Macey Responds to Lubet

Abstract

After a time, I suppose, academic writers become accustomed to having certain aspects of their work misconstrued. This has happened to me on occasion, sometimes as a result of what I believe to be a misunderstanding by a particular reader, but sometimes, I must concede, as a result of my own lack of clarity. Thus I was not surprised to find that Steven Lubet, a clinician at Northwestern Law School, has misread my review' of Allan Bloom's book, The Closing of the American Mind. What is both amusing and disconcerting about Mr. Lubet's rather petulant reaction to my Book Review is that he accuses me of precisely the intolerance against which I was inveighing in my Review. In other words, he interprets my plea for tolerance as an example of intolerance. How depressing. The point of my Book Review was quite simple. It seemed to me then, as it does now, that Professor Bloom's perspective on American education is troubling because it is likely to result in a dangerous intolerance of academic diversity. I was making the basic point that one can have high academic standards without succumbing to Bloom's rigid, absolutist philosophical perspective.