Allan Bloom
1930-1993 Professor

Prophet of Doom.

Each era has its prophets of doom, critics who diagnose the ills of their society in apocalyptic terms. During the 1980s Allan Bloom emerged from academic obscurity to become America's best-known advocate of a return to a classical model of higher education, a back-to-the-basics approach that saw many of the changes that had occurred in the universities since the 1960s as misguided. His critique, The Closing of the Ameri can Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (1987), was a surprise best-seller that generated a storm of controversy about such issues as cultural literacy and political correctness.

Scholarly Career.

No one could have been more surprised by the success of the book than Bloom himself. His previous publications had been translations of works by Plato and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and...