The closing of the American mind.

• Author: Weisberg, Jacob

The Closing of the American Mind.

One night before my recent graduation from college I was standing in the library with some classmates, talking about our final papers. One friend explained that the was writing an essay comparing Outrageous Fortune to Desperately Seeking Susan for a popular lecture course called "Women and Film.' Another said she was on her way home to finish a paper on Max Headroom. I can't honestly say anyone was writing about Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Cervantes, or Kant.

How did this state of affairs come about? How was the traditional concept of liberal education supplanted by the anything-goes attitude of today's academy? Allan Bloom tries to explain what has happened.* And as hyperbolic, meanspirited, and fuddy-duddyish as he occasionally sounds, his book is an essentially sound analysis of the mess our universities are in and the consequences for our country. Yet Bloom errs by blaming all our intellectual woes on the potent messages of Neitzsche, Heidegger, and Mick Jagger, rather than providing sound histories of what actually happened to colleges. Just as important, he assumes our disease has advanced beyond hope of a cure. Higher education is indeed in a state, but as the enormous sales of Bloom's book--a number one bestseller--testify, a consensus for necessary reform is already in the making.

* The Closing of the American Mind. Allan Bloom. Simon & Schuster, $18.95.

Bloom begins with the argument that the classics are the best materials for grappling with the eternal questions. He thinks that those authors generally accepted as "great' have survived because of their success at forcing generations of readers to think about the permanent issues, questions like: How should I lead my life? What is the best kind of government? The universities' purpose, he argues, is not to train biologists, or help us compete with the Japanese, but to enable the young to enter into dialogue with the great minds of the tradition.

To Bloom, universities are in a state of crisis because they have abandoned this mission, considering it naive, even misguided. Their retreat has had disastrous consequences for college students and the nation, as indicated by Bloom's mouthful of a subtitle: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students. As for democracy, today's universities have reduced it to an unthinking prejudice. Without taking seriously either the ideas upon which our government is founded or the undemocratic alternatives, students cannot really believe in the justice of their system.

Bloom does not suggest that we have given up reading the great works of our tradition altogether. But we read them less, and in the wrong way. The supermarket approach to higher education has assured that the classics comprise an ever-diminishing part of college experience. "And there is no official guidance, no university-wide agreement, about what he should study,' Bloom writes. Most universities insist upon only lame "distributional requirements,' in which students sample the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Bloom recognizes that early specialization assures a head start on a career, but denies that the jump is worth the cost. A student who chooses chemistry as a freshman misses "the charmed years when he can, if he chooses, become anything he wishes,' as he puts it. In America, college is "civilization's only chance to get to him.'

Fist-waving radicals

Why does Bloom think our universities stopped asking about the good life? Not surprisingly, he sees the transformation taking place solely in the realm of ideas. Bloom sketches the decline in an intellectual history of education that begins with Socrates, hops to Hobbes, and rambles around Rousseau before coming to a dead halt at Heidegger--all in the course of a single chapter. According to his version, higher education had its heyday in Hegel's Germany during the early 1800s. Soon thereafter, the notion of liberal arts caught on in the United States. Then trouble began brewing on the continent. Nietzsche and Heidegger signaled rationalism's demise. Bloom's emblem is the Rektoratsrede, the...