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.