Higher Education. Then, Dinesh D’Souza, a former editor of The Dartmouth Review and a research fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, offered Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus.
Somewhere in the middle came another book by Bloom, entitled Giants and Dwarfs: Essays 1960-1990; a book by founder and director of the Institute for Philosophical Advancement, Mortimer Adler, who wrote Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind; and then a book by Martin Anderson, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, entitled Impostors in the Temple: American Intellectuals are Destroying Our Universities and Cheating Our Students of Their Future. There was even Charles Murray, author of Losing Ground and In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government, who also happened at the time to be a Bradley Fellow at the libertarian Manhattan Institute and a researcher with the American Enterprise Institute and who, with Richard Hurrnstein, wrote a controversial book involving IQ and meritocratic-based systems of higher education and politics titled The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.39
Yet just writing about such political positions
was not enough. The traditionalist camp
thought it necessary to transcend the limitation of their ideas and their discussion by offering people a political action committee – the National Association of Scholars (NAS).
Formed, according to its literature, in defense of
traditional academic practices and disciplines and because of a deep concern “about the widening currency within the academy of perspectives that reflexively denigrate the values and institutions of our society” which ultimately undermines the “basis for coherent scholarly dialogue,” this organization revealed itself to be nothing more than a political
organization with strong links to the Madison Center for Education Affairs, which, as noted by David Beers, was first started by the neo- conservative Irving Kristol and former treasury secretary William Simon and founded “by William Bennett and Allan Bloom.”40 Not content with the slow pace of scholarly work and recognition, the NAS raised money and offered research centers, programs, networks, speakers’ bureaus, journals, newsletters, faculty and executive search services, and a university credentialing program – all designed to protect and enlarge the traditionalists’ turf and stature.
The distinguishing factor in each of these respective works and of the NAS activities in general was not so much an emphasis on ideas, but on the processes involved with the production, analysis, and ultimately implementation of ideas. Allan Bloom presented, for example, a brilliant analysis of how Germanic thought and systems of education contributed to the demise of higher education in The Closing of the American Mind, but then proceeded to introduce as a solution an elite cadre of highly qualified individuals (read Bloom, Fukuyama, Bennett, et. al.) ruling
America as philosopher kings, a solution that ends up standing counter to America’s entire tradition of democratic rule.
It might have been worrisome enough if such
practices constituted the bulk of the
Despite the rhetoric of advocates and their attempt to ground arguments in terms of science, individualism is not going to end. Individuals are, at their core, thinking beings who use their reason to initiate speech and action.
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