Even The New York Times has made a bow to this being the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. My own take on Bloom’s anniversary (“Closing, Still Open“) comes from a Princeton University conference panel reconsidering Bloom, and you can see that panel on video. Better yet, this link takes you to the entire conference on “The Free Society: Foundations and Challenges.” The conference was jointly sponsored by Princeton’s James Madison Program and by the University of Nebraska’s Association for the Study of Free Institutions.

There’s lots to see here, so I can only single out a couple of things. I thought Matthew Frank (of NRO’s “Bench Memos”) gave a particularly powerful talk for the panel on “Security, Liberty, and Terror.” (Frank is the third speaker on that panel.) You may or may not be able to tell from the video, but the audience was electrified by the fifth speaker on that same panel, John Lenczowski. (Lenczowski and his Institute of World Politics do very important work in the War on Terror, and prospective grad students ought to check it out.)

In the Bloom panel, I’ve already mentioned Peter Lawler’s very smart take on Bloom. The third speaker on the panel, Alan Levine, was a student of Bloom’s and his talk is organized around stories about Bloom the man. Near the end of the question period, I was challenged by the very smart, and decidedly left-leaning, Benjamin Barber. We clashed a bit, although politely. Barber was very much the gadfly at this conference, and there were many such clashes during various question periods. Barber holds up his end well, and the conference was better for having him there.