Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind with Mark Hlavacik

Explaining the show's new art and how Mick Jagger "failed democracy and impoverished the souls" of students before 1987.

References and suggested readings:

• God and Man at Yale episode with Sam Tanenhaus
• Why white nationalists love Plato episode with Curtis Dozier
• Allan Bloom. The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students.
• George Lowery. April 16, 2009. A campus takeover that symbolized an era of change. Cornell Chronicle.
• Lauren Lassabe Shepherd. March 21, 2025. Attack on the Faculties. The Carryall.
• Michelle Alexander. 2020. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The New Press.
• Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein. 2024. They Say, I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing. W. W. Norton.
• Saul Bellow. Ravelstein.
• Mark Hlavacik. 2025. Willing Warriors: A New History of the Education Culture Wars. University of Chicago Press. 
• Mark Hlavacik. 2016. Assigning Blame: The Rhetoric of Education Reform. Harvard University Press.
• Mark Hlavacik’s faculty page.