The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students

In the final section of the book, Bloom addresses the roles of the intellectual and the university in society. Bloom begins by remembering the grand impression that the University of Chicago made upon him as a teen, inspiring a noble vision of what constitutes a university. His undergraduate years were a transformative experience, dictating the course of his life in academia. In the university he recognized a select community of individuals dedicated to a common good, the pursuit of truth and the theoretical life of reason—a perception that proved naïve and idealistic in hindsight but partially true and continually inspiring. The beauties of this intellectual life, he laments, have been under persistent attack by unworthy economic and psychological motives, obscuring the special value and purpose of the university today.

The university has a singular and often paradoxical function within democratic society. As an institution dedicated to reason, the principle upon which liberal democracy is based, it preserves and protects the pure pursuit of knowledge from the prejudices endemic to egalitarian regimes. Tocqueville observed that the great danger in democracy is the tyranny of public opinion. The university’s role is therefore corrective: It counters the democratic bias for the present and ephemeral by preserving the classics and balances democracy’s anti-elitist tendencies by emphasizing the heroic and the noble.