National Association of Scholars

History and organization

Originally called the Campus Coalition for Democracy, the National Association of Scholars was founded in 1987 by Herbert London and Stephen Balch with the goal of preserving the "Western intellectual heritage". Peter Wood is the president. The advisory board of the NAS has included several notable conservatives, such as Jeane Kirkpatrick, a U.S. ambassador and adviser to Ronald Reagan. Chester Finn helped to form the conservative movement's education policies. Irving Kristol, founder of the neoconservative movement, "characterized multiculturalism as 'a desperate strategy for coping with the educational deficiencies and associated social pathologies of young blacks.'" According to the association, it has affiliates in 46 states, as well as in Guam and Canada.

Positions

The National Association of Scholars opposes campus speech codes, which it argues violate the First Amendment. The NAS strongly objects to racial and gender preferences in college admissions and hiring, but states that it does not oppose all forms of affirmative action. Time Magazine in 1991 called NAS the "faculty opposition to the excesses of multiculturalism." The NAS describes its main work as the defense of "the core values of liberal higher education."

By 2017, "multiculturalism" on American campuses had come to mean a) acceptance of minority Spanish-speaking cultures; b) study of, and religious freedom for, US Muslims; and c) dispassionate study of ideas not within the Northern-European or Judaeo-Christian heritage.

William A. Donohue, former NAS board member and leader of the politically conservative Catholic League, writes in American Conservatism: an Encyclopedia (2006) that the NAS wishes "to foster renewed respect for the proposition that rational discourse and scholarship are the basis of academic life" and to emphasize "the Western commitment to freedom and democracy." On the other hand, Jacob Weisberg stated in 1991 that NAS is "prone to conflating its admirable ideals with far less compelling political prejudices."

Prior to 2017, the NAS had denied the conservative label. Writing in 2007, NAS's current president Peter Wood said: "Both Left and the Right produce their share of intellectual obtuseness."

However, immediately following the 2016 US elections, the NAS's tone was upbeat. In his "Counsel to President-Elect Trump", the NAS leader says that the election is a positive step, then asks Trump to de-fund public universities that do not carry out NAS reforms.

Shortly afterwards, the NAS positively greeted the new Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, offering, as a prime justification, the latter's opposition to school regulation and to preferential streaming of minorities into college education. Aspects of the NAS position seem to favor streaming minorities away from higher education: "“President Obama repeatedly emphasized the need for all Americans to attend college. By contrast, Secretary DeVos recognizes that college education is only one path among many that can lead to a good life."

In addition, the NAS statement looks forward to deregulating enforcement of civil rights in schools: "The Obama Department of Education proliferated these regulations at a record pace, and Secretary DeVos will have to deal in particular with the Department’s Office for Civil Rights. In recent years that office pursued an aggressive ideological strategy of threatening schools and colleges that failed to conform to its positions on sexual assault and transgender students.”

A contrasting evaluation of the DeVos confirmation was offered by most mass-media and specialist supporters of accessible education. The National Education Association headlined that DeVos was "dangerously unqualified to serve...” pointing out that DeVos had “spent decades working to dismantle public education and privatize public schools, is dangerously unqualified and lacks the experience we should all demand in America’s secretary of education.”

One enduring NAS demand is for explicitly patriotic teaching. As Wood says, "The problem is that American higher education is currently dominated by those who deeply dislike America and who work hard to convince students that we are fundamentally a bad people and a bad country.". Good and bad are not defined, except that NAS has always extolled America's "Western" heritage. Wood does not call for an environment of rational enquiry, which might allow his members to counter-teach the NAS concepts of "bad" or "good," based on reading and research, and hoping to win students to their perspectives.

Elsewhere, Wood and the NAS have argued for mandatory courses which define what the NAS calls "virtuous citizenship," both in secondary and in higher education. This would be part of core curriculum. In reply, Dr. Stanley Fish, a traditionalist writer on education, has found the NAS formula unscholarly, pointing out that scholars in higher education neither impose a definition of "civic virtue," nor mandate its transmission. They merely "study" it, so that their students may construct their own ideas of it.

