Interview with Alan Bloom: A Most Uncommon Scold:

A professor of political philosophy at the University of Chicago, Bloom unleashed a storm of criticism last year with his book, The Closing of the American Mind, an acidic assault on the way the U.S. educates its young people and on the decline of intellectuality in national life. Liberal academics, defending the trend toward de-emphasis of the classics, responded that Bloom’s prescriptions are unsuited to a society as heterogeneous as America’s. The book has sold 800,000 copies and has just been issued in paperback. TIME senior correspondent William McWhirter spent four hours with Bloom, 58, surrounded by classic texts and European oil paintings in his apartment overlooking the campus.

Q. Benjamin Barber of Rutgers University calls your book “one of the most profoundly antidemocratic books ever written for a popular audience.” What do you say?

A. All the comments I made about the closing of the American mind have been proved — in spades — not by the negative reviews but by the violence and passion of the reaction. I’m an elitist, I’m a sexist — you know, all the great political terms. You only had to wait for a few months after the book’s success for such “intellectuals” to come out.

We’re going through a very intense period in the American university today. It is in many ways more profound and revolutionary than the campus upheavals of the 1960s. It may not be as noticeable to the outside world because there has been less resistance. But without such resistance, it is as if the foundations are collapsing.

You hear all the talk that this is a very large and diversified country. But precisely because we are diverse, we have to remind ourselves what we have in common all the time — what is America, what is a human being — in order that we not just break down into a set of atoms that cannot cohere to a greater whole. That was always the characteristic of the immigrants, who understood that. They became Americans not by growing up in old roots or maintaining ethnic diversity or accepting American myths but by learning certain common – principles. I’m a son of such immigrants, a Jewish boy, but one who could be raised in Indianapolis, the American Midwest.

My notion of education is precisely that in the U.S. we have this lengthy, old tradition. You read the Federalist papers and you are already with Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke.

Q. Can you really fault the universities?

A. I do partly blame the universities. One of the reasons for students’ not reading seriously is their belief that they can’t learn important things from books. They believe books are just ideologies, mythologies or political tools of different parties. If the peaks of learning offered some shining goal in the distance, it would be very attractive to an awful lot of people — people with very diverse backgrounds. The golden thread of all education is in the first questions: How should I live? What’s the good life? What can I hope for? What must I do? What would be the terrible consequences if we knew the truth?

Q. So it is preferable for society to have some elites?

A. One of the most important things to human beings is the capacity to recognize rank order, or decent people, or moral people, or intelligent and wiser people. Without those kinds of elites, we don’t have leaders. This kind of greatness inspiring one to human perfection is the central perspective of education. If I were all that man is, it would be very boring to be man . . .

Q. Your scathing depictions of the influence of blacks and women’s groups on campus place them well outside your definition of “natural elites.” You contend, for example, that “the latest enemy of the vitality of classic texts is feminism. In its view, all literature of today is deemed to be sexist. The muses never sang to the poets about liberated women.” You disdain affirmative action as having created “this little black empire” and perpetuating something of an institutional fraud in the form of “permanent quotas, financial preference, racial hiring of faculty and difficulty in giving blacks failing marks.” Aren’t you yourself treading close to the line of sexism and racism?

A. The two groups are, of course, quite different in their programs and goals, even though there is now an alliance between them that favors getting rid of the Western thought that enslaved both. The main distinction is that black aims generally do not challenge the basic curriculum, but radical feminism is arguing that there has been an entire misinterpretation or an evil % interpretation throughout history that has led to women’s enslavement. There is now a demand for the suppression of all such literature, and that goes directly to the heart of the curriculum.

Radical feminism tends to be present in the universities more than within the general society. That’s one of the things people don’t realize. You have to read their literature, which regards the natural relation between man and woman as only an invention of males. There is a whole language of the phallocentric society. There is a mystique around all the related issues, requiring that men have to change. This is an agenda, and it has entered the university as a huge theoretical network. It is overwhelming in its power and its very angry passions. The radical feminist argues that such differences are not capable of being mediated because all intellectual life is power. That is a direct attack on the premise of universities as a common ground of reason on which people can meet.

These kinds of ideology mean that there are no possibilities for a man to transcend himself: there are things that only women can understand. Only blacks can teach black civilization. There is a tremendous bombshell here because the whole principles of science and modern democracy suppose that we are a common humanity.

In the absence of such principles, everything becomes a power struggle. There is now a demand for the study of non-Western civilization, nonmale, nonwhite. Aristotle is seen only as a white Western male. So is Karl Marx. My book was written by a white, Western male, which means, in this kind of shorthand, there must be something wrong with it. One knows that the charge of sexism exists, and if you’re called a sexist, it’s a kind of crime. It’s like the old days in the 1950s, when people had to be careful about things that very powerful critics could call Communist. Or, in earlier days, atheist. The universities, not wishing to be separated from the sense of injustice done to women and blacks, are simply giving way and largely accepting such arguments.

