Word: bloom
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Allan What? and E.D. Who? Educators are bemused, booksellers astonished. No wonder. Two professor-authors, Allan Bloom of the University of Chicago and E.D. Hirsch Jr. of the University of Virginia, are leaders on the best-seller lists, even though their tomes would not seem the stuff of mass browsing in the summer...
...there they are. Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, with the daunting subtitle How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students, has 250,000 copies in print and tops the New York Times nonfiction list, where it has been for 15 straight weeks. It is also No. 1 in Chicago, Los Angeles and Boston. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy ranks No. 3 after ten weeks on the Times list, with 155,000 books issued...
...Bloom, 56, a genial philosopher, professes himself to be "absolutely astounded" at the impact of a work that he thought might have 5,000 or 6,000 buyers, "75% of whom I know." But somehow Bloom's gloomy tract (Simon & Schuster; $18.95) and Hirsch's book as well (Houghton Mifflin; $16.95) seem to be full of things a lot of people care about. Bloom's principal message: American universities, capitulating to 1960s activists, abandoned sound liberal arts teaching for trendy, "relevant" studies in which all ideas have equal value. Bloom deplores this surrender to "cultural relativism," which he considers...
While praise in academe has hardly been unanimous for Bloom and Hirsch, the two have got raves from some powerful and diverse educators. Secretary of Education William Bennett, a staunch conservative who has beaten the Western drum while beating up on the colleges for the same perceived derelictions as Bloom denounced, calls the Chicago philosopher's work a "brilliant book, a phenomenon" that "points out where higher education has gone wrong and what we need to fix it." Bennett says, "Too many schools ignore the great minds and instead try to teach kids how to make a living...
...Honig, California's superintendent of public instruction, concurs. "We need to have that cultural understanding," he says. "There should be agreement -- whether in Portland, Ore., or Portland, Me. -- that you're going to learn something about freedom and justice." And John Silber, iconoclastic president of Boston University, declares that "Bloom and Hirsch are on the best-seller list because people around the country are just starving for this...