A book by a philosopher at the University of Chicago might not be expected to become a rallying standard for a social cause. But when Allan Bloom wrote The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, conservatives took it to heart. Its impact, immediate and widespread, has hardly lessened since then. The book is still widely read, and widely debated. (Mr. Bloom died in 1992.) “In a strange way, he’s on common ground with the protesters of the ’60s,” Tom Hayden, the former student activist, told The Chronicle, “because from different perspectives we felt that the university was lacking in moral commitment.”
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