In one of its policy positions within Wood's "Counsel," the NAS talks about gun rights. The text calls upon campuses to honor what the text calls The Right to Bear Arms—presumably, inside classrooms, "where State law permits." According to the NAS, these guns could be visible or concealed. The NAS does not elaborate on how bringing firearms onto campus is an academic goal. Also in the "Counsel" statement is a denunciation of the teaching of the theory of carbon-dioxide-based climate change as settled or consensus science.

Official policy statements

Since its founding, NAS has released six official policy statements.

"The Wrong Way to Admit the Other Half: Why We Oppose Class-Based Affirmative Action" (June 2013) critiques class-based affirmative action for undermining the principle of individual merit.

"Fixing Sustainability and Sustaining Higher Education" (April 2011) recommended that colleges and universities protect the academic freedom of scientists who express skepticism of man-made global warming and treat the campus sustainability movement as an object of inquiry rather than a body of precepts.

"Rebuilding Campus Community: The Wrong Imperative" (July 2008) expressed concern over the proliferation of non-curricular, typically residential, programs instructing students in progressive ideologies of social change.

"Sexual Harassment and Academic Freedom" (January 1993) urged colleges and universities to respond to instances of sexual harassment promptly and firmly and to avoid vague definitions of harassment.

"The Wrong Way to Reduce Campus Tensions" (January 1991) articulated NAS's belief that individual evaluation on the basis of personal merit is central to achieving educational opportunity for all and to maintaining academic community.

"Is the Curriculum Biased?" (November 1989) defends Western Civilization courses.

NAS describes its mission as "to foster intellectual freedom and to sustain the tradition of reasoned scholarship and civil debate."

Funding

NAS has been funded extensively by politically conservative foundations, including the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, the Castle Rock Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Arthur N. Rupe Foundation.

Publications

The NAS's quarterly journal, Academic Questions, publishes articles and interviews on higher education, with a focus on the perceived excesses of political correctness in academia. Academic Questions describes itself as "a journal dedicated to strengthening the integrity of scholarship and teaching." Its name comes from the "broad range of questions" it explores, related to "the maintenance of scholarly standards, the quality and even-handedness of peer review, the preservation of intellectual tolerance and civility on campus and within academic associations, and the relationship between government and education."

In a review in The Times Literary Supplement, Jonathan Rauch noted the journal's ideological tone, writing, "Though written mainly by scholars, it is a missionary journal, not a scholarly one." Rauch concluded: "If at times hectoring, Academic Questions is that rare and useful thing among journals—a live wire."

Most issues of Academic Questions focus on a particular theme in higher education. Previous themes have included "Why Study Islam, India, and China?"; "Why Study the West?"; "Hard Cases: America's Law Schools"; "Liberal Education and the Family"; and "A Crucible Moment? A Forum on the President’s Call for a New Civics."

Academic Questions has included articles by Jacques Barzun, Eugene Genovese, Thomas Sowell, and Terry Eagleton, and it contains interviews with Tom Wolfe, Julius Lester, Napoleon Chagnon, and Joseph Morrison Skelly.

Richard Arum, Jill Biden, Andrew Delbanco, Joseph Epstein, Victor Davis Hanson, Wilfred M. McClay, Charles Murray, and Ibn Warraq were among those who contributed to Academic Questions, "One Hundred Great Ideas for Higher Education," a symposium in the journal's 100th issue published in 2012.

Activities

The NAS was an early critic of political correctness, engaged the American Association of University Professors over some of its policies, and complained to the secretary of the U.S. Department of Education, Lamar Alexander, who ruled that the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools eliminate its diversity standard. NAS's stands have led critics to label NAS "conservative", a "group of reactionary scholars" and "a leading vehicle for the conservative attack on multiculturalism and political correctness".

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. 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. Simultaneously, the NAS encouraged a successful campaign to defund the university's Chicano newspaper.

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".

