Your last 2 paras under 55 are a real classic, though — in no way reflecting Bloom’s clear, plain and organized English.

His “being unburdened by a university education” says a lot.

Seems to ramble about college grads being illiterates based on his random sampling of those with marketing and business degrees (or engineering) — exactly where you turn if you can’t put three sentences together. And no decent Ivy League university has a “communications” major (those are all from second-rate places for aspiring newsreaders etc.): they have rigorous English and philosophy training, with demands for proficiency in modern foreign languages and often Latin. So many of these people go on to law school for a “real job.”

None of them would sit through any of reg’s incoherent, bitter slings, either.

Far from being a conservative ideologue, Bloom, a University of Chicago professor of political philosophy who died in 1992, was an eccentric interpreter of Enlightenment thought who led an Epicurean, quietly gay life. He had to be prodded to write his best-selling book by his friend Saul Bellow, whose novel ”Ravelstein” is a wry tribute to Bloom. Far more than liberal speech codes and diversity regimens, the bêtes noires of the intellectual right, darkened Bloom’s horizons: He also mistrusted modernity, capitalism and even democracy so deeply that he believed the university’s culture must be adversarial (or at least subtly subversive) before America’s market society, with its vulgar blandishments, religious enthusiasms and populist incursions.

”The semitheoretical attacks of right and left on the university and its knowledge, the increased demands made on it by society, the enormous expansion of higher education,” Bloom wrote, ”have combined to obscure” the universities’ mission ”to maintain the permanent questions front and center” and ”to provide a publicly respectable place . . . for scholars and students to be unhindered in their use of reason.”

Some conservatives may insist they are saying exactly that. But Bloom warned that liberal education is threatened as well by ”proponents of the free market,” whose promise of social well-being ”no longer compels belief,” and by religious belief that, ”contrary to containing capitalism’s propensities, as Tocqueville thought it should, is now intended to encourage them.”

Bloom argued that our capitalist economy and liberal-democratic order turn civic virtue to mercenary ends. To cultivate ”the use of reason beyond the calculation of self-interest,” he contended, ”it is necessary that there be an unpopular institution in our midst that . . . resists our powerful urges and temptations.”

(snip)

Bloom wanted liberal education to resist both ”whatever is most powerful” and the ”worship of vulgar success.” True openness, he said, ”means closedness to all the charms that make us comfortable with the present.” He disdained professors who strive to become counselors to the king and forget that ”the intellectual, who attempts to influence . . . ends up in the power of the would-be influenced.” (end clip)

(Perhaps his student Paul Wolfowitz should have taken Allen Bloom’s counsel more seriously. The right-wing hacks who tout Allen Bloom only read about half of him.)

Oh yea, I almost forgot ……..
Que Viva Che Quevara y Fidel Castro, Que Viva la Revolucion !!!!!

Reread Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, about your gen and what they did to academia and society. Title = apt.