Nietzsche by Another Name

By Ezra Bowen

Over the past two years, critics have been calling U.S. higher education to account for everything from inflated tuitions to deflated black-faculty representation. Now a crusty philosopher at the University of Chicago argues that the problem is more fundamental -- and more dire -- than anybody has yet imagined. In his provocative new book, The Closing of the American Mind (Simon & Schuster; $18.95), Allan Bloom, known mainly for his translations of Plato and Rousseau, makes the charge that American universities have abandoned their principles and their purpose. "These great universities," writes Bloom, "which can split the atom, find cures for the most terrible diseases, conduct surveys of whole populations and produce massive dictionaries of lost languages -- cannot generate a modest program of general education for undergraduate students."

Bloom claims that colleges have replaced liberal-arts core studies with a "democracy of disciplines" that offers "no distinctive visage to the young person," and, even worse, "no university-wide agreement about what ((a student)) should study." Faculty members, he maintains, focus on specialized fields and personal advancement instead of creating a consensus for learning. Meanwhile, students opt for career training, so that the M.B.A., writes Bloom, has become the "moral equivalent of the M.D. or law degree, meaning a way of insuring a lucrative living by the mere fact of a diploma that is not a mark of scholarly achievement."

In Bloom's analysis, the universities went seriously off course in the 1960s, when they succumbed to pressures from student activists, feminists and black radicals for more "relevance" in the curriculum. This coalition hardened into a leftish tyranny whose demands, asserts Bloom, wounded American universities as sorely as right-wing assaults damaged German higher education during Hitler's rise. He defines the U.S. movement's essence, which he calls cultural relativism, as a half-digested export version of the nihilistic Nietzschean doctrine that underlay the trashing in Germany. Such relativism, says Bloom, broke down higher education's traditional role as defender of real enlightenment against society's ephemera, leaving the universities open to the "radical subjectivity of all belief about good and evil," as well as to a primacy of self that demanded equal time for anyone's own thing. This egalitarian "education of openness," as Bloom brands it, was a reform without content, accepting everything and denying the power of reason to pursue the common good.

Bloom, 56, a dedicated teacher whose colorful lectures are popular with Chicago students, likens the humanities today to a "submerged old Atlantis" and to the "great old Paris Flea Market where, amidst masses of junk, people with a good eye found castaway treasure." He calls for a return to the reasoned insights to be gained from classical philosophy. He warns that for Americans, whose government was founded upon reason, the present "crisis in the university, the home of reason, is perhaps the profoundest crisis they face."

Some of Bloom's points place him in close accord with recent criticisms by other U.S. educators, ranging from the back-to-basics calls of conservative Secretary of Education William Bennett to the pleas for unified learning by Liberal Ernest Boyer, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The book comes with endorsements from top scholars such as Leszek Kolakowski, philosopher at Chicago and Oxford, and former Diplomat Conor Cruise O'Brien, who praise both its passion and its perceptions. And in France, Bloom has won the support of commentators like Raymond Boudon, professor of sociology at the Sorbonne. Boudon concurs with the book's message, adding that the "pessimistic diagnosis applies to Western Europe and especially to France."

Unfortunately, Bloom does not confine his critiquing to shortcomings in academe, nor does he exercise consistent care and attention to context or supporting data in adapting his freewheeling lecture technique to the ineradicable medium of print. Though he is a genial man whose avowed purpose is to spark discussion, some of the dictums that play well in the Socratic dialogues of his classrooms, when published uncontested, tend to damage the credibility of a useful book. Some sample Bloomers:

-- McCarthyism in the 1950s "had no effect whatsoever on curriculum or appointments."

-- Good black students "are victims of a stereotype, but one that has been chosen by black leadership."

-- "All that is human, all that is of concern to us, lies outside natural science."

-- "Slavery ((was)) laid to rest by the Declaration and the Constitution."

-- "The women's movement is not founded on nature."

Though faithful to absolute values of a kind, such pronouncements may not respond perfectly to Bloom's own call, repeated throughout the book, for unified scholarly dialogue aimed at defining absolute truth. Elsewhere, Bloom offers perhaps the perfect example of that dialogue when he describes Plato and Aristotle "at the very moment they were disagreeing about the nature of good . . . They were absolutely one soul as they looked at the problem." America's universities, many of them guilty as charged, may do well to heed this, the best of Bloom, if not all the rest of Bloom.

With reporting by Jack E. White/Chicago