FROM THE EDITOR IN CHIEF

Remembering Allan Bloom

Herbert London

I first met Allan Bloom after the publication and startling success of The Closing of the American Mind. His candor was both amusing and disarming. He said that the first time he called the office of his publisher, Simon and Schuster, the secretary inquired, "Allan who?" When his book made the bestseller list, every time he called he was immediately connected with a senior editor. When the book reached number one, the president of the company answered his calls. After it remained at the top for several months, the chairman of the parent company, Gulf and Western, called him. When the book finally fell from the bestseller list Allan had occasion to call the company only to be connected with the secretary he spoke to originally. After listening to his message, she asked, "Allan who?" Allan was always entertaining. At several social events we both attended, he was the center of attention. Like Paul Heinreid in a scene with Bette Davis, he would drag on his cigarette before delivering his epigrammatic punch line. It was hard for me to believe that this gifted storyteller could become the b~te noire of academic circles. With the publication of The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students, Bloom became the scholar university officials loved to hate. He's an "elitist," said one president of a major eastern university. That fatuous charge fails to distinguish democratic elitism from antidemocratic elitism. Rigorous stand- ards of the kind advocated by Bloom enable newcomers to achieve success by work that benefits all of society, whereas lack of standards permits existing elites to entrench, securing privileges no longer earned. The latter readily adopt the rhetoric of radical egalitarianism, which disguises their true motives, even from themselves. Whenever a commencement address derided Bloom's critique of higher education, in what I called Bloom-bashing, I found myself marveling at the extent to which radical egalitarianism has insinuated itself into higher education. Although Bloom's book was embraced by conservatives, he was uncomfort- able with that political label. He was a scholar whose translations of and

In addition to being editor in chief ofAcadem/c Quest/0m and chairman of the National Assodation of Scholars, Herbert London is John M. Olin University Professor of Humanities at New York University, New York, NY 10003. From the Editor's Desk 11

commentary on Plato's Republ/c and Rousseau's t~mile have had enormous influence. He was broadly cultured and entirely at ease not only with the philosophical classics but Mozart's symphonies and Shakespeare's plays and sonnets. Most of all, he was an inspiring teacher. He was not immersed in the world of politics. Perhaps that explains why he was surprised by the vitriol poured on his work. Bloom answered his cridcs with an essay addressing their concerns, but remained baffled by his book's commercial success and the generally negative academic reviews it received. On one occasion, he asked me to speculate on the reason for the book's success. I argued that many middle-class parents spend $25,000 a year only to hear their children speak in a form of psychobab- ble, describe them as hopeless pawns of bourgeois culture, and denounce this democratic polity. "It is therefore not surprising that they would invest $20 in your book to discover why they are wasting $25,000." Bloom looked at me with a wry smile and simply nodded approvingly. When I saw Allan at a conference in Washington a few years ago, he thanked me for my defense of his thesis. I noted then, as I have since, that his book was one of the most important written in the past two decades. It set the stage for the parodies of political correctness that appeared later and made legiti- mate an examination of the radical sensibility now reigning on American campuses. There have been notable books written on higher education in the past few years, including those by Peter Shaw, Dinesh D'Souza, Charles Sykes, and Roger Kimball. These authors and all the others who have written about higher education work in the shadow cast by Allan Bloom and his extraordi- nary book. Until the university changes its direction, The Closing of the American Mind will stand as the most powerful excursion into the byways of the modern university. Allan Bloom died last fall. He set the standard by which the university will be measured. Anyone who talks seriously about higher education today cannot ignore his comments. He inspired, he challenged, and he attacked. He was our Socrates on a journey from Cornell to Chicago, from anonymity to fame and back again, from the halls of ivy to the caverns of publishing. He jolted the academy out of complacency, and for that alone he will be remem- bered and sorely missed.