crisis amid student uprisings. Teaching at Cornell, he witnessed the escalation of a confrontation between the university administration and Black student activists that took a frightening turn when firearms appeared on campus and the lives of professors were threatened. Bloom was dismayed when the administrators capitulated, ceding moral authority to the agitators and defending their decision with justifications that proved, to Bloom, the professors didn’t understand the meaning of the texts they sanctimoniously cited. The upshot was that the university was dragged deeper into the realm of common public opinion, and the distinctions between educated and uneducated, high and low, were further diminished. The effect of the campus disturbances and the reforms that followed them were deplorable in Bloom’s view: The freedom of thought and preservation of alternatives that are the university’s special prerogative were weakened, and the institution proved it didn’t believe in the value or authenticity of its pedagogical authority.

The reforms of the 1960s were unequivocally disastrous for universities, Bloom avers. The rhetoric about greater openness, personal growth, and letting students follow their own inclinations substituted a doctrine of self-indulgence for a legitimate educational philosophy based on substantive content. Contrary to public opinion, the 1950s were a golden age for American universities, Bloom claims. Whereas the following decade was characterized by progressivist dogmatism, the 1950s capitalized on the influx of intellectual talent that arrived in America prior to and during the war years, and universities realized the special status of their mission in their unified rejection of McCarthyism. The moral commitment that students espoused in the 1960s was rife with hypocrisy and ignorance, Bloom insists: “Tyrannical impulses masqueraded as democratic compassion, and quest for distinction as love of equality” (332). Resisting “the establishment” on behalf of a supposedly higher cause became little more than an exercise in narcissism; “make love, not war” replaced the old moral injunction “love thy neighbor” (328), a far more difficult prescription than indulging in sexual pleasure.

Bloom concludes the book with a meditation on the present state of the university and the challenges it faces in reestablishing an effective liberal arts education. In the aftermath of the reforms of the 1960s, the university lacks a coherent, unified vision of its purpose and of what an educated person is. The emphasis on specialization within departments and graduate programs and the increasing obsession with careerism has left a vacancy in the core mission of undergraduate education, which is to cultivate and civilize the individual during a brief four-year period before the demands of adult life take precedence. The university’s problem is philosophical; having bowed to the demands for greater equality, it has abandoned its function of making value distinctions and is therefore incapable of providing incoming students with guidance as to what course of study will provide the cultivation of the mind that will enrich the remainder of their intellectual lives. The contemporary university is a multiversity, Bloom argues; it has lost its original vision of the unity of knowledge that is its mission to conserve and propagate and is unwilling to address the problem. The result is that students—entering college with no intellectual tastes, or even the awareness that there are such things—are baffled by the number of disciplines and courses available and become demoralized.

The solution Bloom offers is a return to the Great Books curriculum, the study of classic texts without historicist or other interpretive schemes that supplant the meaning of the works themselves. Liberal arts education “requires that the student’s whole life be radically changed by it, that what he learns may affect his action, his tastes, his choices” (370). The Great Books approach engages students more effectively and completely than the typical survey or topical courses constituting the “core” curriculum, which he feels is inadequate and superficial. In addition to providing the content lacking in most forms of liberal education, the Great Books curriculum restores a sense of the unity of knowledge lacking in the university today.

Bloom explores that lack of unity by examining the relations of the three main divisions of the university—the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities—and their responses to the disruptions of the 1960s. The natural science departments were least affected internally, and have historically preserved an autonomy, based on their claims to truth and mathematical predictability, from the human sciences. The social sciences, the youngest within the university, were most pressured by the cultural revolution of the 1960s to conform by generating scholarship—historical, psychological, sociological—that supported the new leftist interpretations. The humanities departments, considered little more than antiquarian enclaves, achieved notoriety and currency when they became radically politicized during the 1970s and 1980s under the influence of French deconstructionism.

Paradoxically, the classic texts that have long been banished from the natural and social sciences as obsolete find a home in the humanities, where they live a tenuous afterlife subject to the varied weapons of contemporary literary criticism. Bloom deplores deconstruction as “the last, predictable, stage in the suppression of reason and the denial of the possibility of truth in the name of philosophy” (379). However, the humanities possess as their objects of study the only books that are not specialized and that are able to give a synoptic sense of knowledge and the world, hence their irreducible value: “Men may live more truly and fully in reading Plato and Shakespeare than at any other time, because they are participating in essential being and are forgetting their accidental lives” (380).