A L S O_ T O D A Y

Historiographic revisionism
By Christopher Shea
DNA evidence shows that Jefferson fathered at least one of Sally Hemings' children, and his academic defenders are scurrying to cover their tracks

What do Jefferson and Clinton have in common (besides randyness)?
By Christopher Hitchens
Answer: They're both protected by a group of credulous historians
(11/18/98)

Comics
Keith Knight: My first midlife crisis

T A B L E_ T A L K

Humanities and social sciences graduate schools survivors tell their tales of triumph and woe in the Education area of Table Talk

R E C E N T L Y

Jane Eyre, to go
By Victoria Olsen
Internet plagiarism: Where the term papers are free and the words are misspelled
(11/13/98)

Seven Deadly Sins
By Bebe Maddux
The university's hypocritical stance against marijuana can prevent even the best of students from getting an education
(11/11/98)

Seven Deadly Sins
By Sarah Rose
The Binge Myth: What recent studies of university alcoholism won't tell you
(11/11/98)

Is the emperor of queer theory naked?
By Etelka Lehoczky
An e-mail prankster fans the flames of controversy in the inner circles of queer studies, but the anticipated war never erupts
(11/09/98)

Out of academia
By Annalee Newitz
The shame of academe: one degree, nary a profession
(11/06/98)

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A tale of two Blooms

Allan and Harold Bloom dared to buck the conformity and cowardice of the academy.

Dear Ms. Paglia,

What do you think of Allan Bloom? I have noticed that you make many of the same points in your column for Salon that Mr. Bloom made in "The Closing of the American Mind." At the very least, you and Mr. Bloom seem to share the same attitude toward the current state of American higher education. As a young academic, I am very interested in your response.

-- Matthew

Dear Matthew:

When it was published in 1987, Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind" was a surprise mammoth bestseller. The book struck a responsive chord with the mass audience, which had clearly been troubled by the leftward drift of campus politics and by the degeneration of academic standards in both primary and secondary education.

Bloom (1930-1992) was a professor of social thought at the University of Chicago and was the translator of Plato's "Republic" and of Rousseau's "Emile." As a faculty member at Cornell University in 1969, he witnessed what he regarded as the mishandling by a cowardly administration of a protest by black militants involving threats of armed violence. The bitterly tumultuous events at Cornell, which have yet to be fully studied, were pivotal in the much later emergence of the "culture wars" in the United States.

Bloom's book, with a foreward by a Chicago colleague, novelist Saul Bellow, was immediately vilified by the academic establishment, then dominated by poststructuralism and feminism -- both of which Bloom attacked for their enmity toward "Great Books." "The Closing of the American Mind," which argued that the chic nihilism of higher education would inevitably weaken American democracy, got caught up in the conservative crusades of the second Reagan administration and that of George Bush, when Secretary of Education William Bennett and Lynne Cheney, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, took to the hustings to challenge the P.C. panjandrums of the insular campuses.

The book also appeared at the zenith of the academic star system, when institutions like Duke University, trying to buy instant cachet, drove the pay scale of trendy humanities professors into the stratosphere and pushed the showy conference circuit into overdrive -- a blot on Duke's good name for which its administration should be held ethically accountable. Things began to unravel for the arrogant campus theorists in the late 1980s when Yale luminary Paul de Man was revealed to have been a Nazi apologist early in his career in Belgium. The contorted defense of de Man by his fellow poststructuralists, particularly those in the camp of Jacques Derrida (another Yale fixture), seemed to prove Bloom's charges about the hypocrisy and amorality of the campus elite.

Personally, I found "The Closing of the American Mind" a chilly and uncongenial book, since its primary animus was so fiercely directed against my 1960s generation. While I certainly agree with Bloom that students deserve a strictly organized core curriculum based on the best ever produced in art and thought, I am much more interdisciplinary and reform-minded in orientation. I honor and defend the great European tradition but also freely revise the "canon" (as when I booted out Chaucer and Milton and substituted the Marquis de Sade). I also insist that 21st century education must be systematically broadened to incorporate the history, art and religion of non-Western cultures.

As a libertarian Democrat who voted for Jesse Jackson in the 1988 presidential primary, I felt Bloom's conservatism to be somewhat dour and puritanical. And as a pop acolyte of Marshall McLuhan and Andy Warhol, I embrace mass media while Bloom disdainfully rejected them. Rock music, which Bloom singled out for attack, has been my pagan inspiration for over 40 years. From the perspective of an older generation, Bloom called Mick Jagger "weird"; but the Rolling Stones, along with major groups from the Doors to the Velvet Underground, dominated my college years (1964-68) and enormously influenced my present understanding of art and culture.

The main problem with "The Closing of the American Mind" was that it seemed caught in a time warp: By 1987, yet another generation had risen up (the melancholy, anxiously ironic latch-key kids scarred by parental divorce and craving the consoling Big Tit of P.C.); thus Bloom's quarrel with the 1960s didn't feel completely up to date. Nevertheless, his complex book will certainly endure in American letters as the soberly reasoned protest of an intellectual dissenter who was treated with outrageous disrespect by the liberal lemmings of academe.

In the early 1990s, to my vexation, European commentators sometimes misidentified me as a student of Allan Bloom -- whom they confused with my real mentor, literary critic Harold Bloom, my dissertation director in graduate school. The latter's massive new book on Shakespeare has recently inspired press queries about my connection with him. For the record: Harold Bloom was the first person to fully understand and encourage my vast project for "Sexual Personae," which as a dissertation drew on materials (notably about Shakespeare's treatment of sex roles) that I had been developing since my undergraduate years at the State University of New York at Binghamton.

I never enrolled in any of Bloom's courses at Yale, nor did I meet him until he imperiously summoned me in 1970: He had heard, via fellow students, what I was planning for my doctoral thesis, and he had also been told about my problem in finding a sponsor after my graduate-seminar teacher Richard Ellmann left Yale for Oxford University to complete his biography of Oscar Wilde. "I am the only one who can direct that dissertation, my dear!" Bloom grandly announced to me -- thus beginning one of the most fruitful professional relationships that anyone could wish for.

Bloom had not yet published "The Anxiety of Influence" (1973), which made him the leading literary critic in the world, but he had already achieved fame for his books on English and Irish poetry, which revolutionized Romantic studies. Bloom and I shared a respect for Freud, a love of great art, a drive for omnivorous learning, an instinct for epic sweep, a contempt for conformist careerism and dainty institutional etiquette and an unembarrassed openness to strong emotion and intellectual risk-taking. I preached the pop gospel to him with Warholite fervor, but at that time he shared Allan Bloom's scorn for pop.

Through the long, isolated and increasingly impoverished years when I could not get "Sexual Personae" published in whole or part, Harold Bloom's faith in the book and in my ideas was an enormous source of strength and fortitude. In today's campus climate of adolescent sexual paranoia, I wonder whether women will ever get the kind of generous, freewheeling mentoring I did from Harold Bloom. Perhaps that era is over -- gone with the feminist wind.
SALON | Nov. 18, 1998

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