The Allan Bloom Forum

The Allan Bloom Forum, a student organization at Yale University, holds that ideas have consequences, and in this spirit, seeks to promote the public exploration of the ideas which have shaped American and Western culture. The Forum is named after Allan Bloom, who was a professor at Yale, and was best known for authoring The Closing Of The American Mind, the book which launched much of today's debate about the nature of education and the Western canon.

The Forum invites distinguished individuals from academia, media, and related institutions to speak on cultural, historical, philosophical, and political subjects of general interest. Past topics have ranged from "The Institutionalization Of The Counter-Culture" to "The Crisis Of Conservatism In The Post-Cold War Era" to "The Uses Of The Past." Upcoming guests include Mary Lefkowitz, professor of Greek and Latin at Wellesley College and author of Not Out of Africa and Black Athena Revisited; and Edwin R. Meese III '53, former attorney general of the United States.

Past guests include Roger Scruton, Editor of the Salisbury Review and author of An Intelligent Person's Guide To Modern Culture; Roger Kimball '82, Managing Editor of the New Criterion and author of Tenured Radicals; Alan Kors, Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania and Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment; Harvey Mansfield, Kenan Professor of Government at Harvard University and author of Machiavelli's Virtue; Michael Medved '68 law '73, film critic for the New York Post and former host of PBS' "Sneak Previews"; Hilton Kramer, Editor of the New Criterion and former Chief Art Critic of the New York Times; George Nash, presidential biographer and author of The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945; Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, economist and author of Liberty and Equality; Dinesh D'Souza, author of Illiberal Education and The End of Racism; David Gelernter, professor of Computer Science at Yale University and author of Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber; William F. Buckley Jr. '50, Editor-at-Large of National Review and author; and Arthur Laffer '63, economist and editor of International Economics in an Integrated World. The Forum is a project of the Conservative Party of Yale University (the Forum, founded in the 1950's, was originally called "The Conservative Forum").