Allan Bloom at Harvard, a Lesson Reverberating through the Years

“ The university is nothing less than the institutionalization of Socrates. So the end of philosophy in the university portends the subversion of democracy itself.”

“Fellow elitists,” thus began philosopher Allan Bloom’s lecture before a packed audience at Harvard University in 1988. The audience hooted and applauded. Bloom’s opening salutation was a tongue-in-cheek evocation of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s own ironic opening of “fellow immigrants” before The Daughters of the American Revolution in 1938. (1) Bloom, the bald, bespectacled professor, seemed to be enjoying himself.

The publication of his The Closing of the American Mind the previous year had struck a cultural nerve. A highly respected but obscure academic, Bloom never expected his book to create a cultural firestorm. Bloom’s lecture touched on ideas evoked in the book that concerned the emergence and dominance of certain ideas in academia. The most elite people on the planet were now all committed to an egalitarian, anti-elitism. The new true way was to recognize that there was no one true way.

I suspect The Closing of the American Mind may well be one of the most bought but least read books of our time.

Living in the area, I happened to attend Bloom’s Harvard lecture. Bloom’s speech was indeed colorful and, at times, even mocked his audience. But I must admit that most of it went over my head. Intrigued by the controversy Bloom had generated, I had begun reading The Closing of the American Mind. I found the book provocative but also daunting. Much of the book was not simply a description of the current state of higher education but, rather, an intellectual history of how we got where we were. Only after spending years reading many classic thinkers did I feel comfortable following Bloom’s arguments.