Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

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  JANIS FREEDMAN WAS BORN on September 3, 1958, the second of Harvey and Sonya Freedman’s three children. Harvey, a psychiatrist, came from Romanian and Polish Jewish stock. He was the first member of his family to go to university, receiving his medical degree from the University of Toronto, where he later taught in the Faculty of Medicine. In addition to teaching, Harvey had a busy private practice. He also helped to found the Gestalt Institute of Toronto, having studied in New York with Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt therapy. Sonya Freedman (née Rosen), a second-generation Canadian, came from Russian Jewish stock. At the University of Western Ontario, she studied music, then trained as a concert pianist and taught the piano for many years. By the mid-1980s, she was also writing short stories. The Freedman children were high achievers. Janis’s younger brother, Robert, an architect, was for ten years director of urban planning for the city of Toronto; her older sister, Wendy, an eminent astronomer, now at the University of Chicago, was previously director of the Carnegie Observatories, in Pasadena and Chile, codirector of the team that discovered the Hubble Constant, and a c0-winner of the Gruber Cosmology Prize, astronomy’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize. All three children went to local public schools and the University of Toronto. Janis describes herself as literary from an early age, “through the influence of my mother.” Bright and serious, a straight-A student, she “worked like a maniac” at university; when she enrolled at the Committee on Social Thought in 1980, she had narrowly missed out on a Rhodes Scholarship.

  The Freedmans were “a tight pack,” and they still are. They have no tales of sibling rivalry or adolescent rebellion. Right through college, the children liked to retreat from the city with their parents, spending weekends and holidays on a small family farm forty miles from Toronto. The farm was purchased in 1971, when Janis was thirteen, and it came with horses, to which were added cows, rabbits, a dog, and many cats, at one point twenty-one of them. Here the Freedman children and their friends skated on the pond, went cross-country skiing, and rode horses; Janis describes her adolescent self as having “a thing about horses.” The Freedmans were well off but not rich; there were family holidays to Europe, Israel, and the Caribbean, but they did not have enough money to educate the children privately (had they wanted to, which they didn’t). Although raised in Orthodox Jewish families, Harvey and Sonya did not belong to a synagogue (except, presumably, when Robert had his bar mitzvah); Wendy and Janis did not have bat mitzvahs. As Wendy puts it, though they were not religious Jews, “culturally we identified with where we came from.” The family hosted seders and on Friday nights lit candles and ate challah bread, but they did not say prayers. Nor was the family political. When asked to sum up his politics, Harvey answered, “A plague on both your houses.” “We raised a family that was apolitical. We see the folly on the left and the folly on the right and consider ourselves smug, snobbish, and superior.” When asked about voting, his answer was “Every four years, vote for the other guy.”

  It was at the University of Toronto that Janis discovered philosophy, taking courses in Kant and Aristotle, along with courses on Shakespeare and the Romantics. She had “a hard time with anything having to do with math,” and panicked when she took a logic course, until Harvey, the scientific parent, stepped in. “My father was always astonishingly calm about everything, and he said, You know what you have to do here? Everything one step at a time, and you can do this, calmly, easily, and well….I needed a lot of that coaching through college, both from Wendy and from my dad.” Janis ended up with the top mark in her logic class. The class that mattered most to her, however, was on Plato’s Republic, a large lecture class taught by Allan Bloom. Janis describes Bloom’s lectures as “absolutely astonishing.” What distinguished him from other professors was “the seriousness with which he took what he was teaching” and his intellectual “adventurousness.” Bloom made his students feel that there was more to education “than just going into a profession.” His popularity with students, Janis believes, contributed to the hostility with which he was viewed by some of his colleagues at Toronto. She remembers her ethics professor announcing, “Anyone who uses Allan Bloom’s translation of the Republic gets a fail.” At the end of Janis’s sophomore year, Bloom left Toronto for a position at the Committee on Social Thought, and Janis went on to take courses from his ex-students Clifford Orwin and Thomas Pangle, by then colleagues at Toronto. After her Rhodes disappointment (she “blew” the interview), she was admitted to study for a Ph.D. at the Committee. It was the only graduate program she had applied to, partly because it would allow her to combine philosophy and literature, partly because of Allan Bloom (whom she had never met, despite taking his Plato course), and partly because she wanted to read Homer in Greek with David Grene. When she set off for Chicago in the autumn of 1980, she was the first member of her family to move away from home.

