Conservatives and the Higher Ed 'Bubble'

By Jonathan Marks. Conservatives once proudly stood, in William F. Buckley’s words, “athwart history, yelling Stop.” This posture led them to befriend defenders of liberal education like Allan Bloom, author of Closing of the American Mind (Simon & Schuster, 1987).

Conservatives once proudly stood, in William F. Buckley’s words, “athwart history, yelling Stop.” This posture led them to befriend defenders of liberal education like Allan Bloom, author of Closing of the American Mind (Simon & Schuster, 1987).

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Inside Higher Ed

Admittedly, Bloom announced in a 1988 lecture at Harvard that he was “not a conservative.” The liberal education Bloom defended initiates students into a “quest for truth,” but Bloom didn’t think that “man is, or can be, in possession of absolutes.” That Socratic stance, in tension with discipleship of every kind, may have troubled Buckley’s “disciples of Truth, who defend the organic moral order.” But both the quest for unknown truths and the defense of known but unpopular truths required a stand against relativism, and for the university as a haven for reflecting on enduring problems. Conservatives and defenders of liberal education alike wanted the university to challenge, not merely reflect, the society that sheltered it. More...