TWENTY YEARS AGO the American philosopher, Allan Bloom, published a book called
The Closing of the American Mind, a devastating indictment of the nation’s universities and, more broadly, of its cultural elites.
Its premise was that the spirit of openness, a willingness to consider ideas freely, the great virtue of American life and the guiding ethos of a university had been perverted into a cultural relativism. From the 1960s liberal philosophy had taken hold, defiantly asserting that truth was in the eye of the beholder, and that notions of absolute ideals or virtues were anachronistic. In this new world, liberal democracy was no better than totalitarian theocracy, Plato’s philosophy was no more valid than Marianne Faithfull’s and Mozart should be considered on the same terms as the Monkees.
The resignation of Larry Summers as President of Harvard University this week indicates that the closing of the American mind is a continuing process, remorselessly squeezing the light out of its academic enlightenment.
Mr Summers, elected to the top job at America’s richest and most famous university five years ago, never fitted the mould of a modern academic chief. He is fiendishly clever, for a start, a brilliant economist. If he hadn’t jumped into policymaking in his 30s, first at the World Bank, then as a senior official in the Clinton Administration, finally becoming Treasury Secretary in 1999, he would almost certainly have won a Nobel prize by now, as two of his uncles did.
These days the values more often prized in university heads have less to do with intellectual candlepower, and more to do with smoothness, access to influence, and above all, a capacity to generate hundreds of millions of dollars. Smooth, Mr Summers was not. In his often awkward personal habits, overweening intellectual self-confidence and execrable management style, he variously appalled and terrified. Never properly socialised, this impatient young man behaved in the rarefied surroundings of government departments, diplomatic salons and academic common rooms like a semi-housetrained wildebeest.
He was famously unco-ordinated, and before he shed 50lbs recently, the possessor of a voracious appetite. At a diplomatic reception in Beijing a few years ago, he dropped a spicy chicken wing into the cuff of his trousers and, to the alarm of aides, walked around for the rest of the evening with the half-eaten deposit stuck there. Unkind observers wondered whether he was saving it for a midnight snack.
Stories of his unbounded self-belief and lack of diplomatic skills are legion. Robert Rubin, his boss when he was at the Treasury, was Mr Summers’s complement — laconic, rail-thin, smart, urbane. But he valued Mr Summers’s intellectual brilliance, and sought his guidance on the most important matters. Every week, Mr Rubin would breakfast with Alan Greenspan, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Mr Summers was usually invited. On one occasion he arrived very late, and joined the world’s two most powerful economic figures a full half-hour into breakfast. Breathlessly apologising, he explained that he had been detained by a fascinating chat with a visiting foreign official. Smiling, Mr Rubin turned to the Fed Chairman and said, “Alan, it looks like you and I will have to improve the quality of our conversation if we want Larry to come on time in future.”
But it was not his arrogance, or his table manners, or even his envy-inducing genius that did for him at Harvard. It was his determined and ultimately futile effort to open the closed minds of America’s proudest academic elite.
Though a liberal Democrat, Summers had a traditional view of what a university should be doing, pursuing truth and excellence wherever it led.As he surveyed the vast ranks of well-paid academic celebrities at Harvard, puffing out their ideologies on women’s studies and black history, he wondered what it was all about. His first run-in was with Cornel West, the black professor, who had produced more rap music in recent years than he had books or papers. After a very public row, West left for the more forgiving pastures of Princeton.
Mr Summers quickly challenged the other pillars of political correctness on which most American universities sit. He opposed an effort to block university investment in Israel and condemned attempts to ban the US Armed Forces from recruiting on campus. Note that these were not assertive steps designed to enforce a particular world view, but the opposite — attempts to keep minds open to the possibility that their accumulated prejudices might need to be re-examined.
But his campaign was a challenge to the view that the approved answers of America’s academic elite to the great issues of our time and history were the whole truth, never to be reopened or re-examined.
Most famously, a year ago, he questioned whether that there were so few women professors at the top of their fields in mathematics and engineering might reflect not only sexual discrimination, but also gender-specific aptitudes in different disciplines.
In the Index of Sins against modern academic political correctness, this is about as grave as it gets. Even to suggest the possibility that there might be innate differences between the sexes or races that could lead to different outcomes is to invite condemnation from the academic Church of the Closed Mind. Despite abject apologies for his errors (which he now regrets), the closed-mind crowd wanted his blood. And this week, after the threat of yet another vote of no-confidence from his faculty members, they got it.
Ironically, in the 20 years since Bloom’s book American universities have risen to even greater global pre-eminence. Floating ever-higher on a sea of cash from wealthy alumni, they are able to attract the brightest minds from around the world. In science and technology especially, this has yielded great strides in research. But in too many cases these great inflows of cash have done nothing to alleviate the poverty of philosophy that characterises intellectual life at so many universities.
gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk