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  IT WAS EDWARD SHILS who had masterminded Allan Bloom’s appointment to the Committee on Social Thought. On February 17, 1976, Shils wrote to Bellow listing several possible job candidates, including Bloom, whom he described as “really quite outstanding.” That Bloom had himself been a graduate of the Committee was an advantage. He was also, Shils thought, “probably the best of Leo Strauss’s pupils.” Shils’s only worry was that Bloom could be “a bit of a fanatic on all the important questions discussed by Strauss,” though “I have become informed that he has become a bit more polished in his manners and a bit easier to get on with.” David Grene, no ally of Shils, also welcomed the appointment. He knew Bloom well, had supervised his thesis, and could be counted on to welcome the appointment. Opposition came, however, from the Departments of Philosophy and Political Science. On June 8, 1978, Bellow wrote to John Wilson, president of the university, protesting, not for the first time, the requirement that outside departments approve Committee appointments, what he called “this insulting fashion of dealing with our nominations.” A year later, Bloom’s appointment was approved.

  Bloom remembered meeting Bellow in the 1950s, while Bloom was a graduate student at the Committee. They had been introduced at a party in Hyde Park, where Bellow and Jack Ludwig were among the guests. Bloom told Nathan Tarcov that he was so disgusted with Ludwig’s fawning over Bellow that he steered clear of them both. Bellow had no recollection of this meeting, but when Bloom came from Toronto to be interviewed, Bellow was charmed by him. Tarcov remembers that Bellow told him Bloom resembled Tarcov’s father, Oscar, “which was to me strange but interesting, since one was my father and the other was a very influential teacher of mine. The resemblance had never occurred to me.” The summer before Bloom took up his appointment, which began in 1975, Bellow wrote to him about arrangements for a seminar they had agreed to teach in the spring:

  We’ll run a tutorial on any afternoon convenient to you. I refrain from coming to the campus in the morning. My habit is to work until noon at whatever I happen to have to hand and then seek refreshment in Hyde Park. We should have a splendid time with Stendhal and Flaubert, against a background of Jean-Jacques. There must be a few students at the Committee who read French….Whenever I taught with David [Grene], there was always a preliminary session for the two of us—at Jimmy’s naturally. You and I can find another suitably grimy spot, if Jimmy’s is too much for you. Some people can’t take it.

  With great expectation,

  Ever yours,

  Saul

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  ALLAN BLOOM WAS BORN in Indianapolis in 1930, the child of Jewish social workers. Two years after the family moved to Chicago, he entered the University of Chicago. He was fifteen. Three years later, he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in liberal arts. As an undergraduate, Bloom fell under the influence of Leo Strauss, a professor in Chicago’s Department of Political Science. Strauss, a German Jewish émigré, moved to the United States in 1937, after brief research
stints in Paris and England. He was a research fellow at Columbia, taught for ten years at the New School, and in 1949 took up his post at Chicago, where he taught for two decades. In later life, he taught for a year and a half at Claremont Men’s College (not yet Claremont McKenna College) in California, and then went to St. John’s College, Annapolis, in 1970, where he stayed until his death in 1973.

  Through Strauss, Bloom became a devotee of Plato and the classical tradition. In The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (1987), Bloom writes, “When I was fifteen years old I saw the University of Chicago for the first time and somehow sensed that I had discovered my life.”3 He received his Ph.D. from the Committee on Social Thought in 1955, for a dissertation on the Greek rhetorician Isocrates. What David Grene remembered of Bloom as a graduate student is that he was “frightfully enthusiastic and very dogmatic, very funny.”4 From 1955 to 1960, Bloom taught courses in Chicago’s Basic Program for Liberal Education for Adults. During these years, he also studied for periods in Heidelberg and Paris. In 1960, he moved first to Yale, where he taught until 1963, then to Cornell, where he taught until 1970, and where student militancy had a profound effect on him, as it had on Bellow. So appalled was Bloom by the violence of the militants at Cornell and what he saw as the cowardice of the administration that he left the university in disgust.

