The National Association of Scholars (NAS) is an American 501(c)(3)non-profitpolitically conservative education advocacy organization.[2][3] It advocates against multiculturalism, diversity policies, and against courses focused on race and gender issues.[4][5]
Originally called the Campus Coalition for Democracy, the National Association of Scholars was founded in 1987 by Herbert London and Stephen Balch[6][7] with the goal of preserving the "Western intellectual heritage".[2]As of 2021[update], Peter Wyatt Wood is the president.[8] The advisory board of the NAS has included several notable conservatives, such as Jeane Kirkpatrick, a former United States Ambassador to the United Nations and adviser to Ronald Reagan. Chester Finn helped to form the conservative movement's education policies.[5] According to the association, it has affiliates in 46 U.S. states, as well as in Guam and Canada.[9]
Chapters of the NAS have been involved in a number of campus controversies related to affirmative action and multicultural studies programs. According to People for the American Way, NAS faculty at the University of Texas, Austin blocked the inclusion of civil rights readings in an English course; the readings had been proposed to address concerns about racial and sexual harassment on campus.[11] In 1990, the NAS placed an advertisement in the Daily Texan (the University of Texas student newspaper), calling for the rejection of a proposed multiculturalism curriculum at the University of Texas.[16] Simultaneously, the NAS encouraged a successful campaign to defund the university's Chicano newspaper.[11]Time magazine in 1991 called NAS the "faculty opposition to the excesses of multiculturalism" and to "courses about race and gender issues."[4]
In 1990, a Duke University chapter of the NAS was formed by political science professor James David Barber. The new chapter provoked "a sometimes bitter debate" about the NAS stances on race and gender, and on whether academic freedom should extend to what NAS critics viewed as intolerance. Stanley Fish, chairman of the English department at Duke, wrote that NAS "is widely known to be racist, sexist and homophobic." In an interview with the Durham Morning Herald, Barber called Fish "an embarrassment to this university for his gross insult to this organization." In response to the NAS chapter formation, a larger group of faculty formed "Duke Faculty for Academic Tolerance".[17]
Also in 1990, the Harvard University community debated the presence of the NAS. Writing in the Harvard Crimson, Martin L. Kilson Jr. acknowledged some "overzealous behavior by supporters of ethnic studies and women studies" but argued that the NAS was an "overkill neoconservative response." In Kilson's view, NAS had succumbed to "anxiety and maybe phobia" of multiculturalism. He asks, "why shouldn't persons on our campuses go to great lengths to avoid the tag 'racist'"? Or the tags 'homophobic', 'sexist', 'anti-Asian', etc.?"[18][4]
In 2001, it was reported that the Colorado Commission on Higher Education had paid the National Association of Scholars $25,000 to generate a report on several Colorado universities with education programs. The NAS report criticized diversity curricula and recommended that the University of Colorado's education program be suspended and new admissions to other programs be halted.[5] University of Colorado, Boulder dean William Stanley resigned in protest of what he called "teacher-bashing" by the NAS,[3] while regent Bob Sievers deplored "anti-teaching, anti-C.U./Boulder, anti-women and anti-minority bias." Questions were also raised regarding why money was paid to a "right-wing" organization like the NAS[3] rather than to a group "with credentials in teacher education."[5]
In September 2008, The New York Times described the NAS as among the politically conservative organizations intensively and successfully lobbying for federal funding for programs which emphasize "traditional American history, free institutions or Western civilization". The Times reported that NAS and allied organizations sought to advance conservative causes by attaching conditions to university donations.[2]
In January 2013 the Center for the Study of the Curriculum, along with NAS's affiliate the Texas Association of Scholars, released a report, Recasting History, on U.S. history courses taught in the Fall 2010 semester at the University of Texas and Texas A&M University, which criticized the weight that the courses gave to race, class, or gender.[19][20] After the report's release, Jeremi Suri, the Mack Brown Distinguished Professor for Global Leadership, History, and Public Policy at UT-Austin, called the report "misleading, and frankly dumb."[21] Writing in The Alcalde, the official alumni magazine, Suri defended the University of Texas's course offerings, saying, "What we are teaching at UT, in almost all of our history and related courses, is a plural history of how many different people and parts of America relate to one another. What we are teaching is the beauty, the color, the promise, and also the challenge of contemporary America."[21]
The NAS's quarterly journal, Academic Questions, publishes articles and interviews on higher education, with a focus on examining issues that arise from the interplay among politics, ideology, scholarship, and teaching in higher education.[25]Academic Questions describes itself as "a journal dedicated to strengthening the integrity of scholarship and teaching."[26]
Bowdoin College is a private liberal arts college in Brunswick, Maine. When Bowdoin was chartered in 1794, Maine was still a part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The college offers 35 majors and 40 minors, as well as several joint engineering programs with Columbia, Caltech, Dartmouth College, and the University of Maine.
