A society in which citizens believe that truth is relative, or one with a significant number of citizens who deny that truth can be known and taught, will be susceptible to greater forces that use power to achieve their own goals. For that reason, Bloom writes with what can only be called frustration that “there is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.”

In the late 1960s, revolutionary protests were directed at the conduct of the war in Vietnam and in advocacy of a “Civil Rights” movement. Leftist activists, assessing how best to capitalize on this unrest, concluded that revolution in the United States would not arise from America’s working class and began to focus on American colleges and universities.

When this occurred, the American system of higher education had changed significantly from its early days when colleges served to educate the clergy, began to focus on education for employment and with increasing influence of the national government had become a system of training for massive numbers of “students” who no longer sought knowledge in the seven liberal arts that formed the basis of a classical education. With the appeal of modern ideologies to high-school and college teachers, American higher education was used to change traditional culture and weaponize “students” for political action. American higher education became what James Piereson called a “Left University.”

As early as the Morrill Act of 1862, a system of Land Grant universities was founded to foster the agricultural sciences and which, in time, became a system of state, i.e. “public,” universities.[1] After the American Civil War which challenged the Protestant Christian faith of the American people, American colleges and universities began to break away from their religious moorings and higher education underwent a process of secularization.

Then, the 1944 “GI Bill” flooded American colleges with returning GIs and, finally, the Higher Education Act of 1965 established a federal student loan program that was designed to give every American the opportunity of a college “education,” but has had the unintended consequence of driving the cost of a college education to levels that most Americans cannot afford.

All Americans were given the opportunity to earn a college degree, but these large numbers of ‘students’ entering college tested the limits of a system of higher education that had never accommodated enormous numbers of student enrollments. Many had not mastered basic subjects such as English grammar and composition and the knowledge of arithmetic, algebra, and geometry of many more required remedial training.

By the mid-1960s, there was much to dissatisfy students, especially at large “mega universities,” where students were crowded into large lecture halls and seldom met with college faculty members. Conditions were ripe for an explosion, and the University of California-Berkeley led an initial uprising against speech restrictions placed on student activists. The “Free Speech” movement at Berkeley elided into a national, college-based movement against the war in Vietnam. Thus began a revolution in higher education perpetrated by student protestors.

Faced with rioting students, college administrators across the nation capitulated and granted student demands for removal of Core Curricula of required courses, as well as foreign language requirements. Procedures were established for review of faculty by students, and students were granted representation on college Boards of Trustees. The dumbing-down of higher education in America had begun. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, calls for multicultural, gender, and African-American studies completed the decline of courses focused on Western civilization.

In 1968, Allan Bloom, then a professor of Government at Cornell University, was witness to these events as they occurred across the nation, and specifically at Cornell University, where complicit administrators and student radicals brought Cornell to its knees. In his 1987 classic, The Closing of the American Mind, Bloom detailed these developments and diagnosed their ramifications. A former colleague of mine who taught at a major state university describes how the environment for scholarly discourse at his university changed over the period in time that Bloom examines in The Closing of the American Mind.

When I first joined the faculty there was a core curriculum and there was a commitment to providing a liberal arts education. That is, there was recognition that there are skills and training (arts) needed by free (liberal) and responsible citizens in order to remain free. Faculty from different political views agreed that there was a tradition that had to be understood and there were thinking, reading and writing skills that had to be acquired. Of course, that common purpose has completely disappeared. There is no effort to coordinate course offerings to provide any of the arts required to be free. There is also little or no intellectual engagement among the faculty. When I first arrived there was a sizable group from several fields and political perspectives that met regularly to discuss projects we were working on. These were not ideological harangues but serious intellectual engagement with topics of common interest–and the best criticism usually came from someone who was on the opposite side of the political aisle.   Now, there are only clashes over ideological code words and other nonsense.

The history of those “days of rage” at Cornell has been published by historian Dr. Tevi Troy in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.[2] In an essay titled, “Cornell’s Straight Flush,” Dr. Troy recounts in detail what happened at Cornell. His account is a good way to come to terms with Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind.

Dr. Troy’s story begins when James A Perkins became the seventh President of Cornell University in 1963. Perkins had been chairman of the Board of the Negro College Fund and secured a quarter of a million dollar grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to increase the number of African-American students at Cornell. At the time, Cornell’s enrollment was swelled by the post-World War II “baby boom” to 14,000 students.

Perkins’ actions increased the number of African-American students to 250. During the 1960s and 1970s, racial sensitivity was the hallmark of university professors and administrators. And the U.S. government’s “affirmative action” policies facilitated the college education of African Americans. At Cornell, some black students felt alienated from the culture of white students and began to take actions that thrust their feelings of alienation on the entire Cornell community.

In 1968 black students attempted to force the firing of a visiting professor of economics who had criticized economic development programs of some African countries. His class was disrupted. When he complained to the Chairman of his Department, his Chairman praised the disruptors for their activism.

That established the principle that use of force for political ends at Cornell would not be punished, but would be approved by Liberal faculty and Cornell’s Administrators. Black conservative economist and former U.S. Marine, Thomas Sowell, in his first academic position teaching economics at Cornell, tried to eject a disruptive black student from his class, and was not supported by his Chairman. Mr. Sowell saw the writing on the wall and resigned his academic position. Thirty years later, Mr. Sowell wrote in The Weekly Standard that these students were “hoodlums” with “serious academic problems [and] admitted under lower academic standards, and noted “it so happens that the pervasive racism that black students supposedly encountered at every turn on campus and in town was not apparent to me during the four years that I taught at Cornell and lived in Ithaca.” [3]

Following Allan Bloom, here are the six reasons American higher education corrupts the youth:

1. Replacing core curricula with gender, African-American or “Global” studies ignores where we came from, who we are, and how we should act as citizens of the West.
2. When that basis is removed from higher education, the virus of moral relativism cannot be confronted by scholarship leading to discovery of truth because only “opinion” has value.
3. If there is no “Truth” that can be discovered, what is left for us to search for but self-interest?
4. If there is no “Common Good,” then to what can we appeal in the face of the demands of the powerful?
5. If the appetites of the young are aroused by Rock, Rap, and other musical trends, how can we instruct them about virtue?
6. If a democratic regime values equality of condition, what will become of the equal protection of the law or any of the limits placed on the power of the state by a philosophy of limited government enshrined in the Constitution of the United States?

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