  In the chapter of The Closing of the American Mind entitled “The Sixties,” the events at Cornell are given pride of place. At their heart lay problems of race. In 1963, when Bloom arrived at Cornell, there were only twenty-five African American students out of an undergraduate population of eleven thousand. The newly appointed president of the university, James A. Perkins, previously chairman of the board of the United Negro College Fund, set out to increase the number, and by 1969 it had grown to 250 out of fourteen thousand. Despite their increased numbers, many African American undergraduates felt alienated from the university. Influenced both by the Black Power movement and by a series of real and perceived slights and threats to their safety, they sought measures to separate themselves from the main student body. The newly created Afro-American Society (AAS) lobbied for curriculum reform and segregated programs and facilities. When the university dragged its feet over the society’s demands, frustrated protesters disrupted classes and damaged property, insisting upon the right of black students to devise and administer their own courses and to restrict admission to some classes on the basis of color.

  By 1969, these and other separatist demands were accompanied by threats of violence and disruption. In one instance, during a symposium to discuss the university’s investments in South Africa, an AAS student rushed onstage and grabbed President Perkins by the collar while he was speaking. When the university’s supervisor of public safety moved to defend Perkins, another AAS student climbed onstage and threatened him with a wooden plank. The story made the front page of The New York Times, and the AAS immediately expelled the two protesters. The administration, however, was reluctant to punish African American students, or to punish them severely, and some administrators and faculty expressed admiration for the moral convictions of the protesters.

  Then things got worse. On the night of April 17, 1969, a burning cross appeared on the lawn of Wari House, a cooperative residence for black women. The next morning, the AAS occupied Cornell’s student-activity center, Willard Straight Hall, evacuating students, their visiting parents, and all university employees, and chaining shut the doors.5 In solidarity, 150 white students from SDS formed a barricade around the building, condemning the “racist and capitalist policies” both of Cornell and of America at large. When twenty-five white fraternity students tried to invade the building to end the takeover, leaving after a brief scuffle, rifles were smuggled in to the occupiers. The administration ordered the campus police not to intervene. Over a megaphone, an armed AAS leader shouted, “If any more white students come in, you’re gonna die here.” Later in the day, an agreement was reached between the AAS and the administration. In exchange for the occupiers’ vacating the building, the administration agreed to recommend that they not be punished, that punishments for previous disturbances be nullified, that the university would help the protesters with legal counseling and pay for any damages to Willard Straight Hall, and that Wari House would be given round-the-clock protection. As the last AAS occupiers left the building, they did so carrying rifles and making Black Power salutes. An Associated Press photograph of the moment appeared on the cover of Newsweek and won a Pulitzer Prize.

  To many students and faculty, peace at Cornell had been bought at the price of a shameful capitulation on the part of the administration. Bloom was outspoken in his opposition to the administration, directing students, some carrying signs reading “Berlin ’32, Ithaca ’69,” to hand out extracts from Plato’s Republic.6 When the faculty met to discuss the administration’s recommendations, they accepted some measures, but by a wide margin rejected the amnesty granted to earlier demonstrators. The presence of guns on the campus made it “impossible for the Faculty to agree at this meeting to dismiss the penalties imposed.” In reaction, an AAS leader denounced the withdrawing of the amnesty on campus radio, calling its supporters racists and threatening four administrators and three named professors, one of them Allan Bloom. He gave out their home addresses and warned that if the faculty did not reverse its vote by 9:00 p.m. “they would be dealt with.” He ended his speech by announcing, “Cornell has three hours to live.” Bloom and the other threatened faculty and administrators checked themselves and their families into motels under assumed names. Bloom also helped to protect a black student who had opposed the takeover, putting him on a late-night bus to Montreal and arranging for him to finish his studies at Harvard.

