Posted by Mark Judge and Emily Esfahani Smith Cross-posted from the Daily Caller and Acculturated.com. Mark Judge: How Bloom Killed Conservatism Almost 25 years ago, a catastrophe befell American conservatism. University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom wrote about rock and roll. His words came in the book “The Closing of the America Mind,” which was […]
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By Jonathan B. Imber It is now nearly forty years since the sociologist Robert A. Nisbet published The Degradation of the Academic Dogma, followed two years later by Philip Rieff’s Fellow Teachers. Then in the late 1980s, Allan Bloom’s best-selling bombshell, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished […]
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C-SPAN Book TV will broadcast three panels from the Manhattan Institute Center for the American University’s Closing of the American Mind Conference on Saturday and Sunday. Take a look at the schedule for details. Robert George, Roger Kimball, Jim Piereson, Heather MacDonald, and other luminaries are not to be missed.
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Brown University has been described as providing “the worst education in America.” Brown’s New Curriculum, far from requiring that students read a list of Great Books, has no core of any kind. Brown students are free to “shop” their courses and take only the ones they like. Brown’s libertarian attitude toward curricular structure no doubt […]
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[This is an excerpt from a paper delivered by James Piereson at a Manhattan Institute conference on October 3, 2007, marking the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. He is Executive Director of the Center for the American University and President of the William E. Simon Foundation. […]
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[This is an excerpt from a paper delivered by Roger Kimball at the Manhattan Institute’s Closing Of The American Mind conference. It will appear in complete form in The New Criterion.] ..It is a rich and promiscuous stew that Allan Bloom served up, part polemic, part exhortation, part exercise in cultural-intellectual history. It sometimes grabs […]
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The Manhattan Institute’s Center For the American University is hosting a conference today here in New York celebrating the 20th Anniversary of Allan Bloom’s The Closing Of The American Mind. The book was an astonishing best-seller on the misdirection of the University, and the Center for the American University has assembled Robert George, Mark Steyn, […]
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“The Hungry Student: Reopening After The Closing of the American Mind” At the end of the introduction to Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, Bloom mentions that only Socrates knew that he was ignorant, albeit “after a lifetime of unceasing labor.” Bloom observes at the time of his writing that every high school student […]
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“Bloom’s Closing Revisited” It may well be that a society’s greatest madness seems normal to itself. Introduction: Fifteen years after his death, Allan Bloom still commands a rapt audience. This past April, his thoughts once again filled a University of Chicago lecture hall. Though he was a brilliant essayist, translator, and educator in his own […]
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“The Permanent Questions Are Still Permanent: A Reflection on Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind” Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, “a meditation on the state of our souls, particularly those of the young, and their education”, ultimately reflects on a problem that goes back to Socrates: the tension between the […]
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Donald Lazere offers a breezy and factless hatchet job on Allan Bloom today at Inside Higher Ed. At first he seems about to offer a detailed critique of his works, asserting that they are “lofty-sounding ideological rationalizations for the policies of the Republican Party from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush.” Stern words; Lazere follows […]
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