(4 of 5)
A. The issue is not about moral absolutes, but whether the pursuit of truth is possible at all. If we are not understood as believing in everything equally, we are depicted as believing in only one thing absolutely. There is no longer room for the theoretical middle ground, where one spends one's life discussion. We can't avoid thinking. The thoughtless are always going to be the prisoners of other people's thoughts. American intellectual life has given us an easy way to believe anything we want.
Q. What about your own beliefs?
A. I'm not going to go into personal confessions. I was raised as a Jew. I read the Bible. I was taught the Ten Commandments and other laws. These were demands made of me, and I questioned them. I still question them, all the time, in every book I read. Whether there is or is not a God is still among the most critical questions in life. But I'm not a social reformer. I'm not a founder of movements.
Q. What would you propose instead for the American university? Is there an equivalent ideal of Bloom's campus, and what kinds of students and faculty might be found there?
A. The universities are practically all that we have left of our intellectual life, so you have to fit in the kinds of things that frequently happen elsewhere, in Europe. In a way, we stake everything on the universities.
The important thing is to figure out in some measure what is in the hearts of students. If they are preoccupied by war, then read books about war. The kinds of programs that are the best for me bring together the various disciplines. You would hear what the scientist has to argue with the philosopher and the poet about the place of modern science against philosophy, against religion. These would be the places where the physicists have to think about Kant and Hegel, not just Einstein; where the social scientists consider what is a good society as well as polls and survey results; where a political scientist asks whether he can justify giving advice to tyrants as well as democrats.
Q. Many of your viewpoints still seem profoundly affected by the events of 1969, which you describe as "the guns of Cornell," when armed weapons were brought onto the campus. You evoke these very strong images as if they were the last days of Pompeii for American higher education. How much influence did this experience have on you and your decision to write the book?
A. Misinterpretations and criticisms of the book have said that I was traumatized by those years, that I am still in some kind of state of rage. In fact, I felt a certain kind of release when these very powerful and intense things happened. It was like Thucydides looking at the decline of Athens. I had had these expectations. I didn't believe the professors who said they stood for freedom of speech. I thought their faith in the classic curriculum had lost its vitality. It wasn't right wing vs. left wing. It was clearly right vs. wrong in the protection of free speech.
% Q. Why do you believe that Cornell was so vulnerable?