  When the Cornell faculty reconvened, under threat of violence not only from AAS militants and their SDS supporters, but from the intervention of armed state authorities, they overturned their previous vote, repealing all penalties. During the debate, forty-nine faculty members sympathetic to the AAS students threatened to go on strike, and twenty-six faculty members declared their readiness to participate in further occupations. The reversal of the earlier decision was covered in The New York Times, as was the resignation of President Perkins in June, and the furious departure of a number of well-known faculty, including not just Bloom but Walter Berns, a past chair of the Department of Government; Allan Sindler, the current chair; Donald Kagan, the historian and classicist; and Thomas Sowell, a black assistant professor of economics who was later to describe the AAS occupiers as “hoodlums” with “serious academic problems.”7

  In The Closing of the American Mind, Bloom attributes the uprising at Cornell to affirmative action. In the drive to recruit black students, he claims, the university sought them out in inner cities as well as among the privileged. “And, of course, in order to get so many, particularly poor blacks, standards of admission had silently and drastically been altered. Nothing had been done to prepare these students for the great intellectual and social challenges awaiting them in the university. Cornell now had a large number of students who were manifestly unqualified and unprepared, and therefore it faced an inevitable choice: fail most of them or pass them without their having learned.” For these students, integration was seen as “an ideology for whites and Uncle Toms.” Hence the demand for black-studies courses, “decidedly attractive to the kids who were the victims of the university’s manipulations” (p. 94). Hence also the appearance of separate tables in the dining halls, “which reproduce the separate facilities of the Jim Crow South” (p. 95). As Bloom saw it, “The worst part of all this is that the black students, most of whom avidly support this system, hate its consequences,” principally the sense “that whites are in the position to do them favors” and “that everyone doubts their merit, their capacity for equal achievement.” Bloom’s conclusion is that “democratic society cannot accept any principle of a
chievement other than merit” (p. 96). Of the need for a level playing field in determining merit, Bloom says little. This is similar to Bellow’s failure in the Jefferson Lectures to acknowledge, or adequately acknowledge, the role of discriminatory practices in the disintegration of the black slums.

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  NATHAN TARCOV, as a student at Cornell in the late 1960s, knew and admired Bloom, and took his courses in the Department of Government. In 1968, he wrote an article in the fall issue of The Public Interest, edited by Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol, deploring Cornell’s failure to stand up for what he called “the fundamental characteristics of education in the arts college.”8 Tarcov had come to Cornell in 1964 a moderate leftist. In his freshman year, he joined SDS, not yet a radical organization, and served as its treasurer. He soon drifted toward the center, steering clear of mass rallies both for and against the Vietnam War. Instead, he and five fellow students, one of them Paul Wolfowitz, formed what they called the “Committee for Critical Support of the United States in Vietnam.” Wolfowitz, later deputy secretary of defense and president of the World Bank, had been a student of Bloom’s, as had the political scientist Francis Fukuyama. Other students of Bloom’s included Edith Jones, who would become chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit; William Galston, later an adviser to President Clinton and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution; and Alan Keyes, former presidential candidate and assistant secretary of state. Keyes was the black student Bloom sent to Montreal and then to Harvard. According to Tarcov, neither Bloom nor the majority of his students could rightly be called conservatives at this time, certainly in terms of electoral politics. Bloom voted for Johnson in 1964, for Humphrey in 1968, for Carter in 1976, and had he lived to see the 1992 election would have voted for Clinton.9 In “Western Civ,” the opening essay in Giants and Dwarfs: Essays 1960–1990 (1990), Bloom himself declares: “I am not a conservative—neo- or paleo-. I say this not to curry favor in a setting where conservatism is out of favor [the essay is a reprint of an address delivered at Harvard University on December 7, 1988]. Conservatism is a respectable outlook, and its adherents usually have to have some firmness of character to stick by what is so unpopular in universities. I just do not happen to be that animal. Any superficial reading of my book will show that I differ from both theoretical and practical conservative positions.”10