Twenty-five years on, academic minds are still closed

THE most popular book on higher education sent a message: mass education does not demand the destruction of Western civilisation.

THE most popular book on higher education in the past 50 years sent a clear message from the public to universities: mass higher education does not demand the destruction of Western civilisation. On the 25th anniversary of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, is there any evidence universities have listened?

When The Closing of the American Mind sold its millionth copy, its author must have met the news with craven perplexity. Bloom had not expected it to sell. His core thesis was, after all, that the US was in cultural decline due to an intellectual crisis pervading universities that had displaced the classics with pop culture.

Bloom didn't court controversy but he soon found it. His claim -- that identity politics, science divorced from soul and pop culture were corroding higher learning and debasing a generation of thinkers -- displeased progressives.

Philosopher Martha Nussbaum questioned his philosophic capability in The New York Review of Books. The New York Times reporter Richard Bernstein wrote of an event co-sponsored by Duke University and the University of North Carolina at which Bloom was "derided, scorned and laughed at" by humanities professors. Bernstein compared it to the minute of hate in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The most revealing criticism of The Closing of the American Mind was by an aptly named sociologist, Dennis Wrong, who claimed the reason Bloom's tome became a bestseller was because "the book-buying public is moved by vague hopes and fears, and it often does not know what it's getting". Like many critiques of the book, Wrong's was a shameless substitution of literary criticism with Marxist false consciousness theory.

Bloom's work undulates with Western civilisation's eternal questions and its intellectual largesse widens the margin for technical, and at times serious, error. His writing on women admits more contradiction than Hugh Hefner's claim to be a feminist. And the race chapter contains assumptions about African-Americans' academic capability that are premature at best, bigoted at worst, and today can be disproven by empirical research.

The furore surrounding Bloom's refusal to admit social equality to the academy does not, however, discount the vitality of his core philosophical question: what is an educated human being?

Education policymakers and administrators today begin with more instrumental and politically safer questions: how do we make universities profitable? How do we protect standards? What quality indicators should we use? At our most daring we may ask, what is the purpose of higher education? When wondering why the public disengaged philosophically from universities, I suspect it is because our questions are institutional and institutionalised. Bloom's questions were personal and of the person. While we speak to ourselves, he spoke with and about you.

When I said I would be reviewing the 25th anniversary edition, a friend asked: "Why are you writing about that? It's already closed." The popular literature and proliferation of films about Western decline indicates that many share her belief.

For all his literary pretensions to pessimism, the sheer existence of Bloom's writing effects optimism. By declaring that the higher mind was in cultural absentia, Bloom shared with the reader the melancholic beauty of his platonic longing for the human soul; his deliverance of love from the mechanical screw fashioned by late-stage modernity to an amplifying and humanising eroticism; and his unerring dedication to higher learning as the first and last reveille revealing humanity to itself.

Jennifer Oriel is a Melbourne-based writer.