>You may recall concern last semester over legislation introduced in 
>support of Horowitz's "Academic Bill of Rights" for students. It did not 
>get out of the Education Committee, I believe, and I hope our new UT 
>lobbyist in Nashville keeps a watch on this development. The recent 
>article below in the New York Times Review of Books (September 4, 2005) 
>provides an historical context and perhaps caution, depending on your politics:
>
>
>
>Allan Bloom and the Conservative Mind
>
>
>
>By JIM SLEEPER
>
>CONSERVATIVES in 1987 may still have been basking in Ronald Reagan's 
>''morning in America,'' but nothing prepared their movement, or the 
>academic and publishing worlds, for the wildfire success of Allan Bloom's 
>"Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy 
>and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students."Allan Bloom's ''Closing of 
>the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and 
>Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students.'' Amid a furor recalling that 
>over William F. Buckley Jr.'s ''God and Man at Yale'' in 1951, Bloom 
>indicted liberal academics for betraying liberal education. His attack 
>sold more than a million copies.
>
>Who on an American campus could ignore Bloom's accounts of Cornell faculty 
>groveling before black-power student poseurs, or his sketches of 
>politically correct administrator-mandarins and ditzy pomo professors? 
>What dedicated teacher could dismiss his self-described ''meditation on 
>the state of our souls, particularly those of the young, and their 
>education''? Some thoughtful liberals found themselves reading ''The 
>Closing'' under their bedcovers with flashlights, unable either to endorse 
>or repudiate it but sensing that some reckoning was due. Conservatives 
>championed Bloom then, of course, and they invoke him still. Roger 
>Kimball, the managing editor of the conservative New Criterion, writes in 
>an article, ''Retaking the University: A Battle Plan'': ''Traditionally, a 
>liberal arts education involved both character formation and learning . . 
>. to produce men and women who (as Allan Bloom put it) had reflected 
>thoughtfully on the question 'What is man?' '' Kimball charges that the 
>''adversary culture of the intellectuals'' has taken over universities, an 
>accusation echoed across a growing web of conservative campus activists, 
>including Daniel Pipes's Campus Watch, which tracks the utterances of 
>leftist professors on the Middle East; the Collegiate Network, which 
>trains combative conservative student journalists; the Intercollegiate 
>Studies Institute of conservative campus organizations; and David 
>Horowitz's Center for the Study of Popular Culture, whose ''Academic Bill 
>of Rights'' -- which would subject professors to student grievances 
>against political discrimination -- is now before several state legislatures.
>
>But everyone seems to have missed the elephant in the room: Bloom's 
>ostensibly conservative meditation in fact anticipated and repudiated 
>almost every political, religious and economic premise of Kimball's and 
>Horowitz's movement. Conservatives who reread Bloom today are in for a 
>big, perhaps instructive, surprise.
>
>Far from being a conservative ideologue, Bloom, a University of Chicago 
>professor of political philosophy who died in 1992, was an eccentric 
>interpreter of Enlightenment thought who led an Epicurean, quietly gay 
>life. He had to be prodded to write his best-selling book by his friend 
>Saul Bellow, whose novel "Ravelstein" is a wry tribute to Bloom. Far more 
>than liberal speech codes and diversity regimens, the bêtes noires of the 
>intellectual right, darkened Bloom's horizons: He also mistrusted 
>modernity, capitalism and even democracy so deeply that he believed the 
>university's culture must be adversarial (or at least subtly subversive) 
>before America's market society, with its vulgar blandishments, religious 
>enthusiasms and populist incursions.
>
>''The semitheoretical attacks of right and left on the university and its 
>knowledge, the increased demands made on it by society, the enormous 
>expansion of higher education,'' Bloom wrote, ''have combined to obscure'' 
>the universities' mission ''to maintain the permanent questions front and 
>center'' and ''to provide a publicly respectable place . . . for scholars 
>and students to be unhindered in their use of reason.''
