"How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students"

"The erosion of reason does no favors for the campus or the left. Much of the history of the last century goes to show that equality, freedom, and reason rise and fall together. But Bloom's barrages of contempt, however viscerally launched, do not point the way toward an educational system that might serve democracy in crisis. In a world that mocks reason and, day by day, debases democratic potential, the American mind surely needs no further triviality, no further nihilism, no further closure. What it needs is an opening to our better angels. What it needs is the joy that comes when human beings reason our way through our troubles toward light."

Todd Gitlin at The Chronicle of Higher Education rereads Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind thirty years later.

And Nicholas B. Dirks writes in 2015 that "It is hard to avoid a feeling of nostalgia for the virulent days of the 'culture wars.'"