Q. As a teacher, how do you cope with such conflicts in your own classroom?

A. I find that a lot of students are just staying away. Perhaps because they have been led to distrust the value of humanities, black students are taking fewer theoretical courses, while many are living within their own separate worlds on campus. But the main problem is in the new mentality. It’s harder and harder to get students interested. They would rather talk about “rights” than reflect on the purpose of life itself. Students would rather just be angry. This is not an attitude with which one can have a serious discussion. This is a new kind of thought control.

Q. It often seems that your own disregard and anger toward these dissidents in your midst may be every bit as great as the hostility that you say exists toward your philosophy and teaching. Is your own approach to teaching within a hierarchy of principles seen as equally rigid and uncompromising?

A. The movements, in their radical forms, argue that there isn’t a common ground and therefore that the conflict is nonnegotiable. I’m open to serious argumentation. I believe that students who know me well have never thought that I have insisted on anything other than that these books must be taken seriously and that there have to be serious interpretations and confrontations with the philosophers. Without that, the discussion cannot proceed. There is no good reason to read Plato if you know beforehand that he is wrong. Very few great thinkers are likely to reflect exactly what modern or contemporary American factions want to think.

Q. In a sense, you wrote a book for parents, not deans.

A. I have a student going through thousands of reviews for me. He says the most stupid ones are from university administrators. Some of them gave great evidence of not even having read the book.

There’s no question I’ve touched a popular vein. Americans really do believe in the idea of education. Unlike the class systems in Europe, America’s educational systems were the means for salvation, not only in making money but in allowing one to become a fully educated human being. That was an ideal with parents. Universities in general have nothing but contempt for that.

Q. One of your critics describes you as the leader of a “new cult of educational fundamentalism.”

A. The issue is not about moral absolutes, but whether the pursuit of truth is possible at all. If we are not understood as believing in everything equally, we are depicted as believing in only one thing absolutely. There is no longer room for the theoretical middle ground, where one spends one’s life discussion. We can’t avoid thinking. The thoughtless are always going to be the prisoners of other people’s thoughts. American intellectual life has given us an easy way to believe anything we want.

Q. What about your own beliefs?

A. I’m not going to go into personal confessions. I was raised as a Jew. I read the Bible. I was taught the Ten Commandments and other laws. These were demands made of me, and I questioned them. I still question them, all the time, in every book I read. Whether there is or is not a God is still among the most critical questions in life. But I’m not a social reformer. I’m not a founder of movements.

Q. What would you propose instead for the American university? Is there an equivalent ideal of Bloom’s campus, and what kinds of students and faculty might be found there?

A. The universities are practically all that we have left of our intellectual life, so you have to fit in the kinds of things that frequently happen elsewhere, in Europe. In a way, we stake everything on the universities.

The important thing is to figure out in some measure what is in the hearts of students. If they are preoccupied by war, then read books about war. The kinds of programs that are the best for me bring together the various disciplines. You would hear what the scientist has to argue with the philosopher and the poet about the place of modern science against philosophy, against religion. These would be the places where the physicists have to think about Kant and Hegel, not just Einstein; where the social scientists consider what is a good society as well as polls and survey results; where a political scientist asks whether he can justify giving advice to tyrants as well as democrats.

Q. Many of your viewpoints still seem profoundly affected by the events of 1969, which you describe as “the guns of Cornell,” when armed weapons were brought onto the campus. You evoke these very strong images as if they were the last days of Pompeii for American higher education. How much influence did this experience have on you and your decision to write the book?

A. Misinterpretations and criticisms of the book have said that I was traumatized by those years, that I am still in some kind of state of rage. In fact, I felt a certain kind of release when these very powerful and intense things happened. It was like Thucydides looking at the decline of Athens. I had had these expectations. I didn’t believe the professors who said they stood for freedom of speech. I thought their faith in the classic curriculum had lost its vitality. It wasn’t right wing vs. left wing. It was clearly right vs. wrong in the protection of free speech.

% Q. Why do you believe that Cornell was so vulnerable?

A. Cornell had become the central place where black power entered the universities for the first time. There was a weak president eager to be on the good side of a hot new thing, admitting great numbers of black students, no matter what their preparation. Of course, it was very hard on those kids. It was much harder to defend institutions that people saw as bourgeois. People just didn’t feel good about them. It was more important to be engaged and committed. At places like Cornell, people just didn’t believe in very much any longer. Free discussion was no longer the primary function of the university. Only if blacks and women, Latinos and so on used force were they to have a place in the curriculum. Rationalization became reason.

Q. You say you were labeled a fascist, you resigned from Cornell in protest and were unable to find a job within the U.S. academic community for a long time. If you were not traumatized by these experiences, how did they affect your views on education?

A. I grew up believing in universities as places where everybody, particularly minorities, could be free of the old impediments and everyone had access to all these wonderful things. But I have since come to regard universities as much less reliable allies. My critics see extreme moral indignation. I have much more contempt for the disproportionately great pretensions and claims about their courage and beliefs than any real anger. But I didn’t really write the book to settle accounts. My passion comes out of the sense of what’s important and the freedom that comes through study and the concern for young persons who are being deprived of all standards outside themselves. But the book is not the brooding account of someone’s anger. It’s really the memoir of a very happy lifetime.