>
>Some conservatives may insist they are saying exactly that. But Bloom 
>warned that liberal education is threatened as well by ''proponents of the 
>free market,'' whose promise of social well-being ''no longer compels 
>belief,'' and by religious belief that, ''contrary to containing 
>capitalism's propensities, as Tocqueville thought it should, is now 
>intended to encourage them.''
>
>Bloom argued that our capitalist economy and liberal-democratic order turn 
>civic virtue to mercenary ends. To cultivate ''the use of reason beyond 
>the calculation of self-interest,'' he contended, ''it is necessary that 
>there be an unpopular institution in our midst that . . . resists our 
>powerful urges and temptations.'' That unpopular institution was the 
>university. Surveying with nuanced regret what he saw as the failures of 
>religion and of the Enlightenment (whose rationalism had collapsed into 
>fascism or Communism), he hoped to rescue a classical Greek pedagogical 
>tradition that wove eros and intellect into the love of knowing and the 
>love of natural virtues.
>
>Conservatives who reread Bloom will also discover that the 60's left 
>reminded him of the right-wing hordes his mentor Leo Strauss had 
>encountered in Europe in the 30's: ''The fact that in Germany the politics 
>were of the right and in the United States of the left should not mislead 
>us. In both places the universities gave way under the pressure of mass 
>movements'' whose participants, full of animal spirits and spiritual 
>animus, undertook ''the dismantling of the structure of rational 
>inquiry.'' Yet Kimball and Horowitz themselves are trying to rouse a mass 
>movement of alumni, the public and legislatures to ''take back'' the 
>university.
>
>''Many parents are alarmed, rightly so, at the spectacle of their 
>children'' coming back from college and jettisoning ''every moral, 
>religious, social and political scruple that they had been brought up to 
>believe,'' Kimball cries. But Bloom wanted reason to overturn familial and 
>religious commitments, if necessary, to forge deeper attachments to truth 
>and civic-republican virtue. Try to imagine Bloom's seconding Kimball's 
>praise for ''the rise of conservative talk radio, the popularity of Fox 
>News . . . and the spread of interest in the Internet with its many 
>right-of-center populist Web logs'' as ''heartening signs'' that 
>conservatives are becoming ''a widespread counter to the counterculture'' 
>of universities.
>
>Similarly, Horowitz's Academic Bill of Rights would force professors to 
>teach scholarly work opposed to their own. Most already do that, but it's 
>hard to imagine that Horowitz, or his conservative allies, want Milton 
>Friedmanite free-marketeers to be required to tell their packed economics 
>classes about Daniel Bell's claim, anticipating Bloom, that our economy 
>had led to ''corporate oligopoly, and, in the pursuit of private wants, a 
>hedonism that is destructive of social needs.''
>
>Bloom wanted liberal education to resist both ''whatever is most 
>powerful'' and the ''worship of vulgar success.'' True openness, he said, 
>''means closedness to all the charms that make us comfortable with the 
>present.'' He disdained professors who strive to become counselors to the 
>king and forget that ''the intellectual, who attempts to influence . . . 
>ends up in the power of the would-be influenced.'' And he lamented the 
>emergence of new academic departments like mass communications and 
>business management, which ''wandered in recently to perform some job that 
>was demanded of the university.'' A few years ago, a great university's 
>government department (not mine) nearly abolished its foreign-language 
>requirement for Ph.D. candidates because ''rational choice'' whiz kids 
>were touting a great new, universal language -- computer English. An 
>eminent conservative scholar and one of his formidable leftist colleagues 
>rolled their eyes empathetically and voted together against the initiative.
>
>Horowitz and other conservative activists know very well that Bloom didn't 
>reduce what he saw as liberal education's crisis to a contest of left 
>versus right: ''I don't want the universities to be conservative,'' 
>Horowitz himself protested recently to The Chronicle of Higher Education. 
>''I want them to be academic, scholarly.'' The magazine reported, however, 
>that his small board of directors included John O'Neill of Swift Boat 
>Veterans for Truth. That can't be kind of the truth Allan Bloom had in mind.
>
>Jim Sleeper, a lecturer in political science at Yale, is the author of 
>''The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New 
>York'' and ''Liberal Racism.''