Angry and Stupid

In 1965 Allan Bloom surveyed the emerging generation of American students and was pleased. “These students,” he wrote, “are a kind of democratic version of an aristocracy. The unbroken prosperity of the last twenty years gives them the confidence that they can always make a living. So they are ready to undertake any career or adventure if it can be made to appear serious. The ties of tradition, family, and financial responsibility are weak. … A look at this special group tends to favor a hopeful prognosis for the country’s moral and intellectual health.”

Well, to err is human. To publish a 392-page apology is divine. As a product of the university system largely molded by the Sixties, I couldn’t read The Closing of the American Mind and escape unscathed. At the University of Pennsylvania, my alma mater, college administrators schizophrenically admonished us to consider ourselves America’s elite, while making leveling egalitarianism the university’s etiquette. The result, in Bloom’s thumbnail sketch of me and my cohort, is: “Today’s select students know so much less, are so much more cut off from the tradition, are so much slacker intellectually, that they make their predecessors look like prodigies of culture.”

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Henry Klingeman

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In 1965 Allan Bloom surveyed the emerging generation of American students and was pleased. “These students,” he wrote, “are a kind of democratic version of an aristocracy. The unbroken prosperity of the last twenty years gives them the confidence that they can always make a living. So they are ready to undertake any career or adventure if it can be made to appear serious. The ties of tradition, family, and financial responsibility are weak. … A look at this special group tends to favor a hopeful prognosis for the country’s moral and intellectual health.”

Well, to err is human. To publish a 392-page apology is divine. As a product of the university system largely molded by the Sixties, I couldn’t read The Closing of the American Mind and escape unscathed. At the University of Pennsylvania, my alma mater, college administrators schizophrenically admonished us to consider ourselves America’s elite, while making leveling egalitarianism the university’s etiquette. The result, in Bloom’s thumbnail sketch of me and my cohort, is: “Today’s select students know so much less, are so much more cut off from the tradition, are so much slacker intellectually, that they make their predecessors look like prodigies of culture.”