Twenty Years and Closing

Submitted by Micky Love on Tue, 07/15/2008 - 6:48am. Tags:

Books and Film

The Closing of the American Mind was written by Allan Bloom some 20 years ago. I’ve just got round to it now. Much of it lacked interest for me. I did not find Bloom’s speaking on behalf of American university students, their parents, women or minority groups worthy of much attention. A good deal of the book is taken up by Bloom’s presentation of what others think and want, only to be knocked down as straw persons. I chafe against this sort of polemical exercise.

I found a strange patchiness in the book. Bloom’s influences are almost entirely European. One African, Augustine, and only two Asians, Jesus and Buddha, deserved a mention in his book. And nobody, anywhere, who lived between the early Christian era and the time of Descartes – some 1,200 years of history - is discussed. Even though the university, the institution that Bloom is determined to save, is a product of this era.

Something else that grated was the discussion on the prevalence of the notion that ‘truth is relative’ in the university – a central part of his critique. I think there is absolute truth, but it is tautological, trivial, or irrelevant. If Bloom thinks there is meat on those bones, why not simply write down the absolute truths once and for all and have done with it? Deconstructionists get a lot of the blame for the spread of relativism. Many years ago, out of curiosity, I signed out a copy of J. Derrida’s magnum opus from the library. I didn’t get much further than a few paragraphs, but I understand from those who have finished his work that it can be summed up in a few words as “there is no final reading of any text.” A very reasonable conclusion in my view, though it obviously opens the door to such conservative-rankling abominations as feminist re-readings of The Declaration of Independence etc. To me, this is mind-expansionary and Bloom’s dismissal of such efforts is evidence of a closed mind.

I agreed with much of his discussion of the problems of university education. Bloom taught at several of the world’s top-ranking schools - Cornell, Chicago. I attended the University of Toronto in Canada, where Bloom had taught as well. It was not a very satisfactory experience. I was surrounded by a lot of very clever people, and I enjoyed that, coming from a rather isolated rural background, but I felt adrift. Sitting in a lecture hall with 200 other students while the professor copied sections of the calculus textbook on the board was profoundly disheartening. I did have some good experiences in the classroom, but they seemed to have arisen more out of blind luck than anything else. Towards the end of my career there, I came to the conclusion that the university was geared to the education of graduate students, and undergraduates were to be processed rather than educated. When Bloom taught at Cornell, the campus was in uproar over the struggle for civil rights. This is covered in exhaustive length in The Closing of the American Mind. At around the same time in Toronto, students illegally occupied the massive newly constructed Robarts Library (aka Fort Book) which was to be used only by graduate students and faculty and closed to undergraduates. Thanks to those efforts I could use the library, but I had no idea just what was on offer. If the university made any attempt to educate new students on how to best exploit the vast resources on hand, I wasn’t aware of it.

I have nothing against graduate schools, schools of dentistry or law, and so on, but Bloom and I were looking for a place to educate the leaders of tomorrow. I’m surprised he devoted himself throughout his entire career to teaching in expensive, high prestige institutions like Cornell – those that he found so unsatisfactory. I have thought that personally, a smaller college might have been more rewarding. Or that Bloom, as an American conservative, would have gravitated to military academies like Annapolis. For someone who holds up the death of Socrates as a model, his kvetching over career choices doesn’t sit well. And speaking of death, his own – secretly dying of AIDS in 1992 – well, Rock Hudson had publicly acknowledged the disease before he died back in 1985. A heroic death in its way; one that Bloom did not live up to.

http://www.amazon.com/Closing-American-Mind-Allan-Bloom/dp/B00150GHF6/re...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom

Nothing resembles virtue more than a great crime. Saint-Just

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U of T (#103170)

by AndrewSshi on Tue, 07/15/2008 - 1:56pm

Okay, I think that I'm about to throw away my patina of anonymity, but I have to comment.

I've only seen U of T as a graduate student, but it always seemed to me that it would be far less alienating to an undergrad than an American state university is. After all, at U of T you have the college system, which I would think would keep you from feeling as though you are a cog in a 60,000 student machine. My undergrad was in an American state university, and I would have dearly loved to have what U of T undergrads have, namely a way to feel like they're part of a smaller group of people than the enormous university bureaucracy.

You've also got a strong advantage over the American state university in that there's a certain caliber of student who in the U.S. would wind up in a prestigious northeastern university or midwestern liberal arts college where all of the students are either fearsomely smart or richer than God. As Canada tends to lack private universities, the really smart kids go to a big university and provide something of a leavening effect to classes full of a lot of mediocrities. It certainly makes things quite rewarding for a TA to run across flashes of absolute brilliance after slogging through a stack of semi-literate garbage.

So, yeah, U of T is strongly research-oriented, but it's got advantages that it's south of the border counterparts lack.

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a Jew in University (#103226)

by Micky Love on Tue, 07/15/2008 - 9:42pm

Well, I lived off-campus so the college system never meant much to me. I did know a Jew in University College, but I also knew a Buddhist in Trinity and a protestant in St. Michaels.

I think you have the makings of a great TA. You have mastered the English language and can use it to communicate your thoughts. That is something I found I could not take for granted in my TAs as a UofT student.

Nothing resembles virtue more than a great crime. Saint-Just

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Twenty Years and Closing

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