Word: blooms
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Such numbers provide reassuring proof that not all Harvard students are the self-centered, pre-professional yuppies Allan Bloom and William J. Bennett would like us to think. By funding 51 public service programs, PBH ensures that undergraduates will not isolate themselves behind the Yard's ivy walls but instead spread Harvard's resources in the community. The 94-year-old organization plays an important role in the lives of the underprivileged in Boston and Cambridge--operating programs such as summer camps, tutoring and free legal help for the poor...
Higher education officials say the debate over education traditionally helped Democrats because it centered around expanding educational opportunity for all students and on levels of federal financial assistance necessary to do so. However, rising college costs and recent sweeping attacks from such critics as Allan Bloom on the quality and content of college teaching have refocused the debate more along lines that Republicans prefer, on issues such as quality and "accountability...
...Bloom obviously is on target with much of his criticism. At the very least, he certainly has struck a resonant chord among "the many" who have purchased his book. Yet his tenuous relationship with democracy is perhaps best captured in his failure to understand the importance of the democratizing role played by universities, especially the Ivies, in postwar American society...
...Bloom is rightly impatient with those who are ever-ready to rail against elitism in the university. Universities are eliti institutions, at least insofar as they operate on the meritocratic principle. What needs to be guarded against in the great universities is a more insidiousism, aristocratism. Like it or not, universities are at some level credential factories. They serve as a springboard for middle and lower-class individuals not only to live with and befriend those of the privileged classes--which is at least as important for the sake of the latter--but also to join them, eventually, in running...
...university can be a democratizing minor leagues for American society, it is serving a great and noble social purpose. Allan Bloom ignores this idea of the university because it only makes sense in the realm of worldly power and relationships that he abjures. Like his hero Socrates, the city that could claim his allegiance exists only in speeches, not anywhere on earth...