The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students

Bloom argues that multiculturalism and moral relativism have severely eroded the purpose and quality of American higher education. Intended to promote the tolerance of diversity, relativism is the only “virtue” taught in American primary education. Students enter the university believing two things: Truth is relative, and equality is the essential American value. Acceptance of diversity requires we recognize that knowledge is the product of specific historical and cultural conditions and the biases that inevitably accompany them. To insist on the possibility of universal truth is tantamount to asserting the superiority of one culture to another, thereby opening the door to intolerance and discrimination. The lesson of history, according to this narrative, demonstrates that wars, slavery, racism, religious hatred, and xenophobia are fruits of the chauvinism by which one group claims possession of the truth while denigrating the beliefs and claims of other groups. “Openness” demands that moral absolutism and White privilege be rejected. The relativity of truth, however, is not an insight arrived at by reason but a moral position held by those convinced that it is the necessary condition of a free and equitable society.

This false idea of openness rejects the rational grounds of democracy and the spirit of free inquiry, championed by the Enlightenment, that seeks authentic truth.