Harvard admissions scandal and Allan Bloom and the Closing of the American Mind

Tue Apr 09, 2019

in the news right now,

College Admissions Scandal: Lori Loughlin among 16 parents indicted with additional charges
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Lori Loughlin & Felicity Huffman Might Go To Jail, But That Doesn't Mean Their Careers Are Over
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Lori Loughlin & Felicity Huffman are 2 of the most famous examples, of parents paying, in this case bribing or donating large sums, to ensure their children get accepted into Harvard.

I of course grew up listening about Harvard Yale Princeton Stanford Brown Dartmouth elite institutions of higher learning. The ivy League.

But i really had no info, and this was the 1980s.

but this admissions scandal shows some parents will pay from hundreds of thousands to millions to get their children a spot at Harvard. Natalie Portman, Bill Gattes, Mark Zuckerberg attended Harvard.

through church i learned about Allan Bloom and the Closing of the American Mind. what really caught my interest is where Allan Bloom taught, he taught at Yale, Cornell and University of Chicago.

He was head of the University of Chicago Great Books program.

He was the sort of "eye witness" as it were to the inner workings of these elite colleges.

Holocaust scholars, for example, pour over the diaries and letters of Nazi cliques from Joseph Goebbels to Hitler's secretaries to get into the mind of how Nazi Germany functioned. Diaries of Nazi generals and Nazi mass murderers.

well i wanted to go to Harvard and Yale, and Allan Bloom was the only person I knew who was from this so he was like my tour guide.

and for some families, an admission to Harvard or Yale, is for them, worth literally tens of millions they are willing to donate to the college.

In the Closing of the American Mind, for example, Allan Bloom trashes rock music of Beattles, Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and Michael Jackson, in favor of classical music.

Allan Bloom loved only classical music of Mozart and Beethoven. not rock music.

I myself in the 80s heard of the Mozart effect, that if you are a woman and pregnant, and you have your fetus listen to Mozart, you can improve its future IQ.

if true, I kinda wish my mom listened to Mozart.

Allan Bloom talked about Niezsche and Plato and Shakespeare.

I saw a movie Dead Poet Society. that movie premise is that their prep school sends many of its graduates to Harvard.

Its poetry teacher played by Robin Williams, talked about Yates and Keats, which Allan Bloom also referred to.

My English Lit teachers have heard of Allan Bloom and endorsed him.

I was quite shocked when i learn that many professors and faculty are politically far left, and hate and despise Allan Bloom as a reactionary, and that the picture Allan Bloom presents of the Ivy Leaquge is uh quite warped.

now, i see his book and ideas as totally irrelevant to me and my life.

Allan Bloom sees leftists as a menace to the Great Books and classical learning and classical music, and really it has no effect on my life.

If Leftists academics of Universities do away with Shakespeare and Niezsche and replaced them with leftists feminist LGBT thought, it wouldn't have much effect in my life.

I don't know if in 2019 you can use Allan Bloom's ideas to get accepted into an elite college, except perhaps University of Chicago, which still has a Great Books program and Saint John's College.

at the time i thought colleges would be impressed if i talked about Niezsche. Now, Nietzsche doesn't pay my dental bills so. there's that. I've always found UFO and bigfoot and mysteries more interesting to me, though i doubt Harvard cares for students with interests like this.

my thinking at the time was if i told harvard admissions i like ufo and bigfoot i would be rejected.

my classmate in high school told me she interviewed at Northwestern University, and when she was asked who she admired, she said Madonna, the rock star. she was rejected, though whether it was from interview i don't know.

my thinking was if i talked about Allan Bloom and Niezsche Harvard Yale Cornell would be impressed. as well as classical music like Mozart and art like Da Vinci.

i now know i'm not being authentic, i prefer video games comic books and star wars and the paranormal. i still think these topics are not good admissions essay topics for elite universities.