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.?"

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. University of Colorado, Boulder dean William Stanley resigned in protest of what he called "teacher-bashing" by the NAS, 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 rather than to a group "with credentials in teacher education."

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.

In 2011 NAS launched its Center for the Study of the Curriculum to "document and to analyze important changes" to college curricula and "to propose improvements." The Center conducts yearly reviews of colleges and universities' common reading programs. The annual Beach Books report identifies the colleges that have these programs, the books they assign, and patterns in the assignments. The 2012–2013 report found that 97% of colleges and universities chose books published in or after 1990. The most popular book assigned was The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. Writing at The Guardian, the report's author, Ashley Thorne, criticized the lack of classics: "The choice of a recent book that is often the only book students will have in common with one another points to the death of a shared literary culture. To the extent that colleges want to approach that culture, they display willful selfishness in confining their sights to the present."

NAS president Peter Wood wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education, "What is lamentable is the scant attention to important books, let alone classics; the relentless emphasis on the short-term and easily accessible; and the dominance of books that emphasize personal perspectives over efforts to know the world as it really is." NAS also publishes a list of books it recommends for colleges to assign as common reading.

In January 2013 the Center for the Study of the Curriculum, along with NAS's affiliate the Texas Association of Scholars, released a report on U.S. history courses taught in the Fall 2010 semester at the University of Texas and Texas A&M University. The report, Recasting History, examined all 85 sections of lower-division courses that satisfied a Texas statute requiring students at public institutions to take two courses in American history. NAS concluded that a preponderance of the courses emphasized social history focusing especially on race, class, or gender. Other topics such as military, diplomatic, religious, and intellectual history were taught less frequently.

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." 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." Richard Pells, a former history professor at the University of Texas, wrote in an op-ed for the Austin-American Statesman, "I am neither conservative nor a member of the NAS. But I am an American historian who taught at UT from 1971 to 2011. And based on my own experiences at UT, I believe the report’s main arguments are absolutely correct."

In April 2013, NAS released What Does Bowdoin Teach?: How a Contemporary Liberal Arts College Shapes Students. The 383-page study examined Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, presenting it as representative of trends in elite college education in the United States. The report tracked the college's decisions over forty years bearing on the curriculum, academic requirements, advising, faculty hiring, faculty committees, core values, key terms, campus controversies, residence life, disciplinary codes, student government, clubs, sports, and administrative priorities. The report cited faculty minutes and other official documents, accreditation self-studies and reports, presidential speeches, statistics from the United States Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, statements by Bowdoin faculty members and administrators, The Bowdoin Orient (the student newspaper), and interviews with students and faculty members.

The authors criticized Bowdoin for abolishing its core curriculum in 1969 and creating the system that remains in place in which there are few general education requirements. They also criticized Bowdoin for what they argued are overly specialized and politicized academic departments, a politically-correct environment, and the college’s disregard for intellectual diversity. What Does Bowdoin Teach? was covered by The Wall Street Journal,The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Washington Examiner, and the New York Post.

David Feith wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the report "demonstrates how Bowdoin has become an intellectual monoculture dedicated above all to identity politics." Harvard University government professor Harvey Mansfield called the report "the first of its kind and probably destined to be the best, which shows in the practices and principles of one college what political correctness in our time has done to higher education in our country."

Bowdoin College's response to the report was mixed. Writing in the Bowdoin Sun (the college’s official newspaper) Bowdoin president Barry Mills called the report "mean-spirited and personal." Bowdoin Social Sciences professor Jean Yarbrough wrote in The Bowdoin Orient, "Although I do not agree with all the findings of the NAS report, I believe that it highlights serious problems with the current state of education at Bowdoin and at elite institutions in general."

In January 2017, the National Association of Scholars entered into a formal partnership with the Classic Learning Test (CLT). The CLT/NAS partnership will focus on the CLT10, an alternative to the PSAT. The CLT/NAS partnership offers an alternative pathway to scholarships and academic recognition for students who do not wish to participate in the PSAT.