The University of Dallas is a private Catholic university in Irving, Texas. Established in 1956, it is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.
Academic freedom is the right of a teacher to instruct and the right a student to learn in an academic setting unhampered by outside interference. It may also include the right of academics to engage in social and political criticism.
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) is an American non-profit organization whose stated mission is to "support liberal arts education, uphold high academic standards, safeguard the free exchange of ideas on campus, and ensure that the next generation receives a philosophically rich, high-quality college education at an affordable price." ACTA does so primarily by calling on trustees to take on a more assertive governing role. It is based in Washington, D.C., and its current president is Michael Poliakoff.
The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America is a 2006 book by conservative American author and policy advocate David Horowitz. Contending that many academics in American colleges hold anti-American perspectives, Horowitz lists one hundred examples who he believes are sympathetic to terrorists and non-democratic governments.
The Association of American Universities (AAU) is an organization of American research universities devoted to maintaining a strong system of academic research and education. Founded in 1900, it consists of 69 universities in the United States and two universities in Canada. AAU membership is by invitation only and requires an affirmative vote of three-quarters of current members.
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Stephen H. Balch is an American conservative scholar and higher education reformer. He was the founding president of the National Association of Scholars from 1987 to 2009.
Edward Bruce Burger is an American mathematician and President Emeritus of Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas. Previously, he was the Francis Christopher Oakley Third Century Professor of Mathematics at Williams College, and the Robert Foster Cherry Professor for Great Teaching at Baylor University. He also had been named to a single-year-appointment as vice provost of strategic educational initiatives at Baylor University in February 2011. He currently serves as the president and CEO of St. David's Foundation.
Stanley Kurtz is an American conservative commentator, author and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He has taught at Harvard University and the University of Chicago. He is also a contributing editor to National Review.
Thomas Kevin Lindsay is an American academic who briefly served as President of Shimer College. He was the Deputy Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities until December 2008. He was also the Director of the NEH We the People initiative, which funds programs, research and other activities that explore significant events and themes in US history and culture, and advance knowledge of the principles that define America. He serves as the Director of the Center for Higher Education at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank.
The James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, often called simply the James Madison Program or the Madison Program, is a scholarly institute within the Department of Politics at Princeton University espousing a dedication "to exploring enduring questions of American constitutional law and Western political thought." The Madison Program was founded in 2000 and is directed by Robert P. George, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University.
William Pannapacker is a professor emeritus of English and a higher education journalist, consultant, administrator, and fundraiser. He is the author of Revised Lives: Walt Whitman and Nineteenth-Century Authorship, and numerous articles on literature, higher education, and the Digital Humanities published by Cambridge University Press, Duke, Harvard, Princeton, and Routledge. He was a regular columnist for The Chronicle of Higher Education from 1998 to 2014, and he has been a contributor to The New York Times, The North American Review and Slate Magazine. Pannapacker has received $2.3 million in grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He was the founding director of the Mellon Scholars Program in the Arts and Humanities at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, from 2009 to 2016; the director of the Digital Liberal Arts Initiative of the Great Lakes Colleges Association, from 2013 to 2015; the DuMez Professor of English, from 2015 to 2019; senior director of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Grand Challenges Presidential Initiative, from 2016 to 2019, and Professor and Senior Director of Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Programs and Initiatives at Hope College, from 2019-2022.
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