The humanities curriculums of so many universities today are dominated by “multicultural studies” that teach only “ethnocentric truths” crowding out the study of classical and Enlightenment ideas. Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind (1987) argued that the current state of liberal arts education has failed these students and left them intellectually impoverished, and that the social and political crisis of 20th-century America is really an intellectual crisis.