Chicago's Grumpy Guru

'Best-Selling Professor Allen Bloom on the Chicago Intellectuals', by James Atlas, The New York Times.

"In 1946, Allan Bloom entered the University of Chicago.

"Founded in 1891 with an initial gift of $600,000 from John D. Rockefeller, the University of Chicago was determined from the beginning to model itself upon Oxford, Cambridge and the great German universities - and to do so, noted a later president, Edward Levi, 'in a most unlikely geographical place.' Even Bloom can't entirely suppress his skepticism about the look of his alma mater, the 'fake Gothic buildings' surrounded by slums. 'But they pointed toward a road of learning that leads to the meeting place of the greats.'

"These aren't just words. Under the stewardship of Robert Maynard Hutchins, who began his legendary tenure as president of the university in 1929, Chicago became famous as an institution devoted to the higher learning. Mortimer Adler, recruited by Hutchins to serve as a resident intellectual guide, introduced a program devoted to the classics of Western literature, and, by the mid-1930's, what had begun as a course (General Honors 110) defined a milieu. Adler is much derided today - Bloom puts him down as a kind of equal opportunity intellectual. But for a precocious Midwestern boy like Bloom, Hyde Park was the Promised Land."